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.