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

and gardens to make a pedestrian’s web of the city quite separate from the drivers’ map.) I raise my eyes to the hills, where the sun shines from the north-west onto pine woods, and flashes off streams. Behind the dual carriageway, the sea is too bright for my eyes, and across the inlet, the white church at Kópavogur stands like a lighthouse on the headland. Sea-birds glide about their lives on the Álftanes peninsula, calling to each other from rock to rock. The skies, the light and the water have a physical effect; every time I look up, there is more room for my lungs and my sense of inadequacy lightens on my shoulders. I am fascinated by this place, but I do not understand it, and all I think I have learnt so far is that understanding it won’t be easy.

A couple of weeks after Pétur’s and Hulda Kristín’s departures, Matthew phones. Matthew took his doctorate at the same university a few years ahead of me, and we established in May that we know people who know each other. He fell in love with an Icelander and moved to Reykjavík as soon as he finished his DPhil, and has been working at Háskóli Íslands, the University of Iceland, for the last fourteen years. Even more than Hulda Kristín, he knows where I’m coming from. What can I do? he says. Tell me what you need. Someone to talk to, I say. Someone to talk about. And a washing machine, and a high chair because Tobias is too small for the garden chairs, and a rubbish bin, which is not sold anywhere within walking distance. And a fridge. But we are short of money. Where are the second-hand shops? Oh, he says. Ah. That’s something about Iceland. There isn’t a second-hand market. People just don’t buy used goods. I’ll come and see you.

Matthew takes us to the Zoo and Family Park. The sunshine is hot, and there are brides posing under the trees in the Botanic Gardens. Mount Esja basks across the water, and the children look at seals in a pool and horses in a paddock and ride on a merry-go-round. So, says Matthew, how’s the culture shock? Do you want to go home yet? I take a breath. Most of the friends I made in my first year at university were international students who liked to spend their evenings complaining about England. Just the usual: plumbing, food, weather. Aged eighteen, I believed their dissatisfaction to be a sign of their cosmopolitan sophistication, but towards the end of the year found myself muttering that they should go home if they didn’t like it here. I determined before we came to Iceland that I would not be a whingeing expat. Anthony and I have not complained to each other, but somehow, while Anthony takes the children on a pedalo in a lake where white-legged blonde children are paddling, it all comes out to Matthew. I am doing the laundry by hand in the bath, and drying it on an airer which we managed to bring from Hafnarfjörður on the bus. In dry weather and with twenty-two hours of sunlight, each load is not quite dry when I bring the next one dripping to the balcony. We are keeping food in a coolbox on the balcony. We are putting rubbish in plastic bags hanging off one of the array of empty cupboards in our granite and oak kitchen. I want to see Iceland, but it takes hours to get anywhere walking with a two-year-old, the buses are infrequent and days are passing without us going further than the beach and the supermarket. We are in each other’s unrelieved company all the time and I need to read and write.

Matthew takes me to the Icelandic version of B&Q to buy a bin, and to the National Library, where he verifies my unconvincing assertion that I am a member of staff at the university and gets me a card. The top floor of the library looks over the tops of the pine trees waving in the old graveyard to Esja. It’s a close-up version of the view from my desk in the flat, and I soon learn to monitor the weather by looking at the mountain. If you can see all of Esja from Reykjavík, it’s not going to rain, although it doesn’t rain much anyway, during our first month. The sun goes round and round the sky. The light is always changing: the yellow of morning, gone by 7 a.m., the white of day, during which the city’s shadows are a sun-dial, edging round the buildings like wine in a swirled glass, and then the old-gold and pink of a sunset that goes on for hours. When I look up from my book, I can tell from the colour of the light on Esja when it’s time to go home. I colonise a desk by the window and begin to feel like myself again, ensconced in a maze of bookshelves, high above the university. Some of the books I expect to find in anyone’s National or University Library aren’t there, including the Complete Sigmund Freud and a proper edition of Wordsworth, and a flicker of concern for the autumn’s teaching crosses my mind, but for now I have found a refuge. I take a few days to work on my book, and between times, Matthew and Hulda Kristín get together and, over a week, produce a second-hand washing machine, a fridge and a Danish beech high chair. But I thought there was no second-hand market, I say. There isn’t, they reply. Foreigners never understand this. The fridge comes from Hulda Kristín’s step-father’s garage. The washing machine is from her neighbour’s cousin, who was buying a new one and is happy, though surprised, to take some money for the old one. The high chair was in Hulda Kristín’s attic, waiting for a relative to need it. There are very few shops where you