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

bullying. ‘I was surprised,’ he adds, shrugging. ‘No-one has spoken about that aspect.’

‘So they were treated like immigrants?’ I ask.

‘Yeah,’ says Teddi. Margrét speaks. ‘She’s saying that when they lived in Hveragerði, the first weeks after the eruption, there was a school just for the kids from the island. With their own teacher. They didn’t go to school with the Hveragerði kids at all, they didn’t blend in, and so they didn’t experience these problems there. They were never teased in Hveragerði.’

‘What was it like for the grown-ups? Were they able to integrate?’

Hveragerði is less than half an hour’s drive from Þorlákshöfn, where the ferry goes to the island. You can see the Westman Islands, and would certainly have been able to see the eruption, from Hveragerði.

‘I was away,’ says Theódór. ‘Working.’

‘At first, it was really cold.’ Teddi is translating for Margrét again. ‘We were staying in the summer houses. They weren’t meant for winter. We all had to get used to being cold. But the children were very happy there. Of course it was a strange time, but we had our community there, the islanders, together for those months.’

The Westman quarter of Hveragerði. It takes fifteen minutes to stroll with a toddler from one side of Hveragerði to the other.

‘You must have been able to follow what was happening on Heimaey while you were away.’

Margrét nods. ‘There was a programme on the radio every single day, telling us what was happening. Because there was someone there on the island all the time.’

I’ve been holding back this question, although I think I know the answer. ‘Was your house destroyed?’

‘No. Our house was standing but it took seventy trips with a pick-up truck to remove the ash. There were five hundred tonnes of ash in my house.’

‘What was it like?’ I ask. ‘When you got back and saw it?’

Theódór frowns, turns his cup. ‘This was very dark.’

There is a pause, which tells me that the darkness was metaphorical.

‘Many of the people who were there at the beginning, trying to make progress with their houses, slept in boats in the harbour,’ says Teddi. ‘Some of the houses were undamaged, but people preferred to be on boats. That way, if something happened, you could just go. Start the engine and go.’

I turn to Margrét, who was always home, who was raising those six children while Theódór was at sea. (I would rather be at home, I think, even with six children, than fishing those waters.) ‘What was it like for you when you saw your house again?’

She looks at her grandson. ‘For the first days and weeks, I went many times to the window. We were busy cleaning, but I made many trips to the window, to see if anything was happening.’

‘There was always smoke coming from the lava,’ says Theódór. ‘We could go up there to cook our eggs! And we used the volcano for our heating systems. It stayed warm for the longest time, so we pumped the cold water up through the lava and then into our houses.’

‘How long did it take you to stop checking?’ I ask Margrét.

‘As people started to move back, and things became normal again – you could see there were lights in the houses and people on the streets . . . The children were so happy to be back.’

‘Do you ever worry about it now?’

I know what Theódór is going to say.

‘No. I don’t think about it at all.’

But Margrét does.

10

Vilborg

I have been applying for jobs again. It’s a dreamer’s tic, like lingering in front of estate agents’ windows. What would it be like to have a different life? What would my story be if we lived in a house with apple trees in the garden, or if we moved to Denmark, or Japan? It’s the same instinct that brought us to Iceland in the first place, and being here, having left England, I want to hold on to our emigrants’ freedom. Going back to Canterbury now would feel like aborting a journey. I accept that we have to leave Iceland, I tell Anthony, but let’s keep going. We know we can do it now, being foreigners. Let’s stay foreign. I apply to universities in Switzerland, Singapore and Australia. I haven’t yet told anyone at Háskoli Íslands that I’m going to resign at the end of the year, as if I think the elves might double academic salaries and allow us to stay. I keep listening to Icelandic stories, acting as if we won’t leave.

You know, says Pétur, you should talk to Vilborg. We’re in his office, and I’m distracting him from marking by asking for more tales about Iceland in ‘the old days’. I’m like a child who doesn’t want to go to sleep – just one more. Tell me the one about the rubber boots. Vilborg, he says, remembers the Second World War, and she’s a gifted storyteller. I’ll get her to phone you, but it might take a while. She’s busy, travels a lot.

I scent some more first-hand history. Before we left England, I read the memoirs and journals of some British soldiers occupying wartime Iceland. Iceland seems, for many, to have been a relatively safe and easy posting, where the weather and the land were more dangerous than the enemy. But despite their physical safety, anxiety sings through some of the soldiers’ writing. The North Atlantic was a deathly place in the early 1940s, known intimately by both sides. Towards the end of the war, Iceland’s mid-Atlantic location, its potential as a stepping-stone from North America to Europe, made other nations’ hunger for power swirl around it like an Atlantic storm. I would like to hear a first-hand account of the Icelandic wartime experience.

I wait. Vilborg is busy. And then one Sunday afternoon when we’ve all gone round to Pétur’s house for gluten-free waffles with whipped cream and French jam, she phones. Pétur’s not saying much, but the call goes on. The rest of us wander