IT WAS THE HOUSE RIKA DIDN’T LIKE. WHEN LEONARD WENT TO THE university, silence drew in around her. The house on the canal had moved and groaned with the water. This house was dry, untried. True, there were times when the house in Leiden had tormented her with its sounds, its memories. The cry of her mother at night when the cancer grew and her father was powerless to stop it. His night-weeping after the funeral. And the nights when she had wept and the house creaked in sympathy, grieving for her dead mother, and for herself, and then for the ache in her heart and the mornings she woke up nauseous, flushed green bile away with the water. The clanking of pipes as it made its way down to the basement, to wherever it went, drains and sewers under the canals. She didn’t want to think about that, or the man in the orchid house. He’d come upon her when she was learning to use the Leica, a gift from her aunt in the dreadful weeks after her mother’s death. The orchids calmed her, she found, as did the concentration it took to capture their texture. The man had come one day, then another, until he was there often. He told her of his high island in a blue ocean. He took her to a café, ordered her mint tea. She didn’t want to think about the sudden rush of feeling that had come upon her unawares, or its consequence: the shame on her father’s face, his sorrow, or the term away from school. Little wonder she had married Leonard, with his stories of a new moon, a new sun to hang in the sky. The promise of a life elsewhere.

After she’d accepted Leonard, her father kissed her on the forehead. ‘Now I’ll know you’re safe,’ he’d said, and she’d seen his relief, able at last to grieve alone, without worrying about a daughter he could find no way to console, and who had turned instead to a stranger – a man he’d never met. How could a father comprehend that? It was to Leonard, his young colleague from Oxford, that Piet turned for an answer. He saw that Rika spoke easily to him, and when Leonard first came to stay that she’d shown him the photograph of her mother on the mantelpiece. ‘She gave me my first camera, a Kodak,’ she told him. Leonard looked at the photo of a woman with a pale face, oval like Rika’s, and her hair in a roll. ‘I took it,’ Rika said, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘See, there’s sun on the water beside her. She framed it.’

It was a symptom of her grief, Leonard told Piet later, speaking as an anthropologist might, that she had turned to the man in the orchid house. It was a symptom of her sensibility, and the enormity of the loss, not a betrayal of it. With the curtains of the house on the canal closed against the sun, it was an attempt at salvation: a grasping at life.