They found a table at the very back of the top deck, just out of reach of the protective covered area, leaving them to the mercy of the elements, the wind wildly whipping everyone’s hair. It was a beautiful day, so they weren’t cold, but Bell knew that by the time they disembarked in two hours they would look like crows had nested on them – and that they’d be burned. She dug out the suncream and began slathering it onto Elise’s face.

Hanna was sitting inside, downstairs, doing some work on her laptop, and Bell had to keep the girls from running down to her every ten minutes. They passed much of the journey playing I Spy and Would You Rather, Elise setting everyone into deep contemplation with her conundrum of ‘would you rather eat a whole raw onion or drink mustard’?

Bell’s gaze kept returning to the archipelago; it was impossible not to. There were so many tiny, almost fragment-like, islets and islands and skerries – Kris had once mentioned a figure of 30,000 – that on a map, they looked like smashed glass on a stone floor. Some were nothing but smooth rock plateaus, breaching the glassy surface like beluga whales; others were fully forested and bushy, like distant, dark clumps of moss floating upon the water.

This would be her third summer on the archipelago; it was where she had truly fallen in love with the country, why she’d decided to stay. Stockholm was great – smaller than London, friendlier than Paris, calmer than Rome, even cooler than Berlin – but experiencing the Swedes’ summer lifestyles at their island cabins and houses had been a game-changer for Bell. Her own childhood had been spent summering on the North Norfolk coast, sailing and crabbing and playing tennis, but the version here was even more stripped back, raw. Pure. Some of the islets were so incredibly tiny that there was barely enough room for a single-room cabin to perch on the rocks; clearly, electricity and heating and running water weren’t options. There was really nothing for the occupants to do but sit on the shore and read, fish, swim and watch the boats go by.

And there were a lot of boats to watch. Saturday mornings in particular looked like regattas, with low-lying yawls and ketches and sloops in full sail, small speedboats zipping over the water’s surface, some towing inflatables or water-skiers, jet-bikers carving into tight turns and trying to catch air over the ferries’ wakes.

Bell always loved the two months she spent with the Mogerts here. Their island – known in the family as Summer Isle – was still small compared to some; it took just fifteen minutes to walk around, whereas the larger ones would take perhaps an hour and the very smallest, just a couple of minutes. But they had a few neighbours, including Gustav Persson, an elderly man who spent ten months of the year in an almost defiantly rudimentary cabin on the northern tip; it got the worst of the weather and had been patched numerous times with squares of corrugated tin, so that the effect on approach was of a patchwork house. There was another house, too, further up from the main jetty on the eastern side, owned by a middle-aged couple, the Janssons, from Halmstad. It was painted in the traditional brownish-red, with white square windows and a Swedish flag flapping from a pole out front. None of the gardens had delineated boundaries, and it had taken Bell a while to adapt to the idea that the island was theirs collectively; people were largely sensible about respecting each other’s privacy without the need for fences, walls or gates.