‘Of course they will. Any number of them, if only you look properly …’ She broke off, her face thoughtful. For a while she was silent, smoking her pipe as though in two minds about something, till finally Iwamoto seemed to feel uncomfortable and tidying up the papers on the table said stiffly, squaring his elbows and bowing his head:

‘Well, then, I’ll be off. Please send for me if you want anything done.’

‘Why – do you have to go? Have you got a lot to do today?’

‘No … the shop’s not –’

‘Then sit down, please. You see, on this question of your marriage there’s something I wanted to ask you about.’

Tomo pushed the table to one side and moved the brazier beside her slightly closer to Iwamoto.

‘Here, warm yourself up.’

‘Thank you.’

‘The thing is, you see … Now, this is just between ourselves, but does the girl you marry have to be untouched?’

‘Eh?’ Iwamoto blinked his large eyes dubiously and stared into Tomo’s face.

‘I mean, would you object to a woman who came secondhand?’

‘Secondhand? You mean someone who’d been married already?’

‘Yes … well, not exactly married, but …’

She broke off and spent a while poking at the charcoal in the brazier with a brass poker. Eventually she looked up again and said:

‘Actually, I’m thinking of Yumi …’

‘Yumi …?’ echoed Iwamoto, then sat staring vacantly at some point in the distance.

A while earlier, as he had come in through the side entrance and walked along the corridor that skirted the front rooms, he had seen Yumi and Suga sitting facing each other, arranging aspidistras in a bronze vase.

‘Is the master out?’ he had asked.

‘He’s gone over to the new house at Tsunamachi,’ replied Yumi in a clear voice, snapping away busily with her scissors. ‘With Master Takao and his nurse … Yes, I expect he’ll stay there tonight.’

The house at Tsunamachi was the house where Michimasa had gone to live the previous year. Suga merely bowed and murmured something inaudible without looking up from the dark green leaves of the aspidistras. Yumi might lack conscious charm, he had thought, but she was more lively and straightforward than Suga, who always seemed somehow heavy and remote. His head in a whirl at Tomo’s unexpected proposal, he found himself recalling the impression and somehow began to feel nervous.

Iwamoto was still looking startled as Tomo began to explain from the beginning about Yumi’s background and the circumstances that had made her available for marriage.