Claire saw her come in. She walked past her. She did not tell her anything. She went straight upstairs, and Jonathan followed her up and she told him that she had to go. Go where? he said. I don’t know, she said. London, for a start. She was packing already, taking things out from the drawers and the wardrobe. He said, It’s Richard, isn’t it, and she said, No, yes, but it’s not what you think, it’s not just that, although that was a part of it, it was something else, something I said that I should not have said, you will never forgive me. I told him, Jonathan, I did not know that he did not know.
That was not quite true. And Jonathan knew it was not true. He did not say. He only looked at her. She was taking her clothes from the wardrobe and folding them and putting them in her case. He left the room.
She packed everything. All her clothes, folded in the case, except for the clean ones she would wear. Then she went to the bathroom and washed, and gathered up her bottles and things, and brushed her hair, hard, and even put on some make-up, though she didn’t usually do that in the mornings. She took her case downstairs. She wanted to be gone before Richard returned, persuading Jonathan to take her to the station, saying that she would talk to him later, in London, in a day or two when he came, if he came, to see her.
When she got to London it was raining. She realised she had left her raincoat hanging by the back door. It did not matter. She could buy an umbrella easily enough.
She had taken a liking to the girl. But she was a foreign girl, from a long way off; from Japan, after all. She had been bound to leave, sooner or later. And now she had. That was what visitors did. Visitors came and stayed awhile, and then they left. The girl had come in flustered this morning and run upstairs, and when she came down again she looked very neat and clean, contained and Japanese once more, her suitcase packed and placed beside her. She noticed too late that the girl had left her red raincoat behind. She ran out with it just as the car turned away down the drive, hoping Jonny might see in his mirror and stop. Not to worry, she thought. He could take it to her sometime, couldn’t he?
The trip to the station and back took an hour at least. She spent the morning waiting for one or other of her sons to come home. She made soup for lunch and laid the table for the three of them. When Jonny came in he saw the table and asked if Richard was back. No, she said, but I thought I heard him coming into the yard. I laid for the two of you.
He slammed the door of the Land Rover, went in the back door, down the little corridor to the kitchen. They were sitting at the table having lunch like on any ordinary day, the two of them sipping soup and a place at the end of the table laid for the girl perhaps – or perhaps it was laid for him, as if he had just been out on the farm and was coming in a little bit late. There would be a bowl warm on the Aga, soup kept warm for whichever one of them it was. Such an everyday scene, except for the fact that one place was missing, and you did not know which of them it was who was meant to have been there. The two of them looking at him, spoons raised. Sunlight coming in the window over the sink, where a flypaper ugly with trapped flies dangled and shuddered in the draught.
His mother started to get up to bring him some soup. No, don’t do that, I’m not eating. He walked out and on to the office. He took the key from the central drawer of his desk and opened the metal gun case in a cubbyhole to the side of the room. He took out a shotgun and a couple of cartridges and went out again, by the front door this time so that he did not have to pass them.
I’ll go after him, Jonny said, running to the front door.
No. She pictured horror. No. Not you. You can’t. She caught him back. If anyone goes, it has to be me.
They tussled on the step there for a moment and then he saw that she was right, and let her go, and she ran out down the drive, hectic, apron flapping. She was still wearing the blue apron she had been wearing to cook, that she had been too distracted to take off before lunch. But already Richard had disappeared from view, down the drive, past the hedges. He might have turned in any direction after that. The hedges hid everything beyond.
Come back in, he said. It’ll be all right. She was walking back so slowly, taking off the apron as she walked, smoothing her hair, closing her eyes and opening them as if to dispel a dream. Come inside and sit down, I’ll make some coffee. He’ll be all right, you know Richard. He’ll settle down. He always does. It’ll be all right, you’ll see.
The kitchen was quiet. A fly buzzing on the fly paper. The kettle coming to the boil. They heard a single shot in the distance. Claire stood. Jonny turned to her. The shot – if it had indeed been a shot, and not just some sudden bang, or bird-scarer (but what bird-scarer could there have been this time of year?) or backfire – was not repeated. The fly buzzed. He took the boiling kettle off the heat.
We have to go, she said. Both of us.
Yes. Only when they moved it seemed they moved so slowly.
They saw him coming back up the drive. Upright, striding, the gun under his arm, a tall blond man like a hunter coming home. He looked to them where they stood at the door of the house.
That scared you, didn’t it?
