The strangeness of seeing him after all that had happened had the unexpected effect of reversing the distance Rika had become used to. Here was Leonard, immediate and present. Port Moresby had retreated beyond the cloud, its dusty streets barely imaginable. She knew she should speak at once and not let this familiarity spill over and silence her, but even as she came to sit beside him already he was talking of Don, the bruising details of that conflict obliterating everything she needed to say as effectively as the rain had removed all sight of the village.

‘I know how little anthropologists get right.’ Leonard’s voice was aggrieved. ‘Better than Don, I know. All I claim is that it’s a valid task, a way of safeguarding something, preserving it against the onslaught of change. Don can’t accept that. To him it doesn’t matter that a film can observe small cultural details. He won’t accept that my work isn’t political. It’s quite different. It’s a move towards understanding something human and complex.’

‘Like a dance,’ Rika offered, ‘that goes from one generation to the next. The feet change and the steps continue.’

‘Yes,’ Leonard said, taking her hands in his. ‘You always have the right image. How excellent that you’ve come. I knew you would. You’re so good, giving up the library. When we get back to Oxford, we must find another job that you’ll enjoy.’

She stood up, walked to the top of the steps from the platform, her heart thumping. The rain was easing, smoke was coming from the cookhouse door and she could see people inside. How could she tell him now?

‘I wish you’d warned me, though,’ Leonard was saying. ‘I’d have come down to meet the plane.’

‘I wanted to surprise you.’

‘And no surprise could be better.’

Boja came in, tutting at the rain, a black palm leaf held over his head as an umbrella. ‘Kago,’ he said. ‘We open the kago.’

Rika was grateful for his presence as he opened the boxes carried up by Obi and the boys, retrieving tins of fish, packets of sugar, tea, rice, nails, laundry soap. Newspapers.

‘Good man,’ Leonard said. ‘I’m telling Rika about the trouble with Don.’

‘Full of humbug,’ Boja said, tearing a strip from along the edge of a newspaper, rolling tobacco from the packet he’d extracted from the depth of a box. ‘Tauba humbug.’ He handed the tobacco to Leonard, who filled another pipe.

‘If Don couldn’t accept what I was doing,’ he said, ‘he should have kept away from the filming.’

‘But wasn’t the camera what he wanted? I thought that was the point.’

‘If I had a penny for each time Don told me the camera isn’t an innocent eye!’ Leonard took a long draw on the pipe. ‘He took me for a fool. I know the arguments. But the fact remains, a camera can be disinterested. It depends how it’s used.’

‘Did you say that?’ There was an edge to Rika’s voice. A kick of irritation. Did Leonard really believe the camera was disinterested? She knew there was no scene, no situation, no moment, no detail that couldn’t be reinterpreted. Hadn’t he taught her that himself? ‘Did you say that it was disinterested?’