Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

nice for the next thirty years. Then Anthony lost his job. Max was unhappy at school. Iceland, sang a newspaper feature read late one night while the children slept, was the happiest country in the world, a Nordic paradise of gender equality, fine schooling and public art. It wasn’t landscape that pulled us this time – or not only landscape – but the idea of a better society. According to the website of the National University which I chanced to encounter at work the next day, Iceland needed an expert in nineteenth-century British literature.

2

Leave of Absence

Six months later, I stand in Iceland’s National Museum, under the flat-screen television showing rolling news at the end of the exhibition of twentieth-century Icelandic material culture, when the International Monetary Fund steps in to save Iceland from sovereign default. It’s November 2008, and I’ve just finished my interview and verbally accepted the job. Over lunch, my future colleagues were talking about arranging new courses around texts available on Project Gutenberg, because they were expecting the import of books to halt. The headmistress of the international school is frank about her concern that all the foreign families are about to leave the country. The value of my proposed salary drops by a third during the week. Well, we reason, Icelanders aren’t going to starve, so there’s no reason why we would. I don’t know why the collapse of the Icelandic economy, the kreppa, doesn’t put us off; I think it seems important not to fear poverty. I think it seems likely to be interesting.

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