No, I’m not going to do that again, he said. Too much maumau.
‘Maumau’ shut Richard up. ‘Maumau’ was a word they had between them, just in the family, one of those words that holds a family together and closes it against the world. ‘Maumau’, crushed roadkill. ‘Maumau’, the entrails of a poached deer thrown into a ditch. Billy knowing the sight, explaining how a deer when it was shot must be disembowelled on the spot or its meat went bad. ‘Maumau’, a sheep’s skull he found once when they went on a walk, or Jess found it, snuffling in the bushes. He didn’t know what had happened to the rest of the sheep, there was only this skull, half of it bared to the bone but the other half with dry skin still clinging to it tight and leathery, and the eye gaping through. His mother’s distaste. You’re not carrying that home, are you? Yes. Well you can’t bring it in, it’ll have maggots in it, you’ll have to put it on the bonfire or bury it or something. He persisted, holding it by the bare jaw all the way back. It was interesting, weird. He thought he might do a drawing of it, strip off the rest of the skin maybe, or preserve it in something. What was it people used, formaldehyde? Do we have any formaldehyde, Mum? No, I told you, you’re not bringing that smelly thing in here. Take it away, it’s maumau, I’m not having it in the house. The word was shorthand. Once it was said nothing more needed to be said. Though of course the thoughts would remain, the unsaid images that couldn’t be forgotten. Richard knew that as well as he did. So now Richard shrugged and turned away from the photos. He went to the window, put his big hands to the frame and stared out through the glass. They both stared out. The garden was bare. Only the black hedge to see there, the stripped trees, the dead stalks of plants and the leaves on the lawn that hadn’t been cleared away.
I don’t think it was as easy as you say. You really worked at getting there, didn’t you?
Perhaps.
Why did you go?
I don’t know. Adventure. A challenge. Robert Capa.
Who’s he?
A famous war photographer. He was one of the greats. He was in Spain. He was at the Normandy invasion. He went everywhere and saw everything. He was in Vietnam too, but it was still French Indochina then and it was the French they were fighting. He got killed there, sometime in the ’50s.
Richard wasn’t interested in anything he had to say about Capa.
I think you went because of Dad.
I don’t know. Maybe in some way I did.
But you didn’t see Dad’s war. You saw another war.
You’re right. There are lots of wars.
It was the closest moment they’d had since he had got home. Too close, in that room, on a day like that one, with the trees bare and the leaves on the ground, when the past pressed them closer. Richard took down his hands and looked at Jonny for a moment. They were men now, not boys, two men looking into each other across a room. He did not know if his brother had done that before, seen him as a man, as much a man as their father or himself. And then Richard walked out of the room and there were only the photos on the table, the pretty ones, the Japanese ones, the ones of the pretty girl, and beside all that maumau they seemed like nothing.
It was true, what he had said. It had been surprisingly easy to get in, whoever you were, that first mad modern war where photographers got to go everywhere. The trip to Vietnam had been an accident, as far as he was concerned, an aberration, as it seemed now, though at the time it had seemed intentional, fated even, the turning of a circle. Even if to others it seemed an achievement. How could he explain that to his brother? That those photos, which so impressed people that they remembered him for them, which had made a magazine cover, and which might even have been the start of a career, seemed all a mistake and even a shame. That there was no courage in them but only chance, and rush, and fear. The weight of the camera in his hands, the cold consciousness of the camera, as if only the lens saw what he himself could not bear to see and the hands were helpless to help.
Surprising how doors opened to you sometimes. Offered you a chance to be Capa, running into battle with a camera around your neck. To be a hero like Capa. Like your own father even. To see war. Shouldn’t a young man see war? Wasn’t the greatest photographer the photographer of war, of life and death?
Hey, Richard, see this. This is more than anything you’re ever likely to see. See what your father might have seen. Get in closer. That was what Capa said made a photographer great, getting in close.
Turn war into images. Make money out of it. Let the men and women in your pictures stand for men and women anywhere. The victims, and the soldiers. Fix them in that moment in their lives or their deaths. So what if they are individuals each with their own future, who might be recognised later, those who survive, when they’re not soldiers or victims any more. You don’t have responsibility for them. You’re only the one behind the camera. You are producing the images for other people to see, that either they think they want to see or you think they ought to see. Richard wouldn’t understand how it felt. In Tokyo there had been a friend who might have understood, but he didn’t see him any more. His friend had been at the war but he had been a soldier, in front of the camera, not behind it. He, like their father, like those victims, wasn’t ever going to escape having been there. Even if he had a home like this to escape to, a safe home where nobody knew any of that. Where there was a view open in all directions. A wide sky. Nice clouds. Hedged fields. A girlfriend who would travel halfway across the world to visit him.
She stood at the front door.
He said, I want a picture of you there. Just like that, standing there with your back to it, like it’s your house. Like a child’s picture of a house and its owner.
But if I owned it, she said, I’d be going in, wouldn’t I? I wouldn’t be standing here looking out.
