Daddy’s had an accident, she said. That voice again, that might not have been hers. She said that he tripped when he was climbing a fence and the gun went off. It seemed a plain enough story for boys to understand, even if boys knew that a man shouldn’t be climbing a fence with a loaded gun. But clearer because of that, because they would assume that if a man were to do such a thing, and the gun were indeed to go off, then he might well die as a consequence. It was the sort of thing one said, wasn’t it? At the time, in her world, among people like herself – themselves.
Only much later did she think about the mud on Jonny’s boots. It was too late by then. Her lie was told, fixed from that first moment as fact. It wasn’t the sort of lie one could go back on. If he had been outside that morning, if he had followed his father, if he had seen what might have been seen outside, then one could only hope that he hadn’t noticed that what she said was different from what was there; he was only seven, after all. It wasn’t meant as a lie, but as a way to make truth gentle. An accident, she had said it was, with the two boys beside her on the sofa, and the dog, who knew but didn’t know her words, before them. And Jonny was closed in on himself, but so was his brother with the tears like ice in his eyes; the two boys, each so different, each closed away. And she would be closed too, only the dog shivery but warm between them. But did they really understand? And the dog? Did Jess know he was gone for ever or was she looking for him each time that she went to the door and whimpered? Jess attached herself most to Jonny after that, though it made Richard jealous. Every day Jonny took her for a walk when he came back from school. If it was raining and Claire said he couldn’t go, he was angry with her.
But, Mummy, Jess has to have her walk. She hates to be in the house all day.
I’ve already taken her. We walked to the village this morning. All right then, you can go out for a short walk, when the rain stops. She’s an old dog now, she doesn’t need to go too far.
It helped to take the dog with her when she went to the village. The dog was a shield against the kindness of the people who stopped to talk. A golden place for them to put awkward and pitying hands.
Cricket
The Green, they called it, the place where they played. That was what it was, green. Men in white stood in a pattern on the green. She was a Japanese girl in a picture postcard of England, sitting on a striped deckchair watching cricket. Wearing sunglasses. Sipping lemonade through a straw.
Claire sat in a chair beside her. Now and then one of her friends came and sat with them. Jonathan had been lying on the grass until a short time before but he had gone to prepare to bat. His trousers were too big. They were Richard’s. He looked comical in the baggy trousers that now had green stains on them from the grass. His team had been batting for a long time. He was one of the last to go in. She could see that he was afraid that he would do badly. He had not played cricket since he left school. It was Richard’s game, he said, not his, it had always been Richard’s game. Richard was good, even Kumiko could see that. He looked good playing. He looked tall and strong in the white clothes and his hair was bright in the sun. He stood very still as the bowler ran in, and then he raised the bat and hit the ball a long way. He went out to bat at the beginning of the match, second or third, and he was still there. Claire had explained the rules to her, but she didn’t think you needed to know the rules to watch. She didn’t mind about the rules. She watched the men moving across the Green, and the little clouds, and the swallows flying over. And the other people watching, children running about, mothers calling them back.
No one would have guessed they were brothers, seeing them there, Richard looking so heroic, Jonathan dark and tense and restless, fidgeting with his bat while the bowler got ready, tapping the grass with it as if that would make a difference. Then looking up, facing the ball, hitting it away just a short distance so that he scored a run and went to the other end and Richard could take his place.
He looked exposed there out on the grass. Yet he had as much reason to belong as all the other villagers. He had been born in this village. He had lived in it for at least twenty of his twenty-five years. He seemed apart, even here where he came from, standing with his bat, looking about him, ready again to run as soon as his brother hit the ball.
Do you know, Claire said, sometimes when he was away he didn’t write home for months. We had no idea where in the world he was.
She said, I think he was on the move a lot, travelling. Maybe some letters did not get to you.
She could understand why he didn’t mention it when he went to Vietnam. He would have known how much that would have worried her. She let the words drop and didn’t speak them. Easy to do that, as the bowler bowled and Richard tapped the ball away, and the bowler bowled again, and Richard hit hard and clean, Jonathan running forward a couple of steps and then relaxing as the ball flew out across the grass to where the spectators were on the other side of the ground. It was careless of him, Kumiko thought, not to write. For Claire, here in the permanence of their home, it must have seemed that he had disappeared from the face of the earth.
As all the white figures moved around and settled again, Claire said something else. She said that his father had been missing for a long time in Asia, in the war, in the Second World War. I wasn’t married to him then, she said, only engaged, and there was no word for a long time. I don’t know if Jonny ever told you. No, I don’t imagine that he did.
No, Kumiko said, he didn’t tell me that.
All the more careless then.
The cricketers played on.
He sat on the bench in front of the pavilion, put down his batsman’s gloves and then stretched out his legs, one after the other, to remove his pads.
These things he had not done in years: fastening and unfastening the worn leather straps of cricket pads, holding a bat in his hands with that scent of oil on wood, facing a ball, playing opposite his brother, knowing that there were some things that his brother had always done better. Watching his brother show off.
