On Stangholmen she buys Thomas and Inga’s two remaining sheep, as well as the four lambs they have just given birth to, together with two rolls of wire for the racks and their plough, which is almost new. She tells them they should spend all their money at once. Thomas says he knows, he has seen the scale of Margot’s stockroom too; his son, Atle, will soon be coming to fetch them, so they can spend the rest of their lives somewhere on the mainland Ingrid has never heard of, so it is good that he has the opportunity to shake her hand before they leave.

Ingrid shakes Inga’s hand, too.

Sverre rows back home while Ingrid, her ears still ringing, wonders whether to strip off all her clothes and stand up in the boat in the middle of the gleaming sea, it is a sledgehammer of an idea, for, as she waves goodbye to the elderly couple for the last time, she realises that her Russian is also dead, Alexander, the young engineer from Leningrad, he has been killed, and she will never see him again.

One ewe is startled by her cry and is about to jump into the sea, but Ingrid grabs it by the forelock and holds its head in her arms and does not shrink from mumbling words she is ashamed of. Sverre turns a deaf ear and carries on rowing. Safely home, Ingrid wonders how she has been able to get through yet another day.

When the brothers return, she examines the catch, listens to Arne, who needs four new nets, tells them they should ask Barbro to get them ready, she has plenty of nets, and asks them to row to Stangholmen when they have finished gutting the fish, to fetch the plough that she and Sverre had no room for. After that she goes back to the house, and lies down, her ears still ringing, and dreams about things that are bearable, all manner of things, and about a perplexed smile on a face she thinks she recognises, but it is not always the same face, it fades and reappears, and her sleep is no longer a refuge.

Nevertheless, she doesn’t get up.

She wastes away in bed, unable to sleep, until one morning a figure she doesn’t recognise is sitting on the edge of her bed, it is Suzanne, and the sun’s rays on the window bars in the north-east are so golden it must be evening, unless it is the morning and she is at the wrong end of the house, she sits up and looks around.

~

Suzanne is young and strikingly beautiful, although it is hard to put your finger on what it is that constitutes her beauty, or say anything meaningful about why she catches the eye, she just always has done. Now she looks tired and worried, has unnatural hemp-coloured curls in her shiny hair, lipstick on her lips and on one of her front teeth, which is slightly protruding, and she is wearing a white dress with embroidered yellow flowers and small, green sprigs of conifer, Ingrid smiles at her.