Tomo also knew through Sonoda, however, that Yumi’s father had been dimly aware and privately hoping that this would happen when he put her in service. That the father should send such a pompous letter when he almost certainly had an eye to the remittances that would make life easier if Yumi became a concubine like Suga was doubtless no more than a sign of the importance of pride to an old man of samurai stock, yet Tomo herself felt more sympathy with the unsophisticated straightforwardness of Suga’s mother and with her frank appeal that carried no pretense of equality. The greed she sensed behind the lines of well-formed characters and the well-turned phrases was to her far the more base, and she stayed a while with the letter in her hand, a grim little smile playing about her mouth.

When she entered the bedroom, Shirakawa was in his nightwear, one elbow resting on the small mahogany writing table beside the lamp as he made corrections in red ink on some official documents.

‘Why don’t you change?’ he said, directing an ill-tempered look at her. Quietly, she went out into the anteroom again. The sound of rustling fabric reached him with an odd clarity. She must be undoing her sash of stiff silk; he put down his writing brush and listened to the indications of slow, heavy motion that were melancholy and monotonous yet powerful as the waves on a wintry sea in their silent suggestion of the body and the voice so familiar to his sight and hearing after nearly twenty years of marriage. They summoned up forgotten scenes that came and went as she moved, scenes of the mountain streams of his home in Kyushu and the deep snows that buried the northeastern districts of Honshu where his work had taken him. Like a shadow that he could never leave behind, Tomo would gradually age in this house, growing more and more like a family ghost till finally she died. Vaguely he sensed the deep-seated, icy will so far removed from love or self-sacrifice that made her follow so submissively the vagaries of his will. It aroused in him some strong emotion akin to hatred. To him she was, quite unlike Suga or Yumi, something formidable, an enemy entrenched in a fortress that no assault could reduce. Yet today he was sick at heart and would gladly have put aside the stiffness in which he normally encased himself and talked to her easily and familiarly, as they had when they were young.

Why should that be? Today, he had seen a ghost in broad daylight.

Although he had accompanied Superintendent-General Kawashima to the ball that was held in the great drawing room of the Rokumeikan following the charity bazaar, he had no interest in Western music or dancing and had been sitting on a sofa in the antechamber quenching his thirst with white wine that a waiter had brought him.