She drags him outside. The others follow them over the hill and down to Karvika, including Barbro, still chuckling. Helmer points down at the sea beyond the jutting rock which will form one of the moles sheltering the new quay. Fredrik looks up at his mother imploringly. But the sun is shining and there is no mercy. He edges his way down through the belt of seaweed, but has got no more than his ankles under water before he wails that it’s cold, cold . . .

Arne takes some deep breaths and looks at Ingrid. She nods. He kicks off his boots and strips down to the waist, brushes Fredrik aside, dives in and is gone for a long time.

They see him below the green water, like a flapping, white bird, until he disappears completely. Then he emerges again, with the hammer but without the bolts, scrambles up onto the barnacled rock and he cannot speak, his lips are blue, as he stands amid the tangled seaweed shivering, and is all muscle and sinew, a perfect da Vinci anatomical drawing, like the one that hangs in every single schoolroom along the coast. Ingrid has brought along a blanket and drapes it over him, telling him to take off his pants and his brothers to pummel him.

It turns into a game and a brawl, with them all trading punches, until Arne gets back his voice and can tell them to go to hell. They watch as he dries his body, naked beneath the blanket. Then they follow him up the hill again, like in a procession, along the path the boys have trodden in Karvika, where others very rarely go, even now, it is hard for them to get used to the idea, but they are changing, beginning to accept the idea that one day some good can come even of a curse, and none of them fails to hear Suzanne calling her son an idiot.

Ingrid stops and looks at her. Suzanne looks down and says:

I know, I know.

She carries on walking, with the boy in tow. Everyone also hears the next thing she says: “Cretin.”

But they don’t know what it means.

~

That same evening Arne comes to see Ingrid, who is tending the lambs in the southernmost garden, and he says there is a boat on the seabed in Karvika.

She looks at him. Then she asks him why he is telling her this now, and when they are alone. He shrugs.

“Tha’s got kien eyes,” she says.

Arne says yes, there is nothing wrong with what is left of his eyesight, he found the hammer, but not the bolts. Ingrid says that doesn’t matter, he should sit in the grass while she remains standing, in case somebody sees them from the houses.

He does as she says.