Near the old post office the road sloped up towards an enclave of high-lying houses that belonged to my family. The post office had been built by my great-grandfather, the joiner. ‘Was he an architect too?’ I’d asked. He was not. ‘Stuff like that, people just made do.’ The brown birthmark high up on the mountain was the copse of trees. Further north, towards Botni, was the hydroelectric plant.

Abbe had wanted to be an electrical engineer. That was the goal, his Ithaca, the place he wanted to go to, then go home to. But the school was in Denmark, he didn’t have the money, and so he went to his Great-Aunt Ingrún. She had a soft spot for him and wanted to help, but she also had a soft spot for his other brother, Jegvan.

Abbe’s brother Jegvan was good-looking, I remembered, even as an old man. A Hollywood star folded out of 49thin parchment. At parties he wore his grey suit and tie. Abbe took his hand, and they danced.

Whenever I saw him just standing, by the wall perhaps, he seemed slightly in the dark. It struck me that grief pounces on the lips. Does something to the mouth, if it can get hold.

Jegvan had got engaged early, as a young boy. The girl was quite grand, a shopkeeper’s daughter from Klaksvík. Omma-in-Vágur approved of the match. Before that he travelled around with the local jet set. I knew he’d drunk schnapps beneath the harvest moon with the famous Vágur painter Ruth Smith, about whom William Heinesen wrote a poem. She drowned; Jegvan did not. But he wanted to go into the merchant navy, and he wanted to get to the top, and so he went to Ingrún, he too.

50

THE PACT

I picture them on a night like tonight.

The blue mountain is a drum beaten by the sky.

The midnight glow is taut as belly-skin above the house, where the three of them sit together. Ingrún, Jegvan and Abbe, who there in the dim kitchen is still just Fritz.