English was so indecisive, confusing and obscene even. In the end of year play, I performed the part of the Vicar of a small village. I had the line, ‘warm the cockles of my heart’. To my surprise, a hammy delivery of this line drew a laugh. I had no idea why but I came to think that there must have been some sexual innuendo attached to cockles, and that a cock was involved. How there came to be a penis of the heart, I didn’t understand at all.
There were other confusions. Exotic and erotic meant quite different things. This became clear during Mr Grenfell’s much-anticipated ‘chat about sex’.
‘Boys,’ he said. ‘The way I usually do this is through an exercise.’ We looked at each other unsure of what he meant.
‘It’s a word exercise,’ he went on. ‘What I would like . . .’ and he’d paused on like, ‘is for us as a group . . .’ and he’d paused on group, ‘to come up with a list of nicknames for . . .’ and he’d paused one last time before he said, ‘. . . condom.’
A dozen hands went up.
‘Yes, Durant.’
‘French letter, sir.’
‘Good. Yes, French letter is one. Wilkinson.’
‘Sir, Johnny.’
‘Excellent. Yes, you Leroy.’
‘Rubber, sir.’
‘Yes, Rubber. American I think. But that’s okay. Shaw, you’re next.’
‘Raincoat, sir.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Raincoat in the shower, sir.’
‘Well. All right then. Thank you, Shaw.’
‘Prophylactic.’
‘Who was that?’ asked Grenfell.
‘Me, sir, Wilson.’
‘Not really a nickname, wouldn’t you say?’
‘No, sir, not really.’
And on it went until there was no doubt in our subtle English minds that the best thing to do during moments of Continental intimacy was to wear a Johnny, a rubber, and raincoat, even if Mr Grenfell had never quite said so. It was another moment of humanity in a school that understood itself through rules, when what he gave us in place of precision and instruction was the suggestion of things, and words with the merest imprint of real life on them. Imprecision meant that they had their own life. Sex was unclear, unstructured and, above all, the property of language.
Every morning for the next two weeks, blown-up and brightly-coloured condoms appeared in the library, the tea room, in hallways, and were tied to door handles. The school was overrun.
‘Do you know where they’re all coming from?’ asked my mother. I didn’t. ‘Mr Grenfell thinks it’s probably Durant.’
‘Really, Mum, I don’t know; honestly, they just appear.’
‘He’s quite distressed about it. He thinks it’s aimed at him.’
I knew the school loved language, but I was never clear about how it regarded our stories, the narratives of how we’d all ended up at Mostyn House. I sensed that these were meant to go unsaid, or veiled by fiction and subtle, ironic references. As a boy living in Iceland, I had simply lied about my father, exaggerating what I knew and inventing details for what I didn’t. Now, in England, I felt the rise of some non-fiction, the beginnings of a process that has now found its, perhaps final, expression in the story I am telling here. I wanted to speak about Gísli as plainly as I could, and I was always on the lookout for the friend or teacher who might be my first audience, or reader, if you like. In the end, it was Powell, whom I had only recently befriended—another one of my fast-forming, intense friendships—after my best friend West and I had fallen out over a pen he wanted to borrow.
Powell and I were standing on a low bench, and looking out over the window ledge. We could see the salty marsh of the Wirral and, beyond it, the mud-brown outline of Wales. It was dull, as always. There was not much life—just the occasional walker and, rarely, a rat scurrying across the marsh.
‘My father lives in Iceland,’ I told Powell.
‘Yes, we know that. What does he do there?’ he asked.
‘He’s a rich businessman.’ And he really was.
‘Are your parents divorced?’
‘I haven’t told anyone this before, but my mother and father weren’t married when I was born. It was an affair. My father is married to another woman. And when I was born my mother was still married to her husband in Australia.’
‘That’s a shame,’ he replied. There was a pause, and for a moment the strange solemnity of children confiding a secret.
