The Gun Room

by Georgina Harding

  And his father was in the spinney, not the field. There was no fence in the spinney. There had been no accident, no climbing of any fence.

  This picture he did not take, of the girl in the white dress, yet he sees it as if he had taken it, a single still shot that will be followed by a blur too fast for his eyes. Here, in England, in the little-used dining room of the farmhouse, where the yellow and the green boxes are variously spread and stacked on the carpet, and the pictures piled on the long oak table, he goes to the window and looks onto the wet lawn and the bare trees of winter, and he sees the image sharp, clear as the glass of the window and the empty view.

  He has brought home few things besides the boxes of photographs and undeveloped rolls of film, only a suitcase of clothes, and Christmas presents for his mother and for Richard. He had taken time on the presents and Kumiko had helped him buy them, a red lacquered bowl for his mother, and for his brother a tool of a type seen and admired at her grandfather’s, a folding pruning saw of high-quality Japanese steel, the handle of hardwood shaped with a tactile and oriental-seeming curve, but then at the last moment he couldn’t think of Richard doing any pruning except with a chainsaw, so he had bought in addition a bottle of some expensive Japanese whisky. He thinks that they liked the presents. They seemed to understand that he had taken care with them. How long will you stay for? they said, and he said, Till after Christmas anyway. That’s fine, they said, stay until you’re sorted out. You can use the top bathroom as a darkroom again, as you used to, some of your things are still up there in the attic. And have the dining room to sort your pictures – not over Christmas of course, we’ll have to have it clear for Christmas, but in the meantime, and afterwards, if you’re still here. You know how little entertaining we do nowadays. It’s much more friendly anyway to have people to eat in the kitchen.

  His mother looks older. That had struck him forcibly when he got out of the taxi and she came to the door. But then he had understood that the impression was partly an effect of the falseness of memory, that the memory which he had been keeping and against which he had measured her most likely dated from some time long before he had left. (From what age should you keep a memory of someone, he wonders, at what age would you take their portrait, if you were to keep of them just a single portrait, as the Japanese do, for the family shrine?) All in all, she looks well enough. It must help that Richard is running the farm so efficiently now. As for Richard, he seems fine, unchanged, except that he appears to respect him a little more. They were great, those Vietnam pictures, he had said. It is almost the only praise he can remember having from Richard. Why didn’t you go on with it? Their mother says that Richard needs a wife, a girlfriend at least, and then he sees her look on himself, the question in her, and volunteers nothing.

  Later she will see the pictures of Kumiko – some of them, those that he will allow others to see. The photographs might be assembled to make a story but it won’t be the right one. It won’t ever be the full story because of all the images that are missing.

  Is a man responsible for what he sees, or only for what he looks at? He has read that somewhere, someone asking that question. Did he look at this girl on the platform, or only see her? If he had had his camera in his hand, would he have taken her picture?

  He was waiting for a train on one of the suburban overground lines, heading out of the city centre while the commuters were heading in. It was one of those mornings when you could see Fuji. The first time he had seen Fuji from this station he had missed a train in order to take a photograph, so rare the sight seemed, so magical the cone of the mountain rising disconnected above the city. He had not known that it would become a recurrent sight on clear days in winter. This particular Wednesday morning was bright and cold, and Fuji was there on the horizon, and he noticed the girl because she wasn’t wearing a coat. She wore a white dress, no coat, but she did not look cold. The dress was tight at the waist, the skirt flared out to the calf. It was the sort of dress in which it would have been lovely to see a girl dance. She might have worn the dress to go out the night before, be returning home now without her coat after a wild night out and a one-night stand, but she looked too pure for that. She stood at the fore of the crowd of waiting passengers on the opposite platform, standing very still, but then they most of them stood still, they were people waiting, living the blank moments, the dead routine of their day. Just the hem of her skirt fluttered with the breeze that came down the open space of the tracks. So many times he had stood like this and watched the people waiting, photographed the figures and the patterns they made, composing his picture perhaps around the one element that stood out, a child or a particularly dapper man or a bright shopping bag, taking another picture as the crowd shifted and the element moved.

  She stepped out like a petal detaching itself from a flower. His eyes were on her. He did not see but only heard the oncoming train. The sound. The rush of air. The screech of the train braking. The gasp of the crowd which took away his breath, took away all of their breath so that for an instant there seemed to be no air in the place at all but only metal.

