She tells him what type of boat it is, where it came from and what it was carrying, and she can tell him everything without her eyes flickering, as in happy moments at the hospital, or when she told Barbro, and the only important thing she omits is the love, which is not her word anyway but the doctor’s, and she ends up saying that Arne shouldn’t tell anyone else, it has nothing to do with them.

He nods and looks as though he knows she is holding something back, but that he is still content to be initiated into half a secret. But then his eye tells her he is wondering whether the time is ripe to ask her whether she has ever been married, or has a husband, her belly is large now, as if that had anything to do with the boat at the bottom of the sea in Karvika, so Ingrid turns and walks up towards the houses.

11

Something happened to the island as Arne rose like a faun out of the ice-cold sea, a ticking in a much vaster clock than the one which is still confused on the wall in the house: the last snow falls, lands on green shoots and is gone in minutes, tarred boats lie with their bellies in the air and have to be shielded from the sun by tarpaulins, spring is no longer evasive and furtive, it grabs them by the scruff of the neck, it is upon them, like a summer.

The main structure of one wall is finished, the potato field has been tilled with the new plough, drawn by Arne and Barbro, while the others sow the seed for the autumn harvest, bent backs over steaming, brown soil, and there is food and coffee outdoors.

Fredrik does his best, which still isn’t good enough, Ingrid looks after the eider ducks and sheep, casts a worried eye over the stockfish for worms and Armageddon, and Suzanne isn’t averse to flirting with Arne; she asks him why he has only one eye, is it so he can see her better, in her new dress, and shouldn’t she cut his long hair, he looks like a girl.

Ingrid, who is more restrained, has to walk away, but only as far as her vantage point on the hill overlooking the bay so that she can follow the conversation, Arne on the ladder propped against another wall, Suzanne on the ground, shouting up to him in the sunshine, and for the first time Ingrid sees a smile on the face of the eldest Skarsvåg brother, who says he will be seventeen next week; he has finally told her when their birthdays are, Ingrid considers these dates important, everyone is entitled to a birthday, she has marked them on her calendar. Suzanne has just turned twenty-two, and Fredrik will soon be seven, but according to his mother he can already read.