‘There’s one,’ Powell then said. ‘A rat. Did you see it?’
This, then, was more important. James Herbert’s The Rats was doing the rounds, shadowing the three copies of The Lord of the Rings that were slowly making their way through the school. The marsh rat outside was about the size of a cat, a shadowy, humped thing.
‘Imagine if it got in,’ said Powell. ‘They could make it the fucking school mascot.’ Were we really already onto a different topic? Was that it? Was this all it took to tell the truth? And what was the reaction? Kindly indifference.
‘You don’t care?’ I asked.
‘I couldn’t give a fuck,’ said Powell. ‘Your mum’s nice. Who cares about your dad? How often do you think I see my dad?’
He had a point. The other children might well have come from respectable homes, but few of them saw their parents as often as I saw my mother. Somewhere in the past, their parents had decided that it was better to have your children raised for you and, in the majority of cases, it had been discretionary—this was a very wealthy group. Whatever people say about taking responsibility for your own life, Mum’s decisions were never entirely her own. She had been desperate when she took the job.
And Gísli, for all his nervousness, did not really choose how he behaved towards me. He was the flirt who had lost control of his life and had been unable to collect it back. He had fallen in love twice, when he thought he would only ever fall in love once. He had had another child, when he thought his family was big enough.
In Powell’s mind, if not mine, there was nothing that could be done about any of it, about any of these things. There were tides. There were the rats inside, and a solitary, humped rat outside. Sooner or later, the tide would turn, and we would get out.
8
ON THE LAKE
I made my first return to Iceland when I was twelve. I went on my own during the school summer holidays at the invitation of Gunnar and Lilja and, although only two years had passed since we’d lived in Reykjavík, I was barely able to communicate. I had even forgotten the Icelandic for toilet. This was a problem, as I had just come off the plane and I was desperate. Gunnar and Lilja spoke no English. I remembered the verb pissa but, after two years in an English boarding school, I was all too aware of good manners to use it.
‘What do you want, dear?’ asked Lilja.
‘Well,’ said Gunnar, ‘do you want to piss?’
Poor man, I can’t imagine what was going through his mind. I was about to spend the next month with them without a word of Icelandic. How were we going to cope without language?
‘It’ll come back,’ Gunnar said, hopefully.
The first thing we needed to do was to go fishing. It was summer and time to bring in his hundred haddock, and Svanur was already in the water, waiting. The next day we drove to the pebble shore in the Lada, which rattled less now, a sign that it was getting older, settling down. We steamed out of Reykjavík in the boat and Gunnar passed me the rudder and pointed in the direction of the deep, haddocky waters. Half an hour later, I was drawing up fish the length of my arm as the tug rocked evenly on the bay.
During the weekdays I helped out in Gunnar’s shop in Vesturbær, mainly stacking bottles and staring whenever I could at Gunnar’s granddaughter, Björk, who’d captivated me simply by the fact that she was female. I was twelve and she was eighteen, a woman. I could forgive the diff
erence in our ages if only she would. I even knew a dozen or so English words for condom to impress her. I spent the whole week looking for excuses to come out from the bottle room, as Björk never came in. She was clearly meant for the checkout, she was that kind of girl. She had a perm that made her look beautiful, which, even at the time, seemed unusual.
For me, there was an alternative to Björk even if she didn’t know it. If I had wanted to, I could have devoted myself to a higher being: the president. Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, who held office for sixteen years from the early 1980s, was a regular at the shop. Her home, where she stayed when she didn’t need to be at the presidential lodge, was also in Vesturbær. Gunnar introduced me to her and suggested I help Vigdís with her shopping. I wheeled the trolley while she picked out items, making light conversation about life in an English boarding school as she did.
‘Your Icelandic is coming back, though,’ she said. ‘I hope you’re going to come back to us one day, too. We wouldn’t want you to forget your Icelandic all over again; and your good friends are here, too. Have you been to visit your old friends from school?’
