In the warm atmosphere of home, Rebecca’s father, Andreas Holmefjord, was a good-humoured man, with a horse-like face and a melancholic expression in his eyes, as though he knew in reality there was no reason to be good-humoured; but in the parish-hall pulpit somewhere in town he metamorphised into a fiery apostle, a prophet with doomsday visions on his slide projector, a baptiser of those who had found salvation, a redeemer 94of life’s vassals and a light in the darkness for those groping around in the mists of atheism, like the blind in Gethsemane. As a Sunday-evening preacher he placed his sensitive hands on the temples of young girls in white tunics, raised his face to the heavens and drew them from the swamp wherein they had found themselves; he helped alcoholics to recover, talked the desperate out of suicide and gave them something to live for, led the two-part hymn singing for Sunday-school children and on dark winter evenings showed slides of missionary work in Madagascar. He was Father Christmas and Jesus rolled into one, and it was to no one’s surprise that occasionally, in the privacy of his own home, he would stroke his face and appear endlessly tired and weary. But he had a mission to fulfil and a life to live. And when his life down here came to an end he had nothing to worry about. All he had to do was go home. Home to Jesus.

One November evening when we were thirteen Rebecca and I had hurried to the meeting where her father was going to speak, but we got there too late, and instead of entering and occupying a bench at the back we went upstairs to the gallery. Gripped by some sudden impulse we crept along the floor above, between the rows of chairs, hidden behind the balcony and so close to each other that our shoulders bumped as we crawled. Once by the balcony we sat secretly listening to Andreas Holmefjord’s voice without actually hearing the words. His voice had been like music, like an accompaniment to something that was still beyond our understanding. My eyes had been drawn to hers and hers to mine. I could have stretched out my hand and touched her, touched her hand, her mouth, her hair. But I didn’t. We just sat there in spellbound proximity, detached from time and place, and suddenly all alone with each other.

From the room below came the rousing hymn: ‘Promises 95cannot be broken. No, they are ever true…’ Like a choir of angels, the voices filled the ceiling vault above us: ‘Heaven and earth may burn. Mountains and hills may wane. But those who believe will find. Promises are eternal.’

Afterwards I often thought that we had tacitly made each other a promise, up there in the gallery of the parish hall where her father preached that November evening in 1955.

Later we went down and outside. Quietly, without saying anything important, we walked home, along the dark streets to Nordnes, in the clammy November air, our ears red, our hands stuffed deep in our pockets to keep warm.