When she returned to school, she was wary, closed in on herself. She returned to her books, and to her camera, but not to the Botanic Gardens. Other girls in her class had boyfriends, but not her. She rarely went to parties. The feelings that had risen unbidden in the orchid house vanished as if they too had been scraped out of her. Only the smallest shadow remained of whatever it was that led her into a punishing nausea. In this way a year had passed before Leonard began to visit, and the dark feelings that she thought had vanished gave a small roll in the depths of her belly.

‘And when you married him,’ the gynaecologist asked, ‘did you consider the question of pregnancy?’

‘I don’t think Leonard had babies in mind,’ she said. ‘I was barely twenty.’

She’d booked into a clinic not far from her old school and an IUD was fitted. It stayed in place during the marriage and on through the first year with Aaron, when everything was strange and intense and uncertain. Her periods came rolling along, one after another, with little pain and no trouble worth bothering a doctor with. She gave the whole process no thought, she told the doctor, until Aaron turned his mind to how he might make gifts to her father in preparation for a child.

The IUD was removed; a whiff of anaesthetic, and she was given it in a small plastic jar. A translucent sliver of skin was wrapped in its coils. What was it, she’d asked the nurse. A part of her? A baby trying to take? Something Aaron had left behind? It was nothing, the nurse said. Some tissue, that was all. Maybe a small infection. Don’t upset yourself.

‘As we can’t test your husband,’ the gynaecologist said, ‘we’ll begin by taking a better look at you.’

He took her into the small examination room. When they returned, Martha was brought into the doctor’s office. She sat in the chair facing his desk, looking at the large, shiny fertility pod with a groove that made it look rather like child-sized buttocks. It was oddly reassuring. Everything about the room exuded confidence: the sun shining on the window, the doctor’s notes on the desk, the leather-bound books and medical journals, the plastic models of ovaries and wombs. And, indeed, the doctor was hopeful. Apart from a cyst he’d found on Rika’s left ovary, there was no other sign of abnormality. While he didn’t think the cyst likely to be a cause of the difficulty, it merited further investigation, given her remoteness from specialist care. He could fit her in for surgery at the end of his Thursday list, in two days’ time, and wrote the admission slip. Rika, her slender fingers back on the seed pod, smiled.

Two days later, Martha sat beside her as she surfaced, nauseous, from the anaesthetic. The ward was shaded; curtains separated her from the adjacent bed. The soft tread of nurses and the low moan of another patient were the only sounds. Rika opened her eyes and pushed the oxygen mask from her face. What? she asked. What had they found? Martha didn’t know. When she asked a nurse, she was told the doctor would be along soon. Rika dropped back into a sleep of tears that seeped from her closed lids.