Her teeth chattering all the while, Suga repeated what she had heard from Maki that evening. Miya had kept Yukitomo company over his saké and had herself drunk her fill, then, complaining that the noise of the waves scared her, she had had her bed laid out in the same room as Maki and Takao and, too far gone even to be got out of her kimono and into her nightwear, had finally been put to bed by Maki and a maid so that they could clear the things away in the main room.

Yukitomo went to bed in the back room, separated from the others only by a pair of sliding doors. Tired from the day’s exertions Maki had slept soundly, but awoke with a start to find the night still dark and the waves beating on the rocks below, roaring with the ferocity of a storm. Peering at the next bed by the faint light of the bedside lamp, she found the quilts in which Miya supposedly lay in a drunken stupor quite empty, while from the room at the rear, fitfully between the roar of the waves as they advanced and retreated, she could hear Miya’s voice strangely seductive and nasal, whether crying or laughing she could not tell … Several times Maki had doubted her own ears and told herself it was all a dream, but the intimate sounds from the rear room had continued, murmuring on and on till close to daybreak.

‘Tonight, too … the young mistress said she had a cold and went to the separate wing alone …’

Again Suga broke off. Yukitomo had excused himself a while ago; he had doubtless gone surreptitiously to join her there.

Tomo had a mental image of Michimasa’s eyes staring vacant and motionless from his smooth, pallid face as he played go upstairs with one of the guests, and a shudder raised goose pimples on her skin. Who could tell what dreadful things might occur should Michimasa get wind of what was happening? She was appalled at her own naïveté in assuming, despite her countless bitter experiences on account of Yukitomo’s lechery, that within himself he still maintained the same moral code as herself. Without so much as a second thought he had trampled into the forbidden territory of his own son’s marriage. For Yukitomo, no woman was anything more than a female of the species; and in that sense, of course, Miya must be a far more attractive female than either Suga or even Yumi … Nonetheless it was with a seething indignation quite different from the jealousy she had experienced when Yukitomo had first turned his affections to Suga and Yumi that Tomo now listened to Suga’s complaint. The feeling was equally remote from both marital love and marital hatred, a fierce wrath that stood up to Yukitomo, the ungovernable male, and took beneath its protective wing Suga, Yumi, and even the offending Miya herself.