The light was off in the cellar. I couldn’t find the switch. Fumbled. I gave up and crept down the railing into the dark. Finding my room, I got into bed beneath the floorboards, above the family’s foundations.

The next morning we trudged down the road from the upper village, heading to the Ruth Smith Museum by the harbour before we went to the village of Tvøroyri, where the MS Smyril set sail for Streymoy. We were going to take the ferry then pass through the tunnelled darkness to Vágar, to Gásadalur, but first Aunt Ása had offered to show us round the museum.

The car bumped over the potholes in the asphalt, past the house that had belonged to Ragnar and Beate. It had since been sold.

The house, square and little, stood nudged into the gap between some older buildings. The wall was weatherfaded, the paint chafed by the salt. The green was peeling slightly.

The hulder stone was still in the garden. I strained against the seatbelt, remembering how it felt beneath my palm. In childhood. The coating of moss, soft and slimy, with the hardness underneath. 58

The stone hummed when it was touched.

The power of the hulder, the hidden folk, reached far into the moss, into the skin. A watchful quivering felt in the hand, tempting as the sound of an electric fence.

We parked on the quay.

The Ruth Smith Museum overlooked the fjord, positioned among shipping containers and rowing boats set on blocks. It was a yellow building, the old village school. The opening times varied. Aunt Ása was in a club, and had the keys.

Now, in the old schoolroom, among dark yet still lush landscapes, beneath the desperate or heavy or resigned eyes of the painter’s fearsome self-portraits, there were no more deary me’s. Aunt Ása straightened her back as she talked about the painter’s life. Her white-scoured hand pointed us authoritatively from work to work. Her face gave off a warm pride the colour of whole milk, and I realized she saw the paintings like childhood friends made good.

The sun dropped onto the fine dust. The place had retained an element of the classroom. A snug drowsiness.

In a bust rendered by Gianfranco Nonne, the painter’s smile is resigned and froglike. I searched her eyes for a place to stay.

It was one May night she’d swum out and drowned. Just outside. Aunt Ása pointed through the window. In the fjord. They said she often swam alone, that she was an 59elite swimmer. She found it easy to swim but hard to let herself be borne with the current. That sort of mind. I stopped listening and never heard whether it had been officially designated a suicide.

I saw her. She was floating in the breakers, in the crushed mirror of the summer sky.

A dot in the universe.

A tiny, dwindling island.