The journey was sad, mostly motorway, and Omma wouldn’t be offended if we put it off, would she? Just for a bit?

The Tarantula leant forwards and draped the coat around my shoulders. His hand rested there. Then he left 20the kitchen door ajar behind him. I mumbled as he went that she was just lying there dead anyway. He gave a mild cough and shifted his feet in the hall.

‘Marita wasn’t bloody stupid,’ he grunted. We had stopped at a red light near Valby Hill. The observation tower at the zoo rose up like a wet stick of charcoal. Fog hung glutted above what remained of Søndermarken Park. The Tarantula’s voice came from low in his throat, gruff and a little dry. I nodded. Outside: a glistening column of car windows. ‘And she had a sense of humour, she had that. You just never saw that side of her. It was before your time.’

‘What was?’

‘The way she was before.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, that she ended up so sad.’

I thought of Omma’s juice-spattered hands. Of stewed red fruit and lace slips in the wardrobe. The delicate woven sandals with heels and the golden shoes that glinted in the darkness of the closet long after Omma had lost her health. All her fine things.

The grain used to run in the wind all the way around the house where Omma and Abbe lived when I was a child. It used to be summer. That house was of the weekends, of national holidays. 21

I thought of it like this: the House among the Fields. Abbe had built it with some of his brothers. Jegvan had also moved to Denmark. Ragnar took the boat down there, I think, just for that. This was before aeroplane tickets came down in price, but after Ma had met the Tarantula. They left the city on Saturday and helped out. The Tarantula could carry heavy things, but he was hopeless at roofing. Afraid of heights. Not like Ragnar.

‘That small square man,’ I could hear the Tarantula say, ‘leaping around up there nimble as a mountain goat.’

Ragnar died before I was born, but Ma and the Tarantula had both been fond of him. Now I was fond of him. All in all I was fond of Abbe’s four brothers, the ones I remembered and those I’d mostly had to invent, colouring between the lines. There was tall, stately Jegvan, the captain. Ruddy-cheeked Arni, paralysed from polio. Kalle-Leg and then Ragnar.

But the House among the Fields—it stood grand and a little reserved at the top of a grassy lawn that sloped down towards the forget-me-nots, the country road, the waves of wheat.