Aunt Ása’s kitchen smelled of dried mutton and plunger coffee. Guests had been filing through all Midsummer Day long, family and strangers, faces I almost recognized, a few I could put a name to. Støkka in á gólvið. A quick stop on the floor. A chat, a festive bite to eat, then on to the 43next house on the route. A tour-de-feast. Eid Mubarak, I thought.

A sated sense of triumph now rested on the kitchen table, as though after a major battle or a marathon. Only the Tarantula and I, with our under-qualified blood, were still high. It was the much-too-bright night.

‘You remember Aunt Ingrún?’

The schnapps had given my mother skin like an apple. Her voice fluttered upwards from the rim of the little glass. Great-Aunt Ingrún had died while I was still a baby, but there was no point mentioning that. As soon as Ma came up here, she gained access to an expanded stock of memories, deeper and more richly coloured than her own, embedded in everything. The family well. Really, though, she was leaning over and speaking down into it.

‘Ingrún knew exactly how she wanted things,’ muttered Aunt Ása.

The house we stayed in while visiting family in Vágur belonged to Aunt Ása and Uncle Laurus. It was Abbe’s childhood home. Only the foundations were actually part of the old house; the rest had been rebuilt from the ground up. Expanded, modernized. But the place was the same, tall, with its back towards the fields above the village. In the morning sheep came jingling past. Ma’s idea was that from there we’d go on short expeditions around the islands. Spend a few nights here and there. A long weekend in Tórshavn. 44

One morning the house was empty. I crept into the living room. Touched the crystal glasses in the vitrine. I cherished an affection for those glasses, French or Czech, which had been ordered through the post and stood in the cabinets for generations. There was a power in them. A thirst for the world. Aunt Ása’s had been inherited from the matriarch, Omma-in-Vágur. She was my mother’s omma, my great-grandmother, but was never called by any other name. Now she was sitting at the bottom of the family well, in the tallow-glow, with a woollen shawl around her head, her fists callused, dreaming of Parisian crystal.

In a photograph I remember, her face was broad, wind-wizened. What was her name? Everybody here knew the matriarch’s name; no one used it. I didn’t dare ask my mother. She might be sad she’d never brought it up.