Ingrid asked whether they shouldn’t just forget about the liver, fry the fish in margarine, now Barbro was home again with her coupons and they had double rations, they could celebrate, couldn’t they?

Barbro said she wanted liver, she hadn’t had any for years and a day, and they should eat off the porcelain plates and drink redcurrant juice.

Ingrid said there wasn’t any more redcurrant juice.

Barbro said that wasn’t possible with all the juicing and preserving they had done in the summer.

Ingrid said the jars had burst in the frost while she was away.

Barbro asked where she had been.

Ingrid said she had been working at the trading post.

Barbro turned to face her and asked if there had been anyone on the island all the autumn. Ingrid said no and knew that her sketch pad had not only come to light, to her suffocating relief, but had brought along with it the onset of a new darkness.

She went outside and stared up at the falling rain.

On her return, she saw her aunt had set the table.

Ingrid dried herself, and they ate in silence, apart from Barbro praising the food and singing both before and after the meal. Ingrid did not comment on her singing.

Then they wrapped up, went out and fetched a spike and a rope tied to an iron ring, led the sheep into the nearest garden, hammered the spike into the ground and placed the ring over it, watched until the animal began to nibble at the brown blades of grass. Then they walked home.

They did some housework, went down again and moved the spike. Barbro said it wasn’t necessary to have the sheep tethered, there was nowhere for it to go.

Ingrid said now at least it wouldn’t jump into the sea.

They laughed at that.

When night fell they went and led it back to the barn and gave it a tuft of dry hay. This was the most important sheep they had ever had; had it not been a sheep they would have kept it in the house.

4

In February the sea is turquoise and the islands are as white as mountaintops. But they have dark edges. The sky is as hard as ice, and Ingrid doesn’t row over to the village, she heads for Stangholmen instead, where old Thomas sells her all the hay she wants. She sits at the side of his wife, Inga, who is bedridden, talking island language and drinking coffee substitute.