Right, yes, thank you. She’s heard him, and if that were all—but there’s someone else, she can tell, who wants to poke his snout into her finances.

Jegvan straightens his back. It’s his turn now. The golden emblem on the captain’s hat is already glittering in his eyes. Unlike his younger brother, he has known nothing else in life but being given what he’s owed. The calculations have been made, the career planned; his is a gripping monologue.

The night shifts restively outside. High above the fog, the colossal morning sky is whirring. Fritz tastes smoke and vodka in his mouth.

At last Ingrún hammers both fists down onto the tablecloth.

‘All right, this is what’s going to happen!’ She pours them a drink and pushes the glasses across the table, her lips and eyes pinched around the cigarette. Jegvan is the 53eldest, and that’s the way it is. But brother must help brother. ‘The money I give you, Jegvan, you owe to Fritz when the time comes, and you’ve earned it yourself.’

Fritz sees the years stretching ahead of him. The matter is closed. Ingrún spits into her broad, white hand and reaches across the table.

54

RUTH SMITH

On midsummer’s eve I walked down steep, small paths among the houses of Vágur, past low windows with yellowed curtains, patterned curtains, lace-trimmed net and tiebacks, cars parked at an angle.

The blue mountain rumbled above the village.

It happens that tourists, typically women, go into the mountain. They go into the mountain. Wander up and disappear. I felt I’d heard about these women, drawing north to die. A suicide holiday. A kind of longing for home. Perhaps they brought the longing with them on their travels, or it caught them in the air, the North Atlantic air.

I reached the upper borders of the village, the rim of the mountain.

The grass was asleep.

Migration takes place over three generations. The first generation feels the urge and has the will, the roughness: a heavy stone, moving unaided. The inconceivability of that.

You wade ashore somewhere, or you take the boat from one of the colonies, hitch your roots up around your ankles 55and set to drudgery. You live in shelters, in camps, under bridges, or you’re lucky enough to have an uncle.

Once money’s not too tight, you travel home in the one set of clothes that isn’t worn threadbare, your children in their Sunday whites, hair wet-combed. You buy big cars and have no place to park.