She got up again, dressed, walked around the island in a snow shower and found nothing and went home again, intending to make some coffee. She stumbled on the even floor, got to her feet again and slumped into the rocking chair, fell asleep and dreamed of a pine cone she had drawn at school as a child. She woke up, feeling refreshed, her skin twitching as if someone had blown on her, went up to the loft and got out her old sketch pad and crayons, remembering the teacher who had once, with a triumphant expression, placed a huge pine cone on the desk and told the children to draw it, a gigantic seed vessel, the like of which none of them had ever seen. Ingrid’s cone came to resemble the shell of a snail, which the teacher laughed at. But then all of the children’s cones resembled snail shells, conches or seashells, to a greater or lesser degree, and Ingrid went up to bed determined to have him write something before he left her – for he would be leaving, he had to, that was the whole point – whether she could read what he wrote or not, one day she would understand.

11

They were at that time of the year when everything living dies, when man and beast shrink into themselves and become even smaller than they already are, when nature is void of any sound but the sea, and no prayer has the power to arouse anything at all.

Ingrid had taken the tattered clothes down from the drying rack and piled them on the fish crates in the boat shed, and now she found herself holding another handful of wood shavings, the difference between frostbite and warmth, summer and winter, life and death, when she heard the throb of an engine, which wasn’t her own heart, and she fell into an inner calm that she thought had abandoned her for good.

She went up to the house, tousled her hair, smeared fresh soot on her face, pulled an extra scarf over her head and went out with the peat bin and watched as the trading post’s old cargo boat rounded the headland and came alongside the new quay.

She let go of the peat bin and walked calmly down, her eyes scanning the snow for tracks, she found none, continued to the water’s edge and saw the boiled-egg officer standing at the rail looking up at her. The skipper threw the mooring ropes ashore. Ingrid slipped the loops over the bollards. Behind the officer stood four uniformed soldiers, and behind them the local lensmann, Police Chief Henriksen, who hadn’t been much of a man before the war and whose participation in it hadn’t made him any more of one, no dogs though.