He’d taken his viewers into Auden’s ‘land of unlikeness’.

NOVEMBER CAME AND THE RAIN KEPT FALLING. WHEN RIKA BLED again despite herbs from the Chinese apothecary, she took Martha’s advice and booked in to see a gynaecologist in Sydney. Martha flew down with her, and Rika was grateful. ‘Imagine doing this alone,’ she said. They stayed with Martha’s widowed mother, Gloria, in the house where Martha had grown up. The shipyards had been replaced by docks, a different noise coming up the cliff and into the kitchen, where Gloria fussed over Rika. She made her scrambled eggs and cottage pie, telling her to eat up as if a baby could be produced by another layer of fat beneath the skin. On the morning of Rika’s appointment, she came down to the jetty to see her and Martha onto the ferry that would take them into the city. It was early summer, not yet hot. The harbour was at its sparkling best, a light breeze in the sails of the skiffs. The new Opera House was rising from the old tram depot. They walked up from the Quay, through the noise and the buildings and the traffic, to Macquarie Street. Rika grasped Martha’s arm when they reached the gynaecologist’s building and took the lift to his floor. In his waiting room with its leather sofas, framed degrees and piles of Vogue, they stood at the window looking out over the Botanic Gardens, until he opened the door and ushered Rika in to his consulting room.

He was a tall man with a boyish haircut, and on his desk was a brown seed pod the size of a small plump cushion.

‘A fertility pod from Africa,’ he said, and Rika put her hands on it.

It had been a long time, he agreed, for a healthy couple not to conceive. He looked at her temperature charts. She told him about her young self, who was so fertile that one ignorant event in an orchid house had filled her with a pregnancy nothing could save her from. Not her father. Not the school. Not her own will. She spoke to the doctor as if he were a confessor. She told him everything, from her first period all the way through to Aaron and the pressure of his job, the exhaustion of his sperm and her fear that he would fall, without warning, dead on the floor.

‘And that first pregnancy,’ the doctor asked. ‘How many weeks were you when you went into hospital?’

She couldn’t mark that time in weeks, only that after the man had gone back to the rocky hills of his island, she vomited and couldn’t eat breakfast. She’d stayed at home in bed, but the next day was no better. Nor the next. Her breasts hurt when she ran; she fell asleep at her desk. Her father, alarmed, sent her to the school nurse, who sent her to the doctor, who delivered the news. The school was pragmatic. She was given leave for the rest of the term and taken to a hospital in Amsterdam.