The women in Sølve’s life had not entirely appreciated the bourgeois late empire trappings. Each of them had brought something to the place and pushed out something else. A mahogany writing desk and a dining room set in stained beech with chair covers of silk damask were first to go. Subsequently chaises longues and sofas, beds and paintings, as well as the heavy curtains below beautifully decorated pelmets had all disappeared, to be replaced by the occasional piece of furniture from Expo Nova and Møbelringen, from IKEA and Skeidar and a suite from the flea market at Ruseløkka school into the bargain. The problem was that these women eventually vanished from the scene. Along with their goods and chattels they took some of their items of furniture, and in the end increasingly obvious gaps leered at Sølve in every room. Of course he could have bought replacements – his finances weren’t in such a bad state – and there were ways of furnishing an apartment for less than 200,000 kroner. But that wasn’t how he wanted it. Sølve Bang liked expensive things. Biedermeier, for example. When he had gone along with the women’s demands for dilution of all the heavy brown furniture, it was primarily because the pieces had given him a necessary financial lift each time they found their way to the Blomqvist auction house and new owners.

His great-aunt had known a thing or two about Biedermeier.

The desk was among the few pieces he had kept.

It was actually a dining table, and it had pride of place in the centre of one of the three drawing rooms. Facing the windows, and with the door to the almost clinically bare kitchen behind it. The chair was new. Sølve Bang bought a new chair once a year, and then he normally did not stint. This one had arrived in early autumn when he was short of funds, a Kinnarps Capella upholstered in anthracite-grey wool. It was the first time in years he had not gone for leather.

He didn’t like the chair: to his mind, it looked cheap.

He didn’t care for the calculation that appeared on the computer when he asked for a fourth word count, either.

The contract from Statoil had been impossible to turn down. Almost five years ago, Sølve Bang had been offered the opportunity to write the history of Norwegian cross-country skiing. There was plenty of reading material about skiing in Norway, of course, but he was going to write The Book. The standard work. The saga, the highly literary, but nonetheless widely accessible description of the nation’s most important and popular sport.