I nodded.

In front, to the right sat Bente Solheim, her son and closest family. A few pews further back sat Anita and Sissel, alone.

I turned towards the entrance. People were still coming in. But no one I could identify as Ruth Solheim.327

Bringing up the rear was Vegard Vadheim, bowed with his coat hanging open. He nodded to the undertaker as if to say they could start now, then sat down in the last row and ran his eyes vigilantly over the assembled congregation.

I met his gaze and nodded without getting an immediate response. Then I addressed my attentions to the front.

The officiating priest came in from the left.

It was Berge Brevik.

He walked with his head held high as if invisible threads were holding it. His beard was quivering, and before sitting down, by the pulpit, his hands folded, he surveyed the congregation, located Rebecca, Jakob and … me, with the precision of inbuilt radar, nodded to the gallery and lowered his eyes.

From the gallery came the raw, sensuous sounds of a violin: ‘In Moments of Solitude’.

A sudden mood of reflection filled the church.

Berge Brevik talked, as most priests do, about a Johnny Solheim none of us recognised, but maybe had dreamed about on the odd occasion.

He spoke of the creative, hard-working Johnny, a busy representative ‘of so many branches of endeavour’, as he put it. In addition, he was an artist, an artisan within a decried sector of our cultural life, at least at a local level, but with a wingspan that would have afforded a flight of unimagined proportions if, for example, he had hailed from Liverpool or Memphis and not from Bergen. On a personal level he had been a good, self-sacrificing father and his wives’ … erm … his wife’s best friend. Now that he has departed this earth, so prematurely and so abruptly, he has left a void that could never be filled with anything but that which words of solace and reconciliation with the inevitability of death can offer. ‘God has given you the gift of solace, and only 328Jesus, the son of God, can reconcile you with this, and let you ask with Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians: “O Death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”’

Rarely have so many rock singers sung so loudly in unison and with such turns of phrase as when their voices rose to the vaulted ceiling of Møllendal chapel and the wings of the hymn soared. The vocal power and volume had perhaps declined, but there was nothing wrong with their timing, and they lifted the melody to a level that was rare, causing the gallery choir hired for the service to look up from their hymn books and peer down over the edge.

After the sprinkling of soil on the coffin, Bente Solheim and her little son went forward and each threw a long-stemmed red rose on top, and then we all trooped out.