‘Among others, me.’

‘Yes? Yes, right,’ she said with a new glint in her eyes, as 317though she had only just remembered. ‘But then I met Jakob again. This time it was serious. Like me, he’d grown up. In fact, he’d caught me up. As if I’d been just ahead of him. And after that there was no one else.’

‘Yes, I noticed.’

‘What?’ she exclaimed, as though she was thinking about something else. ‘When?’

‘I returned from sea that year. It must’ve been 1964. Don’t you remember? I met you in the basement of Beyer’s bookshop. It was the foreign section in those days. We talked.’

She looked at me with a sudden sadness while shaking her head. ‘No, I don’t remember that,’ she said softly.

‘Exactly.’ I took a sip. My lips still wet from the wine, I said: ‘Love is a lonely business. Love is something no one else knows about.’

‘Who said that?’

I looked at her and grinned. ‘A banned writer in a banned book … No, it just occurred to me.’

We sat in our own silences with nothing in common, it seemed. At length I said: ‘What happened later – to you and Jakob?’

She sat up and became matter-of-fact again. ‘I suppose what happens to most couples. The storm of passion abates, but if you’re lucky you can still have a few years with a gentle breeze in your sails and small lagoons of … excited reprises.’

‘However, you turned to others?’

‘Let’s not talk about this anymore. I did have good reason to, though. He’d done the same. He’d had someone else all the time. He didn’t think I knew, but I … Gro, wasn’t it? Isn’t that her name?’

I made a show of shrugging my shoulders, as if to emphasise I knew nothing about this. ‘Then Johnny, of all people?’318

She studied me. ‘And why not? The whole point wasn’t who I did it with, but that I did it at all. Perhaps I knew that this would hurt Jakob more than anything else. Perhaps … it was just happenstance.’

‘And then Berge Brevik.’

‘Let’s not talk about this, I said!’

Another silence. Our glasses were empty. She refilled them. A low, red sun rose over the landscape inside us and she went to get another bottle.

On her return she said: ‘Everything is so, so long ago, Varg. I think about my parents. Of course I loved them, all of them: my mother, my father, my brothers. The milieu we grew up in, one foot in the chapel and the other … somewhere else … It was safe. I still know all the hymns off by heart. Verbatim. In the evenings, if I pass a parish hall and I hear the old tunes being played I can’t help saying the words, under my breath. But I never go in. That time’s over and they’ll never get me back.’

‘Really? Not even a man like Berge Brevik?’

‘No! The state church is even further away from me now. After all, I’ve grown up in a world where religion permeated everything, from when you woke up in the morning to when you went to bed at night. A life framed by prayers. Morning prayers and evening prayers, grace before and after all meals, prayers at gatherings and meetings. Not like in the state church where for most people prayers are said once a year, on Christmas Eve or at christenings and burials, weddings and confirmations. I’ve lived Christianity, Varg. All those years. But I grew out of it and that hurt my nearest and dearest more than anything else I’ve done. But not so much that we weren’t always welcome. Pappa never turned his back on us, but there was always something sad about him when he watched us … which can still cut me to the quick now that I know he no longer … exists.’319