But in the midst of all this welcome jollity she raises a hand to her face, a hand with red nail varnish on all five fingers, and tells Ingrid she would like to see the island in the fine weather, she has been so looking forward to this, Fredrik can stay with his aunt, Barbro, can’t he?

Ingrid and Barbro exchange glances, the boy is eating cinnamon biscuits spread with butter, which these fine townsfolk have brought with them, and the two younger women get no further than the yard before Suzanne bursts into a violent fit of sobbing;

“How horrid it is here!”

Ingrid stares, too stunned to speak.

“Hvur grim,” she wails from the heart. “A can’t mind it bein’ s’ grim . . .”

Ingrid has never viewed the island as more magnificent than now, this comes as a shock, either due to Suzanne’s unexpected words or some sudden inner turmoil they set in motion. She turns her back on Suzanne and her nail varnish and strides over the hill to Karvika and watches as Arne and Helmer and Sverre lay the last sill timber on the foundations. They are all dressed in overalls, her father’s and cousin’s, partly taken in and partly taken up, and they have re-used the original holes in the rocks in the foundations, which they first took completely apart and then reconstructed, so everything is plumb and solid, but they are using new bolts, and Arne looks askance at Ingrid as she approaches, as do his brothers. Ingrid sees that the grass around the new buildings has been trampled flat and there are paths and tracks, the plot has been tamed and consecrated by man, it already looks inhabited, then she bends down and places both hands around the sill and pulls as hard as she can, and it doesn’t budge.

9

And Barrøy is not horrid for long, Suzanne wakes up after one night’s sleep in the South Chamber as her normal self, while Fredrik sleeps in Ingrid’s old childhood room, in the bed where someone died not so long ago, but no-one says a word about that.