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