‘It’s tricky,’ he replied. ‘We’re going to Spain soon. It’s going to be an expensive trip.’
‘It doesn’t matter, then.’
‘No, wait.’ He offered me a couple of hundred dollars, saying we would have to drive to the bank to get it. ‘Would that be all right?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that would be all right.’ I also thought it would be humiliating and ridiculous. Why didn’t I at least ask for a decent amount, something that looked like a request for help and not a failed extortion attempt?
He gave me the money, and we shook hands a second time.
‘You won’t tell anyone, then?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I replied, ‘you have my word.’
That promise came into being through my mother’s kindness to Gísli. Eventually I broke it—I turned my back on Gísli’s needs and, in a sense, on my mother’s. But breaking that promise wasn’t going to be an easy decision, and it would bring with it as many questions about the past as it did answers. It would also make me realise that you can only ever make your own way home.
1
THE SHARK NET AT BALMORAL
‘Will you keep me a secret?’ he asked. That was what he’d said on the night she told him she was pregnant; a dark, winter’s night in the west side of Reykjavík in February 1972. Outside, the lawns were frosted over, brittle underfoot. Shadows crossed between the hazy arcs thrown by orange streetlights. Pedestrians scurried past and left behind them the cold scent of cigarettes and office dust.
Inside my mother’s small basement apartment he reminded her, as he did me later on, that his wife would certainly leave him if she found out. A wife who had borne him five children. A devoted wife. He would be disgraced. The children would lose respect for their father. They would see his absences in a new way. They would know that they hadn’t been because of hard work, but due to the philanderer’s distance.
Then he wrote down his blood group on a scrap of paper and said, ‘You’ll need this.’ Rather like, as eighteen years on, he wrote down my birthday—they were the only written records of my bloodline.
And my mother had agreed. She would bear the secret for both of them, and the responsibility for the affair, one that ended up lasting for seven years and which he always managed to keep from his family life and good reputation. She would protect him, and herself I suppose, from the implications of his paternity, the scandal. At seventeen, when he and I met in Reykjavík, I couldn’t even overcome the feeling that he deserved our loyalty and protection still, and the feeling that the slight chance that might exist for us to be father and son depended on it. He was more likely to become a true father if I did as he wished.
As long as I could remember, I had wanted him to recognise and love me. That can’t be surprising. Wasn’t it just a basic, instinctual need for a father, intensified in my case by a desire for what I knew I couldn’t have? From an early age I was aware he was beyond reach, and I was conscious my father’s identity was a secret from all but me, my parents, and perhaps one other—my father’s brother and only confidant, Pétur. I had grown up with this, and I was as committed to the secret as my mother. He was my father, but he was also my father only to me.
Another side of me, though, wondered why.
Why, really, were we so careful of his position in the world? Why had my mother promised to protect him, and why had she kept to her promise with such perseverance, even in the face of constant pressure from her friends, from officials and, eventually, from me to make Gísli face the consequences of the affair? And then, why had I agreed, all these years later, to keep to my part of the promise? Was I scared, as surely he was, of what would happen if my true identity were brought into the open? Was I really so afraid of losing him, a father I’d never had?
And then there is my mother. When I was five, she and I left Iceland for Sydney. My mother wanted to end the affair, and you couldn’t get much further away from Gísli and Reykjavík than Sydney. That’s what it took. Australia also represented a homecoming of sorts, as my mother’s parents had migrated there from England when she was ten. It now became an opportunity for a fresh start in an old haunt—to be clear of Gísli and perhaps find someone new, a father figure for me. She ended the affair by leaving Iceland. She would, like me, spend the rest of her life looking for ways to go back.
Even in the relatively quiet days of 1977, Mosman was genteel and a little off to the side of what was really going on. Military Road, which branched off the main street north out of central Sydney, descended with snobby leisure into the Mosman shops until it seemed that you’d reached a town apart, an enclave of middle-class Australianisms: the milk bar, the bowls club with a view of the harbour, and what I recall as a scrubby, dusty school on a corner opposite a cricket oval that was always parched, always needed sprinkling. In its gradual descent to a terminus of suburban busyness, it was like the main street leading down to the centre of Reykjavík, except dry, warm, and friendly.
My mother recognised all this as the customary features of an Australia that hadn’t changed since she’d left seven years before. The plot points were more or less the same as they had been in Macksville, a little town in central New South Wales where she’d lived as a girl. That wasn’t the real issue, though. In the intervening years a lot had happened to her. She’d had a long affair with a married man and now she had brought a half-Icelandic son to live in a still-unworldly Australia.
