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trap a man than by presenting him with a child?

9
    When Nancy arrived at the consulate early next morning she was dressed in a plain dark frock and a black hat with a veil. Her face was bare of powder or paint. Sharpless thought she looked as though she was on her way to a funeral. She strode into the office and requested that he take her to the house of ‘that person’.
    ‘Lieutenant Pinkerton’s not here yet.’
    ‘Ben will be along later. I mean to speak to her alone. With your help, uncle.’
    Sharpless was startled: he demurred, he protested, he suggested that such a meeting would be not only irregular but embarrassing, indeed painful. Ten minutes later the two were on their way. Nancy, Sharpless realised, was as stubborn as her mother and had the force of youth on her side.
    In the rickshaw she sat, eyes lowered, breathing deeply like someone preparing for a challenge. The rickshaw came to a halt some way short of the house, the slope too steep for them to be pulled further up the hill.
    As they walked up the final stretch of road Sharpless saw Cho-Cho move away from the window. The shoji door slid open and she stood waiting, expressionless. Sharpless saw that she was studying with cat-like intentness the fair-haired stranger walking towards her. He called out,
    ‘ Ohaygozaimasu , Cho-Cho-san!’
    Her bow was tiny, just perceptible. She motioned them into the house and Sharpless made an awkward, brief introduction.
    Inside, he automatically removed his shoes. Nancy, staring at Cho-Cho, failed to notice, and Sharpless for once decided to say nothing.
    They stood by the door, the three of them, ill at ease, like models awaiting the arrival of an artist, a sculptor, to move them into a composition of harmony, of logic. Then the child ran into the room and buried his face in his mother’s dark cotton kimono.
    Nancy stared down at the small creature, at the back of his head, the golden Pinkerton curls, the thin neck, pale legs. He was dressed in light, washed-out cotton. She swayed slightly. Sharpless thought she might be about to faint, but she drew herself up very straight and said in an unexpectedly firm tone, ‘Will you tell her I have come to discuss—’
    ‘You may speak to me in English,’ Cho-Cho cut in with her lapidary delivery. ‘I will understand.’
    Nancy had not anticipated a direct confrontation; the mediation of a well-disposed interpreter, one she could trust, had been part of the scene she had envisaged. Suddenly she was on her own. Sharpless had withdrawn into himself, his gaze turned inward, though he appeared to be looking out at the dull blue of the sea beyond the window.
    She plunged: ‘I want to speak plainly. I am not here as an enemy. I understand that at some time in the past you entered into certain . . . arrangements with Lieutenant Pinkerton—’
    ‘He became my husband.’
    ‘Well. Perhaps there were misunderstandings. I am his fiancée. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the word.’
    ‘I know the word. It – means’ – a calmly disdainful inflection – ‘at some time you hope to become his wife.’
    ‘We will be married in the eyes of God. And the State. There will be a wedding ceremony.’
    What ceremony else? Sharpless recalled with a pang Cho-Cho’s wedding: that graceless moment, Pinkerton impatiently draining his bourbon, ‘ Bottoms up! Tell her it’s the American way .’
    He listened as Nancy talked on, her light voice carrying words through the air, words innocuous in themselves but deadly in their implications; she was laying out the route for a journey, and who was to embark on it: a father, a child and a destination. America.
    Cho-Cho bent down and whispered to the boy. He looked at the visitors and wandered away, out through the door. A moment later they heard the alarmed squawk of a chicken and the sound of childish giggles.
    His mother gazed incredulously at the pale woman.
    ‘You want me to give you my son?’
    ‘It is for his sake.’
    Sharpless