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

I brought it here with the intention of abandoning it at the end. I love the blue, she says. I loved it too, I reply. Enjoy it. I give away the cutlery my grandmother stole from aeroplanes in the 1980s, which no-one has been able to dispose of because it’s perfectly serviceable although everyone in the family now has proper sets. One of the students cannot remember metal cutlery on aeroplanes. No, I tell him, it wasn’t a more innocent age, only one whose terrors did not include cutlery at 36,000 feet. (But I keep the four-pronged fork and serrated knife from El-Al, all the same.) Even the cheap plastic mixing bowls we’ve used all year are somehow hard to leave. I give it away, all of it. I send our things out to begin Icelandic lives. Mæja arrives to help me clean, Mæja who despite her expertise in linguistics likes to go down on her knees and scrub. We work together. Come and see us, I say. Come to Cornwall.

Everyone has gone, Anthony and the children already at Pétur’s house, which we will leave for the airport after supper, Mæja back to the flat full of grace and books and a grand piano, the students back to their summer jobs in restaurants and hotels and offices. I wander round the flat for the last time, though I know really that there’s nothing left. I go out onto the balcony, which still has traces of dust around the edges, and run my finger along the window-sills, which have been washed by Mæja and are therefore clean. Esja is alpine-bright, the patch of snow on the summit glistening against a sky so blue you can tell it’s black at the top, the pine trees massed on the lower slopes. The church at Kópavogur bathes in sun on the headland, the spire of Hallgrímskirkja rising behind it. The waves in the bay are lazy, and I can hear children playing on the artificial beach at the end of the road. Some of them will be swimming. There isn’t time for the last walk on the lava field that I’d been planning, but I let the door close behind me for the last time and walk down to the shore, where it does, at last, smell of growing turf and rotting seaweed. The goslings have been hatching this week, seizing the short weeks of summer, and they stagger peeping and pecking at clouds of flies. It’s not quite midsummer yet, and they have a few weeks to grow their wings before Iceland tilts away from the sun and the nights begin to lengthen, telling them to leave. I’m not ready to go either.

16

Beautiful is the Hillside

But we do leave. We go home and move the length of the country, from the eastern to the western corner of the British triangle, and start again.

England looks different now. I understand for the first time what Americans mean when they say that everything is so small here. The landscape seems miniaturised, intricate as embroidery. The richness of trees and hedges and canals and bridges and shops and pavements is too much, requires faster reactions and shorter sight than come naturally now. Shops are the size of sitting rooms, town gardens the size of bathrooms, and half the sky seems to have gone away. The colours are too bright, vulgar as Technicolour after black and white. The news seems parochial. I forget to lock the car doors, but take Tobias’s woolly hat in my bag every time we go to the park, all summer. Now three, he can swing himself high on the big swings, and I try to explain to my friends why I’m not trying to stop him climbing to the top of the big slide and jumping off the big climbing frame. I don’t say that I have learnt that children don’t usually fall, and also that they learn only by falling. He forgets the Icelandic songs, and, during a summer spent in shorts and T-shirts, how to do up a zip. He forgets how to swim.

Iceland stops seeming real to me after the move. Tobias tries to speak Icelandic at his new Cornish nursery, but gives up within a week and by Christmas cannot remember his first handful of nouns, losing the language as fast as he found it. I put postcards of snowy mountains and the Northern Lights and Reykjavík on my office wall, but they are only postcards and when I tell people that we spent last year in Iceland I feel as if I am lying. In my mind, I follow the cycle of the year in Iceland: the departure of the birds, the lengthening nights, the week when you stop hoping that it will be warmer today. And then the first snow, the first aurora, the day you start thinking about lunch before sunrise, the day the waves are contained under ice. In Cornwall, the roses in our garden are still blooming on Christmas Day and Max and his friend dare each other to swim in the sea at New Year. In Iceland, I know, the snow on the ground is brighter than the sky and on the brightest winter day the shadows stretch away like ghosts. In spring, Pétur sends me pictures of Icelandic students celebrating the end of term with a barbecue that has to be secured in the corner of two buildings and sheltered from horizontal snow with umbrellas, while from my office I can see people sunbathing around the fountain while they revise. Most people, I know, prefer Cornwall to Reykjavík. At the beginning of the summer, these people begin to trickle down the A30, bringing tents and surfboards and bicycles. As soon as the school holidays begin in mid-July, our new hometown is crowded with families coming for the beaches and the coastal walking, admiring the palm trees along the seafront and the cafés where you can eat organic ice