A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. She writes radio plays and edits a magazine on the same subject. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.

You can be aware of your capacity for love before you meet your beloved. Sense your potential for passion before you experience passion itself. You can know it as a child, as a latent possibility: I am able to love deeply. Even if you never meet him, you still comprehend something about love. The spirit sleeps in stones, it slumbers in plants. It awakens in animals, she is about to become an animal.

His letter arrives three days after her thank-you note. Four handwritten pages on German drama, about his work as a translator, about this and that, about the sun that sets in the fjord while he sits on the terrace with a glass of wine as he writes. His wife is away. Kjersti is away, he writes. She replies, not as lengthy a reply as his. He is older than her, a well-established academic. He critiques contemporary drama. She writes it, she has only just begun. She is a little intimidated by him. She writes that. She mentions the age gap. She doesn’t enter into a discussion about Goethe and Schopenhauer.

He saved her. It is true though he doesn’t know it and she is grateful for that. He led her into the world, into the daylight. Coffee in the morning and a child who needs looking after. Grounded her. So she survived. She said yes to him in order to survive. Because he smiles, is easy-going, doesn’t ask questions. Because he doesn’t grow, he is nailed too solidly together for that. He chews and the inside of her brain creaks. His voice on the phone makes her brain ache: Oh, that’s nice! Long time no see. Great. Absolutely. Excellent!

He writes in a measured letter to Ida that he doesn’t have to explain himself to her. Yes, I went to a party and no, I didn’t go home alone, he writes so she can really imagine it for herself. Besides, my student is a grown-up, he writes, she is thirty-four years old. It is not what Ida thinks. Ida has been invited to a seminar on alternative theatre in Trondheim. It must have been advertised in Adresseavisen, the Trondheim newspaper, or he might have seen the leaflet, which says that she will be on the panel, because he concludes his letter with: I see you’re coming to Trondheim. I will be in Bergen and Kjersti in Stavanger. Fuck you, Arnold. As if she would contact him against his will. Intrude on him. Or his wife. Track down his wife and tell her about his infidelity. Break up the happy family. Take revenge, be the homewrecker. As if she would be that stupid. As if she thinks she can win that way. As if she has no self-respect, as if she doesn’t think she can be loved without begging and threatening.

She runs to her own room and she never sees him again, besides, he is married as most of them are. Ida, that’s enough! Ida, you have to stop now! Where is your self-respect, Ida? You have to do something, take action. Who am I, we ask ourselves, if you respond timidly, you will have a different life to the person who responds to that question with courage. Who are you, Ida? It is time to choose.

‘You’ve taken everything from me,’ her husband says to her.

The aftermath, the shame and the fear, it is degrading.

Choose him again, Ida. It’s the only option. Or go.

Say yes to him again and stay with him. Or go.

She doesn’t love him, and now she knows what love is.

So she has to go.

He is being honest, she realises, and she can handle his fear of the deep, she can work with it. But in the same letter he writes something else, an issue she has suspected in him, but hoped wasn’t there, something she might not be able to live with. Uptown girl meets underdog, he writes. Uptown girl, that’s her, Ida. The underdog, that’s him, Arnold Bush, a senior university lecturer. He doesn’t know enough about her yet, that is the problem. He is guessing. He is speculating. He can sense her strength, the one she is slowly discovering. The fearlessness, the independence she doesn’t yet have, but is in the process of developing, he can sense it and he may not be able to handle it, if he can’t be the teacher, what is he?

‘Why do you need me?’ he asks her, much later.

‘I don’t need you,’ she says. ‘I love you.’

If she has ever felt anything remotely like it, it was one time in Copenhagen. She had gone there so as not to be at home when her first play was broadcast on the radio, so as not to read the reviews the following day, she had gone to visit a friend of her husband’s in Copenhagen. And because she was staying with her husband’s friend, she couldn’t flirt with men when she went out in the evenings. But one night in a bar she found herself standing next to a woman and this woman suddenly touched her arm and Ida let her touch her arm and the woman caressed her cheek and Ida let her caress her cheek. The woman kissed her and she responded, she went with the woman to an archway and let herself be touched, and she in turn touched this random woman in Copenhagen. The next day her hand was trembling, she trembled at the thought, she felt aroused at the thought. The ground was shaking beneath her, the city was shaking, the houses shook on the cobblestones, something terrible was about to happen. Disaster is looming, she can sense it, it already exists within her, it lives in her, it is just waiting to emerge in all its horror.

[...] She isn’t flirting, she is serious. She needs to find out whether this infatuation, she says, the strongest she has ever experienced, is about him, is about Arnold Bush, or whether she needed to be in love, needed the strength which being in love gave her to do what was necessary, to divorce. She needs to know in order to get on with her life.

Can Arnold help her with that?

He listens, silent on the other end. He doesn’t say no, but he makes it clear that he thinks she is asking for something to which she is not entitled.

He says she may visit his office the next day at two o’clock.