Chapter One
The Last Three Houses
The ferry put Agnes Lie ashore at Vesterlid on the ninth of November, at the hour the north calls afternoon and the light calls a closing door, and the first thing she noticed, before her cases were off the deck, was that the ferryman had stopped talking.
He had talked the whole crossing, Einar Berg, sixty one, weather brown, in the easy professional stream of small boat men everywhere: the fjord's moods, the mail contract, the price of diesel, her own business gently extracted and turned over. A folklorist, from Bergen, for the hushing. He had nodded at that the way men nod at a doctor come to a patient they love. And then, as the village opened out of the grey, its dozen painted houses along the shore under the enormous dark shoulder of the mountain, its harbour light already burning, Einar Berg had glanced once at the water, once at the sky's failing seam of pale, and closed his mouth, and finished the docking, every line and fender of it, without one further word, in the fluent silence of a man playing an instrument he had learned before walking.
On the quay, in the last usable light, he wrote in a small notebook and showed her the page. The handwriting was round and unembarrassed, the handwriting of a man who did a great deal of his winter living in it.
