When Wana arrives for dinner they sit at the large table, just the three of them at one end, and talk of New York, where Wana was ambassador to the United Nations for many years. At first she’d seen Rika whenever she came over from Oxford, but the past was so hedged about that they went to films and exhibitions to avoid it. Later, when Rika moved to New York, they spoke mostly of politics. This evening, it is politics again, and when Martha raises the past, Laedi and Wana slide off it, not because they are avoiding it, but because for them it is long gone. Although they ask Martha how she is managing without Pete, and are interested in the few small books she’s written, including the one about the colonial traveller who lived in a house not unlike Laedi’s, for them the present is more powerful, and they are back to the shifting alliances and deals that make up the politics of the fracturing parties, which are doing what they can with the parliamentary system imposed on them.

Martha does not feel offended or neglected. She had great affection for these two women she knew as girls. We become more ourselves as we grow older, she thinks, watching them: brisk, pragmatic Laedi and studious Wana, who’s lost her hourglass figure. She wants to ask her how it was when Sam took a job in Melbourne, where he now has a family of boys. She wants to know how it felt to be the post-modern, post-colonial woman who flew between New York and Port Moresby. She doesn’t ask, any more than they ask how it is for her, a widow with no child.

When the talk returns to Rika and her many successes, Martha admits to the mix of fascination and envy that she feels when she looks at Rika’s portraits of Louise Bourgeois and Lee Krasner. Her Artists Series. ‘What a life Rika stepped into,’ she says. ‘I have to Google her to keep up.’

‘She’s not happy,’ Wana says.

‘Happy!’ Laedi says. ‘That’s not the important thing.’

She doesn’t say what the important thing is. The woman who works in the kitchen comes in with a pot of tea and a platter of fruit.

‘Thank you, Kara,’ Laedi says. She doesn’t drink coffee at night. Nor does Wana. They have to be up early. For their work which, Martha supposes, is the important thing.

Martha sleeps in Jericho’s room. She doesn’t snoop exactly, but she touches the clothes, looks to see which books he has, resists the notebooks with his handwriting, the small pile of letters from Bili. On the table he uses as a desk, there’s a letter, face up, from the director of his gallery in London, attached to a pile of papers, brought by Leonard, she supposes. The director welcomes the idea of an exhibition, if the work is indeed as Jericho describes.

That night, her first in Papua New Guinea for thirty years, Martha barely sleeps, propelled back to those terrible weeks after Aaron’s death when Rika clung to Jericho, and he had to be rescued from her grip. Jericho, Rika would weep, at least there is Jericho. Aaron’s gift to her. Martha went to see her in the hospital, and when the nurse let her through the door, Rika had said, ‘Why are you here? Always nosing about. Can’t you leave me alone?’ They never really spoke after that. Not properly. Martha sat beside her in the ward, but Rika would turn from her, and Laedi said it was better if she didn’t go. Rika didn’t say much when Laedi was there, and Laedi didn’t pass on what she did say. But it was clear that if Rika couldn’t stay, she wasn’t letting Jericho stay – as if he was hers to keep, or let go. When Leonard arrived from England, the doctors allowed him to bring Jericho for a visit. After that she spoke to Leonard, until at last he persuaded them to discharge her.