Under the tree outside the councillor’s house, the heat is building up like the clouds that billow on the horizon. They are soft and round, like clusters of breasts. They could be a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois. Rika photographed her when Jericho was a child. It kept her away. He’d hoped that a memorial for Aaron might bring her back. He’d hoped that if Leonard came, she might too. To see her here at the fjords, that was his wish; to hear her tell what happened the day Aaron drowned. Maybe then he could lay the past to rest.

Leonard has given him the outline, but when he asks for more, he says it’s Rika’s story to tell, not his, and anyway he wasn’t there. Aaron had a heart attack in the water, and afterwards there was a disturbance. A cross-cultural misunderstanding. That may have been the case, but it doesn’t explain an enmity of decades between friends from the same culture, friends who’d once been as close as sisters. He looks at Martha. She was there that day, with Rika, she saw it all.

What he wants is a narrative, and clarity of detail. Rika keeps the archive, as she calls it; she’s never barred him from that. Look at the photographs. They’ll tell you. When he was at university, reading Proust, he’d told her that on their own photographs were like raw incidents from life, memory without thought. Like negatives, that’s what Proust said, they needed to be held to the light, ‘developed’ by the intellect. By Rika’s narrating voice.

‘If you’re reading Proust,’ Rika had said, ‘you should know something about the errors of the senses.’

Back in the present, Jericho has lost all track of what’s going on around him at the table. Milton is laughing. Laughing! His shoulders are going up and down with the surprise of it. He has his hand on Martha’s shoulder, and she’s laughing too. It’s hard to imagine the two of them young, though he’s seen them often enough in photos. They were so thin, and their hair so long. Milton’s grew out in a wide halo that caught the light. Martha’s was rather stringy. Now it’s cut short, like Rika’s. The brown has faded to a silvery gold. With the help of a hairdresser, he supposes. Milton’s is cropped short, greying. Their faces are creased with lines that seem at that moment to be all smiles. They have turned to look along the path, and when Jericho follows their gaze, there is Wilkie coming towards them. He has one of his sons with him, and Martha is on her feet, calling out, shaking the boy’s hand, saying he looks just as Wilkie did when he was at school in Hohola. The boy has a ukulele with him and is looking across to a stand of trees where a string band is setting up to practise. Wilkie gestures across to the boys, calling them to come and meet the visitors.