They were questions that vanished from her mind when a girl scarcely older than sixteen arrived on the veranda and announced herself as Mela, Rika’s haus gel. It was the Monday after the welcome party. Leonard had gone to the university, and she was alone in the house. ‘Haus gel,’ the girl said again. What did she mean? Where had she come from? The questions showed on Rika’s face and were mirrored back to her by the sweet-faced girl in a clean dress.

‘Agnes,’ she said. ‘My small mother. She send me. You tell her.’

Agnes. Yes, Rika remembered. A tall woman, stately, with hair growing high from her head, a flowered apron. She’d been at the party carrying trays of food. Rika had said she didn’t think she needed help in the house, it was too new, and Agnes had said again that she had a niece, the daughter of her sister, a good girl, she would work hard. She’d let the statement stand for agreement, a way of speaking Rika didn’t yet understand and which left her unprepared for this encounter at the door. Her attempt to explain that the idea of a house girl was against her expectations and upbringing was met with a steady, disbelieving gaze. Her offer for the girl to visit whenever she liked was brushed aside as the empty gesture it was. A demonstration of bare cupboards in a bare house that needed no cleaning sent the girl for reinforcements, leaving Rika with a faint and guilty hope that she’d given up and gone home.

Half an hour later Mela was back with Dolly, Martha’s house girl, who had come to her by the same route, with a note from Agnes. ‘This is Mela,’ the note read. ‘Your house girl. My sister’s child.’ Dolly had her two small boys with her, and they all trooped into the house and stood there looking stern and determined.

‘Where’s Martha?’ Rika asked.

‘She take the car,’ Dolly said. ‘She not there.’

Martha had gone to a lecture over at the university, where she was enrolled as a student. So Rika made the only move she could and took Mela, Dolly and the two boys to Laedi’s house.

Laedi and her husband, Don, a tutor in the anthropology department, lived further into the compound, where the houses had been occupied since before the last rains. Hibiscus hedges flowered, pawpaw trees leaned with fruit, vines trailed over veranda rails and water-sprinklers sprayed coarse grass. Mats were being shaken from doors and mops squeezed over steps. Dolly called across to some young women sitting in the shade watching white children in a rubber paddling pool, giving them the news that Mela had come to work for the new missis.

‘How many people have you got working for you?’ Rika asked Laedi when she saw the women in her house, the confusion of buckets and mops, the tea being brewed, and the large jugs of lemon squash.

Laedi didn’t know. She didn’t count. ‘Tamba always,’ she said. ‘She lives here. The rest come and go. They live in town and come here during the day when Don’s at work. They’re my mother’s people. Her language. Wantoks, we call them. Our friends. It’s a complicated sort of arrangement.