If Michimasa should get wind of what was happening and his half-imbecile mind be provoked into actual violence, the reputation of the Shirakawa family that she had always hugged so jealously to herself might be reduced to ruins. By now she was less concerned with her own fate, caught beneath the debris, than with the possible injury to Takao, whom she had reared so lovingly beneath her wing.

She herself had never foreseen that she would come to lavish so much affection on her grandchild. The pity she felt for an infant that had lost its mother at birth had transformed itself into love. It mattered not the slightest that the child was the son of the stupid, abrasive Michimasa; the blood tie only made Takao seem all the more pathetic and lovable. How cold, how unbending she had been in rearing her own children, Michimasa and Etsuko, in comparison with the love that welled up so abundantly and so blindly for this child!

Set in the scales of the love she felt for Takao, Tomo felt a fresh responsibility not only for Michimasa but for Miya and Suga as well. Both Suga, the flower plucked by Yukitomo while still in the bud, and Miya, whose frustration with her loutish husband had been taken advantage of by her father-in-law, came to seem more to be pitied than hated. And when she reflected that the men in question were the husband and son to whom she was bound by inseparable ties, she felt herself powerless in the coils of a cycle of birth and rebirth that reminded her vividly of the hell into which the Lady Vaidehi had been cast; thus for the first time the invocation to Amida rose quite naturally and effortlessly to her lips. The depth of her love for Takao and the dark sense of revulsion against her own complicity in the four-way relationship of husband, son, mistress and daughter-in-law were burdens almost too heavy for Tomo to bear, yet she had entered into neither of them of her own free will, any more than she could voluntarily escape from their hold.

Of late, Tomo was beset by yet another anxiety. It was something that she had heard while she was at Tsunamachi one day, when Miya, who was growing visibly plumper, had remarked cheerfully as she placed a glossy nipple in the mouth of her fifth child Namiko:

‘Mother, they say that Miss Suga’s going to get married … Did you know?’

‘Of course she’s not. Who told you such a thing?’

Her voice was casual as she knocked out her short pipe on the brazier, but something inside her gave a sudden lurch.

‘Father says so. “Suga seems to have taken a fancy to that young Konno,” he said. “Their ages are a bit different, but when he leaves college I’m thinking of getting them married and setting them up with their own chemist’s shop …” ’