But when it was time to put on the red dress for the reception, Rika looked at it with revulsion. She hadn’t taken it out of its bag until Aaron found it and asked what it was, and she confessed to spending money they could ill afford. It was a confession easily made as she was spared telling him of the abortion. ‘That had nothing to do with it,’ the doctor had said, and his words were like a wand. The relief was so great that to tell Aaron about the IUD and the scarring seemed almost a reprieve. Over that they could weep together. Words returned to them. Gone was the loneliness of sleeping beside each other in silence. With Rika’s grief, gentleness returned, their private world of skin and fluid, and when they made love, it was no longer with the urgency of those last few months, which had brought orgasms that made her gasp. Now they rocked in each other’s arms, and before they fell asleep as entangled as new lovers, he told her she was no less beautiful, no less able to love a child. They could adopt, it was not unusual in his culture. But when he coaxed her into that red crepe dress on the night of the reception, she felt a fraud, a parody of femininity, as vulgar as a transvestite. And as barren.

‘Where did you get that word?’ Laedi asked.

But that’s how Rika felt. And that night it was how she looked. With the scar on her belly a purple welt, nothing Aaron said about adopting, letting one of his father’s brother’s sons give them a child – Naomi’s next perhaps – could change the emptying-out that had befallen her. She knew, he didn’t have to tell her, that when one sibling has no children, and another has too many, the children can move, still in the family with their many mothers. Fine, if that’s your culture, but if she was to have a child, something of it must come from her. And she had no sibling.

So she took off the new dress and went to the reception in the old crocheted one she’d worn at the exhibition in Amsterdam and when she married Aaron. She clipped back her hair and wore no make-up. Even Laedi had a trace of lipstick for the occasion. Martha put on her dress and let Pete zip it up, with a long kiss to her neck that had him taking it off again. When they arrived at the reception, she felt as good as she had for some time. Until Rika saw her, and her face froze. They were at the entrance to the reception, near the door, with people all around. The evening air was soft, and so was Rika’s voice. Soft, and fierce. ‘How could you,’ she said. ‘How could you wear it?’ Then she turned and walked past the tubs of orchids, in through the door. Rika might as well have stabbed her with a knife for the effect it had. After all she’d done. Pete, the only person who’d seen the exchange, said maybe it was all Martha had done that was the problem – she’d seen too much, come in too close. She was a reminder, he said, of things Rika wanted to forget.