Something powerful radiated from them, and no one could miss it. In town there was a muted respect. Aaron’s response to the assault – they beat her into me, and beyond that a well-judged silence – had the strange effect of making him safe from further attack. When they walked through town hand in hand, not so much as a gob of spit came their way, which was more than could be said of other couples who linked brown arm in white. This despite the gleam between them, the spark that was palpable in the way they walked, the way they greeted each other, the way they spoke. They breathed the same air, read the same books, woke to the same patch of sky. When Rika danced to a string band, or to a ukulele on the bare earth in front of their house, where children played during the day, it was clear to everyone that Aaron had released something in her. When the music slowed and the rhythm dropped and he wrapped his arms around her with the full power of his attention, ignoring the holler and hoot of every kid in the street, no one could doubt that this was a true union of heart, the gold coin itself. For five years they were happy, with barely a cloud to ruffle their sky.

Martha and Laedi were also content in Hohola. Not the clear-sky happiness that shone from Rika and Aaron. Both were in marriages that were more like the two faces of a coin, easily turning them in different directions, than the solid metal between. Pete and Martha found reason to be apart without actually separating. He had his fieldwork and she began an MA, reading the writings of colonial travellers who had come to New Guinea, some in search of the ‘cannibal queen’ who’d make them a literary fortune, others to escape the grey skies of England, drawn to a dream of the South Pacific. Pete’s research took him up rivers and out to the islands. Martha’s took her to London, to Melbourne: to libraries that housed the books she was after. But when they came back together, it was always to Hohola. Dusty, noisy, happy Hohola with meals under Rika’s vines and visitors from Fiji and Samoa, Sydney and Honolulu. Yes, for Martha they were good years, those Hohola years.

Laedi, too, was surprised to find for herself a sense of peace in Hohola, despite her increasingly unhappy marriage. She gave birth to Daisy, a serene baby who seemed to bestow her peacefulness on her sister and mother, and Don left for a new job at Melbourne University. By the time Laedi and the girls joined him there, he’d met the woman who was to be his next wife, a research student from Trinidad. The night before Laedi and the girls left for Melbourne, a string band played out the front of Aaron and Rika’s house. People spilled down the street - half of Hohola must have been there. Daisy, who was not yet two, slept through it all; Bili, at four, danced as if these were her last hours on earth. She danced with Rika, and tears fell down both their faces.