She stripped down to her waist, showed him her back and asked what he thought of the scars. He said they seemed to be healing well. She changed the water, told him about Nelvy and those long, slender fingers of hers and then began to talk about water too, as though driven by some elevated form of purification, a ritual that had to be repeated in order to have any effect, while he sat swathed in a blanket in the rocking chair and asked his question once again:

“Why are you doing this?”

“I have to.”

She pulled him upstairs to the South Chamber and lay with him without a word, apart from repeating the answer to his question, and she thought that his asking no fewer than three times made him a better person.

After he had fallen asleep, she got up, went down to the kitchen and washed, yet again, now without a thought in her head, climbed the stairs to the North Chamber, lay in the cold bed, fell asleep and didn’t wake until the night had passed and a new winter’s day was pressing hard against the white windowpanes. By then the Salthammer had left Barrøy. Ingrid wondered where Koshka the cat was, and realised that the eagle must have taken her, at least that was a bearable thought. Then she fell asleep again.

III

1

In the late summer when Ingrid Barrøy turned ten, her father took the whole family with him to Nesholmen to buy hay. Nesholmen was so close to the mainland that it didn’t seem like an island. They sounded as if they were going on holiday, her mother called it a picnic and had to explain to them what that meant, it was a red-letter day in a calendar with only black ones.

“But hvor will thar bi room f’r th’ hay?”

“We’ll teik two boats.”

It had been the wettest summer in living memory. But at the end of August such a ferocious heatwave descended over land and sea that minds were sapped and everyone’s eyes swam. A sweltering haze hung over the loam-black fields, the birds were silent, the countryside heaved inaudible groans and the sea shone like a newly varnished floor.

Ingrid’s mother babbled excitedly and packed her father’s Lofoten chest with food and milk and rainwear they hoped wouldn’t be needed. They climbed into the færing and towed the rowing boat and took turns at the oars, stood up and rocked the craft from side to side, laughed and fooled around, in the hours it took to reach Nesholmen, where Hans Barrøy haggled for some of last year’s hay with an elderly couple who no longer kept livestock but still mowed their meadows.

The old man asks if they want some coffee.