He glanced at the children, as if to count them, and was gone again. Anja sent Ingrid another searching look. Ingrid said everything would be fine, closed her eyes and buried her nose in Sara’s hair, it smelled sweet and rancid, clasped her even more tightly and heard Anja repeat to Mikkel that everything would be fine. And then all that was left was the sounds, the engine and a distant, slow rocking – and Ingrid, who couldn’t go home.

7

On Arnøy there was a school with two classrooms, an office for the teacher and a kitchen that was so small it was more like a recess. There was a chapel, five places where they processed fish, a ring of fishermen’s shacks and boat sheds in addition to a number of small farms around a sheltered harbour, where the whole fleet was moored, with thick snow on the rails and wheelhouse roofs, and moustaches of green ice at the waterline.

Ingrid lay with Anja and the children in the school office, the first night on the floor, the next on the reindeer skins, now dry, both nights under blankets, they weren’t cold and slept late into the morning.

It wasn’t the first time the Salthammer had been here, the locals came with firewood and food, they were able to have a bath, and as the weather wasn’t improving, they were also allowed to scrub their clothes in a wash-house next to the biggest fish-processing plant. Two elderly women turned up with a wheelbarrow full of old clothes, woollen slipper socks, nappies and twenty balls of grey yarn, and they wanted nothing for them. They were also given some talcum powder for Ante. And knitting needles. Ingrid taught Sara how to knit while Ellen watched. Anja’s weeping had subsided into something more like regular sniffles and she said she hadn’t been able to watch when her husband left the boat, had Ingrid seen what happened?

“Yes,” Ingrid said. “He’s alright now.”

She counted the stitches and explained what she was doing, while Anja muttered on about the plague of lice and the insect spray and the rough treatment they had received in Risøyhamn, she was a Laestadian and considered having lice as shameful. Ingrid didn’t know what a Laestadian was and said it was good they had got rid of the creatures.

Anja said:

“But we didn’t have any lice. That was the whole point.”

Ingrid talked to Sara about the knitting, praised her, put on her coat and told Mikkel to go with her to fetch some wood, she needed some air, some wind. They walked down the road to a boat shed where a load of cleft birch logs was stacked against the wall on the sheltered side and here they ran into Magnus, who was rested and half-drunk, and repeated what he had already said twice: