He lifts one of the hatches above the hold and is assisted by Magnus – who has come down onto the deck – when he lifts the second. Ingrid hears them discussing which crane to use, and a snatch of laughter. Magnus starts up the engine and yet another woman and boy emerge from the cabin, she is wearing a red skirt and a thick wadmal jacket with an even redder folded woollen collar, she, too, has a headscarf. The two women look around. The one in black interferes in something Magnus is doing with the winch, she watches as a bureau appears unscathed through the hatch and is left dangling by the strap, which Lars hoists up to the winch boom before swinging it over to the quay, and Suzanne yells:

“Hvor’s he fishen’?!”

Lars says, th’ Thor Iversen Bank, without taking his eyes off the bureau, which slowly descends and lands at Ingrid’s feet and stands there in all its glory, on a par with the dresser her father once bought when he had lost his senses, she realises they have come to stay.

She loosens the straps and pulls them from under the piece of furniture so that they can be lifted by the hook that Lars lowers back down into the hold, whence an impressive assortment of trunks, sacks, beds, mattresses, chairs and tables are calmly and ceremoniously winched up and deposited on the stone quay as the future furnishing for two parlours, six bedrooms and two kitchens, a rain shower sweeps over, and the woman in black, who has now stepped ashore, throws a set of oilskins over the bureau and introduces herself as Hanna, curtsies and says she is married to Felix.

Ingrid discovers that she, like the women from Finnmark, has an invisible baby under her clothing, a boy of only one month, Felix’s and her third child, Oskar. Suzanne puts a finger in his mouth and realises that the two twin girls are also Felix’s, her nieces. She kneels down, helps them up onto the quay and compliments them, in city language, on their nice clothes and the curls in their hair, and shakes their hands and asks them what their names are and tells them her own name and calls Fredrik, who, unperturbed, is walking back down to the shore for two buckets of seawater, they need brine for at least three more barrels.

Hanna resembles one of Ingrid’s aunts, who stayed with them once during a crisis, a solemn and deeply religious person, it is written all over her, a strong woman who nonetheless will not be able to survive on her own when the men in her life are gone, Ingrid can see this, and she finds it comforting.

They are told that Felix will be coming on Barrøy II some time before Christmas, shortly after the New Year the men have to go back to Lofoten for the new season.