“What matters most is that it is made out of good material,” Fanný says when Sturla lets her examine the overcoat. “And of course good needlework,” she adds when Sturla repeats the sales assistant’s claims about how the seams were sewn so they would last a lifetime: he is going to own the overcoat until he is ancient, without ever needing to get it repaired. Fanný asks Sturla if he has eaten anything, and he says he has, though he doesn’t mention that he got himself a hotdog on Austurstræti (hotdog number two in just three days). “Well, it’s okay to get you a wine glass, then,” she says, as if she’d wanted to make sure he doesn’t start drinking on an empty stomach, and when Sturla accepts the offer but says he’d prefer white wine, if she has any, his suspicions that she has an open bottle handy are confirmed: “I’ve only got this open bottle of red wine from yesterday. Halla, my girlfriend, came over around noon yesterday, and I invited her to have a little red wine.”
But no-one had visited Fanný around midday the day before; over the phone yesterday she’d told Sturla that she’d been waiting for the plumber since midday (there was a leak in the kitchen) and she’d thought it was the plumber when Sturla called around four to postpone his visit until today. She’d called the plumber three or four times, and she’d let him ruin her day; she hated waiting, because she found herself unable to do anything else with the time but wait.
Sturla takes the red wine and offers to look at the kitchen sink. As he turns on the water, Fanný asks him to leave it alone: she doesn’t want him, a poet, to start messing around with something like that.
“You’re forgetting that I’m a super,” Sturla says, smiling. “A super ought to be able to deal with something like this, right? Or at least try to look as if he does.”
“You don’t know anything about it,” Fanný contradicts him, and Sturla, knowing she is right, turns off the water, taps the faucet, and looks at his mother with an expression that is meant to indicate he should be treated like an expert, though he hasn’t a clue.
“You’re going abroad,” she says, rather abruptly, and looks out of the kitchen window, through the thin nylon window screen, at a huge black station wagon that’s driving lazily past the house.
“I am going abroad, yes,” answers Sturla, and takes a drink of red wine before setting his glass on a cloth coaster on the kitchen table.
Fanný looks at Sturla for a brief moment and their eyes meet in silence.
“I am leaving tomorrow morning,” Sturla says to break the silence, and he looks towards the living room window at the black car going slowly past as if everything outside is moving at a different speed from inside.
“Are you going to take your camera with you?” Fanný asks. She goes to the kitchen table, both hands around her glass, and looks in the same direction as Sturla for a moment. She sits at the table once the black car has finally moved past the living room window, sipping her wine.
When Sturla replies that he doesn’t own a camera Fanný asks whether she’s told him about the photograph of herself, the one which is going to be in the exhibition.
“What exhibition?”
“He sent an old picture of me which he took many years ago, he’s intending to include it in—”
“Who?” interrupts Sturla. “Who sent you a picture of yourself?”
“Helgi Haraldsson. He is an old school friend. An old friend of Örn Featherby.”
“I don’t know who this Helgi is. What is the picture of?”
Sturla is pleasantly surprised to see his mother smile.
“I never got accustomed to that name, Featherby,” she says, shaking her head and still smiling to herself. “But I’ve known Örn a little longer than almost anyone else still living. In some ways longer than your father.”
“What photograph exhibition are you talking about?”
“Helgi H. Haraldsson is going to hold a photography exhibition, and he intends to show the picture he took of me. And to mark the occasion, I want to invite you to have a shot of Danish schnapps which I got from my Halla yesterday. You’re going abroad tomorrow, after all.”
Sturla decides to let his mother take charge of things; he realizes that he won’t be able to stop her from mixing a strong drink with the red wine. He also knows that at some point she will explain the photograph she mentioned, that it is pointless to push her. And yet he asks her what it is a picture of.
“I’m bare-breasted in it,” answers Fanný, turning her head to look at Sturla as she stands by the kitchen sink pouring schnapps into two little shot glasses.
Sturla has taken the cigarette packet from his shirt pocket but remembers his mother doesn’t like tobacco smoke; she always asks him to smoke by the open front door. But on this occasion, as Sturla goes to the door, asking as he passes her what she means when she says she is “bare-breasted” in the picture, she invites him to smoke at the table; she doesn’t want the cold to get in. She means that the picture, which Helgi H. Haraldsson took of her when she was a young woman, is of her head and her breasts — when her breasts were also younger.
“And. .” Sturla doesn’t really know what he should say. “Did he ask you to do that?”
“I didn’t ask him to do it,” answers Fanný, moving the shot glasses over to the kitchen table.
“And he’s going to show it now? In public?”
“Helgi H. Haraldsson has never had a photography exhibition before. Helgi H. Haraldsson is a biologist.”
Sturla glances skeptically at his mother. “Does dad know about this?” he asks.
“That was why he took the picture of my breasts.”
“What was?”
“Because he’s a biologist.”
“And does dad know about this?”
“Why do you think it’s any of his business if an old lover took a picture of my breasts some forty years ago?”
“Lover?”
“Old lover.”
“While you and dad were. .?”
“While your dad and I were, yes.”
“And dad didn’t know about it?”