‘Paa and Nunu came all the way to Auckland to bring us back,’ she said. ‘They told us we were to get married properly at home and that the old ones would have to get used to the idea. It’s not as though my parents or elders had anyone else in mind for me, thank goodness. That would have been a different matter.

‘That’s what we did. Everyone came, even those who had opposed our marriage. And they’re not sorry. Taana’s a worker who quickly learned to be a farmer, learned to shear sheep and keep the fences in order. That’s how he was judged. He’d done a building apprenticeship when he left school, so he brought new skills to our family. As the old ones died, former enmities were forgotten. No one could find anything to complain about with my Taana.’

‘But which was your true wedding?’ Oriwia asked.

‘The second one,’ Dorothea said. ‘The one that everyone came to celebrate.’

Oriwia had no more to say. Her husband would come home one day, but in the meantime she was the wife of Chappy Star, as witnessed by a large gathering of family and friends. No matter how many oceans parted him from her, there would be no other wedding.

In suffocating air, she was driven through the evening streets until they came to a jaded villa where slashing had been going on in the overgrowth. A cool bath had been prepared for her, cold drinks, light food, a soft bed. She fell asleep under a wobbling ceiling fan and woke many hours later – husband gone – in a billowing room. Lengths of coloured material hung from ceiling to floor. They bellied and backwashed like dancers.

Oriwia, dressed in one of the nylon dresses, went out through the back door to where she could hear voices. Ela and her mother were under an open lean-to at the back of the house where there was a leaping washing machine, suds flowing down its sides.

‘Hula mai ‘oe,’ Ela sang, dancing with the machine as Oriwia came to the doorway. Ela was thin, her eyes and smile large. She could dance like nobody’s business. It was a Saturday, a no-work day for Aki and Chappy who, soon afterwards, came carrying fish in a bucket which they had bought from a fisherman at a jetty somewhere. With them were a young man and his two younger sisters who had come to live in the house, too; Oriwia hadn’t met them when she arrived the day before.

When the men came in, the language changed. Oriwia didn’t notice it at first – reo Māori, ‘ōlelo Maoli – as English dropped away. ‘They’d been speaking English for me.’

Aki and Chappy busied themselves cleaning and cutting up fish.