She closes the closet door and stands motionless, pondering. Then she walks into the next room, lifts objects and weighs them in her hand, a chamber pot, a dish, a picture of a lamb, she fingers an embroidered tablecloth, pulls out a drawer and pushes it in again, so gently that it hardly seems to move. She stares out through the window until everything turns to water, then goes down to the larder and removes three jars of preserves which have cracked in the frost, separates the glass from the berries and throws the fruit away, carries out the broken glass and knows where to bury it until the spring, she goes into the cowshed and sits on the steps where she once saw some drops of water without understanding what this meant.

A boat with two men, and their laughter.

The boat was a dory and the men were Lensmann Henriksen and Leutnant Hargel: Henriksen struggled shakily to his feet and threw out the mooring rope, but not far enough, Hargel’s raucous jeers; Ingrid waded out and pulled them onto the skids, Henriksen fell forwards with a thump; she saw him fall and heard him curse, a body hitting the forepeak of the boat, more hollow laughter, distant, and then in the house . . .

They had returned to check up on something, they had come to interrogate her, because of a suspicion, they had come to beat the truth out of her, if necessary, and to do something else, which she can’t remember.

~

She gets up from the cowshed steps, goes inside the house for some more clothes, puts out the boat and rows on the seaward side of Moltholmen and does something while nothing is happening inside herself and she has to start to pin her hopes on the admonishing letter she wrote to Suzanne having its desired effect, the letter she ought to have sent to Lars, for she cannot be alone, less so now than ever before – the fishing line glides over the bow roller and disappears into the sea, re-emerges at the next tug, and a shower of spray falls over mittens and thwart and rail, but it doesn’t turn to ice.

She stares intently at the drops of water. And realises she hasn’t got warm from the work, but because the wind has turned, and it did so a long time ago, as the snow was already wet when she walked down to the boat shed, and in the south there is a column-shaped cloud rising to the sky.

She rows back at top speed and puts the boat out of harm’s way, boards up the shed, carries her catch to the house, guts and cleans the fish in the kitchen, sees to the liver and roe, cooks some food and eats until the crashing of the storm becomes unbearable.