Oh, she said. She did not quite know what to say. She just had an ordinary Tokyo life. Nothing bad had ever happened to her and she had never even been on a farm. Didn’t your mother marry again?

I guess she didn’t meet anyone, he said. There weren’t so many men for her to meet, out there in the countryside.

So she asked him to tell her about the farm. The house where he grew up.

He said the house was a big, rambling old farmhouse. His voice was slow, a little distant, though he lay close beside her. It was the first time they had spent a night together. They had come back from Kamakura and gone to his apartment, in a tatami room bare of things and with the windows open to what seemed like those days’ unending rain, and made love there. They had the conversation the next morning when they woke. Or maybe pieces of it came at other times. At least, this was how she would remember it. Talking while their bodies were soft with the sex and the rain, as if they might melt, one into the other.

What’s ‘rambling’? she said. It was a difficult word for a Japanese to pronounce.

‘Rambling’ meant that the house had no plan, and rooms ran into rooms as it had been extended, piece by piece, over centuries, as the owners had bigger families or made money and wanted to be stylish. There was a symmetrical brick front, added in the eighteenth century, but a muddle of earlier rooms behind. And there were two staircases, one main one and an old steep back staircase for servants.

You have servants? she said. It was a puzzle to her, the England where he lived.

Oh no. Only the house had servants once.

It sounds grand.

Not so grand. All sorts of houses had servants in those days. A cook, or a maid to sweep and clean, make the fires, I suppose, carry water in jugs up those stairs, do whatever it was maids did.

She could not picture it. Do you have any photos to show me?

No.

If you’re a photographer then you should have photos to show.

Not from home. I left home to take pictures of other places. I didn’t bring pictures with me.

Oh.