‘What …? Do you know, I never noticed!’ said Suga, blinking her eyes as though dazzled by the light. It had occurred to her, though, that all the while they had been in the house Yumi had kept on her yellow silk apron. The quickness of Miya’s eye for such things struck her as indecent, as though it were somehow a sign of the lustful desires of her flesh, yet at the same time the suspicion that the child in Yumi’s womb might be Yukitomo’s brushed across her own mind, too, like the shadow of a passing bird. She knew that it could hardly be so in fact, but the idea gave her an odd pleasure, like that of pressing down hard on the root of an aching tooth. She felt like laughing at Michimasa and the other husband, Iwamoto – laughing with the utterly cold and beautiful laugh of the harpy who rips open the bellies of pregnant women …

Yukitomo was walking ahead briskly using his stick, deaf apparently to the women’s talk. Seen from the front, he seemed to have aged strikingly, but his step was youthful and his back as stiff as a ramrod.

In midsummer the following year Yumi came to the Shirakawas’ carrying her new baby.

Miya too was there at the big house that day with her own child. Kazuya, Miya’s child, was two years younger than Takao and just one year older than Yumi’s firstborn, Naoichi.

When she saw Naoichi’s face, so smooth and well-formed, Miya’s eyes narrowed in a smile.

‘Naoichi’s so good-looking!’ she said as she played with him. ‘I’m sure he’ll have all the ladies after him when he grows up.’ Her soft, melting smile as she said this was so completely artless that even the wary Tomo was obliged to smile.

While keeping an eye on Takao, who was running about nearby with his nurse in attendance, Tomo gazed at the children in Miya’s and Yumi’s arms, both of them boys, with something akin to wonder.

Takao, Kazuya, Naoichi… Eventually they too, she supposed, would grow up into adult men. Even now the idea still came as a kind of shock. It was a disturbing sensation quite different from the feeling when she imagined the figure that Takao would cut on the day he came of age. It disturbed her to think that these small creatures now innocently romping in front of her, laughing and making faces, would one day become men just like any others: men like Yukitomo, like Michimasa, like Iwamoto …

It occurred to Tomo that among the women there was one who sat with no child: Suga. Her lap, strangely empty, told of her loneliness far more eloquently than her face could ever do.