As in Reykjavík, the talk of being cosmopolitan was entirely for the benefit of the locals, who alone noticed the minute indictors of the new and the foreign. Foreigners didn’t notice anything except the Australian conservatism, still strong and rude—little had changed. After living in a country devoted to children, even those of secrets and scandals, the frowns now directed at my mother as a single mother were a shock. She was not to be taken in to the polite circles of the North Shore.
Instead, we lingered on Reykjavík time, and ticked along to a consciousness that was always about going back to the north, one day. To the other city of light and water, which is what they had in common. Sydney and Reykjavík were ports with ‘names for the sea’, as W.H. Auden had written. In my mind, they were always twin cities, long since separated but aware of each other.
But for my mother, even though she knew she needed to get away from Gísli and, even with roots in Australia, there was no understanding about why she’d come back. She hadn’t even settled into her new job before she was planning our next departure. It was so like her father, Harold, who had never been able to put down roots. But unlike Harold, who was unhappy until his death, my mother knew where she belonged. She wasn’t lost, like him. No. She was a true exile. It was always Iceland, because she couldn’t ever be finished with it. In the meantime, it was Mosman. It was the steep walk down to Balmoral Beach. White Ford Falcons. Storms on the way home in the afternoon. The navy grey of stone walls. The paper brown of trees.
For my own part, I had decided that Mum ought to marry—I knew, already, that the real problem was that we were missing someone, and the key, I realised, was men. You had to find them and then approach them, neither of which seemed to come naturally to her. So, I did it. Normally, I spoke to the ones sitting on their own on busses or trains, on the ferry benches or at parks. They weren’t always the ones that an adult would pick. There was a simple procedure I followed. I pointed at Mum and said, ‘Do you think that lady over there is pretty?’ Feigning good will, most men said, ‘Yes’.
‘Would you like to marry her?’ I would then ask, moving in a single movement towards my goal. My success rate was low, and Mum didn’t appreciate my efforts, at all. But how else was she going to find a husband?
We lived on the middle floor of a three-storey apartment block, and I confided in our upstairs neighbour, Carline, and our downstairs neighbours, Peter and Mary, that Mum was a hopeless case. I also related another key piece of information, which w
as that, according to Mum, she’d had enough of men.
‘Don’t you think that’s a silly thing to say?’ I asked Carline.
‘Well, you men are quite something,’ she replied to her six-year-old interrogator.
‘Why?’
‘The thing about men, Kári, is that they seldom mean anything they say.’
‘Are they liars?’
‘No, not exactly liars. They want too much, that’s all.’
Carline was unreliable. Like my mother, she had been surprised to find herself back in Australia. Her return had come at the end of many years in London where, she always said—and as I have heard so many Australians say since—she felt more at home than she’d ever felt in Sydney.
‘We can’t decide where to live,’ she explained to me. ‘It doesn’t help if you love Australia, because loving a place isn’t enough. But your mother is a natural homemaker. Your apartment looks much more cosy than mine, and you two have only just arrived. What do you think of that?’
‘Why did you come back, then?’ I asked.
‘Because of my mother,’ she replied. ‘My mother was very sick. But then she lived and lived and lived. And when she died, it was too late to go back again.’
‘Why was it too late?’
‘Because the man I should’ve stayed for hadn’t waited long enough. He wasn’t patient.’
‘Weren’t you married?’
‘No. I missed my chance. But that’s a while ago now.’
‘Are you sick of men, too?’
‘Oh, no. I am not sick of men. And nor is your mother. We’ve got you, haven’t we?’
There. They weren’t sick of men. This was crucial. It meant, of course, that my search must go on. There were nice teachers at Mosman Primary School. Then there was Marco at the milk bar. He’d looked after the twenty dollar note I’d found until, three months on, no-one had claimed it.
‘Kári, the whole of Mosman doesn’t need to know that I’m not married,’ said Mum.
‘But how else will they know?’ I replied.
‘Know what?’
What I wanted the whole world to know, it seems: that there was no particular reason for us being fatherless. Mum was no different to other mothers. With the right man, she might even be cured of her restlessness, even of her attachment to Iceland. We would settle in Mosman. What I wanted all of the world, and most especially Mosman, to see was that Mum was ready to be loved. What I hadn’t yet come to realise about her, was the fact that it was love that stood in the way of love. It had begun to stand in my way, too.
