Wait for me, she said. I don’t want to lose you up here.
There was a time in Tokyo when he showed her his photos from the war. They were horrible pictures that she didn’t like to see and liked less to remember, but all the same she could not pull herself away from them. He gave her a magnifying glass and let her see all of them, the contact prints, the pictures that were not published as well as the ones that were, standing behind her, watching her look, as if each of the pictures was a confession that he had to have her see, showing her things that she did not want to see, that he did not want ever to have seen himself, as if he thought that she would not want to see him if he had seen those things. That’s who I am, he said. A spectator. A taker of pictures. He said that he had felt cold, taking those photos, even when he had been sweating with fear. And it was cold of him, to show them to her. I did not mean to be cold, he said. It’s something in me.
No, she said. It’s only the camera. You put the camera in front of your eyes.
It was raining in the south also when they went back to the farm. In the south rain was different, Kumiko saw, not a force any more, only rain. Claire said that it had been fine most of the time they had been gone. It had started to rain just a day or two before. Grey rain. The fields a dull matt gold because of the wet. More rain waiting in the sky in darker bands of cloud. Colour flat, shapes flat, lines horizontal. Like somebody’s painting she had seen once, only she couldn’t think whose.
So good to have you back, Claire was saying. Was it lovely there? Did you have good weather? She had picked them up at the station. She had not known until she saw them how happy she would be to have them back. They were driving home through the lanes. She drove a little carelessly, looking across to Kumiko sitting in the front, glancing back to Jonny behind, chattering because they were quiet, hoping to see from their faces that they had had a happy time together. Like when Jonny was a boy and she used to pick him up from somewhere, hoping things had gone well.
It’s been beautiful here till now, she said. Just till this last couple of days. Richard’s fretting of course. This weather’s not good for him. He was all ready to get the combine out before this rain.
There were puddles along the road, the hedges sagging, the nettles on the verges limp with the moisture. She had to brake suddenly at a bend when they met a car coming too fast from the other direction, stop and reverse to where there was width in the road to let the other car pass. Yet she went on talking, feeling the need to talk.
Do you know, we came off the road just there once, Charlie and I?
She remembered how happy two people could be, but how unhappy also.
Just here, into a snowdrift. That was in the dreadful winter of 1947. You can’t imagine how high the drifts were, looking at it all now. We had to leave the car and walk home.
You never told us that before, Mum.
Didn’t I?
He was looking out at the rain. All day on the train they had been looking out at rain. There had been so many homecomings, so many times that they had been this way. His parents before he was born, walking in the snow. Or a boy riding in the grain cart, on that same sharp bend. Two boys, one bigger than the other, laughing. The cart swinging round the bend and the surface of the heap shifting, the smaller boy sinking down open-mouthed into a golden quicksand of wheat, feet, legs, body, fear of drowning, grain in his mouth, gripping hard to the hard sides of the cart, coming home with his eyes red and running. Hay fever, his mother would say. From all the dust.
All the times we’ve driven this road, you never told us.
I’m sure I must have. You’ve just forgotten.
Perhaps she had told him, he couldn’t be sure.
This year he had offered to drive for Richard. He didn’t think they would let a boy ride in the cart nowadays. He would have to take care on the bend all the same, take it slowly so that the grain didn’t spill.
Well, it was a long time ago, she was saying. They were close to the house. Through breaks in the hedge on each side of the road came glimpses of Richard’s sodden wheat.
The accident had been her fault, even if Charlie was driving. They had walked home cold in the snow and the dark, huddled by the Aga when they got in, not speaking, each of them separate and alone. They had had a row. It was because of something she had said that Charlie had put his foot down too hard and come off the road. Always it seemed to have been a question of what she was saying and what Charlie was not saying, though it was what Charlie did not say that mattered more than anything she could put into words. She had said what she had said because of Charlie, because of whatever it was in him which was constantly with them and made her afraid. That was before family. Family had been meant to warm them. To fill the silences. Children to bring happiness, to make a way to the future. She was glad that there would be family now, this summer at least, her boys together, this nice girl here, Jonny helping out for these few weeks.
She recognised the trees that marked the site of the farm from a distance. Then the house came into view, with the barns around it, looking square in the centre of its land. She remembered which painter it was. It was Mondrian, when he painted landscapes before he painted abstracts. She and Jonathan had seen an exhibition of his paintings in Tokyo. It seemed an age ago that they did that. It made her sad, that it seemed so long ago. She thought, Mondrian was from Holland and Holland was flat; maybe you felt like painting abstracts if you lived in flat landscape like this.
She had thought the paintings were cold. Jonathan had liked them for their form and restraint. She closed her eyes. It had been a long journey. She sat beside Claire in the front, Jonathan in the seat behind her where she could not see him. Wait for me, she might have said, running after him up there on the mountain. Wait, I don’t want to lose you here. Now let me have a turn, she would say. Let me take a picture now. And he takes the camera from about his neck. And she takes it, hard and black and smooth in her cold wet hands. She holds it by the strap. She does not put the strap safe over her head, but only holds it, holds and swings it, and hurls the camera out into the mist. A black box turning, falling unseen to the lake below.
