It turns out that in her trunk Suzanne also has some clothes more suited to Barrøy and the sea and to that concerned expression of hers, for which there so far has been no explanation. She is a living being among the dead, two people in one, an elegant, urbane, well-spoken lady who says “quite simply” one moment, and the next a woman who is able to inspect the building works in Karvika using all the local terminology; she can gut fish and repair nets and shear sheep, which they should have done a long time ago; now they are stuffing the wool into sacks and idly gossiping in muted voices about how much or how little they can get for it, not to mention in which type of currency or whether they might just as well hang on to it.

Suzanne thinks it is worth a lot as she sits and smells her fingers and has to look up and shed a tear, which the others ignore. They also smile quietly to themselves when she squabbles with her cack-handed son, town boy Fredrik, who is no good at anything and has to have explained to him what a fish is, and a boat, a sea and an eider duck, subjects which even then don’t interest him in the slightest. He keeps asking if they can do things the others have never heard of, and shudders, shamelessly, theatrically, when his mother tells him he has to gut the day’s catch, which is just being landed by the Skarsvåg brothers, she scolds them for not having done it at sea. Grinning broadly, they ignore her.

They throw the catch into the basket and winch it up onto the quay, it is no small catch, and they climb up the ladder and stand admiring Fredrik’s pathetic attempts with a knife, helped on his way by his mother’s exasperated instructions. Ingrid tells her that he is as useless as Suzanne’s brother was when they arrived here, our Felix, but tha can’t mind it, eh?

No, Suzanne can’t.

“No, hvur could tha?” Ingrid laughs. “Tha was three an’ tha couldn’t e’en walk.”

“I can’t remember that, either,” Suzannne says, poking a finger in Helmer’s chest and telling him that from now on it is his job to train her son.