‘She was never my girl,’ I muttered. ‘She was just someone I was interested in.’

‘Interested,’ he snorted.

‘But then … I came home. I went to sea from sixty-two to sixty-four, you might remember.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And when I got home in November sixty-three I heard about … you two. And later that month, a Friday evening, I’d been standing in a doorway in Håkonsgaten talking to a girl. From an open car window somewhere nearby I’d heard Harry Belafonte 103singing in a Jamaican sun-drenched voice, as though the sugar canes themselves had opened their leaves: “So take me, take me, ’cause I’m feeling lonely. Take me back to Lucy’s door. But don’t let her mother know…” And then a radio was turned up so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think and an excited reporter was jabbering away. We caught only the words “President Kennedy” and “Dallas, Texas”. I was twenty-one years old and at that moment, precisely that moment, I knew that our age of innocence had definitively passed and only the rest of life remained.’

He looked away. The record had stopped. He walked over and turned it back to the A-side: “Baby, you can drive my car and maybe I’ll love you…”

After sitting down he nodded towards the record-player again and said: ‘1965. That was the year we got married…’

I didn’t answer.

He hesitated. ‘Where were you then, Varg?’

‘In 1965 I spent most of the year in Oslo.’ Bitterly, I added: ‘That was the year I tried law in Kristiania, the town that no one leaves without the devil’s mark on your soul … or whatever it says in Revelations.’

‘So you didn’t complete your studies?’

‘No, I realised pretty smartly that I couldn’t be anything but a cheap version of Bergen’s famous barrister, Alf Nordhus, so I went back home and drank my way through another six months while pretending to study languages, sleeping with any girls I could get my paws on, not to mention my dick, and making myself generally unpopular wherever I went. The following year I went to Stavanger and started studying social work, met Beate and began to get a handle on my life.’

We sat in silence, listening to the Beatles, trapped in an eddy of memories from the late sixties.104

‘Were we sixty-eighters, Varg?’

‘No, we were more fifty-eighters. Brought up on Elvis and Tommy Steele, with James Dean and Marlon Brando as our idols, Khrushchev and Bulganin as the bad guys in black, and Paul Anka and Jiminy Cricket in our ears: “O-o-o-oh, I love you, baby. I love you so…” We wanted to make love to Brigitte Bardot and marry Shirley Jones in April Love or Debbie Reynolds in Tammy. We were the fifties schizophrenic spawn, growing up in a vacuum, no ideology, no God … All we had was music.’

‘And films.’

‘And films. I remember Pelle mooching around the lower end of Nordnesveien, scowling darkly and trying as hard as he could to look like James Dean in East of Eden.’