Omma and Abbe had moved out many years before. Downsizing. First to a slightly smaller place, then into disabled-accessible sheltered housing with no doorframes and armrests on the toilet. With every move, Abbe’s garden shrank. At last it consisted of a narrow flowerbed 22along the wall of the house and one plot of earth in the housing association’s communal allotment.

The House among the Fields, the original house, seemed to move with them. The odours and the fittings. It had never struck me before, the idea that it wasn’t waiting for me.

The Tarantula switched the radio on. Classics on P2. A cello was sobbing deep in its belly.

I went through the list of things to bid goodbye:

The snails. The disciplined tulips standing to attention down the lawn. The fat earthworms you could use to bait a hook. The blackberry bushes, the rows of potatoes, gooseberries, strawberries. The flowers in the spring and the flowers in late summer, everything timed and trimmed.

Inside is Omma’s: the waffle iron, the fish stew, a nearly empty tub of crystallized Neapolitan ice cream at the back of the freezer.

The schnapps slept in Abbe’s polished crystal carafe on top of the bookcase. It was impossible to think of it without feeling the earthy chill of the potato cellar hidden under the floor in the lean-to.

Abbe didn’t drink, nobody could say that; he would just go into the lean-to. There would be something he had to do. Certain evenings there would be plenty. The terrace door would open and shut. Around my bedtime he would be heard fiddling with the hatch to the cellar, the sound of a suppressed tín helvitis fani—dammit all to hell! A fish-slick 23bottle slipping through his fingers. Clink! You couldn’t let on. You played the last round of Yahtzee, then they let you take a magazine to the fold-out sofa upstairs, to the floral duvet cover.

Alcoholism is a strange taboo, like sex, like visits to the toilet. Men drank. Some drank more than others. Some didn’t drink at all, but then they were pious, or it was for their health. When women drank, that could be a problem. Women didn’t drink, they took pills. Bennies. I thought of Omma’s pupils, sometimes. It stopped in the Eighties. Awareness about drugs spread first to city homes, to those of us who saw the consequences. Then out into the suburbs. Then the countryside. It became not-nice; ladies stopped taking amphetamines, diazepam. Those who did stop.

In the front room was the Wegner set. The newspaper rack in curved teak, holding tabloids and family magazines, Ekstra Bladet and Familie Journalen, His & Hers.