‘The Trobriands,’ Rika said. ‘Three years ago.’

‘I’d have liked to have gone there,’ Leonard said. ‘I have a colleague who’s working on Malinowski’s field photos.’

‘Any good?’

‘As ethnography, yes. As photographs, they’re not in your class.’

‘I never much liked them. The ones that I’ve seen.’

‘My colleague defends them. We’ll have to wait for his book.’

‘Another book,’ she said. ‘This place will sink under the weight of them.’

He laughed. ‘That bad?’

‘Pretty much.’

On the working wall above the light table were shots of policemen and marketplaces, schoolchildren.

‘More Village Shots?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘Can I see what you’re doing yourself?’

‘From when?’ She pointed to the flat boxes piled on a shelf beside the door.

‘From now?’

‘You sure?’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t rather the Trobriands?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Unless you would.’

She opened her desk drawer, took out a slim folder, laid it on the desk and stood behind him as he picked up the prints one by one, looking carefully at the increasingly sculptural images: a hand, the back of a neck, the line of shadow on the muscles of a back, the movement of light and skin. Aaron, he assumed, but rarely his face, and then only the graze of a cheek, a curl of hair; coming in so close it was as if she wanted to get in under the skin. Unsettling images, hard to grasp.

‘Are you thinking of another exhibition?’ he asked, though he knew these were not for public view.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘I can’t go back to Europe, not now. There’s no life there for me. I’m a Papuan now.’ She smiled, and her eyes filled with tears. ‘Only I’m not.’

‘How did you reply?’ Martha asked him. He was in the study room at the library where she was working with the letters and diaries of her travellers. He was standing at the window, looking out at rain that was sweeping across the valley again. ‘I didn’t,’ he said. He was wary of false comfort; he’d had too much of it himself. He’d damped down the impulse to say, ‘No, no, of course you can come back. I will be there.’ Looking Martha straight in the face, he asked, ‘What’s happened? What hasn’t she told me?’

He didn’t speak easily, not of personal things, not of this, and as she watched him struggle to frame his words, a rush of memory came in on her: the shame of the cuckold. What a word, why recall it then, after the authority of that seminar; why that word and the image of Leonard five years before, back from the mountain, doggedly working with Obi to translate the soundtrack, and the house packed up already, and Leonard so restrained, so English; and everyone thinking that surely, beneath those sad eyes, those good manners, he must have been murderous.

‘There’s something wrong,’ he said. ‘I can’t quite put my finger on it. There’s a disjunction. The expansiveness of Village Shots, you know, her ease with the students. Then her own work. Have you seen the recent folio?’