One Sunday morning in the garden, as vapour hung over the fields, sunlight glinting on the greenhouse roof. 122He’d be picking lice off the pear tree, showing me a sticky leaf, and he’d be about to say something else, but then, instead, out it came, his if it wasn’t for your omma.

Or we might have gone into the shed for something. We’d be standing in the smell of potato, sawdust, old iron and alcohol, me in the doorway, him crooked over the lathe. He’d be rummaging in a box of bent nails when down it tumbled quietly onto the iron. ‘If it wasn’t for your omma, we’d have moved home ages ago.’

I thought about it a lot. If it wasn’t for my omma I’d have been half-Faroese, not half-Danish, asthma-free, my mother married to a fisherman, a farm manager, an ornithologist, not a tarantula. I’d have grown up with a better view, more greenery, more Jesus, fewer lesbians, lots of sheep, no pathological homesickness. The latter was the most important.

Abbe taught me his longing like a Bible verse we were cramming.

The Epistles of Exile, Verse 1:

‘If it wasn’t for your omma.’

She bore it patiently, the glass around the ship-in-a-bottle on which he was sailing home. When she died I thought, now it’s happened. Now he’ll just drift.

The islands he longed for lay somewhere outside geography. I knew that. Omma probably knew it too. That his homeland floated.

It was as real as the hulder underneath the stone in Ragnar and Beate’s garden, as unreal. 123

You could tell yourself the stone was just a stone, that all the humming was in your mind. It made your hand no less affected. It made the stone no less huldered.

Ragnar and Beate had got engaged almost overnight. That was during the first, uneasy period of occupation. The way they told it later, Beate had simply crossed the mountain one day from the neighbouring village, shut the door softly behind her and walked upright and taciturn straight into the family.

Beate was as tall and bright as Ragnar was short and dark. When they walked through the village together, this is what people saw: him striding along on his squat legs, and her following after like a long, gliding current of air.

Beate was young; there was a succulence about her, but also a calm. Ragnar had grey in his beard. If you’re born to be hanged, you’ll never be drowned, they said, and they chuckled a little at the craggy bachelor brushing the wood chips out of his beard, moving armfuls of books and loose paper into a new small house and waging war on the rough brickwork with cheery pistachio-green paint.