Yukitomo would dismiss the question airily with ‘Grandmother’s one of those women who never get sick,’ an attitude that was shared by the young grandchildren and even by Suga, who might have been expected to show a more womanly concern but in fact was solely preoccupied with her own delicate health, complaining as though half resentfully:

‘I envy the mistress her strength.’

The stout-hearted Tomo’s constitution was not in fact weak, nor once throughout the years had she had an illness of any seriousness, but this was more than half due to a fierceness of spirit that made her ever anxious to press on, ignoring any feeling of indisposition. She did in fact suffer from dizziness and a tendency to neuritis. Regularly for the past five or six years, at the hottest period of summer, she had had water on the knee and a feeling of breathlessness, but regularly too, when the cool breezes began to blow, the swelling would subside and the over-powering lethargy would leave her, so that however often her married daughter Etsuko advised her to consult a reliable doctor she made no move to go. She dreaded being told that she had some chronic ailment, lest this should cause a crack in the armor of her spirit and start insidiously wearing her down in mind and body. The mere idea that illness might leave her an invalid, immobile in one room of that chilly great house, filled her with an intolerable sense of indignation. Sometimes as she watched Yukitomo sitting, every day from morning to night on his cushion with the back-rest, taking his own temperature, gargling, putting drops in his eyes and otherwise coddling himself with the same greed for life as the ancient Chinese monarchs who sent out men to seek the elixir of youth, she would remind herself that her husband was a full twelve years older than herself. Even if he lived to be eighty she herself would still not be seventy. She must hold on until then. Until then, she must not go under to Yukitomo. And along with the idea that her life must triumph over Yukitomo’s, there came an icy sense of desolation at the coldness of a relationship that could foster such an idea, at its remoteness from all normal ideas of the bond between husband and wife.

The kindly, unthinking inquiry after her health that Kayo had just made at the gateway had come as a shock. Her winter cold had indeed lingered on, half forgotten, in the usual New Year’s rush of visitors, but recently a heaviness in the legs that she normally never felt in winter had slowly crept up to around the pit of her stomach; even at the New Year’s feasts she could not bring herself to have a second helping of the rice cake in soup that she liked so much.