Names for the Sea Page 2
Our boxes leave a week before we do, in the middle of July. The Icelandic school year starts in late August, so we’re allowing ourselves a month for the children to accept a new house, a new language, new food and – maybe – new friends before we present them with a new school and playgroup. We’re taking as little as possible, partly because shipping is expensive and partly because we are beginning to realise that we can escape all the stuff that clutters our house, just walk off and leave it like people fleeing a plague. I pack everything I think the four of us will need for the year into seven cardboard cartons. One is full of toys, just the favourites and nothing large. The dolls’ house goes to spend the year with our friends round the corner, the wooden garage on loan to the little boy down the road who has always coveted it, the toy cooker – after a spell in the attic to make sure no-one misses it – to Oxfam. We take winter clothes, Tobias’s a size beyond his two-year-old summer self. Another box is almost all food, because we spent ten days in Reykjavík in May, house-hunting, and have some idea of the limits of Icelandic supermarkets. We have five litres of olive oil, a dozen tins of anchovies and a dozen jars of capers, miso paste, pomegranate syrup, cocoa nibs, seeds for growing coriander, basil and mint. Smoked chillies, sumac, allspice, dried dill, cumin. Preserved lemons, three kinds of paprika, dried lime leaves. Victorian Arctic expeditions took engraved silver cutlery, napkin rings and embroidered bedroom slippers, the objects that upheld explorers’ sense of who they were even though these things didn’t justify their presence on any other grounds, and were found scattered across the snow with their owners’ bones a few years later. At least the manifestations of English metropolitan middle-class identity are edible. Three of the boxes are full of books, which are the hardest things to choose. How can I predict in July what I’ll want to read in February? Which of the thousands of volumes in the house can I not live without? I’m teaching a course on nineteenth-century fiction, which takes most of a box on its own, and another on Romantic poetry. I’ll need my favourite cookbooks (you can get recipes online, protests Kim, who is going to rent our house, and moves lightly around the country with all her possessions in the boot of her car, but it’s not the same), and the novels I like to re-read. My book-buying becomes more extravagant as I try to anticipate a year’s purchases, for myself and also for Max, who has a two-a-day fiction habit. Which books will fit him when he’s rising eight? How big should Tobias’s snow boots be?
I fold down the last box and wander around, browsing for last-minute additions. I have removed everything I think we’ll need for a year and the house doesn’t look different in any way. The playroom is still full of toys, the kitchen of plates and pans and cake tins and the wok and the ice-cream maker and the toaster (which we’ve decided we can do without – after all, nobody had toasters for most of history without apparent ill effect) and the teapot and the paella pan and the good knives. The bookshelves are still crammed, the books that won’t fit lying on top of their serried companions. The hall is still full of shoes and blocked by the pushchair. Upstairs, there are still clothes bulging out of my chest-of-drawers, and the ones that won’t fit in there are sliding off one of our herd of Victorian armchairs. We still can’t squash all the towels into their allocated chest so there’s a pile on its mahogany top, buttressed by toys and post too boring to open but too important to throw away. The children’s rooms are still full of more toys, and more books, and more drawings, mostly on the floor because the cupboards are full of Anthony’s antique map collection and my knitting wool and the crystal wine glasses that are too good to use and my great-grandmother’s tea-set and the disintegrating woollen hangings that came with our four-poster bed. It is clear to me that ‘de-cluttering’ is a kind of capitalist bulimia, but I wonder for the first time whether, like other forms of economic dysfunction, it might not also be rather nice.
