‘Carla?’ There was the snap of the lock being unfastened, the solid thunk as the security-bolt system she and Chris had paid to have installed was disengaged, and then the door was thrown wide. Her father stood in the doorway, a pool cue hefted in his right hand.

‘Carla, what are you doing here at this time of night?’ He switched to Norwegian. ‘And where’s Chris? You didn’t come up here alone, did you? For Christ’s sake, Carla.’

‘Hello, Dad,’ she managed.

He ushered her inside, slammed the door shut and engaged the bolt system again. Only then did he relinquish his grip on the cue, dropping the makeshift weapon into an umbrella stand by the door and opening his arms to hug her.

‘It’s good to see you, Carla. Even if it is half past midnight. What the fuck happened? Oh, don’t tell me.’ He nodded as the repressed tears began to leak out and she trembled against him. ‘Not another fight? Is he downstairs?’

She shook her head against his shoulder.

‘Good. I won’t have to be diplomatic then.’ Erik Nyquist stepped back from his daughter a little and took hold of her chin. ‘Why don’t you come and have a whisky coffee with me and we can bitch about him in his absence.’

She choked a laugh. He echoed her with a gentle smile.

‘That’s better,’ he said.

So they sat in front of an antique electric fire in the threadbare living room with mugs of cheap coffee and cheaper whisky steaming in their fists and Erik stared into the reddish glow of the heating element while his daughter talked. The tears were under control now, and Carla’s voice was firm, an analytical tool sifting through the settled sediment, first of the last few hours, then of the last few weeks, finally of the last few years.

‘It’s just,’ she said. ‘I’m sure we didn’t always used to fight this much. Did we? You must remember.’

‘Well, you never drove across the cordoned zones in the middle of the night alone because you’d been fighting,’ Erik admitted. ‘That’s a first, at least. But if I’m honest? I think you’ve been having rows with Chris about as long as you’ve known him to any appreciable depth. Certainly as long as you’ve been married. I couldn’t say if you have more now than you used to, but that’s not really the point.’

Carla looked up, surprised. ‘It isn’t?’

‘No, it isn’t. Carla, marriage is an artificial state. Invented by the patriarchy to ensure that fathers know who their children are. It’s been going on for thousands of years but that doesn’t make it right. Human beings were never designed to live like that.’

‘I think I’ve read this somewhere before, Dad.’

‘The fact that it was written by your mother,’ said Erik severely, ‘does not invalidate the argument. We are tribal, not matrimonial.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Let’s see if I remember how it went. The basic human social unit would have been a matriarchal tribe; a female, child-rearing and knowledge-keeping centre with a protective outer shell of warrior males. Uh, how does it go, children held in common by the tribe, reproduction only understood by the females and—‘

‘The point is, Carla, exclusive pairing is unnatural. Two people were never meant to be so exclusively much to each other.’

‘That’s a pretty fucking poor excuse,’ she said, then bit her lip.

Erik gave her a reproachful look. ‘That isn’t what I meant. Look, even in the recent past you had extended families to soak up some of the strain. Now we live in isolated couples or nuclear families, and either both partners are working so hard they never see each other, or they’re not working and the stress of living on the poverty line tears them apart.’

‘That’s a simplification, Dad.’

‘Is it?’ Erik cradled his mug in both hands and looked back into the red glow from the bar fire. ‘Look at where you live, Carla. A village neither of you knew the name of three years ago. No friends living close, no family, not even a workplace social life unless you’re prepared to drive for an hour and a half at the end of the evening. All these things put a huge strain on you both, and rows are the result. The natural result. It wouldn’t be natural not to fight with someone you share your whole sleeping and waking life with. It’s healthy, it provides release, and if you don’t hold grudges it shouldn’t damage the relationship.’

Carla shivered despite the fire.

‘This is damaging us,’ she said.

Erik sighed.

‘You know what your mother said to me before she went back to Tromso?’

‘Fuck you and that English bitch?’ She regretted it as soon as the words left her mouth, surprised that the anger was still there on tap nearly two decades later. But Erik only smiled wryly and if there was pain behind that, it didn’t show. She reached across to him with one hand. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be.’ The smile flickered but held. ‘You’re right, she did say that. More than once. But she also said that it was high time, that she wasn’t really surprised because we didn’t have fun together any more. She said that. We have no fun any more, Erik.’

‘Oh, come on!’

‘No, she was right, Carla.’ He looked across at her and this time there was pain in his face. ‘Your mother was usually right about these things. I was always too busy being political and angry to spot the emotional truths. She hit the nail on the head. We didn’t have fun any more. We hadn’t had any real fun for years. That’s why I ended up with Karen in the first place. She was fun, and that was something your mother and I’d stopped trying to do years ago.’

‘Chris and I still have fun,’ Carla said quickly.

Erik Nyquist looked at his daughter and sighed again. ‘Then you hold onto him,’ he said. ‘Because if that’s true, if it’s really true, then what you’ve got is worth any amount of fights.’

Carla shot him a surprised glance, caught by the sudden gust of emotion in his voice.

‘I thought you didn’t like Chris.’

Erik chuckled. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘What’s that got to do with it? I’m not sleeping with him.’

She smiled wanly and went back to watching the fire.

‘I don’t know, Dad. It’s just.’

He waited while she assembled her feelings into a coherent shape.

‘Just since he went to work at Shorn.’ She shook her head wearily. ‘It doesn’t make any sense, Dad. He’s making more money than he ever has, the hours aren’t so different to what he used to clock at Hammett McColl. Fuck it, we ought to be happy. We’ve got all the props for it. Why are we falling out more now?’

‘Shorn Associates. And is he still in Emerging Markets?’

She shook her head. ‘Conflict Investment.’

‘Conflict Investment.’ Erik smacked his lips, then got up and went to the bookcase set against the wall opposite the fire. He dragged a finger across the tightly packed spines of the books on a lower shelf, found what he was looking for and tugged the volume out. Flicking through the pages, he came back to the fire and handed it to her.

‘Read that,’ he said. ‘That page.’

She looked at the book, turned it to see the title. ‘The Socialist Legacy. Miguel Benito. Dad, I’m not in the mood. This isn’t about politics.’

‘Everything is about politics, Carla. Politics is everything. Everything in human society anyway. Just read the passage in highlighter.’

She sighed and set down her coffee mug at her feet. Clearing her throat, she picked up the line with one finger and read aloud. ‘”Revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century had always been aware”?’

‘Yes. That one.’

‘”Revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century had always been aware that in order to bring about a convulsive political change”.’

‘Actually, I meant, read it to yourself.’

She ignored him, ploughing on with the edge of singsong emerging in her voice. ‘ “In order to bring about a convulsive political change, it was essential to intensify the existing social tensions to the point where all would be driven to choose sides in what would thus be established as a simplistic equation of class conflict. Marxists and their ideological inheritors described this as sharpening the contradictions of society. In populist recog—“ Dad is there a point somewhere in all this bullshit?’