Was Richard always man of the match? He saw his brother walk in the midst of a group of men in white towards the pavilion entrance, throwing back his head to laugh. The women clapping, his Japanese girlfriend and his mother in colourful dresses and sunglasses like pretty ladies in the South of France.
Now I know why they made you captain, he said to Richard as he passed, and Richard waved his bat towards him as if to fend off some irony that he expected to follow.
You did OK yourself. Richard was unusually complimentary, not winding him up like he used to do in the past; perhaps things had changed just so much.
I survived. Don’t say any more. Didn’t let you down anyway.
This was coming home. To old patterns. Old selves that he hadn’t known for a while but just about fitted, like the clothes in his cupboard. A summertime self, the mediocre batsman whose purpose was simply to be safe and not to be out. There was almost a comfort in it, finding that this old self fitted and that the others fitted around him.
He crept down the passage to her bed, the whole length of the house, from his room to hers. I heard you coming, she whispered. He thought he had been as quiet as ever but she had been listening for him.
You played well, at the cricket, she said.
Kind of you to say that, but it’s not entirely true.
Well, Richard was better.
Richard’s always better.
There was a sound at the window. For a moment she froze.
What’s the matter?
There’s something at the window. Like someone scratching against the glass.
They listened.
Oh, I know what it is, she said. It’s only a rose. It’s Madame Alfred Carrière. She must have come loose again. Your mother told me her name.
Afterwards they lay with the sheet away to the side of them.
You never told me about your father, she said. What happened in the war.
His hand was in her hair. She loved to feel his hand in her hair
.
I said he was in the Burma campaign.
You didn’t say that he was missing. That everyone must have thought he was dead.
Oh, didn’t I?
And then he said, Does it matter?
I don’t know, she said. I think it does.
He pulled up the sheet then and wrapped himself around her but they didn’t sleep for a while. There was the white rose scratching at the glass of the open window, and beyond it, the night. The night lay over the house and all the fields and the woods, and there were sounds in it. The sounds were strange to her. A lone raw cry, eerie, came from somewhere beyond the garden, towards the wood.
What was that? Was it something being killed?
It’s a fox.
A fox killing something? It sounds like the cry of whatever the fox killed.
Just a fox being a fox, I think.
Calling its mate?
Mating.
Can’t foxes mate silently?
His laugh ran through them like a tremor.
Next time we come, I’ll tell Mum we’ll both sleep here in the spare room.
Yes, she said. Yes, that will be much better.
We’ll still be quiet.
Of course.
Seeing like Capa
In Tokyo there had been no need to carry his past with him but only his camera. When people asked, What are you, Who are you, he might say no more than his name, that he was English and a photographer, or an English teacher when he didn’t feel like saying that or the photography didn’t pay. There was a whole community of English teachers. Some of them weren’t even English but that didn’t matter because the Japanese who were their students generally couldn’t tell the difference. They were a travelling flotsam with identities that might or might not be true, with grand or less grand notions of themselves and stories they told or stories they didn’t tell. And if you liked to take pictures, you could do what you liked and take pictures of anything anywhere. Because you were gaijin, and nothing was expected of you.
You off on the hippy trail? his brother had said, before he went travelling. That was what some of their friends were suddenly doing, taking off in buses or camper vans, overland to India, coming back with long hair and chillums and ill-cured Afghan coats.
No. Not exactly.
That was when he first put a word to what he meant to be. A photographer. Though he didn’t say it to Richard but only to himself.
He remembered what it had meant when got his first camera. It was on his twelfth birthday. He had been asking for one all year. His birthday was in June, just before the end of the summer term, and all of the holiday that followed he took the camera about with him, photographing everything in sight. That was when it started. He took pictures of his mother, but she got cross when he took the pictures as she hated being photographed when she wasn’t prepared, so he took some of Richard, and dozens of Billy. Billy was great for pictures. Billy at work, with a spade or a barrow, with his cap and his whiskers and his old lined face looking like a countryman from any past time since photography was invented. It was great that he had the pictures, because Billy died that next winter. The best he took that September just before they were due to go back to school. He went with Billy and Richard when they went shooting. He took his camera along instead of a gun, photographed the two of them as they walked and aimed and shot, photographed the dog waiting, the dead pheasants close up with their red-rimmed eyes and fabulous feathers.
Richard liked those pictures but all the same he thought it was only a hobby. Like cricket, or shooting. It wasn’t something to do with your life.
Richard had begun to take the farm in hand the year he went to university. He worked with him over that first summer’s harvest, but he didn’t go back to university at the end of it. He took the money Richard paid him and bought the newest Pentax. He knew what to buy. He knew something about photography by then.
Great camera, Richard said. What did it cost you?
