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.

There was something Jonathan had told her, when they were still in Tokyo, that he said he had to tell her before he left. She had thought that he was telling her something she should know before she could go to see him in England, if she was to go and see him in England. That was where he went wrong, she thought. It wasn’t her he needed to tell. Not she who should have been the one to know.