July is a good time to arrive in Iceland. The lava field beside the road from the airport has wildflowers and rowan bushes growing out of its fissures, and the mountains are sharp against a blue sky. The city lies in a pool of sunlight, the red corrugated iron houses and white roofs small as Lego against the dark northern sea. People sit outside cafés in the city centre where we stay in a hotel for the first few days, and there’s a flow of tourists, of other people who also need a map and someone who speaks English, around the craft shops and museums of Reykjavík. We take the children out and show them the place to which we have committed them. Look, we say, a ship coming into harbour! Look, a playground! Look at the light on the mountains! Aren’t you glad to be here? We take the foot ferry to Viðey, an island in the bay, and the children fly high on the swings, to the top of the mountain behind them and up into the blue sky. We look around the Maritime Museum and Max joins other little boys from other countries yearning over the one gun on Iceland’s coastguard ship. There is no navy here, nor army nor air force. We walk up and down the main street, Laugavegur, rationing our café breaks and admiring the rows of prams in which babies await their parents’ return.
We’re waiting for the builders to finish our apartment, which we haven’t yet seen. It was organised for us by Hulda Kristín, one of the PhD students in my new department. Hulda Kristín is half-Lebanese, half-Icelandic, but grew up in London. She married an Icelander and came here to live when her two sons, born like mine four years apart, were pre-schoolers. We met her when we came to Reykjavík in May to find an apartment, a school and a nursery, and had more trouble with the apartment than we were expecting. Icelanders, by and large, don’t rent; ninety per cent of housing is owner-occupied and renting is a sign of youth or indigence. We needed to be in Garðabær, Iceland’s wealthiest suburb, for the International School, and, despite the newly built and empty blocks of flats crowding the shore, there was nothing to rent. Hulda Kristín heard me complaining to Pétur, my new head of department. Let me make some calls, she said. I can probably sort something out. Her husband is in charge of buildings safety inspections across Iceland and knows most of the builders. She did indeed sort something out, and we see our new home for the first time through the tinted windows of her lumbering SUV.
The other apartments in our block are shells. The building is on the corner of a development that was half-built when the banks collapsed and the money ran out, and it’s still half-built, as if the builders had downed tools and walked away one day in the winter of 2008. Our northward sea view will be blocked if the luxury flats across the road are ever finished. For now, we see the waves between the bars of metal rods that grow out of concrete foundations. Looking the other way, towards the city, a yellow crane towers over us, a line through our view of Mount Esja. No-one else lives in our building. The stairs are unfinished, raw concrete. The lift glides up and down its glass tower just for us. The automatic doors in the lobby sweep for us alone. The apartment comes with one of a catacomb of store-rooms, each labelled for one of the dwellings, and with a second store-room for skis and boats in the basement, opening off the heated underground garage where lights come on and doors open at our approach. The children, I suggest to Anthony, can play football down here in winter. Or we could cultivate mushrooms on an industrial scale.
The flat itself is full of light. When autumn comes, we will find that it is often somehow more light inside than out, but now, in July, light is the condition of Iceland, day and night, and it’s magnified by our floor-to-ceiling windows and white walls. We have a laundry room, which I plan to commandeer as a study, and a walk-in wardrobe that would hold all the clothes we own in both countries and still leave space for my stash of smuggled chocolate. The lowest setting for the underfloor heating is twenty degrees. Anthony and I both grew up in old houses with draughts that came through the floorboards and continued up the chimneys, both remember lying in bed watching the curtains blowing around with the windows closed in winter, and we’ve bought a house with the same qualities in Canterbury. The new apartment has triple glazing, and no curtains. Now, on the hottest days of summer, it’s almost as warm outsi
de as in. We open all the windows, and hear children splashing on the beach at the end of the road. The boys rush out onto the balcony, which faces north and is shadowed by the unfinished block across the road.
