There was a time later when Richard would say, You saw. It was almost a statement by then and not a question, but even then Richard did not know what it was that he had seen. A year later, Richard was still asking him to tell, hating him for his secret, and he couldn’t tell him because his secret didn’t have any words to it, it was only the thing that he had seen. This time Richard didn’t touch him. He looked. His look was so hard that it hurt. But he couldn’t look away. He just stared back, and he didn’t give in. He didn’t speak a word, only let the tears make their way down to his clenched lips. He knew that it mattered. It mattered all the more because Richard thought their father was his, more his than Jonathan’s, because everyone said that he looked like him, was the spitting image of him, because he was older and did everything first, was trusted with a gun and would be a farmer after him. Richard’s father, not Jonathan’s father. Yet Jonathan knew what he didn’t.

Richard was right. He saw. What did he see? The fog, the plough, the spinney, the tree, his father’s body. The leaves beneath him. The consequence of the shot. The dog. Then his mother’s face as they sat on the sofa. Her lie. He tripped and fell, she said. He was climbing a fence in a field, and he must have tripped, and the gun went off. That made a different picture. He could see that picture, and he could see the other one, which was true, though nobody said it was true, he could only see it and not speak it. He had been seeing such things ever since: things that were and weren’t true, the appearance of things and what was said to be the appearance of things and what was missing from the appearances. How the appearance could be empty. How what was present could show what was absent. That knowledge had become a part of him and all that he did. It went into his relationships with people and the world. It went into his photographs. Perhaps it was what made his photographs good, when they were good: not only what they call ‘eye’ or composition or technique, but his understanding of what was beneath, behind, not there. Where the shadows went and where shadows didn’t fall.