‘The women chiefs sent it especially, as a gift to Leonard’s wife,’ Alex said.

‘Yes,’ she said. There was an accompanying letter from Leonard. ‘He told me what the markings mean, the pattern of the vine that used to be tattooed onto the women’s faces when they became artists.’

‘Not quite,’ Alex said. ‘More to do with initiation into clan mythology.’

‘Into the ways of the bark-cloth, no?’

‘When you go up there,’ he said, ‘you’ll be able to ask them yourself.’

She said nothing.

‘Have you thought when you’re going?’

‘No,’ she said, looking him straight in the eye. ‘There’s a lot of work to be done here.’

‘Your husband could do with a visit,’ Alex said. ‘It’s been hard for him with Don.’

She wished she’d had the wit to say it was a pity then, that Alex had taken Don up in the first place. The unfairness of it, that she was made to feel guilty about a situation entirely of Alex Penrose’s making.

Don came back with several bark-cloths. They, too, were beautiful, but they weren’t given to him as a gift to his wife. He complained that he’d had to buy his, as if, somehow, it was Leonard’s doing. With an air of incivility, he went to the library on Aaron’s return from the fjords, sat at the table where he and Rika were working, leaned back in the chair and looked from one to the other. He quizzed Aaron on the lectures he was writing, as if to suggest that whatever he was doing there was an excuse, a paltry cover. Looking straight at Rika, he told Aaron and Sam, who was also working at the table that morning, how little a camera could do, what an outmoded form it was when it came to anthropology and the representation of culture.

That evening he went out of his way to drive past Rika’s house, and saw Aaron on the veranda.

‘What do they think they’re doing?’ he said to Laedi when he returned home. ‘It’s brazen.’

‘Sam and Wana were there,’ she answered. ‘And Martha.’

‘Don’t quibble.’

His bad mood went on and on.

Aaron and Rika were exposed in a glare of light harsher than the sun over their heads. On the morning Aaron returned from the fjord coast, leaving Jacob there for the last week of the vacation, he’d gone straight to the library. It was on the way, between the airport and the dormitory where he lived. Typewriters stopped and every person in the office looked up from their desks. Rika had barely had time to ask how it’d been, going home after so long away, before one person after another found reason to visit the table where they sat, though they talked of nothing more compromising than the character of an Anglican priest whose photographs showed him more interested in orchids than souls.

Gina kept her door closed.

The next day, when Rika was at the beach with Laedi and Martha, Aaron joined them there, as he had many times before on his way back from town. And she, as she had before, went to meet him as he came through the trees. But the light seemed brighter, their every move magnified as they walked down to the water and swam out towards the reef. Martha was with them, not that it made any difference. Sea birds cruised overhead, as they always did, and outside the reef canoes slid past on their way home to Mela’s village. An ordinary afternoon, the water calm with a shimmer of haze over the reef, but on that day even the children stopped to watch, and their mothers stood in groups, turning their heads and whispering.