‘The carpenters came not long after you’d gone,’ said Seki the housemaid, with an overwrought expression. That Seki’s relationship with Shirakawa had been something more than that between servant and master Tomo had once learned indirectly from Seki herself.

Going into the new wing, Tomo was astonished to find a new mulberry-wood mirror-stand with a bright crimson cover of crepe over the glass and a chest-of-drawers standing ostentatiously in the six-tatami dressing room.

‘New quilts, too,’ said Seki with a look of acute discomfort, opening the closet to show Tomo. Inside, two new sets of well-padded bedding in heavy yellow checkered silk, one in the upper compartment and one in the lower, lay on wrapping cloths of silk dyed in a pattern of fresh twining greenery, cozily trailing the sleeves of their patterned-silk, padded covers.

‘Whose room is this?’ asked Etsuko, who had followed them in, tilting to one side as she spoke the fair-skinned, oval face that was so like Shirakawa’s.

‘Your father had it built for reading his official papers in. Now go away dear,’ said Tomo sharply as though repelling her. Above all, she must not let this thing that threatened to engulf her whole existence become a threat to her daughter as well. To Etsuko, however, this desperate determination merely made her mother seem forbidding. She liked much better to be with someone pretty like Suga, who seemed to give off a pleasant fragrance when you went near her; and she ran off willingly along the corridor.

‘Should I put the master’s bed out in here from tonight?’ asked Seki, her eyes seeming to bore into Tomo as she spoke.

‘Yes, you’d better.’

‘And Miss Suga in the anteroom?’

‘We’ll leave Suga to get out her own bed.’

Though Tomo’s outward manner was dignified and pleasant, she shifted her gaze to the garden, overcome by an unbearable sense of shame at the idea that the same fierce fire burned in Seki’s breast as in her own.

She could see Suga and Etsuko standing face to face beneath the serrated leaves of the grapevine in the orchard. Suga, in a cotton kimono with a pattern in white on dark blue, had her hand, probably at Etsuko’s insistence, stretched above her head, clutching lightly at a bunch of green grapes that hung above her. The sunlight falling through the vine flecked the fair skin of her face with green.

‘Can you eat them as green as this?’

‘They’re very good. They’re a kind of green grape they grow in Western countries.’

Etsuko’s voice came cool and clear. Suga pulled off the bunch and placed one of the grapes like a great green gem in her mouth.

‘I told you so – it’s sweet, isn’t it? The agricultural testing station next door gave the vine to us.’

‘Well, so it is! I’ve never had a green grape like this that was so sweet.’