Leaving the wives to their offers of sewing bees and coffee mornings, she turned, and with Martha and Laedi behind her manoeuvred through the party out onto the veranda, where the air was cool.

A young Papuan in a green shirt was leaning against the railing, rolling a cigarette. He was a student, not much more than twenty, with large, slightly hooded eyes and shorts that hung as if too large for him. He’d positioned himself where he could hear the professors and the politician. Leaning there, looking back into the room, he’d noticed the ripple Rika made as she abandoned the wives.

‘Hey, Jacob,’ Martha greeted him, as Alex appeared beside them. Behind him came Leonard and his pipe. Rika was looking out into the dark valley, which at dusk had been washed in garish streaks, transforming the swamp into a golden lake.

‘I thought I’d walk over in the morning and swim,’ she said.

‘Where?’ Jacob asked, following her gaze.

‘There,’ Rika said, pointing into the dark. ‘Earlier I saw a lake.’

‘Lake!’ Alex exclaimed. ‘It’s a swamp! The only things that swim there are mosquitoes.’

‘Still, I’d like to go,’ Rika said.

‘We can’t have white women walking around alone in the scrub,’ Alex said.

‘I’ll take you,’ Jacob said. His face was curiously impassive. Impossible to read.

‘It’s a long walk, Jacob.’ The roar had gone out of Alex’s voice. ‘Much too far for her.’

‘We can take the old track.’

‘I’d like that,’ Rika said.

‘Rika, darling,’ Leonard said. ‘Tomorrow morning we must go to the bank, arrange a car. There are chores.’

‘Then Friday,’ Jacob said. ‘We should go at dawn.’

It was April, 1968.

RIKA WAS UP, WAITING IN THE EARLY LIGHT OF MORNING, WHEN Jacob tapped at the door of the newest house at the edge of the compound. She’d plaited her hair against the heat and pushed the plaits up under the white cotton cap she’d bought in town the day before. She was wearing jeans, so recently indispensable, which were now impossibly heavy. Still, at that hour the air was cool, and the hills and trees, even the bare earth, were transformed by the low slant of the sun that fell around the house in golden streaks.

Jacob nodded in greeting, one hand raised, and Rika echoed the gesture as they set off along the packed gravel road between the houses in which university families were waking for the day. Radios, a child crying, a hose on a garden. After the last of the houses, the road ended abruptly, with earth banked up where the grader had turned around. Clumps of tough grass were already growing over the mound of scraped-aside soil, a small track was worn into it, and on the other side they were in scrub, on a path she could see was well used.

‘Who uses this road?’ Rika asked.

‘There used to be a camp out here,’ Jacob said.

‘What happened?’

‘It was moved.’

‘Where to?’