  There was nothing more. Whatever there was, was swept away at the front of the train. There was only the crowd, acting as one, moving back, moved back like a wave by the men in white gloves, like a wave pulling back from a beach, pulling back with a strange slow calm though you could see the shock and the hysteria on individual faces, streaming out through the turnstiles, out of the station into the street, breaking up there, milling about, then gathering again at the bus stops along the road to have buses take them to wherever it was they wanted to go.

  * * *

  He was late for the lesson but that wasn’t a problem. His student was a housewife whose life seemed too small for her and whose dream was to travel to Europe. She didn’t mind that he was late and the lesson went surprisingly normally. He had done his preparation and the student had done her homework. They read a passage about Italy and talked about what a Japanese tourist would like to see there, the Vatican and the Bridge of Sighs, and Michelangelo’s David, and he kept his concentration all through. When the lesson was over, he went to a public telephone and made an excuse that he was ill, cancelling his teaching in the school that afternoon. Then he went to a coffee shop and sat in it for a long time. By the time he went home trains were running from the station again, precisely to schedule.

  He went back over his pictures. Prints, contacts, negatives. He sorted through everything he had of the underground. He had dozens of that station. They were his Wednesday-morning pictures. It was a good station for pictures because of the views from the platform which was raised above street level, and the Wednesday lessons were well timed for going against the crowds. He put aside all the pictures he thought he had taken at that station and then went through them with the glass looking for the girl.

  Sometime late in the afternoon Kumiko came by. He opened the door to her.

  Are you OK? I called, I kept calling, and you didn’t answer. You said you were ill. Are you ill? She touched his forehead to feel his heat. You don’t look so ill, but you don’t look well. What’s the matter?

  He let her in. I’ll make some coffee, he said, and let her walk through into the room.

  What is it? What are you doing? Why didn’t you come to work? She was getting angry, seeing all the pictures. I thought you were ill. I had to find replacement teachers. What’s going on?

  He told her what he had seen.

  She sat down on the floor then, began to pick up the pictures from the table. And what are you doing?

  I was looking for her. I wondered if I had seen her before.

  Are you crazy?

  She started to cry. Perhaps that was what he needed to do, to cry.

  Are you completely mad? Do you know how many girls there are in Tokyo?

  I think I have to go home, he said.

  He could not bear it. He could not bear that he was only a witness. That all he could do was watch. He could not bear her foreignne
ss. She, all of them, were foreign to him, all of them on the other platform, even Kumiko was on the other platform, over the tracks, observed by him but not to be touched by him, not to be touched or saved if he might have had the chance to save her.

  I can’t explain. It’s just that I’m outside of all this. I can’t live all of my life outside.

  Like Jim, she said. Kumiko was always wiser than he thought.

  Yes, I guess, like Jim.

  Jim could not go home. I think that he could not go home because of your picture. But you can go home.

  Then I have to, don’t I?

  He might be outside at home too, but he couldn’t tell her that. Only that he needed to be there.

  The dining room is dark because it had been decorated for evening circa 1958, decorated by his mother with deep red walls and chintz curtains. It would be a dark room anyway because the windows are low and north-facing. He has lights on even in the daytime, the wall sconces and the desk lamp that he has brought in to put on the table, plugged into an extension lead that runs across the floor. You need a lot of light to look at pictures.

  Call me, she had said, but he will not call. He is afraid to call, for fear that her voice will be too small and strange to him, more foreign, more Japanese, than he remembers. He fears the distortion, the echoes that can occur down the international line. He will write instead and ask her to write back. He believes that he will hear her voice more clearly if she writes to him.

  I’m having a show. I want you to see it. He has been trying to make his selection dispassionately, objectively, ruthless as when he looked through the lens. None of the underground pictures are innocent to him now. Not one of them, not one of those bland figures is bland any more. He is aware of the potential in each and every one. They are walking through halls and tunnels, up stairs and down escalators, walking down on to the platforms of the various lines below ground or up to the platforms of other lines above ground, and all the platforms end the same way; they come to an end all of a sudden in a straight line and any one of those people lined up before the line might step over the line. And they wait for the train to come. And the instant before the train comes there is a rush of air. I’m getting a show together on the underground. Nowhere famous, just a gallery in north London, but it’s a start. Floating, I’m going to call it, floating like in ukiyo-e, like in the old pictures of Japan that people know, but like in Buddhism too: the floating world of the city but the sadness as well.

  He will go outdoors and take a picture for her. I never showed you my home. Here it is. Come and see me. See how it is here.

