‘Ah.’ For the first time over lunch, Jacob’s face is serious. ‘Rika will be pleased. It’s one thing she needs to know.’

‘I hope she knows I’ve not said anything. Not to anyone.’

‘Yes, she realises. But it doesn’t make the betrayal less.’

‘Betrayal? How was it a betrayal?’ Was being there betrayal? Seeing, what? Her vulnerability? Her derangement? The episode with Jacob?

‘Everything was a betrayal.’ Jacob opens his hands in a gesture of query. ‘How does one know anyone’s mind? Especially a western mind. I put a lot of it down to growing up at the end of the war and her mother dying. Rika sees things in terms of betrayal.’

‘Not Aaron?’

‘Yes. Him too.’

‘But they were so close. So bound together.’

Jacob makes an equivocal gesture with his head. ‘In the end he couldn’t give her what she wanted.’

‘Nor she him,’ Martha says, and then, ‘Do any of us?’

‘Depends how much we ask for.’

‘What does she ask of you?’

‘Not much. A bridge, that’s all.’

A bridge? What sort of bridge? To the past, Martha supposes, and in her mind she sees a Japanese bridge over a pond. She transforms it into a bush bridge over a Highland river, and it morphs into a bridge over the lily pond in Monet’s garden. She laughs. She’s glad she’s had this lunch, glad to see Jacob. Glad for her own bridge: that’s what it’s been, this return. A bridge, not a reckoning.

‘Do you think she’ll come back? For Naomi?’

‘She might for Jericho.’

‘And for you?’

Jacob laughs his cultivated laugh, and his heavy lids slide down, veiling his eyes as he pays the bill.

‘It’s been good to see you, Martha,’ he says, as they stand up to go. ‘Very good.’

‘Will you look out for Jericho?’ she asks, taking his arm.

‘For you, Martha, yes. I will if I can. But you know, it’s an unpredictable place here. No one controls it. Not all of it.’

‘I love him,’ Martha says.

‘I know. Rika does too.’

‘So you’ll look after him for her?’

‘For both of you. If I can.’

As they leave the terrace to go down in the lift to where Jacob’s car is waiting, they stand for a moment and look out over the airstrip. The mountains have disappeared. All there is to see is a row of round, green hills, and below them on the tarmac the plane for Australia taxiing out for take-off.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Mountain is a novel. It is not a work of history, ethnography or anthropology. However, in writing about a place as rich and complex as Papua New Guinea, I have drawn on the work of historians, linguists and anthropologists, in an attempt to situate the fictional characters and events in a world that shares salient features of history and experience with a real place and real groups of people. In so far as I have achieved this, it is due to wide reading and consultation, and to the generosity of many people, both in Papua New Guinea and in Australia. What I have made of it all, remains, of course, the view of a white outsider, and misreadings are entirely my own.