‘Is it real?’ Jacob asked.

She turned to him, her face a query.

‘Your husband comes from Oxford,’ he said. ‘He should know. Do they teach us here what they teach them there?’

Other than a year of photography in Amsterdam, Rika hadn’t studied since school. She thought of the students on their bicycles in Leiden. ‘I think it’s real,’ she said. ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

‘In town they call it the bois’ university.’

‘Boys? Like children?’

‘No. Bois. Labourers.’

‘Oh.’

‘What does your husband say?’

‘He doesn’t say anything.’

‘He comes all this way. From Oxford.’ A note of what? Sarcasm? Disbelief? ‘And he says nothing?’

‘He says Alex Penrose knows more about Melanesia than any living man,’ and before she could wish the words back, she saw anger flare. Anger and humiliation, that’s what it was. ‘Any university man, I think he meant. Any anthropologist,’ she added, but Jacob was already bounding down the hill, skidding in the gravelly soil, kicking up dust. He came to a stop halfway down, by a large boulder where a few of the sparse, papery trees were bunched together. Shade.

Rika didn’t know – how could she? It was her second morning in Papua – that from Jacob’s perspective it was a serious question. Why wouldn’t this be a lesser university, a lesser place, as his high school had been lesser? And before that, the primary school, with woven sago walls and windows open to the rain, and the teacher who lined up the children, caning the ones who called out the wrong answer. And now this, hidden away in a dry valley a university the like of which he’d never seen, seven miles from town. This university with no buildings. It was his second year, and still his classes were held in cramped rooms at the college where they trained the clerks. Clerks. Not much better than bois. Or in huts with roofs that leaked when the rain came. Nothing about this university bore any resemblance to the stories he’d been told by his clan-brother Aaron, one of the few who’d been chosen for study in Australia – and that was a concession to the United Nations. So Aaron said. A delegation had come, a visiting mission, and had seen how few students matriculated. The UN had insisted: send out some of those who are ready, fast-track a university for the rest.

The University of Queensland, where Aaron was sent, had colonnades and sweeping steps, clock towers and a library with floor after floor of books to the ceiling.

Alone on top of the hill, Rika felt like a flag, up so high, with a view in every direction. Not a flag to mark the spot, not an English flag. A flag waving into the future. All this way, and here she was, looking across at mountains that were nothing like her idea of the mountain that had beckoned. It was a perilous feeling. She sighed. The heat must be addling her brain and she could see that she’d offended Jacob. She put the camera in her string bag and began the climb down towards him. She stepped carefully; it was harder going down as she could see where she’d fall.