I nodded stiffly. I understood.

‘But it only happened once. Afterwards…’ His voice broke. ‘Afterwards everything had to finish. We couldn’t even meet as we usually did. All closeness was a danger for further falls. I had to accept that. And she did, too.’

‘But yesterday…’

‘Jakob came to me a few months ago and told me she’d left him … again.’

‘Did he know about…?’

He shook his head, in shame. ‘I could never bring myself to tell him. What she did, I don’t know. I certainly hope she didn’t tell him. But of course he knew we’d become good friends, and he thanked me when she returned, on my advice. But perhaps he sensed it anyway? I don’t know. I have no experience of this.’

‘No, of course not.’ Casually, I remarked: ‘Strictly speaking, in liberal times like ours, this isn’t so much to get upset about, is it? One blemish – surely there’s forgiveness for that?’304

‘In heaven, yes. But down here?’ He beat his breast. ‘In my own heart? For the feelings that are still here. Anyway, when I visited her yesterday it was with only one thought in mind: to counsel her to go back home, once again.’

I could feel my neck tighten. ‘And did she follow your counsel this time too?’

He looked at me sadly. ‘No, I don’t think so, Veum. This time I’m afraid she’s serious. I talked about the children, their situation, Jakob’s difficult position within the parish, the church’s view of such matters. Once again I urged her to fight with herself, to fight the demons she must have inside her, drive them out and return to the safe embrace of Jesus, but … not this time.’

I breathed out slowly. Then I said in a low voice: ‘Did she return at all to what you call her childhood faith?’

Again he shook his head sadly. ‘No, but she was on her way, Veum. I’m sure she was on her way.’

In a flashback, I saw her father coming down the street with his worn briefcase under his arm, meek and stooped by nature, but always with the time to stop and talk to us while we were playing, to ask what we were doing and how things were. Rebecca’s father. Later, in the years when I wandered full of dreams to their door in Landås, he had acquired more wisdom and there was more resignation in his eyes, and he met me with friendly scepticism, sat at the kitchen table and rolled a cigarette of the cheapest variety, which he placed neatly beside the open Bible and only lit after he had read the text for the afternoon. And, finally, some rare glimpses of him in the street: a lean face and a body the unseen enemy was already consuming. A death notice in the newspaper, and then his face is slowly erased, disappearing in the hustle and bustle of the time, then it is suddenly there again, part of a collection of memories.305