Then we got back into the car. Before I started up I cast a final glance at the edge of the wood where Roar was riding his horse back and forth, back and forth.

I switched on the ignition and left him to it, this time.

Some of the hills to the main road were so steep that we had the feeling we were lying on our backs. It was a stimulating sensation, as though we were lying beside each other in the same bed.

I glanced at her. She had opened her jacket and was sitting holding her camera, which hung from a tight strap around her neck over her breasts. Her thighs were slightly apart and the thin, light-blue denim followed the contours of her legs.

‘You’re so quiet, Varg. What are you thinking about?’

‘I’m not sure you’d like it if I told you.’

There were so many homeless children in the world. So many involuntary orphans…

Once again, after a sudden bend, I glanced at her. The car hit a dip and her breasts jiggled. Had we been twenty years younger I would have proposed to her on the spot, driven down a forest path, grabbed her around the waist – and made babies with her.

It was too late though. She was too old to have children and I … had had my chances.

But all the same. Why not drive down the forest track, park the car, move to the rear seat and … make love?

‘Varg!’

Her voice pierced the silence. I almost drove into the ditch.

I straightened the car from its skid, stopped and sat with my hands on the wheel.289

She looked at me with genuine bewilderment in her eyes. ‘What’s the matter, Varg? Tell me!’

I looked at her and said: ‘It was just someone I met … out there, someone I would never have wanted to meet … in such a place.’

‘Ohhh!’ She came close, put her arms around me, kissed the side of my neck, let me feel the heat of her body and held me for a long time.

In the end, I gently freed myself. I met her eyes, looked at her lips, the gentle, smiling mouth and her concerned brow.

I had the feeling that if I leaned forward at this precise moment and began to kiss her, all the other stuff would start, just as I had imagined.

But I didn’t, and nothing happened.

We drove back home, all propriety, sanity and morality intact.

When we parted she smiled and said: ‘See you, Varg. Thanks for the trip…’ Then she strode with youthful steps to the editorial office and her computer.

I drove to Strandkaien, parked in the market square and went up to my office to meet Berge Brevik.

290

38

The December gloom had descended on my office with leaden-grey foreboding. I switched on the light and in a flash saw a reflection of myself, in the office on the outside of the windows. For a moment it didn’t even look like me, but the general practitioner whose office I had taken over eleven years earlier. Perhaps it was his ghost staring in at me, and my own would one day haunt the same expanses of lino, the same yellowing window frames and the same December darkness.