Now, on the eve of midsummer, Ma and Aunt Ása took turns describing Abbe’s summer as a fisherman. They told the story of the bear and the toothbrush water. In old photographs, eyes are always bright. Hands are meticulously placed. Omma-in-Vágur stared at me, owl-like, with her eyes of crystal.

Abbe came home sick as a dog from the Arctic Ocean, lay a long spell in his bed, got to his feet and declared he was going to be an electrical engineer. Then he went to Great-Aunt Ingrún, but the story couldn’t begin with that, I realized. Aunt Ása’s gaze grew far-off; she had dipped it 45into the well. I watched her hands. They were big and beautiful, scoured white as a kitchen table.

‘Skál,’ cried Uncle Laurus, raising his glass.

‘Skál,’ answered Ma.

‘Skål,’ said the Tarantula in Danish.

Aunt Ása’s fingers straightened a little on the table, then she picked up the thread with a deary me.

Great-Aunt Ingrún was the second eldest of the band of siblings. First came Ragnar, then Ingrún. Those two had got off to a rocky start. Until the younger siblings arrived and gave them other people to gang up on, they argued bitterly. Hence the paucity of stories from their early years.

Ingrún was born in 1918, just as the machine guns fell silent and the world lowered its bayonets. Ma was the one speaking now. I laughed. I’d once heard Abbe say that Ingrún’s first living wail broke a moment of worldwide silence. That she’d known from square one how to get her own way, hard as nails.

Aunt Ása spoke.

That wasn’t quite right, actually, the date. Ingrún had been born several years earlier, at some point in the first decade.

The Tarantula stifled a disappointed sound.

The Aunt Ása hands swept apologetically over the table, then she kept going: true enough, while the brothers had each had poetry, ideology and even Jesus, respectively, 46when all else had let them down, Ingrún had come into the world with a will of old iron. It was as though her soul had been waiting for the birth in a raised bog, and during the wait had happened to develop a nose for business otherwise unprecedented among her relatives. She had sensibly married a bank manager, while she herself ran one of the grandest hotels in Tórshavn.

‘Probably one of the only hotels,’ I muttered.

‘Not at all,’ said Ma, throwing a doubtful glance at Aunt Ása, who was gazing dreamily into her schnapps.

If you wanted to get on in life, or if there was anything you needed, you could go to Ingrún. It was onwards and upwards, and there was always a little money to be borrowed or even given in a pinch, if you were in her good books.

‘How did you know if you were in her good books?’