Richard had begun to take the farm in hand the year he went to university. He worked with him over that first summer’s harvest, but he didn’t go back to university at the end of it. He took the money Richard paid him and bought the newest Pentax. He knew what to buy. He knew something about photography by then.

Great camera, Richard said. What did it cost you?

It cost him a lot. His travelling would have to be cheap because he had spent so much on the camera. He would have to earn along the way. The camera had to be a good one because it was to be his eye on the world. It would be the means to give what he saw physical presence. The evidence of his seeing – or of his being, if you followed the thought through. That, his grand notion. He was going to go travelling and take pictures. He would be what he did and not what he was. What he did would make him who he was or who he would become. He would become whoever he was at any moment, with a pack on his back and a camera around his neck. Seeing the world, whatever he saw. Would he then be what he saw? Or would he always be what he had seen? (Or when he came home would he be just the same?)

Richard wouldn’t get it, what he planned to do. A photographer, what sort of job was that? As if he didn’t know. It was being something, someone, other than who he had been until now. Richard wouldn’t know anything about that either. Richard had only ever wanted to be Richard, so far as anyone could tell.

When he first came back to England in December, he had laid out all of his pictures, a shiny mass of photos on the dining-room table. It looked like Pelmanism, all those memories laid out on the table to be sorted and grouped together, in the dining room where they had once played cards, the cards face down across the tablecloth.