‘I said it was a record, not an argument that I was making.’

‘And what did he say when you said that?’

‘He shouted at me. Crap! That’s the language he used, and the small boys would hear and go running back to the houses shouting, “Crap! Crap!” Boja would shout at them. Wouldn’t you, Boja?’

‘No good,’ Boja said. ‘The small boys, they go crazy, calling out.’ He shook his head and drew on the tobacco. Leonard watched him, bleak and pale behind his glasses. Rika steadied her breath, stretched her arms above her head. Boja looked at her, looked at Leonard, and, having learned the English salve of tea, rose to his feet and said he’d ask the women to cook the water. Rika watched him hurry away under his black palm leaf, climb the steps to the small cookhouse, where smoke from the roof was vying with the rain. She’d rather be there, where the women were, learning names for the faces she’d seen at the river.

When two young women came from the cookhouse with a kettle, she climbed down the steps onto the grass. Her bare, bruised feet sank gratefully into the wet ground. Cold, but soothing. Mist hung in the valley and moisture dripped from every roof and tree. Two men were crossing the open space of the dance ground with a python looped between them on a pole. The rain was letting up.

‘Josephine?’ The name swum up from a watery memory; the girl with the kettle was the girl with shampoo at the river. She was young and pretty, with pert breasts high on her chest. She smiled and seemed to blush.

Behind her, another woman was carrying several tin mugs. She was less young, maybe the same age as Rika. Her face was restful, and there was something about her that struck Rika as remarkable, but before she could see what it was, Boja was tugging at her arm. ‘The chiefs are coming,’ he said, gesturing towards the house, where Leonard was calling to her from the steps. Two old men were picking their way through the sodden grass, and coming to join them from another path was a woman chief with a headdress of white feathers.

By the time Rika turned back to the woman, Boja had taken the cups from her and she was returning to the cookhouse. There was a slight sway to this woman’s hips, her back was held straight and tall. The walk of a model, Rika thought, and an image from the 1920s superimposed itself, from the camera of Edward Steichen perhaps. No. The picture was wrong, not because of her limp skirt, but because she walked without self-consciousness. The greatest photographers were pressed to find that in a model.

‘My sister Janape,’ Boja said as the woman climbed the steps into the smoky interior of the cookhouse. So she was the woman Tobias had talked of.

‘I have medicines for her,’ she said. ‘From Tobias.’