‘Some,’ Martha said.

‘What do you make of them?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘They’re brooding.’

She nodded. They were. Brooding and obsessive.

‘There’s something not right. I don’t mean they aren’t good. She’s very good. That precision. It’s as if they’re coming in on something and I don’t know what it is. I thought maybe you would, Martha.’

Martha hesitated. Would it be a breach of confidence to tell him? Would it be a betrayal?

‘What is it?’ Leonard asked again. ‘What is it that’s wrong?’

‘She’s not getting pregnant.’

He held her eyes long enough for her to see comprehension pass across his face, and maybe also pain before he turned to the window again, looking out into the rain. The valley was green, the round hills were green, plants that had been bowed by months of dust were pushing up new shoots. She doubted Leonard saw any of it. His gaze was turned inward.

‘Has she been examined?’ he said at last.

Martha shook her head. ‘She’s sure it’s Aaron. And anyway, here, who —’

‘She must go to Sydney,’ he said, cutting in. Then he hesitated, as if this time there was something he wanted to say. But no, all he did was ask Martha to persuade her. ‘She trusts you,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t mention it. And if she needs money, can I rely on you to let me know?’

It was not until many years later that Martha asked him how, given the emotion of the time, he’d made a film that confounded all expectations. She was staying with him in North Oxford. The windows of his study opened onto a garden with a birdbath in the middle of an overgrown lawn. He hadn’t remarried. He had women friends. There was a buxom don from Somerville who came in to return a book and stayed for a glass of wine. Martha couldn’t judge the nature of their affection as they talked of concerts they’d been to, films they’d seen; there was something about Leonard that made personal questions seem improper, even from someone who’d known him as long as she had.

But later that night, after the Somerville don had gone, they returned to the mountain and Rika. It was then, swimming in the great ocean of the past, that the possibility of this other question arose. How did he do it? In a state of grief and shock, how did he make such a film? He didn’t deflect the question. He simply said that it was hard. For a long time he couldn’t play the rushes, he couldn’t unpack the bark-cloth. It took Rika doing what she did, and the inconsequence of the two small films he made on his return from Papua, to force him up against himself, against his unacknowledged vulnerability, his ‘intellectual timidity’.

‘I suppose it’s only when we’re forced to, hard up against it, that we change,’ he said.