Fredrik looks at his mother in puzzlement, but Suzanne can’t be bothered to translate. Ingrid hears the sound of hammering in the distance, squints in the direction of the window and asks what the noise is.

“Th’ lads ar’ builden’ a hous’,” Suzanne says, looking round the room where she grew up, in the years Ingrid tried her hand at being a mother and Suzanne at being a daughter.

“Has th’ builden’ material come?” Ingrid says.

“It must’ve done. They’re busy at work at any rate, in Karvika of all places.”

Suzanne rolls her eyes, and Ingrid gets up. Now she isn’t naked, as she was when Sverre woke her and she had no option. She throws a dress over her shift and looks quite a lot paler than Suzanne as they go down to the kitchen where Barbro once again is in full command. Barbro’s face lights up and she tells Ingrid that Suzanne keeps giving her hugs and pinching her plump stomach, there she goes again.

Ingrid doesn’t get any hugs.

Suzanne has worked in a telephone exchange and can mimic dialects and speech defects and voices, and says:

“It is entirely understandable that Ingrid has had to take to her bed, the situation here being as grave as it is.”

She uses words like “captivating”, “gosh” and “baguette”, but can also – depending on the company she is in – switch to everyday speech, and Barbro serves coffee in cups made of Polish porcelain, which Suzanne recognises with a gasp and holds up to the light, as another worried furrow traverses her pretty brow and she mumbles something they don’t understand.

Ingrid says they got the dinner set from her mother, Zezenie, around the time when Suzanne arrived on the island with her brother Felix. But their guest has no memory of this and puts down the cup again, stands up and says she has brought some presents for them, and she opens a trunk Ingrid hasn’t noticed. Four kilos of coffee, an instrument she calls a spatula, and two irons are put on the table, one of them electric, as far as she can remember there aren’t any irons on Barrøy, this place where there are only womenfolk, ha ha.

Ingrid says they don’t even have electricity on the main island, but the flex is very nice, it looks like the line on a spanker sail. Suzanne says they can cut it off with pincers and use it as an old-fashioned flatiron – then thar’d bi one apiece, f’r Barbro an’ Ingrid. But the spatula goes down best, after Suzanne has demonstrated how it works.