Martha was in Amsterdam when the exhibition opened. She came across from London, where she was researching her travellers, for the small civil ceremony at which Rika and Aaron were married. Again Rika wore her white crocheted dress. Aaron, in a suit and tie, gave her father the trochus shell amulet he’d brought as a gift for the occasion. At the restaurant afterwards, old Piet spoke with the grace of a Melanesian. Rika shone with the happiness she’d brought from Hohola.

But Martha wasn’t there when Rika took Aaron to her mother’s grave, and walked with him past the school she’d attended, into the Botanical Gardens whose gates she had passed on her way home each day. Near the end of their visit she took him into the orchid house, where he read the labels, learning the Latin names for the Port Moresby Gold, Dendrobium discolor, and the pale, spidery sprays he recognised from the rocky cliffs of the fjords: D. cyrtosepalum.

‘Our worlds are not so far apart,’ he said when they were lying on the grass outside, in the afternoon sun. ‘How peaceful it is.’

Rika, lifted on one elbow, looked at him lying there with his eyes closed. She traced the scar over his eyebrow with a soft finger. ‘Aaron,’ she said, and he opened his eyes, looked at her, smiled. ‘Kómbo-ko.’ My love, my lover.

‘What is it?’

‘There was a man. When I was a girl. That summer after my mother died.’ The words came fast as she told him about the man who came across her in the orchid house, and how they’d talked, and he’d come again the next week, then the next. He was older, a graduate student, a long way from his home, and when it was time for him to return to his island he’d kissed her, there in the orchid house, and she’d let the tide carry her, and made no resistance. ‘Just that one time,’ she said. ‘Can you forgive me?’ And Aaron saw the shame and dismay that could still raise tears, and did again that day. But she said nothing of the hospital room in Amsterdam, the term missed from school. Or the sorrow that dropped her into a silence that lasted for weeks, months, and had come upon her again in the gardens with Aaron. All that was hidden deep in her, beyond the reach of words. Aaron held her close and with her face concealed in his neck, he told her she shouldn’t be ashamed. He’d grown up in a culture that did not shame the young for their promiscuity, and, though she bridled at the word, she leaned into him and let the buried remain buried.

Rika saw Martha again a month later in London, when Aaron was invited to speak at University College. The paper he gave on the colonial division of the Pacific at the Treaty of Versailles, the first from a historian whose lands had been traduced, brought him a respect that complemented Rika’s success. They were invited to seminars and galleries, and Aaron saw that Europe need not be closed to him. When he disappeared into the libraries where he no longer felt invisible, Rika lured Martha out from the same reading rooms, and they walked the summer streets and squares. Flowers were in bloom, trees were a tender green that astonished Martha. It was on one of their walks, in Regent’s Park, along the edge of the lake, that Rika told Martha about the afternoon on the grass with Aaron at the Botanical Gardens in Leiden.