It is late in the afternoon when Milton returns to the wide veranda where Martha is reading under the fan. He has the head teacher with him, a fjord man who’s come back to teach at the middle-grade school after many years at a senior high school in Moresby. Milton orders him a beer and raises his eyebrows at the resort’s prices. They sit with Martha in the wide wicker chairs, reminiscing about their careers. Milton tells a story of a student of average ability who became rich and sent his son, also of average ability, to Martyrs, where Milton had him for Literature. He was a lazy boy who never read the text and copied the essays of other students. He was no better in other classes, and one day Milton took him for a walk along the road, spoke to him about the riches of literature and the possibilities of life ahead. To no avail. When he failed the year, his politician father arrived at the school waving a fistful of notes, demanding that the boy’s teachers, including Milton, give a distinction to his lazy bully of a son, who boasted that he need do nothing, for his future didn’t depend on grades. Milton asked the father if he remembered Another Country. The father didn’t. Everything he’d learned in Literature had been a waste of time, no use to anyone. Literature doesn’t make money. Look at you, he said to Milton, and Milton nodded. Yes, it was true, but unlike Rufus Scott he, Milton, was alive, when he could as easily be dead, burned on the anger and arrogance of youth. Taking advantage of the politician’s faulty memory and bad reading, Milton drew a moral tale of boys who burn up in insolence and end up dead. When the boy returned the next year to repeat the grade he failed, Milton put his chastened behaviour down to the power of literature rather than the refusal of the headmaster to make a deal, or even the beating he suffered at the hand of his father.

Milton has lost none of his power with words and, listening to this story, Martha relaxes. The past recedes as she returns to ‘the face of the day’. That’s what Malinowski recommended when the frustrations of fieldwork got to him. It was a phrase Pete used, a way of getting through bad days anywhere, through interruptions and demands, disrupted plans. ‘Trust the face of the day,’ he’d say, which was not much help on the day he died. The broken face of her life was how it felt.

That evening, Martha and Milton have a bottle of red wine, on her account, which she can’t afford. Neither can he. She makes the white gesture and feels herself in a false role. The awkwardness between them returns, and with it a dismaying familiarity, as if they know its contours and origins, which she supposes, though she’s reluctant to admit it even to herself, must have to do with the colonial mind they grew up to, a residue that stays with them even as they lay it aside. Or maybe it’s just personality. They both live too much in their heads. Milton says often enough that he prefers the company of fictional characters, and Martha says she’s rarely happier than with a book, though it’s not entirely true. Or even true at all. Which is why that long-ago time with Rika and Laedi changed her mind as well as her heart, and why those years in Hohola live on in her, despite everything, as more than memory.