She got to her feet, pulled out the peat scuttle and began to tear the newspapers into strips, crumpled them into small balls and made a pile on the floor, like a snow lantern. It collapsed. She stacked them again, the newspaper was one she used to get in the days when Barrøy was a community, with people and animals and a lighthouse, with storms and doughtiness, with work, a summer and winter and prosperity, she laid some kindling and bits of peat around the balls of paper to make a fire, an idea no-one had had before, burning down a house on an island; there were some ruins on the eastern side of Barrøy, but no scorched ground, and suddenly there was no doubt anymore, those who had left Karvika had done so of their own free will, not because of any disaster, they had quite simply got sick of it, had looked at themselves in the mirror, packed their things and gone, it was an unbearable thought.

She grabbed a lamp and went up to the North Chamber, then into the South Chamber, poked her head into Barbro’s room on the eastern side of the house, went into her own childhood room with a pull-out bed and a potty and a bedside table and faded school drawings, which she hadn’t seen since she was here picking potatoes in September; the house had shrunk, the doors were lower, the windows narrower; the smell of its inhabitants had once stuck to these walls like paint, now all that was left was the odour of wet, heavy earth, she ran a fingertip through the beads of condensation and sat on her parents’ bed where her mother had died.

“Let Lars take over Barrøy,” was the last thing she had said. “And leave this place, you’re young and bright, turn your back on the sea, heed my words . . .”

Ingrid said no.

“You’re not strong enough.”

“Yes, I am,” Ingrid said to her dying mother.

The following spring Lars did not return from Lofoten, he had found love, he wrote, and stayed there with the boat and the crew and the tackle, year after year, even when war broke out. And Ingrid and Barbro became lonelier and lonelier with every sun that rose and every storm that abated, with every animal they slaughtered and every sack of down they gathered and failed to sell, a young woman and a middle-aged woman on an island, waiting for letters from Lars, neat, regular ramblings, which one day were also furnished with some green scribbles, the signature of Lars’ three-year-old son, Hans, the longest three years of Ingrid’s life. Now the war had lasted for four, and Hans had a brother, Martin; with him came more scribbles, to an aunt and a grandmother who didn’t write back because one of them was too proud and the other couldn’t.

~