Turn war into images. Make money out of it. Let the men and women in your pictures stand for men and women anywhere. The victims, and the soldiers. Fix them in that moment in their lives or their deaths. So what if they are individuals each with their own future, who might be recognised later, those who survive, when they’re not soldiers or victims any more. You don’t have responsibility for them. You’re only the one behind the camera. You are producing the images for other people to see, that either they think they want to see or you think they ought to see. Richard wouldn’t understand how it felt. In Tokyo there had been a friend who might have understood, but he didn’t see him any more. His friend had been at the war but he had been a soldier, in front of the camera, not behind it. He, like their father, like those victims, wasn’t ever going to escape having been there. Even if he had a home like this to escape to, a safe home where nobody knew any of that. Where there was a view open in all directions. A wide sky. Nice clouds. Hedged fields. A girlfriend who would travel halfway across the world to visit him.

She stood at the front door.

He said, I want a picture of you there. Just like that, standing there with your back to it, like it’s your house. Like a child’s picture of a house and its owner.

But if I owned it, she said, I’d be going in, wouldn’t I? I wouldn’t be standing here looking out.

OK then, open the door and stand in the doorway.

Why?

I’m so happy to have you here, I want it to look like you belong. He was walking away with the camera, then stopping to look through the lens.

I don’t belong, she said. I’m spare. I sleep in the spare room, remember?

She turned about and reached for the brass knocker. It was a big black door, with a fanlight above it. He would have a picture of the door and the back of a short Japanese girl knocking.

Take that one.