OK then, open the door and stand in the doorway.
Why?
I’m so happy to have you here, I want it to look like you belong. He was walking away with the camera, then stopping to look through the lens.
I don’t belong, she said. I’m spare. I sleep in the spare room, remember?
She turned about and reached for the brass knocker. It was a big black door, with a fanlight above it. He would have a picture of the door and the back of a short Japanese girl knocking.
Take that one.
He was happy that she had come during this spell of fine weather. The garden was full of flowers. The house had the windows thrown open. This was the home that he wanted her to see. Stand at the door, I want to take a picture of you there. He had a sudden thought that he should have used black-and-white film. Somewhere in the family albums there was a picture of his mother in the same spot, a grey image of a young woman in a summer dress with one hand to the half-open door, looking out as if she was saying goodbye to someone in a departing car, of which you saw just a bulbous 1950s wing, a wheel hub and a door, and at the same time she was putting out a hand to the dog, their old retriever Jess, to stop her from running out in front of the car. But Kumiko turned to face the door and knocked. That’s lovely, he said. Better that it was colour, because her yellow dress showed up so bright against the shiny black door. There was no telling what colour his mother’s dress had been.
They walked through the garden, taking more pictures. Her dress became garish beside his mother’s old-fashioned flowers. It was disconcerting to have her here, this girl whom he had photographed so many times, changing the perspectives in every direction, this girl who was the same girl as in all those other pictures from the year before, brought into this present which was also his past. She pushed her long black hair back behind her shoulder which was bare save for the strap of the dress and smiled her big smile. He did not know why he was taking so many pictures when she had just arrived. As if each of these moments must be recorded. When what was there came here. The shock of putting two pieces of his life together.
I did not expect, she had said, this house to be so big. Yet he thought that he had told her that before she came.
The farmhouse was big and rambling. He had described all of that, and he had described the village, and the Hall where his family had once lived, which was rather more grand. The day she arrived they had gone for a walk around the village after lunch, he and his mother and Kumiko, not Richard who was out on the farm. The three of them had walked the half-mile to the village through the fields, entering the churchyard through a gate at the back where the gravestones stood nameless, head-high in grass. Are your family here? she asked. Yes, he said, but he would not show her the graves now, not with his mother here and when she had just arrived. He showed her instead the memorials inside the church, that went back five or six centuries; an opulent slab of Victorian marble commemorating his great-grandparents who had first come to the Hall; more austere twentieth-century memorials listing villagers who had died in two world wars.
The church was tall and white, bright with the day, and silent. She walked down the aisle to the altar rail, her steps crisp on the stone floor.
May I clap, she said, or is it too quiet? Would you mind?
Go ahead.
She stood in the pool of light that fell through the east window and clapped her hands together, twice, into the white space. That’s what we do when we enter a shrine, she spoke across the church to Claire. To wake the god.
So fresh and free she looked, in the yellow dress. Sunlight to blaze away the shadows. Snap.
Stay as long as you like, Claire said. It’s lovely to have you here. It was lovely to be there, she said. She said how beautiful the place was, the house, and the garden that Claire had made, the church, the village, the way of life. Jonathan did not tell me, she said, that he grew up in such a beautiful place. She stayed the weekend and then through the following week, and then the weekend after. Jonathan had planned for them to go to London and do some sightseeing, they had even talked about going to Paris, but the summer weather continued so perfect, day after day, that it seemed a pity to leave. So they took Claire’s car and went for day trips to the seaside or across the county.
They went to Swaffham on market day. To Norwich to see the cathedral. To Castle Acre and Castle Rising, those names she would remember, and to other places whose names she would forget. One day they drove past the walls of Sandringham where Jonathan said that the Queen spent her summer holiday but he didn’t know if she was in residence or not. I think they have a flag flying if she’s there, he said. But they did not see any flag. They did not see the house even, only those long walls and trees behind them. Maybe it was just at Buckingham Palace, he said, that she flew the flag to show when she was in. Or maybe she was not there at all, now he thought about it, he thought now it must be Christmas that she spent in Norfolk, or Easter. She had a place in Scotland for the summer.
One day that promised to be particularly fine, they went to the beach and he took pictures of her in the English dunes as he had taken pictures of her on a beach in Japan a year before. They went for a long walk out through the marshes and to the dunes and then on, making their way across mud and clumps of marsh grass and wet sand to a piece of land that became an island when the tide rose, and at the point at the tip of the island they saw seals playing in the sea. Then they put down their things and changed, and swam in the sea themselves. She wore the same red swimming costume as the year before, but there was a sting of wind and the sea was cold, despite the sunshine. It was a few degrees cooler on the coast than it had been inland, with that breeze and a hint of cloud coming in over the sea. This beach on the side of the island that faced the sea was long and the colouring cool, the sand pale and the beach grasses a bleached green. They ate the picnic they had brought with them and then he took pictures of her with the long pale strip of sand stretching out behind her and the endless sea horizon. No shadows, as the thin cloud moved in across the sky. The wind just so gently blowing her hair and blowing sand against her. She wrapped herself in a towel. It’s cold, your English seaside. They moved back into the shelter of the dunes.
