‘I didn’t tell him I was pregnant,’ she said, looking at Martha with such regret that Martha put her arm round Rika’s shoulder. ‘I wanted to tell him, and I didn’t. I couldn’t. It was enough of a betrayal as it was, that I’d felt so much. Nothing like it again until him. You know. You know how it is. That overwhelming feeling, that giving over, that opening that can’t be for anyone else.’ Yes, Martha had known that feeling – it was part of the problem with Pete, now that it had faded. ‘At school,’ Rika said, ‘they made a lot of his age. There was talk of the police, but I was seventeen and nothing was forced. I wanted it. I didn’t know what it was that I wanted, but I wanted it.’ She turned to look at Martha. ‘I welcomed him. That was the betrayal.’

‘You can’t betray someone in advance,’ Martha said. ‘What about Leonard? Was that a betrayal?’

‘Oh, Leonard,’ she said. ‘That was different.’

‘Are you going to have a ceremony in the fjords?’ Martha asked. They were leaning on the rails above the lake, watching the ducks in their little wooden houses. The sun was warm, the light easy on the eye. So different, so very different from Hohola. Martha found it hard to put it all together, the mind map of where they lived.

‘There’s not really a ceremony to have,’ Rika said, still looking at the ducks. ‘He can’t pay bride price, can he?’ She laughed. ‘He gave my father the trochus shell.’ She was quiet for a while before she turned to Martha.

‘Aaron says a child is more important than a ceremony,’ she said. ‘They’re beginning to ask in the village. I’m still an outsider there. It’ll be different when I am pregnant.’

‘You can’t have a baby for the village.’

‘Why not? It’ll change everything.’

‘You’ll still be white, if that’s the problem.’

‘I won’t be clan, but the child will,’ she said, off on a riff about a new generation for a new world, where schools would be places of opportunity and marriages for love alone. ‘See why I can’t live here?’ she said, and Martha laughed.

WHEN RIKA TOOK THE JOB AT THE UNIVERSITY’S NEW ARTS CENTRE, she insisted on a local salary. Didn’t an ‘unlocked heart’ mean unlocking prejudice and unequal advantage? She had a studio to teach from, a well-equipped darkroom, and Aaron. She was on her right pathway. What more could she want?

In the years since she’d been on the mountain, Rika had had a lot to say about pathways. It was a term she’d learned from Nogi. She took down the bark-cloths from the doorways of her house and pinned them on her studio wall at the arts centre. ‘Look,’ she said to her students, running her fingers along the black lines of Nogi’s mountains. ‘On the mountain only the senior artists can draw the pathways. It takes many years of learning, and until the young artists have learned enough, all they can paint is the colour between the pathways.’ She asked her students to consider what the colours would be like without black pathways. They’d have no form, no structure. ‘That’s why we’re using black and white film. That’s where photography starts. It’s in the darkroom that we learn the pathways of the shot, the structure of the image. We take that into our seeing the next time we look through the lens.’