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gin sling. ‘Not many of the old team left, I’m one of the few who stayed on.’
    â€˜You knew about Ronald, I suppose.’
    â€˜Yes. Sorry, Kath. Always liked the old boy. Do you know … just a few days before you left, after the store was sold, he told me what happened that time he went missing.’
    Kathleen found herself staring into her glass, afraid to urge.
    â€˜Yes,’ the assistant secretary said, ‘he reached the top all right. And he managed tocut his name and the date on a boulder up there. It’s true. Went up to see it for myself a year later. It was on the way back he got bushed. Bad show, really. All of it.’
    Crazily she believed then that it was Ronald she had seen from the spy-hole of the descending plane, living and reliving his moment of glory in that steaming wilderness of tree and vine. Nostalgia made her want to weep again, even after a year, especially after a year, grabbed by the stupidity of his pluckiness, whose driving folly she had never understood.
    She finished her drink, leaving the assistant secretary sitting there, and walked up the hill to the house on the ridge. The temptation to knock, to court invitation, jabbed as she surveyed the familiar lines of veranda, the garden denser but much the same, brilliant with scarlet blossom on the poinciana trees. She turned and looked across to Savo Island, unchanged in unchanging waters, her back exposed now to the pointed words that still flew about those rooms. She winced under ghost barbs.
    If she could, she would have redrawn the maps of those lost times, overcome by sadness and its high dingo howl across emptied, flattened desert-scapes. She thought of her children and their kid faces became mnemonics for domestic detail she now dug up, gently sifting earthand sand, to lay each moment out as if it were a bowl, vase, tile, of simple but searing beauty.
    History was more nostalgia than facet. Correction, than fact: an aggregation of personal moments with their sickening lurches of love and hate.
    As she sat alone that night in the dining room of the Hotel Mendana, the black waiter asked curiously and, she imagined, reprovingly, ‘Where is your husband?’
    She looked up and smiled and took her time responding. ‘Where is your wife?’
    Giggling, he backed away, all stumbling feet and flaphands, from this cheeky
waite
.
    She went on picking at her omelette, wondering if, for Ronald’s sake, she should have mentioned he had left his mark on the summit of one of their highest peaks.
    Where, after all,
was
her husband?
    The best thing, she supposed, about that week was knowing no one knew where she was. The boundary lines of protocol were still drawn on the island, though by shakier hands, and the supper party the assistant secretary organisedfor her at his home was a terrible mix of stiff and hearty, through all of which the secretary’s wife regarded her with sharp and curious eyes nourished by the gossip that still, after all this time, gave transfusions of energy.
Nothing
, should she explain loudly over the canapés,
beyond sweat and arms and unwanted kisses in the sticky afternoons of those three lost weeks?
    The temptation to say loudly, clearly, ‘There was no
pus-pus
, my dear,’ shocking with the unacceptable pidgin obscenity, almost overcame her. A nauseous wave swept her up and out to the bathroom where she was noisily sick for quite some time.
    I’ve cut and run
, she wrote on a card for Daisy. The card showed native huts and women in brightly coloured Mother Hubbards.
Wasn’t going to tell a soul but I’ve decided cutting and running is what it’s all about. I think the kids have inherited that gene from me!
    Got your card
, Daisy remembered when they next met years later.
You old devil, you
.
    Daisy was without envy, never said ‘half your luck’ or ‘wish I’d been there’, never stained the moment.
    â€˜I’m lucky,’ she