One night, during a party at one of the staff hostels, Jessica appeared. She had just gotten a job at one of the hotel restaurants, and moved into the smaller of the hostels, across the main courtyard from my own. I was seventeen, she was twenty-three—but I looked older for my age.
‘Where are you from?’ I yelled above the music.
‘Kirckaldy. You won’t know it. Just a wee bit north of Edinburgh.’ The way she said the name of the town was waspish, thin, and musical, just like her.
‘That has to be the sexiest accent in the world,’ I said.
‘Very nice of you to say so.’
When she danced, she flicked her light perm in every direction, but mostly in mine. I fell in love, and wrote six incomprehensible poems. Isn’t that what you do? Sometime during the weeks that followed, she asked me why I wrote so much.
‘Can’t you just live for the moment? Do you have to record everything?’
‘Yes. But some things only make sense on paper.’ As far as I was concerned, that was living for the moment.
‘Things like us?’
‘Not us, but you. You only make sense on paper. How else could I understand you? You’re a poem, aren’t you?’
‘I’m sure I’m not the only one. You write a dozen a week, don’t you?’
‘You don’t trust me?’
‘Do you think I’m mad? I can tell a flirty guy when I meet one,’ she said. The comment wasn’t really fair as I was much too self-concerned to flirt.
‘But I’m yours, entirely,’ I told her.
‘You’ll be gone before I am.’ For good measure, she added that this was who I was: the guy who was always on the verge of leaving. And yet she herself had run, from Edinburgh. Her boyfriend cheated on her and, she said, ‘didn’t even have the guts to admit it’, when she found out about it. He was a coward, she’d said.
‘He wasn’t even a good liar. Even now, he won’t admit it. Don’t you think that’s the worst thing you can do,’ she asked me, ‘cheat on someone you love?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I think the worst thing is to leave the one you love.’
On one of the rare occasions that we had a day off work together, we hired a car and drove up to Ullapool, a village on the West Coast, for a break from the staff hostels and the heavy drinking in Aviemore. The village ran along a little fjord with a white beach and unlikely palm trees. During lunch, in one of the white pubs on the seaside road, I told her about Gísli, and that I would have to visit Iceland soon if I was going to make it there before I returned to Brisbane in December.
‘What’s the rush to go back?’ she asked.
‘University. I’m enrolled for next February—in literature.’
‘Don’t you like it here?’
‘I adore it,’ I replied. ‘I think it’s the friendliest, most beautiful place I’ve ever lived. Apart from Iceland, I mean. Iceland’s less friendly, but more beautiful.’
‘You’ll go, I’m sure,’ she replied. ‘I could live here, in Ullapool. I could live here without even seeing it. What a name, Ullapool! And all you talk about is going.’
As Jessica drove back it was dark and quiet. She didn’t want to talk, and I let my thoughts run ahead to Iceland. Nanci of the army of secretaries had agreed to have me stay for a month from mid August to mid September. Haukur was away getting treatment for his addictions, and she wanted the company. I would need to contact Gísli—I knew that. How could I go back and not, even if there had been no word from him, nothing to suggest that he wanted to see either me or Mum?
I wish I could remember more of what was going through my mind that night and during the week or so that I remained in Scotland. Some years ago, I gave away my journal for that year—an impetuous gift to another girl who I thought ought to read my poetry. But that night, I must have realised that my love life was beginning to clash with my attachment to Iceland, and perhaps I foresaw that this, too, was the start of a trend. Jessica was pulling away, and it was because I was leaving. And yet I couldn’t cancel my trip to Iceland, not now that it was so close. I had to put it ahead of romance. The chance of discovering something about my father came before the chance I had with Jessica.
A few days later, I heard from others at the staff hostel that Jessica’s ex-boyfriend had come to work at Aviemore, and I began to suspect she was cheating on me, and that when she’d asked me about cheating, she had been asking more about herself, not him. One night I climbed the stairs to her room, determined to know the truth.
