Would it have been better, Martha asks, if Jericho had stayed with Laedi; if she’d raised him with the girls? It’s not a question that makes much sense in the face of life as it has transpired. ‘An opportunity lost,’ Laedi says, her voice brisk. Having had Jericho in the house with her, abject with self-pity, pining for Bili, she sees him as untethered. ‘No ground,’ she says and her expression is so like Simbaikan that Martha laughs.

No ground. Was that it? Do any of us have ground, us transient ones? How could Rika give Jericho ground when she’d lost the ground she thought was hers? Laedi saw her in Oxford. She was good as a mother, but her mind wouldn’t stay with the daily grind of school projects and uniforms and cakes for the weekend; everything about her leaned towards the next escape, camera at the ready. Leonard was the consistent one. Isn’t he ground enough? Father ground, Laedi says. English ground. Papua is Jericho’s mother ground and how could Rika be that when she looked to him for ground a child could never give.

Martha keeps her thoughts to herself. She doesn’t say that when the end came, the question of her relationship with Jericho was never raised, and that now it presses on her. Hadn’t she been the third Hohola mother? She knows it’s a vanity to think of herself in those terms, no matter how many school runs she did, or baths she gave, no matter how her heart swelled with the pleasure of it. ‘We’ll have one of our own,’ Pete had comforted, as if one could be had in place of another. But his widowed mother was an invalid, and Pete her only child, and Martha was teaching at one of the new universities in Sydney. So they put it off ‘until there was time’, by which they meant until his mother died and Martha had tenure. By then she was not far from forty and a child was not to come.

‘How was Jericho when he got back from the mountain?’ she asks Laedi.

‘Oh, much better,’ Laedi says.

‘The art project? That’ll be grounding. A good fit with his life in London.’

‘That’s what Leonard says. He seems to think Jericho is in excellent form.’ Laedi laughs as she catches Leonard’s inflection. ‘It’s true, despite everything – and I can tell you there’s been a lot – he’s come through well. Though personally I think it has more to do with Bili taking up with him again.’

‘That’s so good,’ Martha says. Jericho had given a hint of it on the phone. He didn’t want to say much in case he spooked it.

‘It’s been inevitable for years,’ Laedi says. ‘And if they don’t get a move on, she’ll be too old for a child.’

‘I thought Bili didn’t want one.’ Martha remembers her, insistent from the age of sixteen that she wouldn’t have children.

‘She will with Jericho,’ Laedi says.