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clothes.
    ‘They can hear you all over town, Kikuko,’ said Shuichi as he wound an obi around his waist. ‘You might try to seem a little more worried.’
    ‘But I was playing it because I was worried. I couldn’t sit still, thinking about the two of you.’
    But her frolicsome manner suggested that she found the storm exhilarating.
    She was still humming to herself as she went off for Shingo’s tea.
    Shuichi, fond of the Parisian chanson , had bought the collection for her.
    He knew French. Kikuko did not, but, with lessons in pronunciation, she had become fairly proficient at imitating the record. Not, of course, that she could give, as could Gauty, a sense of having struggled and somehow lived on. All the same, her delicate, hesitant delivery was most pleasing.
    Kikuko’s wedding present from her seminary classmates had been a collection of nursery songs from the world over. In the early months of her marriage she had been very fond of it. When she was alone, she would quietly join in the singing; it gave Shingo a sense of warm repose.
    A most womanly kind of observance, thought Shingo. And he felt that, listening to the nursery songs, she was sunk in memories of her girlhood.
    ‘Shall I ask you to play them at my funeral?’ Shingo had once said to her. ‘Then I won’t need any prayers.’ He had not been serious, but then suddenly he was on the edge of tears.
    But Kikuko was still childless, and it seemed, since he had not heard it recently, that she had tired of the collection.
    As the chanson was nearing its end, it suddenly faded away.
    ‘The electricity has gone off,’ said Yasuko from the breakfast room.
    ‘It won’t go back on tonight,’ said Kikuko, switching off the phonograph. ‘Let’s have dinner early, Mother.’
    At dinner, the thin candles went out three or four times as the wind blew through cracks in the shutters.
    The ocean seemed to be shouting above the wind. It was as if the sea were doing more than the wind to heighten the terror.

2
    The scent of the candle that he had just blown out was still in Shingo’s nostrils.
    Each time the house would shake, Yasuko would reach for the matchbox on the bed and rattle it, as if to reassure herself and to let Shingo know.
    And she would reach for his hand, and gently touch it.
    ‘Will we be all right?’
    ‘Of course. And if something does blow over the fence, we can’t very well go out and look.’
    ‘Will it be all right at Fusako’s?’
    ‘At Fusako’s?’ He had not thought of Fusako. ‘I imagine so. On a night like this they ought to go off to sleep early like a good married couple, whatever they do on other nights.’
    ‘How could they sleep?’ Turning away his remark, she fell silent.
    They heard Shuichi’s voice and Kikuko’s. There was a soft coaxing quality in Kikuko’s.
    ‘She has two small children,’ said Yasuko after a time. ‘Things are not as easy as they are with us.’
    ‘And he has a crippled mother. How is her arthritis?’
    ‘There’s that too. If they were to run away Aihara would have to carry the old lady on his back.’
    ‘Can’t she walk?’
    ‘She can move around, I believe. But in this storm? Gives you the blues, doesn’t it.’
    ‘Gives you the blues?’ The word ‘blues’ from the sixty-three-year-old Yasuko struck Shingo as comical.
    ‘It said in the paper that a woman changes her hairstyle any number of times in the course of her life. I liked that.’
    ‘What was it in?’
    It was, according to Yasuko, in the opening words of the eulogy of a painter in the old style, a specialist in portraits of women, to a recently deceased woman painter, also of old-style beauties.
    But in the eulogy proper it came out that with the woman artist the case had been the opposite. For a good fifty years, from her twenties to her death at seventy-five, she had worn her hair straight back and held in place by a comb.
    Yasuko apparently found it admirable that a woman could make her way through life with her