No, I’m not going to do that again, he said. Too much maumau.

‘Maumau’ shut Richard up. ‘Maumau’ was a word they had between them, just in the family, one of those words that holds a family together and closes it against the world. ‘Maumau’, crushed roadkill. ‘Maumau’, the entrails of a poached deer thrown into a ditch. Billy knowing the sight, explaining how a deer when it was shot must be disembowelled on the spot or its meat went bad. ‘Maumau’, a sheep’s skull he found once when they went on a walk, or Jess found it, snuffling in the bushes. He didn’t know what had happened to the rest of the sheep, there was only this skull, half of it bared to the bone but the other half with dry skin still clinging to it tight and leathery, and the eye gaping through. His mother’s distaste. You’re not carrying that home, are you? Yes. Well you can’t bring it in, it’ll have maggots in it, you’ll have to put it on the bonfire or bury it or something. He persisted, holding it by the bare jaw all the way back. It was interesting, weird. He thought he might do a drawing of it, strip off the rest of the skin maybe, or preserve it in something. What was it people used, formaldehyde? Do we have any formaldehyde, Mum? No, I told you, you’re not bringing that smelly thing in here. Take it away, it’s maumau, I’m not having it in the house. The word was shorthand. Once it was said nothing more needed to be said. Though of course the thoughts would remain, the unsaid images that couldn’t be forgotten. Richard knew that as well as he did. So now Richard shrugged and turned away from the photos. He went to the window, put his big hands to the frame and stared out through the glass. They both stared out. The garden was bare. Only the black hedge to see there, the stripped trees, the dead stalks of plants and the leaves on the lawn that hadn’t been cleared away.

I don’t think it was as easy as you say. You really worked at getting there, didn’t you?

Perhaps.

Why did you go?

I don’t know. Adventure. A challenge. Robert Capa.

Who’s he?

A famous war photographer. He was one of the greats. He was in Spain. He was at the Normandy invasion. He went everywhere and saw everything. He was in Vietnam too, but it was still French Indochina then and it was the French they were fighting. He got killed there, sometime in the ’50s.

Richard wasn’t interested in anything he had to say about Capa.

I think you went because of Dad.

I don’t know. Maybe in some way I did.

But you didn’t see Dad’s war. You saw another war.

You’re right. There are lots of wars.