AFTER LEONARD LEFT THIS TIME, RIKA SAID IT WAS AS IF HER MEMORY became an involuntary impulse. Events from her past with him that had seemed commonplace took on a new colouring, and things she hadn’t thought about for years came back to her as vivid tableaux: his visits to the house on the canal when, still a girl, she’d taken out her photographs and shown them to the tall Englishman. She could see herself putting the folio box on the table, and Leonard lifting out the black and white prints, asking: ‘Who developed these?’ and her father replying, ‘She’s been in the museum’s darkroom since she was sixteen.’ Now, eleven years later, the woman she’d become, the photographer she was becoming, understood what Leonard had done for her when he recognised the ease with which she could frame an image, her facility with light and shadow. And she understood that it had been in the mirror of his recognition that she’d come to understand it herself. Leonard had given her that, and it was worth more, far more, than even the Rolleiflex. And then she was back on the mountain, in another memory film, and there was Leonard, his arms out in welcome as she arrived in the village. Her harshness was vivid. Her silence and her cruelty.

She tried to close her mind against these intrusions and, heaven knows, with term ending and self-government so close, there was enough to keep her busy. But when she stopped, when she let her mind rest, Leonard would be there. She didn’t want to return to him, or to that past, but she had the strange feeling that he was re-entering her. Not physically – she had no desire for him – but in some intrinsic way she felt that Leonard was returning to her. A nonsensical thought, when she considered it, but there it was, greeting her each time she swam out past the children at the town beach, or sat under the shade of the veranda and let her mind drift.

She’d had lunch with him the day before the plane took him back to Sydney and his flight to London. They’d sat on the shaded terrace of his hotel and he’d asked her if she’d had any contact with the mountains. She told him she hadn’t. She thought of the people often enough, and of Janape saying goodbye to her on the path.

‘Remember Janape?’

‘I dream of her sometimes,’ Leonard said. He leaned across the table and took Rika’s hand. ‘I feel I owe them. I know I owe them, and not only for the film. All of them. Janape, especially. After you left, she looked after me. She was very good. I owe her a lot.’ He sighed. ‘Exchange. How does it work in the fjords?’

Rika sat back in her chair. ‘It’s hard,’ she said, ‘with both of us on local salaries.’

A group of Australians came in and sat at the next table. They took files and pens from their briefcases and began a noisy discussion, as Rika told Leonard of the grand gesture she’d made when she took the job at the arts centre, refusing the expatriate salary that would have made everything easier. How could she have been so foolish? She told him about Jacob always with more to give, and the endlessness of clan demands: funerals to pay for, young men in town to be bailed out, kids going to school, babies and old people needing hospital. Leonard asked if he could help and she shook her head. There was Aaron’s pride to consider. When Leonard asked if he need know, she looked at him, shocked. There was nothing she wouldn’t tell Aaron, and even as the words came and her voice insisted on them, she knew it was not true.