I sat in the car, needing the glossy, cool sensation of Omma’s hand-painted porcelain, the rehearsed precision of Omma’s hands. Needing the basket of knitting needles and the brown yarn that scratched my arms while she wound it into tight round balls. The little pivots of her wrist. The sorry-looking sausage the ball turned into when she held and I rolled.

The wall clock in the front room was enormous. The long pendulum weights swung listlessly, clicking brass-on-brass 24behind the chime whenever the clock struck the hour. The sound of an old marriage.

Up the staircase to the first floor, the whaling knife hung on the wall beneath the shelf with the stuffed puffin. Its glass eyes stared wildly, witlessly into the dim light. All of us children dreamed it would be ours one day.

In the TV room the velvet easy chairs were arranged in parallel, two brown railway tracks that faced the screen. I murmured a kind of farewell to morning devotions with the radio news hour and afternoon devotions with The Bold and the Beautiful, black tea and cheese sandwiches.

The sofa in Abbe’s office was a fold-out. The scent of paper and crumbling erasers. The low set of shelves, with the most important books at floor height. The Encyclopaedia of World Animals. The Odyssey.

The bedroom with the two single beds was always clean, the whites whiter than white. Omma ironed—everything. But in there too was the jewellery box, a black leather case that bared its padded scarlet innards when you raised the hasp. The only fleshy object in the house. Now I wanted to empty it, to make it simply—red. Free of the silver, the pale stones.

The front garden was a study in accidental symmetry, a faithful copy of all the other front gardens by the road. But from the back garden you could see the hjallen, the drying shed. The hook beneath the overhanging roof, 25where Abbe experimented for a while with drying meat. Until the flies. The sun.

Behind the house, hidden from the road, there might be the odd abandoned garden tool. The hose not coiled or hung in place, perhaps. There was the greenhouse. All the things that blossomed. There was—a blow-up paddling pool. Feet brushed through wet grass.

In the middle of it all Abbe had planted a Japanese cherry tree. It grew like a fragile migrant worker among the older, gnarled fruit trees. Grew and muttered to itself sentences of white and pink.

We arrived at the nursing home.

Ma was shuffling in the porch, speaking low-voiced to her cousin, whose husband was kind. Carl or Karl. Their straw-blonde children were with them too. Further back into the hall was Abbe in his suit, his dark blue coat. I went up and took his arm. It rustled thin as rolled-up newspaper. Then he patted my hand. His shirt at the collar was crooked.