Ingrid got to her feet and placed her suitcase and cake tin in the net that was still lying on the quay, stepped into the net beside them, lifted the lugs and, to Erik Falc’s resigned, inaudible protests, looped them over the winch hook and called to the skipper to lower her onto the deck.

He shouted back, was she serious?

She shouted yes.

He smiled, grasped the levers and Erik watched the net close around his cured patient, who put her fingers through the top meshing, pulled the two sides together and was lifted like cargo, swung over the boat and slowly lowered to the deck to the cheers of the crowd of children who thronged around her and helped her out of the net – and Ingrid remembered she had left her sketch pad in the hideaway behind the closet wall in the South Chamber, under the eiderdown and rug, and that she was alone when she did so.

She also remembered something else: standing on a quay like this as a child and seeing her father arrive in her uncle’s boat, him standing on the deck and smiling up at her, stretching out his arms and saying – nu tha’s got t’ hopp. She was three, four, five . . . it was three metres down, and she always jumped and he caught her, always.

~

Her fingers were numb with the cold. She brushed snow off her jacket and asked the skipper if he had any mittens. He had a think, went to the wheelhouse, lowered a window and threw out two coarse woollen mittens, heavy and felted, stiff with fish blood and guts, but warm and dry. She put them on and raised one of them, waved to Erik Falc, who was on the quay looking down at her with the expression she had woken up to so many times since she began to confide in him as with no other person, but no-one is perfect.

Erik Falc managed to raise his left glove to hip height and almost wave back, stared out across the agitated waters at the yawning gap between the moles at the opposite end of the harbour, placed his other gloved hand on his hat, turned and disappeared into the whirling snow that was falling like icing sugar on the boat and its passengers, while the skipper bellowed at the boys who had pulled in the mooring ropes, not to leave them in a pile on the deck, but coil them up tidily, he was bloody sick of telling them, you’d never believe they’d been to sea, the horse pizzles.

6