At night the sly car continued to keep watch on a house where there was nothing to see. Another was parked outside Aaron’s dormitory.

A day passed. And then, late one evening, Rika was on Martha’s veranda.

‘Are you alone?’ she asked, tapping quietly at the flyscreen. Pete was over at Sam’s playing music with Milton and some students from the drama group.

Martha was at the table writing an essay, the first of the new semester. Heart of Darkness – another book that was hard to talk about. No one in the class liked the way the Africans came across as backward and credulous, but Martha was the one who made the mistake of assuming theirs to be the darkness Conrad, or Marlow, meant. They had a different lecturer that semester, a brilliant man, everyone said, but to her he was alarming. He’d been in Africa and wasn’t interested in teaching Australian girls. Was it the darkness of Africa Marlow found? he asked in response to her blunder. Or was it the darkness of colonialism, the darkness that the whites bring with them, that Kurtz has cast around him? Whose hearts are dark?

‘I think I’ve done a terrible thing,’ Rika said. She was sitting across the table, leaning on one elbow, her head in her hand.

‘It’s not terrible. Don’t let them make you think it’s terrible.’

‘It’s not what they think. It’s what I think.’

She looked worn. Tired. There was a pimple on her chin and Martha wasn’t yet used to her hair. She’d had it tidied up in town, but it remained lopsided.

‘Oh, Martha,’ she said. ‘What shall I do?’ Tears pooled in her eyes.

It wasn’t Aaron she spoke of that evening, it was Leonard. She spoke of his goodness, his steadfastness, his generosity. She spoke of the house where he grew up on the side of a Welsh valley, and his elderly parents, and the household of dogs and no television. It was hard to imagine a child running free there, she said, and yet he had, in what he called ‘the most blessed of childhoods’. ‘It didn’t make him strong,’ she said. ‘That’s the strangeness of it.’ She was quiet for a while. Pensive. ‘At night I wake to someone crying, but I don’t know if it’s him on the mountain, calling for me, or if it’s me, or a dream. Or an animal outside.’ She looked at Martha as if she was about to announce her own death. ‘I must go to the mountain,’ she said. ‘Make him understand. Tell him. I must be the first to tell him.’ Before rumours and letters could reach him. ‘Will you ask Aaron to come and see me? Please?’

‘Of course.’

Early the next morning, Martha drove past the building site, where the new library was taking shape, to the offices which, with the dormitories, were all that were in use. She parked in the dust and already the sun was hot as she walked across to find Aaron. There were no telephones in their houses – every message had to be delivered in person. His office door was open, his desk was neat, but he was not there. Martha was writing him a note when Sam, whose office was opposite, arrived. ‘Rika wants to see Aaron,’ she said.