They fell asleep and lay at each other’s side the whole of the next day, and the night thereafter, listening to the weather and getting up to eat and play with the cat; the storm forced them to shout, even those things which should only have been whispered.

After the storm abated she asked if he could repair a clock.

He said yes and asked if she had any tools.

She said she had already shown them to him, didn’t he remember?

He looked at her questioningly.

She repeated “tools” and explained where they were. He nodded energetically and laughed, wrapped the eiderdown around him, went down and didn’t reappear.

So Ingrid also got up and went downstairs to see what he was doing. He was standing naked in the kitchen with the eiderdown around his feet and hanging the clock on a nail in the west wall, he pulled the weights on each chain to wind the clock and stood still until they could hear the ticking above the wind, which was now subsiding. The hands showed a quarter to nine, but it was night. He turned and seemed to be asking what time he should set it to. Ingrid said to leave it as it was. Then they went upstairs again, and no-one came.

10

There are many ways to row a boat, and he didn’t know any of them. He flailed irritably with the oars in the tholepins and wrestled with the wrist straps while Ingrid sat on a sheepskin in the stern laughing at him. She explained things to him and pointed out skerries and islands only just visible in the darkness. He tried to do better and wanted praise, like a child, and she gave him praise, thinking he was a child, and that he was getting more and more handsome by the day, and that it was unbearable.

She told him to row over the sound in the direction of Gjesøya, then south on the seaward side, where the swell was becoming increasingly heavy. His fingers were too short and he thrashed the oars against the breakers. They changed places and Ingrid took them around the island and into a gap in the rock face, where there was a natural harbour, moored the boat to a driftwood log and said there was something she wanted to show him.

They waded up through squeaking, snow-covered seaweed into the hollow, where the Barrøyers had once broken new ground and came to a haybarn they called the pavilion. Ingrid opened the door and told him to go in. They sat on some old, dusty hay listening to the sea. She said the weather would calm down before long, and sooner or later someone would be coming to Barrøy, so this would be his hideaway, words he understood, this is a different island, she said, they will have dogs with them, and he understood that, too.

They listened to the sea.