I didn’t really want to go into details, but Óskar and Harri had disappeared from my world. The friends I’d found had on my return, to my horror, remembered my lies about Gísli and his jet.
‘It’s hard, though,’ I said, ‘to pick up old friendships.’
‘That should never be too hard, Kári,’ said Vigdís, ‘if they were good friends.’
‘Harri and Óskar were my best friends. They’ve both moved.’
‘But you have Gunnar and Lilja. They are surely the best kind of friends.’
‘Yes, and that’s their granddaughter, Björk.’
‘Yes, I know her. She’s lovely, isn’t she.’
Gunnar made plans for us to visit his relations in Borgarfjörður, to help with making hay. I pretended to like the idea, even though it would mean a week away from Björk and her permed ringlets. Gunnar loaded the Lada and we left Reykjavík for the road going north along the base of Mount Esja and up and down Hvalsfjörður, or ‘Whale Fjord’.
We stopped at the small town of Borgarnes, as everyone still does today even though there is a tunnel under Hvalsfjörður and you don’t really need the break at that point. But Icelanders can only drive for so long without either an ice-cream or a hot dog, and the traffic seems to pull off almost automatically into the exit lane at any cluster of service stations and roadside cafés.
The farm was on the west coast and had hayfields that sloped down to the edge of the sea, and a shoreline of fading spits of black lava rock skirted by gold-brown seaweed. A standby workforce of half-a-dozen children in woollen jumpers and half-a-dozen Icelandic sheepdogs with contracted faces and upturned, bushy tails waited for its chance to work. I was given a spot in the line-up, along with boots, a pitchfork and a woollen jumper, and told to wait.
We were to follow the tractor into the field to collect hay at the base of each stack for the men to lift on to the tops. It was pleasant, repetitive work—like walking uphill, or swimming—and in every way possible removed from my school life in England, where even sport was treated with some distance and irony. I noticed the difference and liked it. However fragile a conception it may seem to me now, it was then that I felt Iceland could survive in me as the site of less-complicated, and more-instinctual rhythms.
It wasn’t long before we children were allowed to climb to the top of the stacks. Instead of helping with the collection, we stood waiting for the hay to thump at our feet so that we could stomp on top of it, supposedly with the aim of compacting the hay but really just to have fun. The sun, as the poet Steinn Steinarr says, was ‘like a thin girl in yellow shoes’, and never more than that—a thin girl who stood beside you while you ‘worked’ and looked past the hayfields towards the sea.
When we returned, Björk had disappeared, invited to some ludicrous life outside the shop. Her absence took the pleasure out of being there, and so I went swimming. Gunnar and Lilja lived close to Laugardalur pool and Molly—of the army of secretaries—had bought me a ten-swim pass, which was hole-punched at a front counter made of security glass and high timber by a woman who paused her knitting just long enough to do so. Inside, I found that the change room was the same as it had been when I’d left two years before, a seemingly constant rampage of naked boys flicking each other with towels while screaming–singing English pop songs. There were also the two pale men dressed in white who did the job of making sure everyone washed properly, and then sprayed us with cold water to get us out of the shower.
The army, too, was unchanged in composition but for Mum, the only one to have left. I was to visit them all, and each one had asked me in turn what my favourite food was. Thereafter, whenever I visited or stayed with one of them I was served lamb chops. At Patricia’s they came with her greying hair and much of the cats’ hair, too. It was that sort of house.
I hadn’t shaken my childish sleeping habit of using my toes to play with the buttons at the end of the bedcover, and Patricia’s cats, delighted by this nocturnal movement, scratched at my feet all night. In the morning, I woke to find my toes lined with thin scabs and the sheet dotted with dried blood. I would then put my shoes on my bloodied feet and run outside to walk the dogs. Patricia, who had become larger and larger until she was barely able to walk, preferred to drive when she took her dogs for their daily walk, so I would run at the side of the car with them. In this manner, the four of us—two dogs, a boy, and the large Australian inside a small car—would edge our way to Highway 1 and back again.
