Marita is sitting in her room. She’s sewing. A voice on the radio crackles in the sitting room downstairs.

The house belongs to an older married couple, hard of hearing, who rent a single room to decent unmarried women with their own incomes: no widows, no night work; children and pets not permitted. Each evening they sit with their faces turned to the radio and listen. The woman rests her hands in her lap. The silence between them is old.

They have a son, who went to university, and a daughter, who keeps house for her husband on a farm a little way out of the city. You wouldn’t know it, so rarely do the old people have visitors.

The radio jumps, and a scratching noise is heard through the floor. They’re pottering down there. Marita pictures it: the man’s trotting slippers on the carpet. The dial he’s turning. The back of his hand, the wrinkles. 99

The needle dives, breaks the surface and dives again. A white ripple over pigeon blue. Her hands work. A collar that needs turning. A seam coming undone.

Now, in late summer.

The room is on the second storey of the villa with its warm, soft wooden floors and carpets in both of the downstairs rooms. There’s room for a bed, wardrobe and desk. The chair, its seat upholstered in royal blue, is positioned slightly to one side and throws a grey angled shadow.

Ragnar’s letter is in the desk. It came with the Red Cross. From the bed there’s a view over the garden. The shadows of the walnut trees feed on the lawn. The lilacs carry their brown, shrivelled clusters of flowers like candles that have been put out. They rustle. The beech hedge rustles outside. The ear knows more than the eye, keeping vigil while the eye’s asleep. Soon she’ll be asleep. The black space behind the blackout curtain. The black weight before sleep. There’s a little time yet.

The city is full of its people, even now in the streetemptied evening. Bicycle tyres whistle. The way the people speak is ugly, but easy to understand. She thinks in Faroese and speaks in Danish. She’s come to know the roads. The sound of the trees. And the forest. That there is a forest.