It was not until he had dismissed her with a ‘You’d better get a good night’s sleep’ and she had gone from the room with Etsuko still following that the stiffness left her body and she relaxed.

‘I’m afraid she seems to have a rather retiring nature,’ said Tomo hesitantly with a glance at her husband’s face as they watched Suga leaving the room. Beneath the drooping lids, Shirakawa’s eyes had a gleam like light on dark restless waters. It was the expression he always wore when he felt attracted by a desirable woman. Time and again the overwhelmingly joyful experiences of Tomo’s younger years had turned sour as she was forced to watch with a helpless horror, as though her very flesh and blood were being devoured by maggots, while her husband’s eyes lighted on another woman in just this way.

‘Why? She looks gentle, surely that’s a good thing? I’m sure a girl like that will make a perfectly good companion for Etsuko.’

His tone was impersonal, but his gaze had followed intently the innocent, childlike movement of Suga’s hips as, clutching at her long sleeves, she rose abruptly to her feet and left the room. The movement, like a boy’s in its innocence of female sexuality, was precisely that of the Tomo whom his mother had invited to their house in the country at the age of fourteen. The discovery excited Shirakawa all the more in that Suga’s face, shoulders and breasts had a rounded, ample, feminine air. He had asked Tomo particularly to find a girl as unspoilt and unsophisticated as possible, the kind of girl who would do equally well as her own maid, but now he was almost ashamed that she had respected his wishes so carefully, searching so diligently to find this flower in the bud whose petals were even more tightly folded than he had dared to hope.

‘You say her parents have a bamboo-wrapper shop?’

‘Yes, in Kokuchō. They used to have quite a good business, but apparently they had a dishonest employee, and the business went downhill. I met the mother; she seemed an extremely pleasant, straightforward person.’