She’s put you in the spare room, I hope you don’t mind. (She did mind. She minded very much. She minded the distance that was put between them, from that beginning.) Mum’s a bit old-fashioned about things like that, a bit out of touch. But she’s looking forward to meeting you. Let her take you around the garden, she’ll like that.

He wanted to please her. He wanted her to please his mother. She understood that. He wanted the two women, his mother and his girl, to meet and talk in the garden, two women walking, and he would see them from the window inside, these pieces of his life running one alongside the other.

It had been easy to see that she was Jonathan’s mother. She was small and slim and dark like him, quite dark she thought for an English person, a pretty woman still. Her face was lined, from being out in all the weather, she thought, in the garden and the countryside, lines about the eyes and grey in her hair, but she moved briskly as if she was younger; precision in her movements, a little sharp and tight.

They walked out from the house across the lawn. Jonathan stood at the window. No need to come with us, Claire had said in her crisp clear way, and he had said no, fine, he’d seen the garden so many times; though he didn’t turn away, he didn’t seem to be wanting to do anything else.

There were double doors that opened into the heart of the garden, onto flagstones, a little area where there was a table and chairs, and then onto the lawn and the flower beds and the hedges. It was late in the day so there were long shadows. There was this one moment in the year, Claire said, stopping and turning to look at her, when the garden was its best. And Kumiko said then she was lucky to be there.

Claire smiled, out there in the evening sunshine, a neat little English smile that went quickly away, that was like the smile of an Englishwoman in some old movie. (But also like Jonathan’s smile, so many of her gestures like Jonathan’s.) It was perfect now, Claire said. Kumiko saw that her hands could not resist breaking off a dead rose head as she spoke. She did not even seem to notice that she was doing it.

The girl spoke English well, but with slight pauses where she looked about or her hands moved as she sought a word. What she said was expressed very simply. Claire couldn’t tell if this was because this was specific to her or because she was speaking English, or because this was the way that all Japanese girls spoke.

Charles de Mills, this rose is called. It’s one of my favourites.

It’s beautiful. An English rose.