They looked shocked, the two of them, Claire and Jonny, the two of them always alike and most alike now, with that same expression on their two scared faces. He knew what shocked them. They were seeing a ghost. He knew them so well, and this narrow little world that they lived in. He placed the gun down inside the door and walked into the kitchen. They followed him, not speaking. There were the two soup bowls on the table, the third place that they had laid, and a fourth chair unused, with no place before it, that might have been laid for someone else, if someone else had been there. For the Japanese girl, but the Japanese girl for some reason was nowhere to be seen. Then for his father. That was who it should have been for. And he wasn’t there either. He was gone too. And now he knew how he was gone, and he knew that he was a different father than the one he had been before. Because his father was only his death. That was the thing about his father that mattered more than anything else, that had made them what they were. They were cowards, all of them, shutting themselves away here in this house, closed away with the wide flat land around them.
Fire
She didn’t see Jonathan in London. She couldn’t telephone to the house because she was afraid who would answer. She wrote to him instead, and then she waited a number of days but he sent only a brief note, that he would not come. Maybe one day, he said. Not yet. Maybe better in Japan, not here. She knew what he meant by that. She did not expect him. So she left on the first flight she could get. It was with a Scandinavian airline, flying north to Helsinki and then across the Arctic. (Funny, she thought, it was not such a great distance as people might expect, that way, to get from England to Japan; the earth was round, after all. So maybe he wouldn’t be so far away as it seemed, not always, not for ever.) The plane left from Heathrow and looped about over London, and then took a course north and east over the countryside until it reached the sea. It might have flown over Norfolk. Over the farm, for all she knew. She watched from her window at the edge of the wing. She understood now the patterns of the fields. Green pasture. Golden stubble. Brown plough. Fields where stubble was being burned off: a flickering line of orange flame, thick smoke spilling away, spilling out flat and white across shiny, newly blackened land. She saw that there must have been wind down there, driving the fire. Richard had spoken about the danger in that, how a single burning straw might carry fire from one field to another. How a farmer must look to the wind before burning the stubble, to take care that the hedges would not catch; that to be safe he must first plough a firebreak of bare soil around the circumference of the field. She hoped that the hedges were not burning.
There was something Jonathan had told her, when they were still in Tokyo, that he said he had to tell her before he left. She had thought that he was telling her something she should know before she could go to see him in England, if she was to go and see him in England. That was where he went wrong, she thought. It wasn�
��t her he needed to tell. Not she who should have been the one to know.
It was the last weekend before he left Tokyo. He was doing his packing, in his two-room apartment in Inokashira. He had packed in a big case all his envelopes and yellow boxes of photographs, and put beside it the black metal boxes of equipment. His camera was still out, and his few clothes, which he could stuff into a rucksack later. There really weren’t many clothes, she was always trying to take him shopping to buy him more – just a few T-shirts and jeans, and two pairs of shoes, one to wear and one to pack. His nice leather jacket, that he had bought when he first came to Japan, he would wear. Come and see me in England. Please say that you’ll come soon. Come in the spring. But she had said that she couldn’t get a holiday in the spring, not long enough to go to England. In the summer I’ll try, she said. She had been thinking only of a holiday then, not thinking then that she might quit her job and go for longer. And then he told her. He’d never told anyone else, he said, but he needed to tell her. He needed to speak the words. For himself.
He said that his father had killed himself. That no one said that, openly. It was said that it was a shooting accident. Except it wasn’t easy to accidentally shoot yourself dead with a shotgun. And in England it was a crime then. Suicide was a crime in those days, a shame, unspeakable. Maybe that was why people didn’t say, or maybe they didn’t say out of kindness, but they did say things about how his father was moody, how he had never been quite the same since he had come back from the war, though the war had been a long time earlier. They didn’t say it, but he knew what they thought.
How do you know it wasn’t an accident?
I know because I saw.
You saw him do it?
I was there just after. Where he was. I woke up early and saw him go out with his gun. And I thought I’d go out too, and I found him.
When he said that she couldn’t touch him. He was standing across the room, just looking and not seeing her, as if he was in a different place. And then he turned round, mechanically as if he had switched himself on again, and slid back the doors of the high cupboard behind him, reaching in to get something out of the back of it. She loved him very much just then. She wanted to go across and touch him but she couldn’t. He was so determinedly looking away. That was how he was. When he was in pain no one could touch him.
His voice was very clear, as if he was speaking a poem or something, not speaking to her, a girl across a room, or as if he was speaking out loud to himself because inside he was deaf. When my mother told us, she said something different. I knew that what she said was wrong because she said he was in a different place. She just made up a story. To protect us, I guess. And the story is still there. We all go along with it.
