Back in the house, she hangs up the phone, relieved that pest control will come imminently to destroy the nest. Tom is still banging on about how they’ve intruded on the wasps’ territory, Anthropocene this, biodiversity that. She’d forgotten how much of Norway feels off-limits to humans. ‘Haven’t the wasps merely done what we’re attempting to do?’ Tom says, lightly but fully serious. ‘They just created a home for their babies.’

Vile that the nest should take the shape of a womb, she thinks. With a shudder she imagines a baby inside, its head lowered into the cone.

She turns back to the window to drink in the view of the fjord, or rather the bits of blue she can make out through the woodland. She can’t imagine why the previous owners of this place didn’t cut down the trees that obscure such an amazing vista. If just a handful of trees were removed she’d be able to see all the green pleats of the valley crimping on forever and that navy ribbon of fjord stretching to the city.

She tells this to Tom, who frowns. ‘They’re pretty ancient, those trees,’ he says.

‘All trees are ancient, Tom. And it’s not like there’s a shortage of trees around here. You could use the wood for the new house, surely.’

‘You mean “Basecamp”.’ He announces the house’s name with finger quotation marks.

She laughs. ‘Basecamp.’ She’d have preferred something along the lines of ‘Villa Faraday’ or ‘The Tree House’, but whatever. Tom says ‘Basecamp’ captures the sense of family adventure they’re embarking on, so Basecamp it is.

‘Basecamp,’ she deadpans, and Tom grins.

‘I’ll cut down those trees tomorrow. Happy?’

‘Ecstatic.’

It is night time. Coco is lying against Aurelia’s left shoulder and Gaia is curled up beside her in the armchair as she reads from her father’s old journal of Norse folklore, as told to him as a child by his parents and grandparents. The yellowing, crumpling transcriptions splattered with ink blots are much too delicate now for handling, and they’re in Norwegian. Some years ago, she began the painstaking process of translating and digitizing the book into an English PDF file that she reads on her iPad to Gaia. Many are simply too macabre for a six-year-old, but there is a selection of tales that are entertaining and that provide a good source of education about Gaia’s heritage. Gaia loves the tale about the raven who raises two sparrows in her nest when her own eggs are stolen. She particularly loves the one about the man who changes into a wolf when his sadness gets the better of him, and always squeals at the tale of the bear who tries to catch a fish that turns out to be a whale that swallows the bear whole – a metaphor, Aurelia thinks, for biting off more than you can chew.