Once she was there of course she knew how it was, so she forgot, or almost forgot, all she had thought it would be before she came, from whatever he had said and whatever she had made out from the photo. Jonathan’s house was big, and old, and many people had lived in it. She was aware of that as she had never been aware of it anywhere else. She had a sense there of others in the past who had lived in those rooms, other women before her opening the doors, touching their fingers before hers to the rail of the stairs. Almost all of the people that she had known until that time lived in quite modern houses – except for her grandparents, and their house dated only from around the end of the Meiji era, so although it looked old it could be no more than eighty or ninety years, and her grandfather had been born there, so she thought that it was never lived in by any other family. Her grandparents’ house was nothing like so old as Jonathan’s. This house was hundreds of years old. It was bigger than any house that she had known, with passages and cupboards and an attic that nobody entered, spaces in it that were never touched, not like a Japanese house where you could reach to every corner. And they wore their shoes indoors. That was only a little thing, but it was the sort of thing that it took time for a Japanese to get used to. There was old dark furniture, a smell peculiar to the place that was both dust and polish, a still dry smell of indoors that told you how the people who lived in the house spent most of their days out of doors, out of the house in the clear air outside, and there were worn rugs here and there on worn wooden floors, glowing Persian reds and blues, and in the bedroom where she slept, a thin faded one that slipped beneath the feet. The floorboards had big cracks between them. When she took off an earring and dropped it, sitting on the antique stool before the table with the mirror, she was afraid for a moment that it had fallen through one of the cracks. Beside the lion’s paw that was the foot of the stool. She wondered if there were more earrings down there in the dust, earrings and hairpins and coins, wedding rings even, that had slipped down and been lost beneath the boards maybe for one hundred or two hundred years. Or longer.

It was only a little pearl stud, one of a pair that was the first present Jonathan gave her. She thought them a bit of a cliché and not really her style, but he had been sweet and shy with her then. She wouldn’t have liked to lose it.