It cost him a lot. His travelling would have to be cheap because he had spent so much on the camera. He would have to earn along the way. The camera had to be a good one because it was to be his eye on the world. It would be the means to give what he saw physical presence. The evidence of his seeing – or of his being, if you followed the thought through. That, his grand notion. He was going to go travelling and take pictures. He would be what he did and not what he was. What he did would make him who he was or who he would become. He would become whoever he was at any moment, with a pack on his back and a camera around his neck. Seeing the world, whatever he saw. Would he then be what he saw? Or would he always be what he had seen? (Or when he came home would he be just the same?)
Richard wouldn’t get it, what he planned to do. A photographer, what sort of job was that? As if he didn’t know. It was being something, someone, other than who he had been until now. Richard wouldn’t know anything about that either. Richard had only ever wanted to be Richard, so far as anyone could tell.
When he first came back to England in December, he had laid out all of his pictures, a shiny mass of photos on the dining-room table. It looked like Pelmanism, all those memories laid out on the table to be sorted and grouped together, in the dining room where they had once played cards, the cards face down across the tablecloth.
Richard came in to see. Richard was never so good at cards. It was the one game that Jonny could win despite being the youngest, as soon as he could read the numbers. He could look at the table all spread with the blue-and-red-backed playing cards and know where the matching ace was, and the eights and the twos and the kings, pick them up in a run as the game went on and the pairs revealed themselves, tight with the excitement of knowing, watching his mother’s hand hovering close to the card he knew but then diving elsewhere and picking up wrong – or sometimes he suspected that that was only a ploy, that really she knew and it was only a ploy to allow him to win, once in a while, at something – then watching with glee when it was Richard’s turn and Richard’s hand moved blind, wrong and wrong again and right only by chance, because cards just wasn’t his sort of thing.
Now Richard picked up a black-and-white print of a street cramped between high-rise buildings, vertical shop signs bearing Chinese characters. Richard was sifting through his three years. Richard himself three years older.
That Japan?
Hong Kong.
One from the next pile. A wider street, figures made nondescript by rain, umbrellas above their heads.
That’s Tokyo.
Not my scene, Richard said, putting them down and looking further, restless, at one pile then another, flicking through the prints, the contact prints, the sleeves of negatives. Nothing for him there; not his turn now.
You took an awful lot of pictures.
Some of them aren’t worth keeping.
Pelmanism. What matched with what? Shuffle the memories, see what matches with what, what begins, what follows. Go back to the beginning.
It had been strange to see it all here, out of the envelopes, here in the red-papered dining room with the carriage clock ticking on the sideboard and the dull Norfolk winter outside. An American called Jim who was his friend in Tokyo. Jim with two girls in the forest. One of the girls recurring in picture after picture, in the park, by the river, on the shore.
Who’s the girl?
He held up a print of the girl smiling beneath a red umbrella; fine drops of rain on the lens.
That’s Kumiko.
Pretty girl. Are Japanese girls pretty?
Not all of them.
She looks nice.
She is nice.
Putting out his hand to take the picture back. Maybe she’ll come here sometime, then you and Mum can meet her.
When Richard looked up from all those photos and asked where were the others, for a moment Jonathan stalled. Which others? Oh, you mean the ones from Vietnam. But those are ages old, I’ve moved on from that now. I boxed them up ages ago and there’s no need to look at them again.
It’s only the more recent ones I’m going through now – but anyway, you’ve seen them already. They were published, you saw that.
They were good.
They were an accident, he said, and he thought, no, in truth, they weren’t good, whatever they were, in fact were a kind of failure, that brought him all the way back to where he was now, come back here to spread out these last few years on the table. And not the full years, edited years at that.
No, surely not, Richard was saying. Not an accident, not at the time?
It was all a crazy thing, he said, some of the cool of those days coming back to him, being cool again as if he still had the camera slung about his neck, light meter dangling, though he was here at home in the dining room and with only his brother to see — and you never quite grew up at home, you were never so free as elsewhere, always aware, wary, of what had gone before, what might pull you back, always the danger there that your big brother would see through you to someone smaller.
That’s how it was out there, he said, trying now to be accurate. Truthful, not tough.
I was just travelling, and I met someone who was going to the war and he said it was easy, easy to get there, easy to go, and it was, and there it was before me. I was only in the country for a few weeks. I just struck it lucky, that’s all.
People who stayed home, people like Richard, didn’t understand how easy travel was. Even to a place like that. Because everything was immediate, every decision and move made for the moment, for that day. Eat, travel, find a place to sleep. Move on. A day at a time. Or maybe consider just the day after or the day after that.
Those pictures were great. Aren’t you going to do more like that?
That war’s over now.
There are other wars.
No.
People, people all over, wanted to see what he had seen. They looked, and they might remember those images he had taken through all the rest of their lives, in place of other images, even in place of first-hand ones that might have made them happy. He had told himself there was meaning in it. Purpose. And then the cheque came in, and he moved to Tokyo where there was no war, and bought a leather jacket, and packed away the prints and the negatives into their boxes. He took them out once to show Kumiko and afterwards regretted it.
Harvest Page 7
