‘Do you want to swim?’ Laedi asked, and it wasn’t until Bili was tugging at Rika’s hair that she was back in the present. It was well into the afternoon and she was hungry.

‘We can stop at the bakery,’ Martha said.

‘First look at these,’ Rika said, holding out the photographs as if they were treasures lifted from the sea.

Wana, her hair tied up in a strip of bright cloth, put on a pair of library gloves, turned over the images, read the dates. Whistled.

‘We must tell Aaron,’ Rika said.

‘I already have,’ Gina said.

Rika cleared more space at the table. She was used to Sam being there, and Aaron, like him, was teaching on the Melanesian history course. He, too, would need to read documents and letters in Gina’s care. Until the library on campus was finished, there was nowhere else for them to work. With few published histories – most that there were belonged to an earlier age, not much use for students who’d go from their tutorial rooms to create a new nation – it meant writing lectures, many of them from scratch.

When Gina apologised for the cramped conditions, Aaron said he wouldn’t mind the squash, or the smallness of the room, or people coming and going outside the door. It was better than the chilly reading rooms of libraries and museums in Europe, where he’d felt invisible; even when he insisted, no, he didn’t come from India, or Africa, but New Guinea, still people thought he meant West Africa, or some part of India, or Indonesia, a spice island maybe. Somewhere comprehensible. It took the paradox of the surrealists’ love of a land they could imagine as not real to get anyone interested in a place that, to him, of course, was intensely real. Talk of the surrealists’ amour fou, more lasting than the love of any woman, and people reached for the atlas!

In the tearoom overlooking the cars in the yard at the back of the building, Sam laughed and Gina made more coffee, but Rika was thinking that if no one had any idea of a real place, after a while it’d vanish into some strange memory zone. When that happened to her, not places but events, it was a kind of relief. Gone. She liked the feeling, and there were times when she encouraged it. But what if it was everything, the entire world you came from. It took a stretch for Rika to imagine that – Europe was mapped. No one didn’t know Europe.

‘When you were in Europe,’ she asked Aaron one day when he was there alone, working beside her at the table. ‘Did you go to the Netherlands?’

‘Yes,’ he said, looking up. A slight smile.

‘To Leiden?’

He nodded. ‘Your home town.’

‘You knew?’

The smile widened. ‘Jacob told me. But I’d have known from the way you asked.’

‘My father’s a curator at the Museum of Ethnology.’

Aaron knew that too. His smile was rather like Jacob’s, without the edgy watchfulness. ‘Some of the earliest plumes taken from Dutch New Guinea are there,’ he said.