As a visitor to the department and a speaker at the conference, Leonard commanded a certain respect, and Don made sure he gave it. But it came with an edge; over the weeks he queried more and more the efficacy, even the legitimacy, of ethnographic film. Wasn’t there something retrograde about capturing tribal cultures on film and showing them stilled in time, as if they existed outside the dynamic of change? Of decolonisation? Times were changing, didn’t he know, and the questions were changing with them. Then, in a manoeuvre that was typical of Don, having raised the doubt, he neatly came up with a solution to a problem Leonard hadn’t thought existed. He should accompany Leonard to the mountain and observe the filming as part of his own research into the impact of modernity on a tribal culture. It was the last thing Leonard wanted. Alex was already going with him, and that was enough. He didn’t want the quiet eye of the filming disturbed. And he feared that if Don came to the mountain, Rika wouldn’t.

Rika didn’t like Don. She didn’t like the way he rolled his eyes when Leonard used words that he considered affected. When Leonard called their wives ladies, he said, ‘Well, you got that right. Laedi was meant to be a lady, and look at her now.’ Laedi had blushed and looked down. Rika especially didn’t like the way Laedi became quiet and subdued in his presence.

No, she wouldn’t go to the mountain if Don was to be there.

Gina was at Alex’s dinner the night the matter was decided. She was sitting a few places away from him, and nothing about her suggested an affair. She seemed more interested in the conversation between Leonard, who was seated beside her, and the visiting historian seated opposite, next to Rika. They were talking about F. E. Williams, the nuggetty Australian who’d been the government anthropologist for Papua between the wars, and the photographer of the bride adorned with shells. Leonard was giving a paper at the conference on his work with the low-land neighbours of the mountain people, which was as close to the mountain as anthropology had come by 1968. The historian was interested in him for his influence with the governor of the time, the brake he exerted on planters who wanted more labour, and missionaries who wanted to ban more tribal custom. Several times in the course of their conversation Leonard used the word sensible.

‘Sensible,’ Don said. ‘Whose idea of sensible are we talking about?’

Leonard said something soothing, deflecting.

‘Do you think polygamy is sensible?’ Don persisted, and Alex gaffawed. ‘No? Well, a headhunter might if he needed to produce sons fast.’

‘In that case,’ Leonard said, ‘one would talk, surely, about the integrity of the culture. Consider it on those terms.’

Rika looked straight at Don. ‘Williams’ photographs,’ she said. ‘Have you seen them?’

‘Some,’ he said. ‘They’re ethnographically insignificant, most of them.’

‘Some of them are marvellous.’