‘It’s all right,’ he said, taking a seat in his nest on the sofa – he had made a bed with the duvet Úrsúla had given him. He always kept a sleeping bag in the car, but she had insisted that if he was going to bed down on the sofa, he should have a decent duvet. He had told her more than once that it wasn’t a problem; part of the job.

‘I feel a lot happier keeping an eye on you here than being at 207home worrying that there’s some idiot banging on your door,’ he added.

She looked up, caught his eye and smiled.

‘I’m absolutely in agreement with everyone who told me at the start that the best thing about being a minister is having a driver.’ She sipped her beer, woke her phone from sleep and handed it to him. ‘In fact, I think the only good thing about being a minister is the driver,’ she added as Gunnar read the text on the screen:

‘Pétur Pétursson Detained Without Charge’, the headline read, and the article beneath it hinted that Úrsúla was using her privilege as a minister to persecute an aged homeless man as a way of settling old scores. Under the article was a link to a petition that people could sign, demanding her resignation.

208

Friday

92

Úrsúla hadn’t slept much; one beer with Gunnar had turned into three. Nonni had been asleep when she went upstairs and was still sleeping when she got up, or else he was pretending to sleep so he didn’t have to talk to her. She seemed to have managed to get everything in their relationship wrong since becoming a minister, and as they had argued the evening before, he seemed to have found an outlet for an anger that she had underestimated. She had known that there were many things that irritated him about the changes to their life, and she regretted having kept a few things back from him, such as the incident at the shop, but the depth of his dissatisfaction had taken her by surprise. Maybe he sensed the gulf that had formed between them, felt something that couldn’t be put into words, and knew that she wasn’t completely there even though she played the part well. Perhaps it was for these reasons that he took trivial things so much to heart.

The guilt weighed on her shoulders as she thought of Thorbjörn and what had gone on between them over the last week, and she felt herself helpless and drained of energy. She stared out of her office window at the double-decker tourist coach that had stopped outside the Harpa concert hall and was swallowing up a whole queue of travellers who had been shivering for some time in the cold gusts that came off the sea. Something inside told her that everything would be fine if only she could be honest with Nonni and share with him even a fraction of the horrors that were buried deep in her soul. But she had no desire to do so. She felt 209she had no right to wreck his happy outlook on life by telling him that it was a stormy biological process that a single kiss or an explosion could in an instant reduce to a foul-smelling pool of blood, or a puff of smoke and steam.