She was sweating. Why in the world did they place him in the city’s most distant hospital? And on top of that, why couldn’t she take her mother’s hand and comfort her? They were in separate corners of the back seat; only their jackets were touching. Villy did things like that. Put his arm around her shoulder, got her to laugh. Villy always was the pride of the family. He had been such a bright, good-looking child. He got his lively, youthful bearing from his mother. When they were children, the two of them shared a buoyancy which she and her father were not a part of. They were each on their own. Vera couldn’t remember ever having had a real conversation with her father. When she was grown up enough, and it became possible, he was already going deaf. And besides, what would they have talked about? He was forty years older than her; in her eyes he had always been an old man. She had shared their bedroom for the fourteen years of her life that she lived at home, and she had been witness to such an impoverished, pitiful married life that she didn’t understand how they still couldn’t live without one another. God in heaven how they fought! And how the poor man always had to give in. It might have been smarter to marry a man ten years older. Then maybe it would have been possible to hold onto him. All Vera’s husbands had been younger –

‘We haven’t seen Asger in a long time,’ said her mother from her side of the seat. ‘He isn’t sick, is he?’

Vera’s heart beat faster. The old childhood anxiety crept through her. She could feel her mother’s scrutinizing gaze.

‘God, no,’ she answered quickly, ‘he’s perfectly fine. It’s just some salary negotiations. They take up all his time.’

You just had to blurt out some terms she didn’t understand.

‘You can imagine how Ruffy misses her Daddy,’ said her mother in a confidential tone. ‘I had to baby her all afternoon.’

Ruffy was their parakeet. They had had several. They always named them Ruffy and they were always – to her father’s dismay – sold or put down when they reached the age at which they ‘sat and scratched’, as her mother put it with disgust.

‘Now try and look happy, Mother,’ she said, as they walked down the long hospital corridor. ‘It will cheer up Dad.’

For herself she adopted the attitude she used for parents of difficult children. She really did feel bad for the old man, and she had every reason to wish him back to health. Besides, it cost her about forty kroner to drive her mother back and forth. And lately she had had to pay attention to money.