She looked like a pretty little doll, Claire had thought when Jonny came home and showed them his photos. Or was that just a mother’s resistance to her boy’s foreign girl? And this girl wasn’t just foreign. She was Japanese. Her son had been away three years, and had spent much of that time in Japan, writing her occasional rare letters from there that said that the cities were vast but the gardens were lovely, and when he came back he had shown them his photos; and now this girl had come to visit them, suggesting that she was important to him, that she wasn’t just some girl to be known and loved and photographed abroad and then left behind, this Japanese girl with a bright face, who was yet so obviously tired after her long flight. And here she was, speaking to this girl, making conversation, letting conversation pause, noting how the greenfly gathered on a rose shoot, and how composed the girl seemed, despite her evident tiredness. She didn’t really know anything about the Japanese, she thought; only what Jonny had said, in his letters and since he had come home. She had been used to thinking of them mainly as the people whom her husband had fought in the war, hating them even, for that – though Charlie had said so little; what knowledge she had was drawn mainly from what others said, others who had been in Burma or been prisoners, or more often others who had known other people who had been there, as no one who had actually been there seemed to say very much. Slowly over the years, over the time that Jonny was away, she had come to revise her understanding, to see that his Japanese were different from theirs, to accept that the one thing didn’t necessarily connect with the other, the history and how things were now. Even so, that didn’t quite dispel the distrust. Though she had to admit, really it did look as if the two of them had had a happy time, Jonny and his girl out there in Japan, this pretty girl always smiling her wide open smile, on the beach or in the park or in the mountains or wherever it was they went.