Molly and Steini had moved from their house near the frozen river and into Vesturbær, not far from Gunnar’s shop. Steini talked to me only in Icelandic, which made communication one-sided, but he was at least beginning to share his back volumes of Private Eye—apparently, I was old enough now. Molly talked only about her travels, which most often still took in a side-trip to Jersey. She showed me a card index of her friends around the world.
‘I send every single one a Christmas card,’ she said. She was up to 250 cards; the index was the only way she had to keep up with them all.
‘I can stay with any of them whenever I want.’
Judith remembered that in the old days I had enjoyed lighting the girls’ cigarettes. She dug around for a lighter she thought I should have. It whistled a dozen songs, including ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’.
‘Doesn’t Gestur want it?’ I asked.
‘I think he’s got enough Elvis memorabilia by now,’ she replied. Apparently, there was a limit to how desirable he could be.
Nanci was disgruntled I wasn’t staying with her for at least a couple of nights. She made less-than-kind comments about Patricia’s animal den because I had slept over there. Her own cats, said Nanci, would never be allowed the run of the house like that. And why would you have dogs?
‘Australians love dogs,’ I explained.
‘My dear, so do Americans. But we don’t keep them inside.’ I pondered this for a moment.
‘In Australia, people have backyards, somewhere for the dogs to run.’
‘Isn’t that why dogs were banned in Reykjavík in the first place?’ asked Nanci. ‘They should at least be castrated.’ Over our game of Yatzee, she added, ‘Has Patricia talked to you about your father?’
‘Patricia?’
‘Yes. Has she mentioned anything to you?’
‘She asked me whether I was contacting my Icelandic side.’
‘I know you can’t tell me who he is. But does Patricia know who he is?’
‘I don’t think so. I haven’t told anyone,’ I replied.
‘Your mother might have told her. She and Patricia were very close in the old days. Both Australians.’
‘Mum thinks of herself as English.’
‘Well, same thing. At least your mother doesn’t go in for dogs.’
‘Or castrations.’
‘Well, I suppose that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.’
Each of my dinners with the army members had been accompanied by conversation along these lines, reminders that it was only a matter of time before I would have to tell. Or, tell them at least. They had given up on getting the information out of Mum, that much was certain. They knew she would never relent and, in any case, she was too far away to be worked on properly with booze, cigarettes, and an atmosphere of indulgent gossip. But I must have been showing signs of weakness. In my own mind, it wasn’t a possibility; I would never let Mum down in that way. But I could see that they believed, that one day, I would switch allegiances and become part of their hunt for my father.
In 1985, as I entered my teens, old friends from Mum’s days with Ed offered her a job in Brisbane.
‘We’ll have to go back via Iceland,’ she said. ‘It’ll be my last trip there, I’m sure. A farewell.’
It would, at least, be the last time I visited before I met Gísli at the president’s lodge.
‘Why do you think you won’t go again?’ I asked.
‘Well, I can’t keep going backwards and forwards like this. I’m sure you’ll get other chances. But it’s time I settled down.’
Even today, I don’t think she has accepted that she doesn’t have a choice about Iceland. It won’t let go of her, and returning to say farewell was her way of checking that Iceland was still there, more or less unchanged. There was no way of farewelling Iceland, only ways of going back.
On that trip, we stayed with Molly and Steini, and they took us for a week’s stay at their summerhouse by a lake in Borgarfjörður. I was set up with a fishing rod and a dingy, which I took out onto the lake and towards a small, wooded island. The idea was to drag the line behind me as I rowed. Steini and I had tried it earlier while we motored, but each time I lifted a silver trout to the surface it escaped, a shining dart that flicked back under the thin surface of grey water. I didn’t care much that we kept losing fish, but Steini became frustrated.
The Promise of Iceland Page 9
