‘What shall I tell him it’s in relation to?’

Martha is tempted to say the past. ‘A personal call,’ she says.

‘Just a minute, please.’

A click, then music comes on the line. A Pacific string band. Then Jacob’s voice.

‘Martha. What a charming surprise.’

Martha doubts that it’s a surprise.

When it comes to lunch – on the top floor of the hotel that looks over the airstrip to the mountains – it’s clear he knows she’d been at the memorial for Aaron. If he is offended not to have been asked, he doesn’t show it. How evenly he speaks. It’s hard to get away, he says, as if that were explanation enough.

Everything about him is suave. His hair is greying at the temples. His shirt is expensive, his tie subdued. He’s grown a little plump, but he has the gait of a younger man. His eyes seem less hooded, less veiled.

‘So how was it?’ he asks.

‘Good,’ she says. ‘Jericho spoke. He’s another orator. He talked about Aaron as one father and Leonard as the other and how Rika had loved the fjords, and the part Aaron played in bringing independence, and now this new generation and another one coming, more children at school, we are one again. One of Naomi’s daughters spoke and said it was her mother’s wish to see Rika at the fjords before she died. Ask her to come, she said. Aya Rika. Everyone cried and you’d never have known any of it happened.’

Jacob laughs. ‘We’re a tactful people.’

‘Sometimes,’ Martha says. ‘I met Lance. His string band played. Handsome boy.’ She watches Jacob’s face, which remains as smooth as an actor’s.

The waiters are attentive. While Jacob chooses the wine, she looks out at the view across to the mountains, which have not yet disappeared behind cloud. The sky is hazy, their outline indistinct, a high barrier the colour of a bruise.

‘So,’ Jacob says. ‘Tell me how you are. I was sad, very sad, to hear of Pete’s death. A good man.’

‘He was.’ Her answer is bright, disingenuous. This isn’t what she wants to discuss, and she’s beginning to think it was a mistake coming here to meet Jacob, this charming stranger who might be entertaining a client. As he talks, of his business, and his other children – two boys who are doing well, two girls who are married already - the young Jacob who has lived in her memory all these years evaporates, and Martha is sad, a little cross, and maybe that is what makes her ask about Rika, even though she knows he can’t see her, or Wana, surely, would have said.

‘Do you ever hear from Rika?’ Martha asks.

‘Yes,’ Jacob says. ‘Quite often.’

‘You do? Do you see her?’

‘When I’m in Europe or New York. Yes. Always.’ He laughs at the surprise on her face. ‘Why the surprise? You saw us that day.’

‘But …’

‘You thought it was a one-off? The black man taking advantage of the distressed white woman.’