Hulda Kristín drives me to IKEA to buy bedding, towels, a couple of pans, the least I think we can get away with. I choose four garden chairs – cheaper than dining chairs – and a table. Later, Pétur drives out from the other side of the city to bring us a set of flat-pack bookcases and an old table that can be my desk, and then, looking around, takes me off to the supermarket in the next town to stock up. Why not that one, I ask, as we pass the hypermarket nearest the apartment, the one to which we can walk so that we will be able to manage without a car. That’s Hagkaup, he says. Far too expensive. It would be like buying your washing-up liquid from Harrods. When we get back, he comes in, guts and cleans the whole fish that I bought by accident and assembles the bookcases for us. I am childlike in my gratitude. At home, I would invite Pétur and Hulda Kristín to dinner, perhaps send flowers or give wine, take Hulda Kristín’s children for the day or make a gluten-free cake for Pétur. But I have only four chairs, four plates, two pans. There is no florist in Garðabær. I need help to buy a light bulb, to register with a doctor, to connect the telephone, to buy bus tickets, which turn out to be sold at swimming pools. The instructions for configuring our internet connection are in Icelandic. There is no laundrette. We are helpless, the adults children again, with nothing to offer but our thanks, and our new friends are our parents, in whom we trust. Thank you, we say. Thank you.
And then they go away, Pétur to his summer house out in the west, Hulda Kristín accompanying her husband in a campervan on a holiday-cum-tour-of-public-buildings-in-outlying-towns, which must have their safety inspections in the summer when the roads are reliably clear. You need to start to feel you can manage this yourselves, says Pétur, making sure we have his mobile phone number. You’ll be fine, says Hulda Kristín, checking again that I have the number for the out-of-hours medical service in case Tobias has another asthma attack. Our second childhood is over, and we must venture out.
We start at the beginning, with food. Hagkaup is fascinating in the way that foreign supermarkets are always fascinating, offering a glimpse into other assumptions. It is not international law to start with fruit and vegetables. Hagkaup begins with cosmetics, mostly French and mostly at twice French prices. Then there are two kinds of apple, called ‘red’ (big, mushy American ones) and ‘green’ (French Granny Smiths). There are Belgian strawberries, hard and sour, Chilean oranges and bananas. We left Kent in the middle of the cherry season, when the farmers send someone to every lay-by with a van full of cherries: small yellow-and-pink ones, big purple ones, the sort a child can’t manage in one bite, and my favourite, slightly sour, deep reds. Our plum tree was fruiting and we could stand in the garden eating plums warm from the sun. The tomatoes were ripening, and Anthony, who grew up on a Kentish fruit farm, was beginning his yearly incantation of apples. James Grieve, St Edmund’s Pippin, Maid of Kent, Worcester Pearmain. When we went for Sunday lunch with Anthony’s parents, we picked pounds of red and white currants, courgettes fast threatening to become marrows, so many raspberries that I seriously considered making jam. There are few trees of any kind here, and the gardens past which we walk seem only deliberate arrangements of the open spaces between houses and roads: turf, rocks, dwarf birch and rowans no taller than me. Hagkaup has raspberries – Hagkaup has everything, including zebra steaks and Scottish pheasant, for a price – but they come resting on bubble wrap in a single layer with about a dozen in a packet costing the same as two pounds of fish. Well, we say, of course. We’re on the edge of the Arctic Circle here. Who wants air-freighted fruit anyway? Icelanders must have lived for centuries without fruit. There’s plenty of cabbage. There is plenty of cabbage, but it seems to have come a long way and got very tired. Even in Hagkaup, fruit is often squashy, courgettes wrinkled and sour, cabbage leaves floppy as damp towels. It’s necessary to check the dates on dairy produce in the chiller because some of it will have expired. It’s only the prices which make it like shopping at Harrods.
We go further afield. The bus service is cut back during the summer, on the assumption that the main users of public transport are high-school students. The buses used to run almost empty, Pétur tells us, except between seven-thirty and eight-thirty in the morning and two and three in the afternoon, when schools start and end. Adult Icelanders share Thatcher’s view of bus travel. Car ownership, Pétur says, is higher than anywhere else in Europe. We are surrounded by houses with three or four cars on each drive, and the cars are newer than at home and larger, including monstrous SUVs that aren’t imported to the rest of Europe. Icelanders adore America, Pétur says. Most people here won’t be happy until we’re beating the Americans on carbon emissions and pollution. Nobody walks anywhere; people think you’re mad if you walk. Cycling? I ask, because there are what look to me like bicycle tracks running along the coast. No, he says. People say the weather’s too bad, but it’s not much worse than in Denmark, which has one of the highest rates of cycling in Europe. The Norwegians and Swedes drive less, walk more and have fewer and less damaging cars than Icelanders, though Scandinavian winters are in fact colder because Iceland is an island in the Gulf Stream and Norway and Sweden have continental climates. During the boom, says Pétur, sometimes Icelandic couples would each take their own Hummer to the same party. Yeah, and another one for the teenage son, adds his daughter. I think she is joking but I’m not sure.
