I reached the end of the corridor where the marching man was doing his drills, the prematurely senile sixty-year-old was continuing his mindless space odyssey and the fifties debater was preening her doll, when a man I had never seen before suddenly trotted up to me, grabbed my lapels and shouted: ‘Anders! At last you’re here. Anders, Anders…’ then burst into tears on my chest.

An authoritative carer led him gently away while asking who I had come to see.211

‘Room 312,’ she said when I told her the name. Then she sent me a look of curiosity. ‘I can’t remember seeing you here before. Are you … family?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m a childhood friend of her … late son. I don’t know if she has any family.’

‘No, she doesn’t. At least she never has any visitors. Don’t be shocked now. If it’s a few years since you’ve seen her … She’s quite changed.’ She whispered: ‘She stays in her bed now. She hasn’t got long to go.’

I nodded and she led the man waiting for Anders back to his base while I found the way to room 312.

Ingeborg Kløve was in a two-person room. The other patient had a visitor, a bossy matron in a dark-brown winter coat with coiffured hair and a mouth that would have made a pike envious. The woman in the bed looked like a run-down version of the matron, frail and debilitated.

Ingeborg Kløve was lying on her back, her head on the pillow, her white hair in thin, untidy curls around a pinkish skull, a pained expression on her ruminant mouth and palpitating life behind her closed eyelids. She was whimpering softly in her sleep.

I went closer. No, I didn’t recognise her, but then I couldn’t remember ever having met Harry Kløve’s mother in Nordnes, when she must have been much livelier than she was today.

‘Just wake her!’ the matron by the neighbouring bed barked. ‘She’s slept long enough as it is, and it’ll soon be time for dinner.’

‘I can wait a bit,’ I said, pulling a chair over to the bed, and sat watching Ingeborg Kløve for a few minutes.

‘Is she your mother?’ a voice asked behind me.

I shook my head.

‘You should visit her more often,’ the stern voice said.212

I didn’t answer.

‘Yes, I know myself what a fag it is, but I’m here as often as I can make it. Well, you have to consider that they could’ve been in bed at home, couldn’t they?’

I turned round and looked at her. Her mother had her eyes open, but she didn’t say a word. She continued regardless: ‘Yes, now I’ve been here almost every single afternoon, taking the bus to and fro, and there’s no appreciation, no assistance from anyone else. What do you say to that?’

I said: ‘And the price of bus tickets has gone through the roof, hasn’t it, eh? Isn’t that scandalous?’

‘Yes, I…’ She bit her tongue, sent me an angry look and demonstratively moved to the side.