But at Steinestø waiting time was at a minimum and when we arrived, one Thursday morning in December, the ferry was already there and yawned us into its jaws, together with twenty other vehicles, so few that we almost felt embarrassed that it was crossing the fjord just for our sake.

We got out of the car and went up on deck. It was like crossing the fjord on top of an iceberg. To the south Mount Veten and Mount Håstefjell towered up behind the old BMW concern in Hordvikneset. To the west lay the islands of Holsnøy and Askøy, to the east the dark, sheer rock faces on Osterøy and to the north the flat, gentle countryside across Lindås before the mountains in Masfjorden stood like a murky barrier to the light and sun. The peaks were laced with white and shimmered like haloes in the intense morning light. The air itself was a promise of good days, scratched with a needle into lead plates, ready to be made into prints.

I looked at Laila Mongstad. She had turned up the collar of her coat against the wind off the sea and her face was adorned with red patches where the frost had bitten the hardest. I put my arm around her shoulders and said: ‘Are you cold?’

‘A bit,’ she said, resting her head in the crook of my arm for a moment. She had exotic, dark-brown eyes with large pupils and great warmth. I looked at her mouth and remembered how as children our tongues got stuck when we licked metal in winter. Perhaps that was why I didn’t kiss her.

Then the moment was past and she straightened her head again, shifted her gaze to the horizon and said: ‘We seem to be … above the countryside. Don’t you feel that?’

I nodded. ‘But now we have to go back down and drive through it. Otherwise we’ll be going back to where we came from.’275

We got into the car as the ferry moored with a surprisingly little bump. The crew directed us up and out to where a queue of vehicles going in the opposite direction was waiting. We crawled up the first hill by Knarvik and headed north by Isdalstø, first through an autumn-brown escarpment of rotund tree trunks, then along a road winding between small, jagged outcrops of rock until we were out onto the wide, open plains of the Lindås peninsula, past little lakes, through scattered copses, past churches and deserted farms towards the as-yet invisible pillar of flame waiting for us further north.

‘In a way, you’re going home,’ I said.

‘To Mongstad, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s where my ex-husband came from,’ she said curtly, stressing the ex. Then she placed a hand on my arm. ‘We turn off here. At the next crossing turn right.’

I nodded and changed down. A narrow road took us between crooked pine trees. After a couple of kilometres the tarmac changed to gravel and the intervals between farms increased.