At first, we think this car-dependence is reflected in the town planning. Walking in Garðabær, or anywhere in Reykjavík except the oldest parts of the city centre, feels like walking in American suburbia. There are no pavements. The only shops are in malls, which have no pedestrian access. We find ourselves pushing the pushchair across dual carriageways and up turf embankments. Going to the other supermarket, we have a choice between crossing the lava field and going along the freeway. Neither is easy with the pushchair, which we need for bringing the groceries back as well as getting Tobias there. (Later, we will find a network of paved off-road walking and cycle tracks, threading parks and gardens to make a pedestrian’s web of the city quite separate from the drivers’ map.) I raise my eyes to the hills, where the sun shines from the north-west onto pine woods, and flashes off streams. Behind the dual carriageway, the sea is too bright for my eyes, and across the inlet, the white church at Kópavogur stands like a lighthouse on the headland. Sea-birds glide about their lives on the Álftanes peninsula, calling to each other from rock to rock. The skies, the light and the water have a physical effect; every time I look up, there is more room for my lungs and my sense of inadequacy lightens on my shoulders. I am fascinated by this place, but I do not understand it, and all I think I have learnt so far is that understanding it won’t be easy.
A couple of weeks after Pétur’s and Hulda Kristín’s departures, Matthew phones. Matthew took his doctorate at the same university a few years ahead of me, and we established in May that we know people who know each other. He fell in love with an Icelander and moved to Reykjavík as soon as he finished his DPhil, and has been working at Háskóli Íslands, the University of Iceland, for the last fourteen years. Even more than Hulda Kristín, he knows where I’m coming from. What can I do? he says. Tell me what you need. Someone to talk to, I say. Someone to talk about. And a washing machine, and a high chair because Tobias is too small for the garden chairs, and a rubbish bin, which is not sold anywhere within walking distance. And a fridge. But we are short of money. Where are the second-hand shops? Oh, he says. Ah. That’s something about Iceland. There isn’t a second-hand market. People just don’t buy used goods. I’ll come and see you.
Matthew takes us to the Zoo and Family Park. The sunshine is hot, and there are brides posing under the trees in the Botanic Gardens. Mount Esja basks across the water, and the children look at seals in a pool and horses in a paddock and ride on a merry-go-round. So, says Matthew, how’s
the culture shock? Do you want to go home yet? I take a breath. Most of the friends I made in my first year at university were international students who liked to spend their evenings complaining about England. Just the usual: plumbing, food, weather. Aged eighteen, I believed their dissatisfaction to be a sign of their cosmopolitan sophistication, but towards the end of the year found myself muttering that they should go home if they didn’t like it here. I determined before we came to Iceland that I would not be a whingeing expat. Anthony and I have not complained to each other, but somehow, while Anthony takes the children on a pedalo in a lake where white-legged blonde children are paddling, it all comes out to Matthew. I am doing the laundry by hand in the bath, and drying it on an airer which we managed to bring from Hafnarfjörður on the bus. In dry weather and with twenty-two hours of sunlight, each load is not quite dry when I bring the next one dripping to the balcony. We are keeping food in a coolbox on the balcony. We are putting rubbish in plastic bags hanging off one of the array of empty cupboards in our granite and oak kitchen. I want to see Iceland, but it takes hours to get anywhere walking with a two-year-old, the buses are infrequent and days are passing without us going further than the beach and the supermarket. We are in each other’s unrelieved company all the time and I need to read and write.