I shrugged. ‘At least you know where it is. So I don’t have to drive around blindly.’

‘You were going to talk to one of the patients, did you say?’

‘If she’s there.’

‘What’s her name? Maybe I…’

‘Solheim. Ruth Solheim. Twenty-four years old.’

She racked her brain. ‘No, I can’t say…’ Then she smiled again. ‘But we’re going to have a wonderful trip, Varg. In this light…’

She was right. We did have a wonderful trip.

Through Åsane the rime frost lay like a veil over the grass beside the road, and the shimmering blue-and-white sky was as transparent as it can be before the snow comes and leaves its ornamental frozen stars on the clear ice.

Laila Mongstad belonged to those blessed individuals who seldom run out of conversation topics and who can fill a silence with benign serenity. We chatted like old friends and never mentioned the first time we met, as though this might have inevitable consequences, as though it would automatically lead to the relationship changing character and taking us to one of two places: straight to bed or to different ferry terminals.273

The one we were coming to now, between Steinestø and Knarvik, was the most used in Norway and probably one of the shortest. This is where the bulk of the northbound traffic came, bound for destinations such as Stryn and Otta, Ålesund and Molde, Trondheim and Namsos. Ferries the size of mountains, with the same capacity as cross-channel ferries, transported you across the fjord in fifteen minutes, and you barely had time to climb to the top deck and enjoy the view for five minutes before you had to find your way back down to the fume-ridden car deck.

Waiting at ferry terminals is the fate of Vestlanders. No sojourns have left deeper marks in their souls than precisely this. On a wind-blown quay – where there is a hot-dog stall, which is closed, a telephone box where the cable has been yanked out and where the summer ferry timetable is displayed in winter (and vice versa) – lives are shaped. Here, they are on their way out into the world, from home, or on their way home, to weddings or funerals. Here, they accompany their sweethearts to final farewells; here, love-rivals sit in big cars, waiting to take over. Here, they set down their cases and rucksacks, their cardboard boxes of books and photographs, on their way to a new life in university towns. Here, they come ashore half drunk after two weeks on the North Sea; here, they come home from military service and teacher-training college; here, women arrive with children in their arms and the elderly arrive with walking sticks for their rheumatism after a visit to an urban medical centre. Here, paths through life criss-cross, unnoticed, more or less. Here, maps are drawn of new paths while old ones are hastily erased. And everyone is waiting for the ferry, which is always somewhere in the fjord. Waiting for a ferry is the Vestlander’s lot in life.274