140I can smell cigarette smoke from the decking, someone is sitting there, it’s Stein. I bring my blanket, sit down with him and take a cigarette from the packet lying on the table, Kristoffer’s packet. It must be a few years since I last smoked. I inhale, feel the numbing spread of the nicotine across my chest, the way it pulses through my arms and hands. The new garden chairs are comfortable, I sink back, feel like I’m lying in bed.

‘Ida, Ida, Ida,’ Stein says.

‘Stein, Stein, Stein,’ I reply.

‘That’s me,’ Stein says, chuckling.

‘Are Marthe and Kristoffer talking?’ I ask.

‘Yes,’ Stein says. ‘I thought it might be a good idea to make myself scarce.’

We sit there in silence, I flinch as a mosquito whistles past my ear, bat it away.

‘I thought the smoke might help keep the mosquitoes at bay,’ Stein says.

‘Why don’t you have any children?’ I ask him.

‘Why don’t I have any children?’ he repeats, scratching the space between his eyes. ‘It just never happened. The woman I was married to, she wasn’t able to. It might have been possible these days, what with all the technological advances and that sort of thing. But.’

The mosquito has landed on my arm. I raise my hand as I watch it, it readies its tiny proboscis and plunges it into my skin, I flick it away.

‘Don’t you have any regrets about that?’ I ask.

‘Watching you all on this holiday, you mean?’ Stein asks and guffaws, and I laugh to myself too. 141

‘There are regrets and then there are regrets,’ he says eventually. ‘I don’t know what there is to regret, in this case. From time to time I think to myself that it might have been nice. It could have been really nice. But it’s no worse than occasionally missing a long-dead grandmother, for instance.’

I say nothing. My skin itches where the mosquito landed.

‘It can be just fine, this life, Ida,’ he says, looking at me. ‘I think it’s a good life. There are lots of different ways to live.’

A good life, I think to myself. For a moment I imagine myself turning into Stein when I’m older, a middle-aged, childless effeminate man with clip-on sunglasses that fit over my normal frames and a fedora hat that I insist on wearing on the boat even though everyone rolls their eyes at me.

Marthe steps out onto the decking. She’s in her stockinged feet and looks exhausted.

‘Here’s Marthe come to join us,’ Stein says.

‘Yep,’ Marthe says.

She sits on the ground beside my legs.

‘Here, take a seat,’ Stein says, standing up. ‘Women and children, and all that. I’ll see how things are going inside.’