‘It wasn’t only old people. If you mean what happened that night. When they turned against Rika. What does Leonard say about that?’

‘Not much. There was a disturbance, and the kiap came for us. Not much more than that. Anthropological stuff about how easily cultures can misunderstand each other. Examples, but nothing specific when it comes to Rika. And she’s so closed down on it, I can’t ask her.’

‘Have you tried?’

‘I did, a few years ago. She became angry, then silent and reproachful. The whole thing was so awful I haven’t gone near it since.’ He sighs, a long exhale of breath held in. He wants a narrative to dress the wound. It’s what he’s always wanted, and here he is, with Martha beside him on the wharf. ‘Will you tell me?’ he asks, though in another part of his mind he is struck by the beauty of the sky, its immediacy, its light, yellow over the mountains to the west.

‘I can try,’ she says. ‘But you know how it is. With something like this, you have to make sense of it, and over the years you think of it differently. I mean, you give different meanings to it. And then things shift a bit. Anyway, the night was confused.’

From Martha’s face Jericho has an inkling of how it must have been for Rika. How very bad.

‘Jacob went over to Noah’s,’ Martha says. ‘He left us in the guesthouse. It was dark. We didn’t have a lamp until he returned. Rika was lying on the floor, completely still. We heard the women from the high village arrive. Their cries echoed over the fjord and joined the wailing that got louder and louder, more and more awful, with each next arrival. The news spread fast. Voices were calling out in the dark, and young men were banging saucepans to drive out the angry spirits that are drawn to a death.’

Oh unhappiness! He has left us poor and alone! Oh unhappiness! The calling cries that came to her in dreams for years, and woke her up. Ai! Ai!

‘From the door, I could see movement on Noah’s platform, shadows moving in the lamplight, and the crowd gathering outside. When Jacob came over with a small hurricane lamp for us, I sat outside on the steps with him. And, yes, he said, emotion was running high; and, yes, they did think it was due to Rika, this death. Or if not to her, as her, then to the order that was broken because of her. No one saw a snake on the reef. Jacob had looked at the body and there was no puncture wound. They didn’t accept his suggestion of a heart attack or a stroke. He told them that it happened in Moresby sometimes, to men working in the government, hard work, some of them die suddenly, just like Aaron. He had names to give them, but, no, it was due to the broken order, to the bad spirits that had declared themselves in the strange, improbable story of Rika’s infertility. They knew it from the tear that dropped from Aaron’s dead eye when they spoke her name. Kaé.