He looked across the table at her in the dusk and wanted her as much as at any time in that day. He saw her talking in that open way she had to his brother, his mother. And wondered at her, that he had brought her here or that she had come all this way for him. It was getting too dark to see the look in her eyes but he knew the heavy fall of her hair and the delicate movements of her hands. He knew all her surfaces. He had touched them and he had photographed them a thousand times. Yet here she was, foreign in his home, present and yet somehow escaping him. Here with his family about him, even at the end of this particular day, he felt that he knew her less than before. He was less sure of her, distracted by the others, by their awareness of her, by her foreignness that he noticed all at once again now as he had previously ceased to see it. He wanted to take out his camera and catch her, only the light right now was too dim for that, she sitting facing out into the garden with the light from the house, all the artificial light that there was, behind her, the light from the windows that spilled out across the lawn. It was an obsession, perhaps, photographing her. The more photographs he took, the more he realised that he would never catch her. Even though she seemed so immediate. He would catch only her stilled surface between one moment and another, never her moving self. Like those painters who paint endlessly portraits of their wives. It might be that their wives were the only people with the patience to sit for them for so long and so often, or it might be that they were trying, really trying, to capture them. Because people need to catch hold of those that they love, because even when they’re very close and have been with them for a long time they can be strangers too. Only their surfaces have ever been captured, what can be painted or photographed, and their words perhaps, that can be written and recorded. Not who they are.

Was that what he was doing, taking these pictures, pictures that had no purpose, so many more hundreds of pictures than he would ever print? Fixing no more than instants, holding them in time. Now here she sat in the dusk, in light too dim for any photograph, escaping him.

What are you doing tomorrow? Richard was asking. Richard sat on the same side of the table as he did, with the window light falling clear on his face.

I don’t know yet, she was saying from the shadow. Jonathan, do we have a plan for tomorrow?

Before he could think to answer, Richard said, Then you must let me show you round the farm. You haven’t done that yet.