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

up to Messíana’s studio to play with the bags of feathers she uses in her costume design and to watch rainbows over the sea. (Is it not magnificent, Pétur said to me once, is it not more than a man could hope, to be married to a woman who buys coloured feathers by the kilo?) After about twenty minutes Pétur comes upstairs. Will you listen to this, he says, holding the phone out. She’s talking about what the American soldiers thought when they first arrived in Seyðisfjörður in 1943. Amazing woman, amazing. And such beautiful Icelandic. He puts the handset back to his ear, reverent as an eavesdropper.

I’ve never heard a British person say that someone speaks ‘beautiful English’, not unless in patronising approbation of second language acquisition (‘you’d never know she’s French, she speaks beautiful English’). Anglophones merely talk, but several people here have mentioned someone’s excellent speaking, as if conversation in the right hands is a recognised form of performance. But of course, says Pétur, there is an art of speech, of rhetoric, that isn’t just about standing on a platform and going on or trying to persuade or convince. I hope it comes over in her English, he adds. Vilborg uses the language better than anyone.

It takes a few weeks before Pétur pops his head round my door at work and says Vilborg would like to meet a young English writer. I hope you two get on, he says. You’ll either love each other or hate each other. She’s a lot like you. A lot like me how, I demand, although I know it’s a compliment of sorts. In a nice way, of course, he says, and he and Matthew, who’s stopped by to explain the latest developments of Eyjafjallajökull and the Icesave Thing, look at each other and laugh. The answer, I think later, might be that we both talk a lot.

On the appointed day, late in April, Pétur e-mails me a map, as he does every time I’m going somewhere new. I walk from work into the city centre, around the lake. There are drifts of what look like miniature violets, or maybe some kind of gentian, under the bushes, and the first few Arctic terns of the summer slicing the air. We’ve all been waiting for them, the kríur. They follow the earth’s wavering, winging the globe to avoid the dark. Northern summer in the Arctic, southern summer in the Antarctic, an annual round trip of nearly 60,000 miles that means the polar summers are always theirs. I’m not sure I like the terns. I admire their fish-like flitting through the air, the fine-line delicacy of their pointed shapes, birds that could be drawn only in the finest pen-and-ink, but I am afraid of their speed and sharpness, the way they share our seaside space and would razor open anyone who put a foot out of line. Sharing the walking paths with the summer birds again reminds me too vividly of last summer’s disabling sense of foreign-ness, of knowing only that I didn’t know the rules and didn’t know either how anyone, any bird, might react to my ignorant mistakes. I don’t, I think, identifying the terns overhead by their cries, feel like that any more.

I come out by the National Gallery, which I have still failed to visit, vicariously traumatized by Anthony’s account of trying to take the children there on a day when they didn’t like each other. I turn up one of the warren of streets behind Laugavegur, into the oldest part of the city where painted houses sit at companionable angles behind wooden fences, in gardens where there are trees and fountains and sometimes even a flowerbed. If we stayed, I always tell myself, we would live here. Sometimes Anthony and I pick out our favourites, and it’s true that if we sold the Canterbury house we could have one of these, one with wooden lace over the porch on a road too narrow for stupid Icelandic cars. We could walk with Tobias to the pre-school by the lake and we’d have the French bakery and the bookshops and the Vietnamese noodle bar right on the doorstep (though Max would still have to get out to school in Garðabær, somehow). I check my map. Vilborg’s house is one of a row that runs parallel to the street. It’s made of corrugated steel, painted sky-blue. I pause on the doorstep, suddenly nervous about turning up at a stranger’s house with the intention of taking her childhood memories. I smooth my hair, wipe my nose, and ring the bell. The door buzzes, I open it, and there’s Vilborg, less of an old lady than I was expecting, leaning down a flight of narrow, twisted stairs towards me. She has long hair, the colour of Regency powdered wigs, swinging over high cheekbones. Come in, she says. I am Vilborg and you are?

Sarah, I say. Sarah, and you’re expecting me, aren’t you? Pétur said?

She ushers me in. On the coffee table, there’s a plate of chocolate digestive biscuits and a steel salver in the shape of a lily pad, the sort my grandmother used to use to offer sausage rolls to the Masons’ wives, holding slices of green and red pepper. There’s a coffee pot and two cups and saucers on a tray. Young women, Vilborg says, often don’t eat chocolate biscuits, so she has prepared the vegetables for me. She hopes I will take whatever I would like. Would I like to look around the house? She and her husband bought the house in the 1960s to save it from demolition. (Her husband, Pétur told me, was a major figure in twentieth-century Icelandic history, a publisher, film-maker, playwright and poet, and I have a sense of his ghost here. He’s the person who’s not sitting in the chair by the window, not in the studio at the back, its windows filled like those of a bookshop with his work, not wearing the