She turns her back on him and takes a few steps, looks round and says he can come to her in the North Chamber tonight, but doesn’t bother to find out whether he has understood. She calls to Fredrik, walks with him up to the house and tells Barbro it was good they wrote the letter to Felix, let’s hope he can persuade Lars, goodness gracious, and slaps Suzanne round the face. What’s that for, she asks, but looks as though she feels it might be deserved. Ingrid takes a pail of water with her and goes upstairs without eating and washes and lies down with the same trembling in her body as in the winter, the same freezing sensation, but not with the same warmth.

~

Arne sneaks barefoot up the stairs to her room, when the light is at its darkest and everyone is asleep. She tells him to be careful and stand behind her so that the baby won’t be harmed. He is ardent and rough, and it doesn’t take long. She says he can’t sleep there, not in this room, but she hopes he and his brothers will stay until the season is over, until they have finished all the work on the islands. He says something, but she doesn’t hear what, it sounds like sniffling, and she doesn’t investigate. He puts his hands around her belly, they are hot and hard, like a cracked shell around a colossal egg. After he has gone, as noiselessly as he came, she misses his hands, but falls asleep in no time and does not dream.

14

There is no normal haymaking this summer, the earth has lain fallow for the two years that have passed since Barbro and Ingrid last did the mowing – and only very superficially at that, compared with the years before – when they were also alone and trying to maintain the tradition from the time the men were there, using hired labourers from Havstein who were not driven by the same dedication.

The mowing machine now stands idle and rusting between the stone walls, and the scythe keeps getting caught in the clumps of old grass, so they curse more than they mow, and have to cut the grass at mid-calf height. Ingrid can’t bear to watch and goes so far as to sell eider down at a time of the year when down shouldn’t be sold, it is a breach of tradition, but she can’t touch the priest’s money, for she doesn’t fully understand its origins.