Later, in bed, in the dark, with whatever wasn’t yet packed scattered on the floor around them, and the two of them sleepless, she had asked him, Why did you tell me that?
I think I just wanted to tell someone, before I could go home.
So you’ve done it. You can go now.
Yes, he said, I can. And you must come and see me there.
But he had said what he said for himself and not for her. And what he said next made her a little afraid to go. I think my mother blames it on the war, he said, like people do. That he had a terrible time in the war.
Well, people did, didn’t they?
What?
Have a terrible time.
Yes.
And they brought it home with them.
Yes.
I don’t think it was only the war, he said then. I think it was more complicated than that. But it’s easiest to say, isn’t it? And turning to her, his head close, his hands about her hair. My mum might find it strange that you’re Japanese. Don’t worry though, she’s all right, my mum, she’ll like you, you’ll see.
And your brother?
He’ll like you too.
Perhaps they all three liked her for coming from outside.
She slept on the plane, and woke and thought of the house burning. She looked down and there was only Siberia, vast and bare, and the shining wing of the plane. She saw the house on fire down there, flames leaping from old long-dry timber, beams, floors, furniture, the flames so bright and the smoke so thick that it could not fail to be seen, however high the plane flew. And she saw the three of them, tiny smoke-blackened figures running out from the flames. Like the figures in the photos Jonathan once showed her. It suddenly seemed like arson, what she had done.
Acknowledgements
So many thanks, on this book and always, to a constantly wonderful team of editor and agent, Alexandra Pringle and Victoria Hobbs, for their thoughtfulness and faith in my work. Also to the rest at Bloomsbury, to Mary Tomlinson, and Jessica Sinyor at A M Heath. And to the farmers, David and Nell.
A Note on the Author
Georgina Harding is the author of five previous novels: The Solitude of Thomas Cave, The Spy Game, a BBC Book at Bedtime and shortlisted for an Encore Award, Painter of Silence, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012; and, most recently, The Gun Room and Land of the Living. Georgina Harding lives most of the time on a farm in the Stour Valley, Essex.
Also available by Georgina Harding
Land of the Living
‘Perfect – a flawless gem of a novel from start to finish … Wonderful, strange and wise’ Patrick McGrath
Charlie’s experiences at the Battle of Kohima and the months he spent lost in the remote jungles of Nagaland during the Second World War are now history. Home and settled on a farm in Norfolk and newly married to Claire, he is one of the lucky survivors. Starting a family and working the land seem the best things a man can be doing.
But a chasm exists between them. Memories flood Charlie’s mind; at night, on rain-slicked roads and misty mornings in the fields, the past can feel more real than the present. Though hidden even to himself, the darkest secrets of Charlie’s adventures in the strange and shadowy ridges of the Nagaland mountains, his dream-like encounters with the mysterious and ancient tribesmen, leak and bleed through his consciousness. What should be said and what left unsaid? Is it possible to forge a new life in the wake of unfathomable horror?
‘Audacious and moving … Elegiac, often elliptical vignettes that immaculately simulate Charlie’s shame, regret and grief … Masterly’ Sunday Times
‘Vivid, illuminating and unbearably tense … A masterly meditation on trauma, on beauty, on the idea of home and the limits of love’ Guardian
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/land-of-the-living-9781408896266/
The Gun Room
The memory of war will stay with a man longer than anything else.
Dawn, mist clearing over rice fields, a burning Vietnamese village, and a young photographer takes the shot that might make his career. The image, of a staring soldier in the midst of mayhem, will become one of the great photographs of the war. But what Jonathan has seen in that village is more than he can bear…
He flees to Japan, to lose himself in the vastness of Tokyo, and to take different kinds of pictures: of streets and crowds and cherry blossom – and of a girl with whom he is no longer lost. Yet even here his history will catch up with him: that photograph and his responsibility in taking it; his responsibility as a witness to war, and to other events buried deep in his past.
‘Georgina Harding’s novel is the finely tuned work of a writer exceptionally at ease with her craft and a testament to the power and poetry of clean and disciplined prose’ Sadie Jones, Guardian
‘Quietly and restrainedly, The Gun Room is a book that provokes searching questions’ Daily Mail
‘Graceful and considered … The dreamlike quality is heightened by Harding’s sharply observed prose … As befits a writer adept at carefully cropped scenes, Harding has the measure of photography. The novel plays with its ability to captivate, shock, inform and misdirect’ Sunday Telegraph
https://bloomsbury.com/uk/the-gun-room-9781408869826/
Painter of Silence
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p; 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
http://bloomsbury.com/uk/painter-of-silence-9781408824474/
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?
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