Have my mother show you her garden, Jonathan had suggested, when they were on their way in the car. He had come to Heathrow to pick her up. It was six months since she had seen him. She had been a little afraid of how it would be when he was back in his own country. There had been a few phone calls, but international calls were difficult in those days, with echoes and time lags. She would hear her own voice coming back to her, which sounded like the voice of a schoolgirl, more Japanese, more accented in its English than she had realised, and then the other one, an Englishman’s voice that surprised as if she had never heard it before. Heard the voices waste expensive minutes speaking of the time and the weather. Put the phone down with a sense of what had not been not said. Then a photograph came in the post, bright with daffodils, and written on the back of it, Come and see me. And she held it and planned, put it on the shelf where she looked at it for months. She went to work in the morning and came back in the evening, alone to her one-room flat. It was still there, beside the teapot, propped up between the teapot and the bills, the thought of Jonathan but also of the adventure, of doing what he did when he came to Japan, going away not just for a holiday but for longer. There were other letters. At last she called and they spoke again. She said the name of an airline, a flight, a time. She had bought her outward ticket but kept her return open. She was taking a great step out into the open. She had savings. She had left her job and she was going to England, and then the two of them would go travelling, all of Europe before them. I’ll come and meet you, he said, I’ll be there. (So was she going out to the known, or the unknown? Somehow, she wanted it to be both, the man she knew and the unknown place.) Now and then on that long flight, she wondered if she would recognise him, when she landed. If he would recognise her. Why she had gone all that way to see a man she might not recognise. But he was there at the barrier, when she walked through, looking, looking first at faces that seemed like his but not like his at all. He was standing there, real, known. Present. His touch, the smell of him. His voice without distortion or echo. Even his clothes, clothes that she knew (and that were also the past), that they had bought together in Tokyo the summer before, that looked quite worn-out, but he was English and Englishmen liked to wear worn-out clothes. Then they were in the car. They were driving through England. It was not so very different, at first. She had wanted it to be entirely different. It could have been anywhere, at first, from the car, only a place of cars and motorways. And then when they left the motorway and were driving in the countryside she saw the villages, the trees and fields, green and soft beneath the changing sky. He said that they’d had a spell of lovely weather, that it was a good time to come. They talked a lot at first, in the car. Once they were on those country roads they didn’t say so much, only as they got close to his home Jonathan talked about his mother.