The Green, they called it, the place where they played. That was what it was, green. Men in white stood in a pattern on the green. She was a Japanese girl in a picture postcard of England, sitting on a striped deckchair watching cricket. Wearing sunglasses. Sipping lemonade through a straw.

Claire sat in a chair beside her. Now and then one of her friends came and sat with them. Jonathan had been lying on the grass until a short time before but he had gone to prepare to bat. His trousers were too big. They were Richard’s. He looked comical in the baggy trousers that now had green stains on them from the grass. His team had been batting for a long time. He was one of the last to go in. She could see that he was afraid that he would do badly. He had not played cricket since he left school. It was Richard’s game, he said, not his, it had always been Richard’s game. Richard was good, even Kumiko could see that. He looked good playing. He looked tall and strong in the white clothes and his hair was bright in the sun. He stood very still as the bowler ran in, and then he raised the bat and hit the ball a long way. He went out to bat at the beginning of the match, second or third, and he was still there. Claire had explained the rules to her, but she didn’t think you needed to know the rules to watch. She didn’t mind about the rules. She watched the men moving across the Green, and the little clouds, and the swallows flying over. And the other people watching, children running about, mothers calling them back.

No one would have guessed they were brothers, seeing them there, Richard looking so heroic, Jonathan dark and tense and restless, fidgeting with his bat while the bowler got ready, tapping the grass with it as if that would make a difference. Then looking up, facing the ball, hitting it away just a short distance so that he scored a run and went to the other end and Richard could take his place.

He looked exposed there out on the grass. Yet he had as much reason to belong as all the other villagers. He had been born in this village. He had lived in it for at least twenty of his twenty-five years. He seemed apart, even here where he came from, standing with his bat, looking about him, ready again to run as soon as his brother hit the ball.

Do you know, Claire said, sometimes when he was away he didn’t write home for months. We had no idea where in the world he was.

She said, I think he was on the move a lot, travelling. Maybe some letters did not get to you.