Here we are, home, Claire was saying.
They turned off the lane into the drive. There was the old iron gate wedged open. Probably the gate didn’t move. She never saw anyone try to move it. There was grass tangled about the base of it that must have grown there for years. Then they were past the gate and driving up to the house. There were the tall straight hedges like walls, and beyond them the garden itself. The garden didn’t look so beautiful as it had when she had left only two weeks before. Because of the rain, of course, but also because the roses, which she thought of as Joséphine’s roses but which were not Joséphine’s roses at all, had finished flowering.
I’ve put you both in the spare room this time. Take your things up and then come down and I’ll make you some tea.
She had gone to the fishmonger’s before she went to the railway station. They ate fish only when she had been into town, which she didn’t do often when there was just herself and Richard in the house; when it was just the two of them she tended to make do with what she could get in the village. Now that she had everyone home, she cooked with care. Fish pie. Family supper. Once the work started meals would be functional and hurried, left a long time keeping warm in the bottom of the oven or even taken out to the field. You used to make this, Mum, when we came home from school. Did I? Yes, I suppose I did. I’d make it beforehand, so I could just heat it up when we’d driven home. She had forgotten. It was one of those rituals, of coming home from school, when the things that were done filled in for all that had not been said, the missing and the separation. This was like the days when they came home from school for the summer. July weather, two boys home, the summer holidays stretching ahead. Raspberries from the garden, only now they would have lost their flavour a bit after the rain. Meringues and cream. They had always liked her meringues, and they were so easy to make, overnight in the Ag
a, these too ready before the holidays began. When the meal was over and they were watching television she took the dog out. The dog snuffled off into the dark and she followed. There was no moon. The night was dank, still. This stillness was no good for Richard. It was warmth and wind, drying air, that Richard needed. She walked to the border before the hedge, where there was only a thin scent from the tobacco plants. They needed warmth to bring out the scent. She had planted them for warm nights, aromatic flowers to draw moths in the dusk. She looked back on the façade, so formal and regular with the wisteria trained across it. There were lights in the sash windows all along, in the hall and in the sitting room downstairs, and on the landing above and in the bedrooms to each side.
Such a pretty façade. The setting for the illusion that was to have been her work. Here, Charlie, here we are, a happy family, two sons, my darling, one dark, one fair, like ourselves, and our fields stretching about us. Not quite all the land you can see from here, because the skies and the horizons are big. But enough. And we shall have a beautiful garden with hedges tall about it. And how they will love this place. They will be rooted here, in this piece of land which has been in the family for so long, in this place and in the past.
Jonny had not said how long his girl would stay. She had been careful not to ask. He had committed himself to working on the farm through the harvest. She supposed that Kumiko would be with them that long at least. Then they were to go away, travelling in Europe, until when she did not know. She hoped that he would bring her back after.
It was surprising, how things turned out. It occurred to her how many plants she had in the garden that came from Japan, which had crept in without her thinking where they were from. She had been coming to love things Japanese even when she had thought she disliked them. She had come to realise it only by their names: her tree peonies and cherry trees, the autumnalis that flowered so kindly through the winter; Skimmia, Pieris, Chaenomeles, evergreen shrubs that flowered in the early spring. Others, probably, that she hadn’t thought of. The wisteria itself, though she regretted sometimes that she had not put in the Chinese variety, which she now thought more elegant. A deep pink camellia. Joséphine had a Camellia japonica. There was a painting of one by Redouté in the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, Redouté who had painted the plants in Joséphine’s collections, whose paintings were almost more famous than the flowers.
He’s there in the field again.
Who?
Richard, of course.
This morning they woke in the same room, Jonathan in the spare bed beside her.
He’s always there, in the mornings, when I look out.
The talk the night before had been all about where they had been in the Lakes and what they had done, what hills they had climbed, the boat they took out on Windermere. And you, she had asked Richard, what have you been doing? Waiting, he said. Watching the weather. Watching the crop. (And now in the evening, she had thought, watching the rest of us talk.)
So there he was again in the early morning, out in the field beyond the hedge. Watching.
In Tokyo Jonathan was the Englishman. She thought at first that there was Englishness in everything that he did. But Richard was more English than he was. Or maybe it was only the surface that made a man English or not English. Once you knew him well you didn’t see that any more.
Claire said that Richard looked like his father. Handsome and fair-haired and blue-eyed. English.
All she knew about Jonathan and Richard’s father was how he died. That was all he had become. Whoever he was, was hidden behind it. So much of him hidden, even here in this house and in his family. Maybe his death had been in him years before, when he was alive as well. Maybe Claire knew that all the time. That was why she was so careful of Richard.
