That’s Kumiko.

Pretty girl. Are Japanese girls pretty?

Not all of them.

She looks nice.

She is nice.

Putting out his hand to take the picture back. Maybe she’ll come here sometime, then you and Mum can meet her.

When Richard looked up from all those photos and asked where were the others, for a moment Jonathan stalled. Which others? Oh, you mean the ones from Vietnam. But those are ages old, I’ve moved on from that now. I boxed them up ages ago and there’s no need to look at them again. It’s only the more recent ones I’m going through now – but anyway, you’ve seen them already. They were published, you saw that.

They were good.

They were an accident, he said, and he thought, no, in truth, they weren’t good, whatever they were, in fact were a kind of failure, that brought him all the way back to where he was now, come back here to spread out these last few years on the table. And not the full years, edited years at that.

No, surely not, Richard was saying. Not an accident, not at the time?

It was all a crazy thing, he said, some of the cool of those days coming back to him, being cool again as if he still had the camera slung about his neck, light meter dangling, though he was here at home in the dining room and with only his brother to see — and you never quite grew up at home, you were never so free as elsewhere, always aware, wary, of what had gone before, what might pull you back, always the danger there that your big brother would see through you to someone smaller.

That’s how it was out there, he said, trying now to be accurate. Truthful, not tough.

I was just travelling, and I met someone who was going to the war and he said it was easy, easy to get there, easy to go, and it was, and there it was before me. I was only in the country for a few weeks. I just struck it lucky, that’s all.

People who stayed home, people like Richard, didn’t understand how easy travel was. Even to a place like that. Because everything was immediate, every decision and move made for the moment, for that day. Eat, travel, find a place to sleep. Move on. A day at a time. Or maybe consider just the day after or the day after that.

Those pictures were great. Aren’t you going to do more like that?

That war’s over now.

There are other wars.

No.

People, people all over, wanted to see what he had seen. They looked, and they might remember those images he had taken through all the rest of their lives, in place of other images, even in place of first-hand ones that might have made them happy. He had told himself there was meaning in it. Purpose. And then the cheque came in, and he moved to Tokyo where there was no war, and bought a leather jacket, and packed away the prints and the negatives into their boxes. He took them out once to show Kumiko and afterwards regretted it.