In Sydney, for that week after the hospital before Rika was well enough to fly back, Martha had looked after her, as tender as a sister. Gloria made soup and Martha carried it upstairs; she went out for fruit, bought books and magazines that Rika wouldn’t read. Gloria sat with her, day after day, and still Rika didn’t talk. When she did speak, it was to tell Martha to leave her alone. In the kitchen Gloria asked questions Martha couldn’t answer. And still she carried the tray up the stairs, saying nothing of the misery that had her pounding the streets at night. And after all that, after keeping her distance since their return, leaving Rika to talk to Laedi alone, now this stab about the dress. Was that fair?

‘Fair,’ Pete said. ‘Fair has nothing to do with it.’

At the reception, the Australian administrator, now recast as high commissioner, gave an affectionate speech, and so did Somare as chief minister. Everyone smiled and clapped and raised their glasses.

‘She’ll get over it,’ Pete said, handing Martha another glass, but champagne didn’t dull the ache. As she listened to the talk of friendship between nations, she thought only of Rika turning away. She felt shamed by her dress, with its hem too high and it circles suddenly garish. Abiding friendship. Somare was replying to the high commissioner. Easy words. Everyone knew of the bitterness that came back from Canberra, and the extra work when budgets were cut and timetables for independence imposed.

Even Jacob, looking urbane in his suit with a dark ochre cummerbund, raised his hand in a salute to the coming nation. ‘He’s drunk,’ Pete said, which, actually, he wasn’t. But he turned as if he knew they were watching, and again raised his glass. Martha watched as he went to Rika, leaning to speak into her ear. She shook her head, as if to say no to whatever it was he’d asked, but the movement was gentle; she turned to him, let her hand rest briefly on his arm, and Martha remembered her musing, months before, that maybe Jacob, maybe Jacob was the solution, he was a brother, a skin-brother; maybe Jacob could give her the child. ‘Don’t be daft,’ Laedi had said. ‘It doesn’t work that way, not when the first brother is alive,’ and they’d laughed. Especially Martha. And there they were, Jacob and Rika, almost intimate. Rika smiled, shook her head again, and he moved on, across the room, speaking to Derek, to Aaron, to the high commissioner.

‘Martha,’ Jacob said later in the evening when he came upon her by the open windows. ‘Enjoying yourself?’

‘Not really. Are you?’

‘Why not? On the road to independence and you’re not celebrating?’ He looked amused, and they stood together, watching the room from the cool of the night air.

‘I saw your car in Hohola last week,’ Martha said.

‘Yes. I came to see Rika. After her operation. That’s your way, isn’t it? To bring flowers. Entertain her.’