He had envied his brother this girl, the apparent ease she felt with him in the pictures – or maybe that was what made him a good photographer, that he was a quiet sort of bloke who made people feel easy around him. Richard didn’t know anything about photography but he thought that the pictures were good. Objectively, not just for himself. For himself, they were compelling. It meant something just knowing that they were there, present in the house, behind the dining-room door. All those places, the people, the girl; these pieces of his brother’s life. When Jonny was gone to London for a few days, and his mother was in town shopping after taking him to the train, he went in and looked through the photos alone. Lucky little Jonny. There were other pictures he hadn’t shown, pictures taken close, in black-and-white. Black-and-white showed contour and shadow, intimacy. He liked this girl in black-and-white. He looked for a long while. When he came out from the room his mother was home. He hadn’t heard her coming in.

What were you doing? she said.

Just looking, he said, as if he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t.

That wasn’t the only time. He went in again after that. Early in the morning when no one else was up, he’d just walk into the room and see that the images were there. Jonny wasn’t hiding them, after all. They were out there on the big mahogany table for anyone to see. Sometimes the door wasn’t even closed.

What was the point of all these pictures? Was this work? This, Jonny’s work? So many images, that was all they were; they had no purpose. There was the girl; she was nice. There were the war photos; he had seen the point of those, though Jonny said he wasn’t going to take war photos any more. The rest of it didn’t seem to be work but only life. The streets he passed through. The people who passed by. Tokyo. He didn’t like the look of Tokyo. It was so crowded, so full of Japanese. Everyone said the Japs did terrible things in the war. They said his father had had a terrible time because of the Japs, though they never got round to explaining precisely what that meant. But the Japanese looked so neat in Jonny’s pictures, in their business suits in front of shiny buildings, and the girl had this big smile.

So when the girl came he knew her already but he didn’t know her at all.