‘The felt-tipped pen ran dry because we kept tearing up the lists and starting again. I told everyone, inside the family and out, that we were planning a holiday. Sometimes it was all a game to me and sometimes it was a dream and sometimes it was life.

‘One morning I suddenly said, “We haven’t consulted a single map!” Solveig looked like a dog that’s been kicked. As clearly as if it had been spread on the table between us, I remembered a map printed in a newspaper. It showed the country where we were to live. The eastern region was a war zone.

‘So now I was the adult who’d overheard a child telling herself stories and spoiled everything with boring facts. Solveig went away early that day. If we hadn’t been sitting on the veranda, she might have slammed the door like an actress in an Ibsen play. Your father considered Ibsen overrated, but he was important to Solveig. She believed that women were oppressed by men. I believed that we all oppressed each other whenever we could. I thought that I’d seen the last of Solveig, but she came back the next day with a book. It was an old-fashioned children’s book, written in a language I couldn’t understand, and it had beautiful pictures. There was a house with pink walls, and a blue lake with houseboats, and mountains with snowy hats – it was all there, even the sunflowers. They’d been hung upside down to dry, and when I saw them, I thought of dead people. Solveig had been reading that book since she was seven, she told me. That was what I was to overturn my life for, a book written for Norwegian children long before either of us was born.’

Once, a long time ago, there’d been silver trousers and golden hair on a veranda. The sun and the stars – my mind whirled with them. I was fighting the sensation, confined to conversations with Ivy, that a subject set to advance on the broad, safe highway of reason had inexplicably veered over a cliff. At last, ‘Was your diet the only thing that Bram talked about?’ I asked.

‘Oh, we discussed the Amendment as well.’ Ivy looked at me intently. ‘Bram said that taking it would be against Sister Perpetua’s teaching. He never knew her, of course. I had to explain that she thought it a kindness on the Bolsheviks’ part to shoot the Romanov dogs. Were they spaniels? I seem to remember spaniels. In any case, Sister Perpetua always said, “What kind of life would they have led? No one wanted them.”

‘What do you think?’ Ivy went on, leaning in, her hooded eye and her large one never leaving my face. ‘What would you have done with the dogs, son?’ Only she didn’t say ‘son’ – she used a different word, a word that means ‘son’ in a language I’ve forgotten. It made me feel very strange. I wanted to clutch Ivy’s hand. I wanted to beg, Please tell me the one thing every child needs to hear from their parent. Please say, You’ve done amazing, son.