But she doesn’t laugh often this spring, and never out loud, because in the person of Nelvy they have taken a quiet, enigmatic creature into their home. She stays there not only for the first week – she is silent and hard to fathom, even though she holds Ingrid’s hand and answers no when asked whether she misses Gunvor. She stays on the island because Ingrid cannot bring herself to send her back to the rectory when school starts again, for the same inexplicable reasons that made her bring her to Barrøy.

Nelvy’s hair grows and is thick and attractive. Ingrid washes and combs and twists it into small plaits. She no longer wears a hat, but a headscarf. Her lips are dainty and her teeth white and nicely regular, and she has two blue lumps on the sides of her nose that become more pronounced with every day that passes, even though Ingrid does her best to ignore them.

Barbro says there is something strange about the girl.

Ingrid says she is as she is; to herself she says she is exactly like me, can’t you see that, you daft thing?

They set the hands of the repaired wall-clock at random, to three, for example, and read Ingrid’s old school books until it is four o’clock; they practise writing the alphabet until it is five, and draw shells, which Ingrid says are the finest on the island; they collect them, too, although, strangely, they have no value at all, indeed there is hardly anything on the island that has less value, even Nelvy thinks this is weird.

She eats a little less than they would like her to, but says she loves Barbro’s cooking, she repairs the eider houses with Ingrid and helps to split and tail-tie the fish the Finnmark boys bring ashore and gut and hang. But she is best at it when someone helps her. And although she is making progress with numbers, letters and words, Ingrid feels she reacts to too many questions – such as does she remember her parents or anything of the journey from Kirkenes to Hammerfest? – by wanting to go and lie down, even though it might be the middle of the day. And Ingrid regards it as a form of laziness, which doesn’t make her angry but weary, at a time when there is no room for more weariness, for although Ingrid can endure more and more of what is still coming back to her, she has now received a letter from Eva Sofie. It informs her that her clothes were intact when she arrived, as far as she can recall, who can recall that sort of thing, and this is not the definitive answer that Ingrid had been hoping for, while the blue lumps around Nelvy’s nose are becoming more and more prominent as the spring fails to appear.

~