‘Aunt Agnes has always been a bit strange,’ he said.

He showed a good appetite, while the young woman sat agonizing over her tea. She felt nauseous. This happened to her sometimes, from hospital smells, for example. She asked Asger for a cigarette and sucked the smoke eagerly into her lungs as if it were fresh air.

‘Oh, you smoke too,’ said his mother, horrified, and suddenly the young woman looked at her with hardened eyes and thought: You are not going to take him away from me – feeling surprised at herself, because of course there was nothing in the world that could prevent her from loving Asger or that would turn his heart away from her.

The photographs stared into the room. Yellowed, half-faded men with high collars and full beards, and modern, artistic child portraits with embellished chiaroscuro effects. Dark and light eyes, serious and smiling faces, some with the same brooding, heavy expression as Asger’s mother, others with hollow, expressionless eyes, as if they were observing the furniture they had once touched and sat on, from somewhere on the other side of the grave. Soon she would be among them, know them, and consort with them. And her children would belong to this heritage for all time and resemble them in some way.

His mother rose and started introducing the family, the dead as well as the living. On the beautiful sewing table were her three daughters-in-law, smiling, slightly apart from the others, as if they were shying away from the rest of the dusty crowd. One had a good-natured, round face with glasses. They probably came to visit often on Sunday with the sons and their children. They knew the round table and the old woman’s kisses and moans; maybe they even laughed at her, remembering the first time they were here, when she had terrified them, young and in love as they were. Space could probably be made on the sewing table for another photograph, and on the piano for a couple of grandchildren.

Asger sat in the rocking chair filling his pipe, while his mother bustled about, presenting the pictures. He was probably impatiently waiting to leave, but controlling himself, as one does with parents. ‘I’m her last one, you know,’ he had said, ‘so she still thinks of me as a child.’

‘And then here is Aunt Agnete, who died last year. She suffered so much at the end – and here is my eldest son; he’s a doctor in Holstebro.’ The doctor had an ill-defined, limp mouth, and eyes so pale that in the picture they seemed to have no expression. Did he look like his mother or his father? The next one, a teacher in a community college, definitely resembled the mother, but in a refined, melancholy, weary way. The brown eyes stared out questioningly at the young woman.

‘He doesn’t look like Asger,’ she said, unbelievably happy that he didn’t; she wasn’t sure why.