She asked what he was going to do with it.

“It’s good quality,” he said, as he cleared away everything they had set up, spread out the net over the floor, three layers of it, put back the skins and rugs and returned Ingrid’s suitcase and cake tin to the position they had been in before.

Ingrid said thank you, but it was rugs they needed, and skins.

Magnus arrived carrying two dirty coffee mugs, gave one to Anja and the other to Ingrid, cast his eye around the bait house and looked as though he was planning to repeat what he had said about it being like a boudoir, then shook his head, raced along the deck and shouted something down to the engine room.

His nephew, Ole, and three youths came up and stood alongside the ship’s rail as if before a priest. The blacksmith laughed at the sight of so much soot and oil, wished them a safe journey and went ashore again.

Ingrid noticed that the oldest, a lad of maybe sixteen, was staring out to sea with his left eye, which was red. She realised he was blind in this eye and asked how it had happened. He lowered his right eye and said they were from Hammerfest, Skarsvåg to be precise, as if that were explanation enough; the other two, Sverre and Helmer, were his brothers. Ingrid repeated the question, and he said something about a red ember when the town went up in flames, his parents were dead.

She asked what his name was.

“Arne.”

Arne was tall and lanky, with broad, bony shoulders, which projected forwards like a yoke; his tar-brown hair was greasy and as long as a girl’s, and some green matter was running from his left nostril. Ingrid presumed his state had something to do with the same fire and asked him whether he had been to see a doctor. He said no and looked down at the deck with his living eye and at her with the dead one. She made a spontaneous movement, as if to get him to rediscover her presence, nodded at a kitbag and an oil-stained cloth bundle on the deck between them and asked whether that was all they had?

“Yes.”

She said they could sleep between the others and the bait-house door, and exchanged glances with Anja, who put her coffee mug down on the ship’s rail and rushed inside and began to arrange the children on the reindeer skins as if to lay claim to them.