‘You know,’ Martha says, ‘I hadn’t thought of this until right now, but do you think that Rika’s still bound to him? That their spirits are still trapped in each other? That’s why she won’t talk?’

‘What a thought,’ Jericho says, though it’s not what he thinks. Laedi says Martha is a romantic, always has been. It may be illogical after all these years of pining for Bili, but he doesn’t believe spirits get trapped in each other, or that true love takes only one form.

He is feeling something altogether different, and it’s a radical shift of sensation. He’s always assumed it’s narration he needs: interpretation, explanation. And yet, as Martha gives it to him, he knows from the tone of her voice when she keeps a detail to herself, and he finds to his surprise that it does not matter. What she gives him reminds him of something he should have known all along, and did: it is form, and contour, the shape things make in space, the absences that are left between them that matter. Not the detail. Or even the narrating voice. Not only. If he had been able to see what Rika had shown him – it’s all there in the photos – maybe he could have spared Martha the hard work of remembering. She is tired. He can see the effort that will be required to climb the hill. He takes her arm.

When they stop to regain their breath at the bend, they hear the plane with Leonard and Laedi on board circling out over the reef before coming in to land.

‘Don’t hurry,’ Jericho says. ‘It’ll take them ages to get through the welcome that’s planned.’

So Martha takes the chance while still alone with Jericho, and edges up to the question she’s been wanting to ask.

‘You and Bili are looking good,’ she says. ‘Happy, even.’

Jericho grins. ‘Did you know that Louise Bourgeois said that in marrying Robert Goldwater she married her mother?’

‘Is that what you’re doing with Bili?’

‘I haven’t proposed, if that’s what you mean. I’m moving carefully, but I think she’s coming round to the idea that we can live in two places.’

Martha is surprised. ‘You mean she’d leave here?’

‘Not for long, she wouldn’t. It’s her ground, this place, and it’s what makes her solid, like the earth, all the way through. That must be mother-longing, mustn’t it? Loving that in her enough to contemplating living some of the time here?’

‘Do you remember Janape?’ Martha asks, still with her arm in his.

‘All I remember,’ he says, ‘is a kind of deep, rooted-down, absolute feeling.’

‘Does she have a face?’

‘Only in photos, and they are Rika’s, not mine. For me, Janape is a sensation, something I once knew and can no longer describe.’

Right then, there on the path, it is enough, complete in itself, an internal space made ready for the future.

EPILOGUE

LUNCH WITH JACOB, 2006

IN MORESBY, MARTHA HAS LUNCH WITH JACOB. SHE HAS THREE DAYS in town, that’s all, and on the second she rings. She is answered by a secretarial voice, polite and guarded. She gives her name.