She thought about the day. She thought about the past that was all around her in the house, and was connected to Jonathan but not connected to her; the past of people she had never known. They had gone for a walk that afternoon, she and Jonathan and Claire. They had lunch, and then they took her around and showed her the village and the church, tall and white in the sunshine that came through its long windows, and close to the church, the Hall, at the end of a long drive. Claire said that the family used to live in the Hall. And then in the 1930s Jonathan’s uncle had sold the Hall and come to the farm, and brought with him to the farm all the stuff that they had in the house – not everything from the Hall of course, she said, because the farmhouse was so much smaller, but whatever was best and most valuable or meant something to the family. I imagine the rest got lost along the way, she said. Sold or burnt, she said, disposed of; you know how these things happen. But how was a girl like Kumiko supposed to know a thing like that? She pictured a bonfire in the fields, of furniture, of whatever it was that a family did not value, old brown cupboards and chairs, and broken picture frames and books and bookcases and dishes, lost between the Hall at the edge of the village and the farmhouse in the countryside, flames and an upturned table, and the hedgerows and the church behind.

She didn’t hear him coming, only the door when it opened. He knew how to walk those old floors without making a sound.

Did you always walk around this house at night, she whispered, without anyone knowing?

Was that what he had done as a boy, creeping down the passage, down the stairs? So that his mother didn’t hear, his brother didn’t hear.

The stairs have carpet on them now, he whispered back. It’s much quieter since the carpet was put down.

They were like naughty children, excited to be doing secret things in the dark. Giggling as they tried to be silent, biting fingers, hands over each other’s mouths. It was so long since they had made love.

Are you happy to be here?

Now I am.

And she was at that moment, everything about her foreign and new, even though it was so old, except for the feel of his skin and the smell of him against her.