‘Why are you avoiding me?’ I called out. I was standing by her door and she wouldn’t let me in.
‘Please, Kári, let’s talk about this later. I’m tired,’ she whispered back through the doorframe.
‘Just let me in for a second.’
‘No. Go to bed. I promise, we’ll talk about this in the morning.’ But I heard a second voice from inside.
‘Who’s that with you?’ I asked.
‘No-one. It’s nothing. Go to bed. Please, go.’
I was drunk, but I trusted my hunch that she was with someone. It was infidelity, and my first encounter with that grasping ache of jealousy. The next morning I asked her what was happening.
‘Who was that in your room?’ I said.
‘It was nothing,’ she said. ‘Brian’s got a job here, that’s all. He and I were talking last night. It wasn’t a good time to see you. I didn’t want to see the two of you fighting.’
‘Are you leaving me?’
‘Kári, you’re leaving me.’
‘I’m just going to Iceland for a month. I can come back.’
‘You’ll have forgotten me in a week. There must be lots of pretty girls in Iceland.’
‘What are you talking about? Why are you always accusing me of thinking about other women? You’re the one who had Brian in your room last night.’ She put her hand up to stop me saying more.
‘Come to me when you come back, if you really mean it.’
The following night, Jessica and Brian came to the club. They were drunk. They danced, touched. He stroked the second-best perm in the world.
‘What the fuck does he think he’s doing here?’ asked Jason.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said.
‘I will fucking worry about it.’ He stepped across to Alex and the others. They fanned out. I felt sick. Jason came back.
‘Just say the word. We’ll kill him.’
10
LOVERS
It was with the offer of Brian’s destruction still lingering with me that I travelled to Iceland. It wasn’t my style to have Brian killed—neither the violence nor the urgency—I would rather have Jessica back. I left Scotland afraid that Jason would take matters into his own hands, but he never did. He later told me that it was the first time he stopped himself.
As soon as I arrived in Reykjavík, the army of secretaries swung into action and urged me to find my father immediately. Nanci had maintained her anger at the unknown man during our years away, and she said that I should ‘at least get some money out of the bastard’. Each morning, after she’d cooked me breakfast and lit me one of her thin, dark More’s, she reminded me where the phone was. Eventually, I picked it up and, the week after I had toured the highlands in a minibus of patriots and amateur linguists, Gísli and I had our drive to the president’s lodge. It was when I agreed to keep the secret for him.
Why did I agree to keep his secret and in turn accept that it was also mine? Why did I allow them to remain secret lovers, and not insist that they be parents together? At the time, my answer to myself was that I was afraid to upset them. Ultimately, that may be the only real answer there is. My fears were well founded and broad based: there was Gísli’s wife, and their children, and my mother’s promise, and what I supposed was their enduring love. I also didn’t want to endanger any cha
nce I had with him in the future, and to this end I was prepared to do almost anything he asked. Keeping him secret seemed a small price to pay for having him. He said he would remember my birthday, and at the time that seemed a gain.
If there is more to it than that—more to it than the fears and needs of a child—then I think it is that I was burdened by an old-fashioned idea, one that I am only now beginning to understand. It was my sense of honour towards Gísli, and my inescapable belief in the love of one’s father. It must sound ludicrous, I know, for me to be honouring the absent father in this way. I suppose, that’s what it means to be seventeen—one is always a little ludicrous at that age. Or that’s what it means to be seventeen in Iceland, where things are always at once simpler and more complete. The point is that I wanted to do the right thing, by both my parents and my country. I wanted to do the loving thing and, in 1990, it seemed positively wrong to be the ruin of his family life. I couldn’t take responsibility for that in quite the same way I could take responsibility for my life, and his absence in it.
I left him that day telling myself that I’d found out everything I needed to know. It wouldn’t be possible for me to move back to Iceland—the law stood in the way of that. Gísli didn’t want me there, either, and I was sure he wouldn’t help me get around the law. But Gísli was in love with my mother and, at the time, that seemed crucial, even the main thing to me. It meant that my mother had probably been in love with him, and I doubted that she was capable of falling out of love.