  The picture he sends her must be colour. Kumiko loves colour. It should be a flowery picture. She likes his pictures of flowers best. They say it’s flat here and grey and often that’s true. It’s always flat but he has told her that sometimes it’s golden. That’s at harvest time. Right now the fields are still brown, but not the garden. The garden has the beginnings of new green, and flowers. In the garden the daffodils are coming out, yellow not gold, a flood of yellow that when they are fully out will stretch from the old sycamores all the way to the house. That will be the perfect English image for her. His Japanese students have been given Wordsworth to read at school. They know Wordsworth like they know Van Gogh. Kumiko will surely have read the Wordsworth. When she comes, if she comes, perhaps he will take her on a trip to the Lakes.

  He will wait for the flowers to come out and then he will set up the tripod facing back through the trees to the house. Stand in the daffs, feeling silly – looking it too, at least to an English eye. Set the self-timer, run back to his spot, reach out his arms and smile.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Georgina Harding is the author of three novels: The Solitude of Thomas Cave, The Spy Game, which was a BBC Book at Bedtime and shortlisted for an Encore Award, and, most recently, Painter of Silence, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012. Georgina Harding lives on a farm in the Stour Valley, Essex.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Fiction

  The Solitude of Thomas Cave

  The Spy Game

  Painter of Silence

  Non-fiction

  In Another Europe

  Tranquebar

  Also available by Georgina Harding

  Painter of Silence

  Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012

  Iasi, Romania, the early 1950s. A nameless man is found on the steps of a hospital. Deaf and mute, he is unable to communicate until a young nurse called Safta brings paper and pencils with which he can draw. Slowly, painstakingly, memories appear on the page.

  The memories are Safta’s also. For the man is Augustin, son of the cook at the manor house which was Safta’s family home. Born six months apart, they grew up with a connection that bypassed words. But while Augustin’s world remained the same size Safta’s expanded to embrace languages, society – and a fleeting love, one long, hot summer.

  But then came war, and in its wake a brutal Stalinist regime, and nothing would remain the same.

  ‘Conjures a tale that recalls vintage Michael Ondaatje ... delicate and sweeping’ Daily Mail

  ‘This is fiction of the most graceful kind ... a quiet storm of imagery and emotions’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘Harding writes with exquisite restraint ... Her deceptively simple prose gives a startling beauty to the ordinary, and evokes great depth of suffering’ Guardian

  Click here to order

  The Spy Game

  On a freezing January morning in 1961, eight-year-old Anna’s mother disappears into the fog. That same morning, a spy case breaks in the news. Obsessed by stories of espionage, Anna’s brother Peter begins to construct a theory that their mother, a refugee from eastern Germany, was an undercover spy and might even still be alive. As life returns to normal, Anna struggles to sort fact from fantasy. Did her mother have a secret life? And how do you know who a person was once she is dead?

  ‘It is the calm quietness of her writing that is so appealing – she lays an image down so gently that it floats in the mind long after’ Margaret Forster

  ‘Harding skilfully weaves together history, memory and imagination in this haunting and beautifully written novel about how, chameleon-like, we construct our own identities’ Daily Mail

  ‘Many writers, from Harper Lee to Suzanne Berne, have explored children’s skewed view of the adult world. Georgina Harding has equalled their take ... Elegant ... Lucid, seamless’ Independent on Sunday

  Click here to order

  The Solitude of Thomas Cave

  It is August 1616. The whaling ship Heartsease has ventured deep into the Arctic, but the crew must return home before the ice closes in. All, that is, save Thomas Cave. He makes a wager that he will remain there alone until the next season, though no man has yet been known to have survived a winter this far north. So he is left with provisions, shelter, and a journal – should he not live to tell the tale …

  ‘Harding’s exquisite novel is a masterpiece of mood and location ... a profound meditation on survival, atonement and faith’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘Her descriptions of scenery are outstanding ... Thomas Cave’s ordeal should hold readers fast in an icy grip’ Independent

  ‘I read it almost at one sitting and thought it was an astonishing and risk-taking piece of imaginative writing. Her language is superb – evocative and poetic. She conjures up a mysterious and haunting world that lingers in the imagination’ Charles Palliser

  Click here to order

  http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/georgina-harding

  First published in Great Britain 2016

  This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  © Georgina Harding, 2016

  Georgina Harding has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as Author of this work.

  The lines here are from Diane Arbus: Revelations, by Diane Arbus, edited by Doon Arbus, Copyright © 2003
by The Estate of Diane Arbus LLC. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square

  London

  WC1B 3DP

  www.bloomsbury.com

  Bloomsbury is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 4088 6980 2

  eISBN 978 1 4088 6982 6

  To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.