She could understand why he didn’t mention it when he went to Vietnam. He would have known how much that would have worried her. She let the words drop and didn’t speak them. Easy to do that, as the bowler bowled and Richard tapped the ball away, and the bowler bowled again, and Richard hit hard and clean, Jonathan running forward a couple of steps and then relaxing as the ball flew out across the grass to where the spectators were on the other side of the ground. It was careless of him, Kumiko thought, not to write. For Claire, here in the permanence of their home, it must have seemed that he had disappeared from the face of the earth.

As all the white figures moved around and settled again, Claire said something else. She said that his father had been missing for a long time in Asia, in the war, in the Second World War. I wasn’t married to him then, she said, only engaged, and there was no word for a long time. I don’t know if Jonny ever told you. No, I don’t imagine that he did.

No, Kumiko said, he didn’t tell me that.

All the more careless then.

The cricketers played on.

He sat on the bench in front of the pavilion, put down his batsman’s gloves and then stretched out his legs, one after the other, to remove his pads.

These things he had not done in years: fastening and unfastening the worn leather straps of cricket pads, holding a bat in his hands with that scent of oil on wood, facing a ball, playing opposite his brother, knowing that there were some things that his brother had always done better. Watching his brother show off.

Was Richard always man of the match? He saw his brother walk in the midst of a group of men in white towards the pavilion entrance, throwing back his head to laugh. The women clapping, his Japanese girlfriend and his mother in colourful dresses and sunglasses like pretty ladies in the South of France.

Now I know why they made you captain, he said to Richard as he passed, and Richard waved his bat towards him as if to fend off some irony that he expected to follow.

You did OK yourself. Richard was unusually complimentary, not winding him up like he used to do in the past; perhaps things had changed just so much.

I survived. Don’t say any more. Didn’t let you down anyway.

This was coming home. To old patterns. Old selves that he hadn’t known for a while but just about fitted, like the clothes in his cupboard. A summertime self, the mediocre batsman whose purpose was simply to be safe and not to be out. There was almost a comfort in it, finding that this old self fitted and that the others fitted around him.