Gísli was the flirty kind, certainly, but I believed him when he said that he’d only ever loved Mum and his wife, because in so many ways it helped make sense of the promise, or at least its longevity. He hadn’t wanted to lose either of them, and openness would have forced him to make a choice. Who, I thought, was to say that you couldn’t be in love with two women at once? Wasn’t that a social rule rather than a rule of the heart?
There was nothing to connect my parents now but me, and I flew out of Reykjavík in low spirits, convinced that I had failed but unsure of how. I didn’t want to leave, and I worried that all I’d done by visiting was prolong and intensify my sense of loss.
In London, I found a message from Jessica telling me she’d left Brian again, and moved to Buckinghamshire. She was doing hairdressing; I should visit her, if I wanted. She spotted my arrival from the salon window, and ran out and jumped on me, covering me with kisses.
‘Thank God you’re here,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry for what I did in Aviemore. I was an arsehole. Brian’s an arsehole. He did the dirty on me again. I’m sorry.’ She didn’t ask me whether I’d met anyone in Iceland, and I thought this very self-possessed of her. Maybe she sensed I hadn’t come close to any women under fifty—the army of secretaries had virtually been my only female company.
We walked to a nearby hotel and checked in as a married couple—why such an elaborate cover I’m not sure. It was 1990, for goodness sake. Then, she insisted on dinner. I must have frowned a little because she asked, ‘What’s the rush?’ She was the rush, I responded.
‘Eat first, Kári,’ she said. ‘You’re so thin.’
‘I don’t know why,’ I said. ‘Nanci’s been feeding me eggs every morning for a month.’
‘Did you see him?’
‘Yes, I saw him. It was no good. He’s a coward. He was terrified of me.’
‘He’s just a man,’ said Jessica, between mouthfuls of English–Italian pub fare.
‘Me, too, remember. And I’m doing just what he wants. Keeping quiet. And at the same time, I’ve been awful to you.’
‘But I knew you wouldn’t stay. You told me you would go back.’
‘But what if I’m in love? Shouldn’t I stay?’
She didn’t reply.
‘Did you hear me?’ I asked quietly. ‘I think I’m in love.’
‘There you go,’ she said after a moment. ‘You said it.’
We finished our dinner in silence. Then she laid it out for me.
‘This is corny, but I have to tell you what a friend said to me once. She said, “Love is like a bus. You wait and wait, and then you see a big truck, and you think it’s the bus. And then you see the bus, and you know it’s the bus.” It’s not poetry, Kári, but it’s true. If you think you’re in love, you’re not in love. You should keep travelling.’
‘But what about you?’ It was a vague question. The one I wanted to ask was, why didn’t she say that she was in love, too? Even if was just a thought.
‘Look me up when you get back,’ she replied at last. ‘Tell me if you know any better then.’
It didn’t occur to me to ask her along. I was too preoccupied with the idea of being in love to really do anything about it. Better to reflect, to write poetry, and to leave. Better to be endlessly concerned with notions of love than to ask a beautiful girl to leave a shitty job and catch the ferry with me to Belgium.
Mum was right, after all. I was just like my father, and never sure how to act. Instead, I worried and made love to Jessica, felt sorry for myself, and two days later caught the train to Dover. So, that was the kind of lover I was.
11
FALLING OFF HORSES
Journeys home are several. My meeting with my father was one, while the month I spent in Iceland, with the trip into the interior and up to the north, another. And now I returned to Brisbane for a third journey home, and in many respects the most effectual, because it was during the next nine years, when I didn’t leave Australia at all, that I began to complicate my childhood in Iceland with a different, and more adult, kind of curiosity, and one that opened up a whole new way of belonging.
For, in my very first class at university, I found myself taken home. My tutor, Martin, looked up from his roll and asked whether Kári wasn’t an Icelandic name.
