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

see wooden decking on the verandah, rowan trees. And the volcano. ‘Where your reflection is?’ I ask.

Þórunn nods enthusiastically. ‘It’s good you said reflection. Sometimes it’s just like that, like a reflection, or even just a shadow, and other times I see her the way I see you now.’ She stands up and crosses to the other window. There are birch trees, a pine dark against the watercolour greens of Icelandic spring, and the Volvo waiting for me on the gravel track. ‘They’re just waking up out there. There’s a tree-elf, here, he’s always the first to show himself in the spring, and a beautiful little being here in the Christmas tree.’

She turns back into the house, holds out her hand as if to a toddler coming out of the second bedroom. ‘And I have this little one here, a house-elf. His name is Oli. He’s very playful, sometimes he’s taking things from me. He’s shy now, I don’t know why. He’s been playing in my bedroom.’ She smiles at Oli, who is smaller than Tobias. ‘I love this little guy, I wouldn’t be without him.’

As I move to put my shoes on, Þórunn says, now you drive carefully, get safely back to your boys. Thanks, I say, I will. I dislike it when people say ‘drive carefully’, calling into being the possibility of accidents, of twisted metal and bloodied windscreens. Goodbye, I say, and thank you again, thank you for so much time on this lovely day. She follows me to the door. You go safely now, she says, take care on our Icelandic roads, drive safely. I walk over the stones across the turf to the metal gate. There are chimes hanging from the trees, and fibreglass toy houses under them. Is there a throng of unseen beings watching me go? I manage not to glance back to see what frisks behind me. I get in the car and close the door quickly, as if I could stop it getting in, coming home with me. But once I set off, I’m fine. It’s easier driving on gravel than I thought; I don’t need to creep along as I did on the way in. It’s like steering a boat down the waves: you know how it’s going to slide, when to pull round before it goes too far. I can do this. I speed up, begin to sing to myself, the kind of thing that privately-educated British women sing when alone. And did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England’s– and there’s a Hummer coming over the brow of the hill in front, going too fast and far over onto my side of the road, and now that I look down my own speedometer’s showing nearly a hundred. It’s not really a near-death experience. I slow down, pull over, and he passes with at least ten centimetres to spare, the kind of thing that happens several times on any Icelandic journey. And still, I find, I haven’t learnt my lesson. All the way back to Route 1, the needle creeps up, and the Volvo swoops over the hills, as if there’s an imp in the passenger seat saying, go on, you can do it, you’re not scared. It’s a bright day, a good road. See if you can take that corner at ninety. Wheee!

12

A Small Farm Under a Crag

At the end of term, I take a group of students from my writing class to the National Museum. Most of them, they confess, have never been there, even though it’s on campus and offers free admission on Wednesdays. Even with your kids? I ask, because although I lived in Oxford for eight years without going to the Ashmolean from one season to the next, once Max could walk we went every week. And to the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Natural History Museum, not because I imagined that a toddler would learn from the exhibits but because it was something to do, somewhere to go, a change from the flat and the playground and feeding the ducks. I still don’t know what Icelandic families do. Oh no, the students say, we wouldn’t take children to a museum.

We’ve been writing about objects, and about the way objects have stories. The curators here don’t like visitors to use pens and paper, or even laptops, and while I negotiate with the woman on the desk I think about the groups of primary school children with clipboards who roost on the floor of every museum in London. At last I prevail, and I ask each student to find one object and write about it, first a still-life exercise in description and then an account of the object’s journey. I wander with them at first. Some exclaim over the national dress costumes, remembering their grandmothers wearing such outfits on feast-days, looking forward to their own graduation ceremony when those who have them will wear the black woollen floor-length skirt, embroidered white lace petticoats, bodice and head-dress passed down the generations. One woman has already become fascinated by a carved chair from a seventeenth-century farmhouse, its arms worn by the hands of the woman for whom it was made, and two of the men settle beside the axe and bloodstained block used at the last execution in Iceland in the late nineteenth century. Someone else stands in the replica turf hut, his head bent to fit under the ceiling. He could, if he tried, reach the beds that line the walls on both sides at once. Despite the flicker of the synthetic ‘fire’, it’s too dark to write in there. Whole families used to spend the winter in those houses.

I wander off to visit the object that called to me last time I came, a Chinese porcelain tea-bowl that was found in the eighteenth-century layer at Skálholt in the north. Skálholt is a cluster of buildings that was once the episcopal centre of Iceland, the dwelling of bishops and site of