They stayed while the other trippers began to walk back.
Can’t we stay here, just the two of us, she said, and play like the seals? This is so much nicer than your spare room.
But look at the time.
It won’t get dark for hours.
It’s not the time that matters, it’s the tide. If the tide comes up we’ll be cut off.
We’ll have to swim.
With the picnic things?
But we have it all to ourselves now, we can play for a while.
So they did, until they saw how far the sea had come in.
They had to run for it, in their swimming things and carrying their stuff, he with his camera held high, she with the picnic basket over her head, wading through the incoming water that seemed to come so much faster once it had rounded the tips of the island. Then putting on their clothes with the wet swimming things beneath, and back across the marsh, dishevelled, wet, sandy, muddy, laughing. Driving like that home to the farm, Kumiko’s black hair salt-dry and grainy with sand. Loving her like that. Not wanting to show her like that to his mother, his brother, somehow indecent as if it showed on her, the sex they had had in the dunes. But only his mother to see them when they got in, Richard not back yet.
Is there time, he said, for a bath before supper?
Yes, if you’re quick.
Kumiko bathed and washed her hair, and they had supper outside because inland there was no wind and the evening was warm.
Did you have a good day? Richard asked.
Yes, he said. A very good day.
He looked across the table at her in the dusk and wanted her as much as at any time in that day. He saw her talking in that open way she had to his brother, his mother. And wondered at her, that he had brought her here or that she had come all this way for him. It was getting too dark to see the look in her eyes but he knew the heavy fall of her hair and the delicate movements of her hands. He knew all her surfaces. He had touched them and he had photographed them a thousand times. Yet here she was, foreign in his home, present and yet somehow escaping him. Here with his family about him, even at the end of this particular day, he felt that he knew her less than before. He was less sure of her, distracted by the others, by their awareness of her, by her foreignness that he noticed all at once again now as he had previously ceased to see it. He wanted to take out his camera and catch her, only the light right now was too dim for that, she sitting facing out into the garden with the light from the house, all the artificial light that there was, behind her, the light from the windows that spilled out across the lawn. It was an obsession, perhaps, photographing her. The more photographs he took, the more he realised that he would never catch her. Even though she seemed so immediate. He would catch only her stilled surface between one moment and another, never her moving self. Like those painters who paint endlessly portraits of their wives. It might be that their wives were the only people with the patience to sit for them for so long and so often, or it might be that they were trying, really trying, to capture them. Because people need to catch hold of those that they love, because even when they’re very close and have been with them for a long time they can be strangers too. Only their surfaces have ever been captured, what can be painted or photographed, and their words perhaps, that can be written and recorded. Not who they are.
Was that what he was doing, taking these pictures, pictures that had no purpose, so many more hundreds of pictures than he would ever print? Fixing no more than instants, holding them in time. Now here she sat in the dusk, in light too dim for any photograph, escaping him.
What are you doing tomorrow? Richard was asking. Richard sat on the same side of the table as he did, with the window light falling clear on his face.
I don’t know yet, she was saying from the shadow. Jonathan, do we have a plan for tomorrow?
Before he could think to answer, Richard said, Then you must let me show you round the farm. You haven’t done that yet.
Oh yes, she said, I’d like that. Her answer came
quickly. He could hear her brightness if he could not see it.
And his mother was passing the salad bowl around. Do you think it’s got too dark to finish the meal out here? We could go inside for pudding. Though it’s such a lovely night.
They agreed they would stay outside. A warm night such as this was rare. The moon had risen. Bats flecked the air above their heads. If no image, then a memory at least to fix. Talking across the table, darkness between them. Making the spaces that were there, the secrets and absences that their words crossed, almost tangible.
She went out with Richard next morning. It seemed to him that they were gone for a long time.
What took you so long?
It’s a big farm, she said when she came back. I didn’t know it was so big. I thought that we would walk but Richard drove everywhere in the Land Rover. He says farmers don’t walk their land, they always drive.
Well, yes, that’s Richard for you. Let’s go for a walk ourselves this afternoon. We’re not farmers so we can walk.
The weather got muggy after lunch, the sky overcast. It wasn’t a great time for a walk. Only the dog was eager to be out. He was getting attached to this new dog. Perhaps she was silly like people said spaniels were, but that might have been only her youth. She was pretty much trained but he took a lead with him because she didn’t know him so well. When finally they left the house they walked out with no clear direction, down the drive and onto the track and then around the edges of the fields. He meant to take a long walk out and beyond the farm and back through the village, perhaps have a drink in the pub before they got home; they were so late that it might be open by the time they got there. They would be able to sit outside on the bench with the dog at their feet. Yet the walk seemed dull. On such a flat day the land seemed flatter than ever, the distances longer. I suppose you came all through here this morning, he said, and she said yes, she had, though of course everything looked different when you were driving.
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