‘Yes, it is,’ I answered.
‘As in Kári in Njál’s Saga?’ he continued, a little shocked.
‘Yes, I think that’s where it comes from,’ I said. ‘I haven’t read the saga myself.’
‘Fancy that,’ said Martin. ‘I’ve been to Iceland twice.’
He had been drawn there by the sagas, the medieval Icelandic accounts of life during the Viking age—the very texts that Ed had brought with him to Iceland in 1972. He knew a lot more about them than I did. I was embarrassed to admit to him that I hadn’t read a saga yet. That wasn’t a problem, he said, I could study them in Brisbane. The next year I enrolled with about twenty others in Martin’s Old Icelandic course. I couldn’t believe my luck.
Martin’s favourite was The Saga of Gísli, the story of a warrior–poet outlawed for killing his brother-in-law. Martin often spoke of wanting to ‘meet’ Gísli, my father’s tenth-century namesake, in the setting of the saga.
‘I didn’t get to Dyrafjörður when I was in Iceland,’ he went on. This was Gísli the Outlaw’s home deep in the Westfjords, the remotest part of the country, a place Mum had visited during her voyage around the island on The Esja.
‘I ran out of time on my car rental,’ continued Martin, ‘and had to return to Reykjavík. I’ll get there one day, though.’ When I told him that I’d never made it to the Westfjords either, he joked, ‘You’ll have to be my guide the next time I go.’
In the meantime, Martin was very much my guide, and the Iceland of the sagas, for hundreds of years the focus of scholarly enquiry, took its place alongside the Iceland of my childhood. In a way it was another surrogate for the Iceland that lived on while I was in Brisbane. It was a heady mix because the sagas were, like me, nostalgic for better, simpler times, when people knew the right thing to do, and how to act.
It was Martin’s way of reading them that helped us to become friends. He treated the sagas as a perfect universe, islands apart in which you found yourself moving beyond yourself. I recognised myself in his relationship with the sagas. The interior otherworld he showe
d us was what I had created at Mostyn House, when I began to treat stories as rooms that lay beyond the control of the school. I think it was also what Mum had found in travelling. It was a way of encountering the world and accepting its complexity.
Just as Martin wanted to meet the Gísli of the sagas, I found myself reading very closely for characters that I thought I recognised. In Laxdæla saga, I encountered Guðrún Ósvifursdóttir, a young woman from the mid-west of Iceland who falls in love with Kjartan. He wants to go abroad, as do all young Icelandic heroes, to prove himself at the court of the Norwegian king. He leaves with his best friend Bolli, with a request to Guðrún for her to wait for him for three years. When only Bolli returns, she thinks the worst—Kjartan has fallen in love with someone else—and she marries Bolli instead. But Kjartan does return. He was just running late, and now he has to look elsewhere for a wife. He has brought with him magnificent presents, which he gives to his new bride. Consumed by jealousy, Guðrún manufactures a feud, and then demands that Bolli kill his old friend. On one of the hill-clipped valleys of the Dales district, Bolli ambushes his Kjartan and murders him.
Many years later, when Guðrún is old, she turns to religion. She establishes the first convent in Iceland, at Helgafell or Holy Mountain, on Snæfellnes. This is the same peninsula Mum’s boat rounded as the fog cleared, when Jón had come down to her cabin to borrow the camera. Guðrún’s son Bolli, the son of the killer Bolli, comes to see her there.
‘Tell me one thing, Mother,’ he asks, ‘whom did you love most?’
She doesn’t really want to answer him. But he presses her for a response. Then, she says, ‘I was worst to the one I loved the most.’ And that is all she’ll tell him: like my mother did a long time later, Guðrún insisted on silence, or the veiled silence of an evasive response. ‘He was clean and I was lonely.’ And, rather like Bolli before me, I had to make what meaning I could from that hint alone.
The Promise of Iceland Page 11
