Rika sat down. Her hands were shaking, a tremble running though her.

‘They got rid of the White Woman’s Protection Ordinance,’ Gina said.

Rika hadn’t heard of it.

‘I’ll look it out for you. It was to protect white women from black men. You know, looking at them in the shower, that sort of thing. Black peril, they called it.’

‘Did they look at them in the shower?’

‘Probably not. There were stories and some incidents. Occasionally they were nasty, but most of it was fantasy and paranoia. Some people blamed it on white women wandering round the house, or out on the veranda, in a towel. It was a huge issue before the war.’

‘When did it end?’

‘1958.’

‘Only ten years ago.’

Laedi said there was something hardwired into the hearts of white-skinned men that refused the claim, any claim, however slight, that a man who is black may make on a woman who is white. All that year there were letters in the South Pacific Post; they’d come in an ugly run, then stop, only to start again, provoked by changes that were a daily challenge to that hardwiring. Papuan men were returning from study in Australia, and some of them arrived home with fair young wives. Hapkas babies were pushed in prams by mothers with flowing hair and no shame. It was not an uncommon sight to see white girls drinking with black students in bars and beer gardens. Tessa wasn’t the only one enjoying a holiday from Melbourne. In the paper were cartoons of black devil figures having their way with voluptuous white maidens. Talk of ‘hotbeds of sin’ and ‘coffee-coloured babies’.

Out at the university, those who saw themselves as moving with the tide of history, not victim to it, grimaced at what they took to be the last shudder of a retrograde world. White staff members joined students in beer gardens and saloon bars to make the point that a change in law meant a change in practice, and when the South Pacific Post warned its readers to ‘Beware the Congo’, they laughed. In their minds, with independence coming so late to Papua New Guinea, they would learn from the mistakes of Africa. There’d be no carnage here; on the contrary. Instead of reading the South Pacific Post, people in town should read the student newspaper. Read Eremiah on the true equality of man, which will come only when each looks at the other as if he looks at himself, no matter what his tribe, or his race.

Two days after Alex Penrose returned from the mountain, he was standing in the door of the room where Rika worked. ‘How do you like the bark-cloth?’ he asked. His paunch had vanished and his face was thin. There was a sore on his ankle.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Rika said. Against a background of muted yellows and reds, delicate black shapes crossed the cloth as if a form of calligraphy.