How long shall we stay now? she asked Jonathan.
I don’t know, he said. As long as it takes. It depends on the weather.
And when the weather’s good, how long then?
A week or two. You don’t mind that, do you, being stuck here? You could go somewhere if you like, go up to London on your own?
No, she said. That’s fine. I like it here.
It used to be his time alone, this time of day. His mother was never an early riser. When they were boys Jonny went out before him one day and never told where he went. Now he was the one who always woke first. But the girl was awake. The days began very early now in midsummer. She woke as early as he did, and she came to the window to draw back the curtain and look out. When he saw her there the first time he had thought that it must be the jet lag, that she was on Japanese time and that was why she was up. Not any more. And she was not alone in her room any more, Jonny was with her, and still she woke early and went to the window. She must just be a morning person. He liked that thought. He was aware of her waking presence within the house as before he had been aware of her pictures on the table.
On the headland where he had walked into the field the crop was thin and still a little green but here at the heart of the field it was ripe and dense. The wheat looked good this year, this his fourth harvest and the yield would be the best, if only this rain would stop and he could get it in. The stalks were strong and the leaf blades showed no sign of discolouration. The heads were thick. He broke one off, separated the sheath to look at the grain in it, rolled the kernel out from the husk, put it to his teeth. Ready to go. Only the ground was wet, slippery underfoot. There was water lying on the tracks and on the tramlines through the crop. He did not like to see water lying this time of year.
He had checked the barometer before he went out. He did that every morning, and again at night when he came in and sometimes again when he went to bed. A habit of the house. The barometer hung in the hall where you passed it whenever you went in or out, or just when you went upstairs or into the office or the sitting room. It had hung there so long that it did not look as if it would bear to be moved. It was an antique barometer, early nineteenth century or something, the kind that was made to look like a miniature piece of furniture, of polished walnut, but pieces of veneer flaked off in places, its face stained, the tiny glass flask that held the mercury slightly askew in its metal clamps. He didn’t know why they had bothered to make it decorative when it was a functional thing, but he liked its being like that. He liked its being there. It must have been there long before his father. It would have been there for his father’s uncle Ralph. It might have been there before Ralph too, already there when Ralph came to the house, for all the farmers before him, so many men checking it before they went out, walking across the hall, tapping the barometer, turning then away from the front door to go down the passage to the kitchen, take a cap from a hook and go out at the back into the yard. So many of them, over the years, repeating the same damn pattern. Pressure low. No change from the day before. The radio forecast had said the same. Risk of showers in late morning, sometimes heavy. The sky was a uniform grey. When he first looked out its colour hadn’t told him anything. It looked the sort of sky that might have cleared by eleven or might as easily have turned to rain. But once he got outdoors he felt that expectancy in the air that told him there was a shower to come. When he came back in to breakfast he made a point of tapping the barometer again, just in case.
The girl was making Japanese tea. Jonny had brought Japanese tea for her from London. It had a different smell from any other tea.
It looks better this morning, his mother said to him.
There’ll be rain later.
Oh, I didn’t hear the forecast.
Well, we’ll see how it goes. Perhaps it won’t rain after all.
Claire put his eggs before him, toast in a toast rack beside the teapot.
He took up his knife and fork, glancing up at the girl as he began to eat. And what are you doing today?
I don’t know. Her bright morning smile. I think Jonathan has a plan to go somewhere. Ely, I think.
That’s nice.
It was raining by the time they left. The rain came suddenly, wi
thout a change in the sky. Claire told them to take an umbrella but Jonny was optimistic. Jonny never listened to him. Thanks, Mum, he said, but it’s only a shower. It won’t last.
I wouldn’t be too sure about that, Richard said.
The shower grew heavy and the long horizons closed in. They drove, quiet as the grey outside. Jonathan broke the silence. He’s right, damn it. Trust a farmer to know the weather.
Windscreen wipers, limp hedges, blurred fields. Somewhere along the way they passed a combine stopped in the wheat, only a stripe cut into the crop behind it. Some farmer had tried to get out before the rain but had been driven in when he had barely started. He drove on through the fens, long straight roads on embankments and deep dykes beside them. Sharp turns where you didn’t expect them, whose logic, he explained, was not to do with the lie of the land or the direction of the road but the system of dykes that you couldn’t see.
Ely loomed from a long way off. The town had once been an island, he said, before the fens were drained. All of this orderly farmland they were driving through had once been marshes. It had been a wild place of rebels and outlaws, but then engineers were brought from Holland to reclaim the land.
But it looks like an island now, she said. You could imagine sailing there, sailing up to it in a boat.
For a brief time the rain held off. The sky became luminous, layers of cloud tearing apart. He stopped the car and got out to take pictures. The town with its great cathedral stood out like an atoll above the shimmering grey flat.
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