The Last Boat Home Read Online Free PDF Page B

her daring. Else tensed against the fingers squeezing her muscle. The curve of her father’s wedding ring pressed the flesh through her skirt. In his urgency to scold her, he stretched across her mother, wholeaned back to make room for him. His cheeks were flushed and his jaw worked to contain his displeasure.
    ‘Submit yourselves to the will of the Lord,’ said Pastor Seip. ‘Serve Him. Fear Him. Enter not into temptation, for temptation is the Devil’s summons.’
    Else sat on her hands for the rest of the sermon. She dropped her eyes to the floorboards between her shoes and traced the grain of the wood long after her father had let her go.
    When the service was over and the members of the congregation had advanced down the aisle to receive the minister’s blessing, they gathered outside between the church doors and the gate, eager to exchange news of the week gone by. The sun was high above them, warming the crowns of their heads and toasting the lawn and the neatly sown graves. Else tailed her parents down the steps as her mother greeted their neighbours. She knew each face; week in, week out, they never changed.
    Dagny met Karin Reiersen and Solveig Haugeli in the shade, while Johann wandered down the path to a huddle of fishermen on the grass. Else stayed with her mother, nodding politely when she judged it appropriate and biding her time until she would be able to slip away.
    ‘Hasn’t the weather been mild?’ Solveig said. ‘Do you know, yesterday afternoon Ole picked half a litre of blueberries behind the Aaby farm. Half a litre, this late in the season! They were a little bloated, but still good.’
    ‘What did you make of the sermon?’ asked Karin.
    ‘It was very strong today,’ Dagny said.
    ‘But did you see Øystein Stormo?’ said Solveig. ‘Sitting straight as a flagpole next to poor Astrid. With all of that man’s carrying on, I don’t think he even flinched.’
    While Solveig shook her head, Dagny frowned over her shoulder at Else, who excused herself and melted into the crowd.She aimed for the outer ring of graves but walked the long way around so as to avoid the horse chestnut tree, where Lars whispered with Rune and Petter. As she wove through the parishioners she picked up scraps of conversation, much of it carried over from the previous week. There had been more reports in the papers about tankers put out of commission by rising oil prices and the reopening of the Suez Canal. Unwanted ships were dropping anchor in fjords and bays along the coast not far from here. Then there was the usual talk about the North Sea oilrigs.
    ‘We’ll be like the Arabs,’ said Atle Aaby, who grinned when Esben Omland predicted that oil would make them rich. Esben was fixing to send his application in to Phillips. With the oil companies setting up offices in Stavanger, there would be worse places to raise a family.
    The collective thrum of chatter followed Else to the relative peace at the rear of the church, where fallen leaves crackled under the soles of her shoes. She read the epitaphs chiselled into slabs of granite. To her left, a mound of earth marked a recent grave. Eva Bruskeland had been buried between her husband and the Tenvik children, whose two tiny plots were trimmed with autumn daisies. Both children had died before Else was born, though her mother had told her their stories several times. The first, a baby girl, had gone to sleep one night not long before Christmas and never again opened her eyes. The boy had pulled a pot of boiling water from the stove over his young body. A week later, he breathed his last in a hospital bed.
    Else strolled to the cross at the centre of the Second World War plot and read off the names that had been cut into the marble. Gregor Sundt. Carl Hansen. Per Henrik Wiig. She stopped at the headstone that had been raised ‘by grateful friends’ for an English soldier, studying the dedication until Lars was in front of her.
    ‘That was one hell of a sermon,’ he