Already, at six, my relations with the opposite sex were fraught. I was being confined to a month of lunches under the big tree at school, the penalty for throwing stones at girls. Boys were different. You could throw all the stones you liked at them. Mosman Primary, I was discovering, had an inflexible attitude to the pleasures in life. They didn’t like it when you raced across the next-door oval while it was being sprinkled. They didn’t like it when I talked in class, which even today—as a lecturer in English—I believe is the main function of a class. And they didn’t like it if I made quacking noises with my cheeks, which, along with playing with the knots at the end of a duvet cover, had become an addiction.
My grandmother, Mildred, came for a visit and mended the torn ends of my duvet cover. She also stuck her finger into my cheek whenever I began quacking.
‘Don’t do that, Grandma,’ I insisted. ‘Don’t poke me.’
‘Well, stop quacking, then.’
‘But I like it.’
‘Whatever made you think that was an excuse for anything? You think you can do things just because you like them?’
I see now it was the answer she must have practised on her husband, Harold, many times before. She must have been hard in her day. In its prima facie seriousness, her face was as Yorkshire as ever. She was still a nurse from Doncaster. But her face had crumpled in that Australian way. They weren’t laughter lines, exactly. More crease marks created over the years as her face had slipped and left behind a memory of its old harsh self. It was now a good, kind face. We were friends from the start.
Between my mother and Mildred, though, tensions begun years before. As a girl, my mother sided with her father Harold and his restlessness. Mildred and my mum now found it hard to talk to each other, and Mum would be relieved when Mildred’s visits ended. But I understood my grandmother—the main thing for her was to feel at home—and I couldn’t imagine why Mum didn’t like her as much as I did. Mildred and I would sit on our balcony overlooking the car park and watch the traffic go by on our street without any sense of restlessness at all. The passing cars were, to us, just passing cars: they weren’t necessarily going anywhere.
As I came out to join her on the balcony one day Mildred yelled, ‘Don’t close that!’ But I had. The door shut and locked. It was only midmorning and Mum wouldn’t be home until five-thirty.
‘What are we going to do until then?’ cried Mildred.
‘We can talk,’ I replied.
‘Talk! It’s all right for you. You can pee over the side. What about me? Where am I going to go?’
‘You can go over the side, too,’ I replied.
An hour passed.
‘Call out to him,’ Mildred said, pointing at a young man walking along the pavement. But she took over. ‘Would you let us in? The front door’s unlocked. Just come around and open the balcony door for us.’
He walked upstairs and slid open the balcony door.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘You talk to him, Kári. I’m going to the loo.’
Naturally, I told him all about my mother.
No-one ever swam within the shark net at Balmoral Beach. It was a gothic-looking apparatus, a sea monster. Sydney Harbour might well have been full of sharks but Mum, for one, had been swimming in open water since she was a girl. Her philosophy, along it seemed with all the other residents of Mosman and Balmoral, was that it was better to be taken in clear water than to swim safely in the trapped effluent of the nets. The rest of the beach was so clean and bright. This was Sydney, after all, a glorious stretch of Australian brightness. As Clive James promised, the sharks only ever took one person at a time.
My mother couldn’t quite bring herself to adopt the same good will in relation to men. No matter my efforts, she had sworn off them, and she hadn’t really trusted another man since we moved to Sydney. Gísli was hardly a shark, but he had done enough to keep her in the shallows. My efforts failed. Over the years, she would often give reasons for staying single. Men didn’t like it when they saw she had a child, or men preferred younger women; and, no doubt, she was right about a lot of men. But, in truth, I don’t think she ever tried very hard to meet anyone. She would remain single, like Gísli in a way, who had allowed a part of himself to become a single man in a marriage.
I say it was love. Surely, love can only ever be a good, worthwhile thing, but for Mum it was complex, full of inner conflict and guilt, and she was never going to be able to limit its impacts. Their love meant that it would always be just me and my mother, a lone parent with a lone child, both to some extent supported by the promise made to Gísli, and the promise of Iceland that it offered. We kept our connection to both.
‘Do you like it here?’ Mum asked me. I was seven, and it would be hard not to like living by the beach. But my mother’s old boss in Iceland wrote and asked her to come back to the firm, the one she had worked for when she started her new life in Iceland ten years before. They offered to pay for us both to come back.
‘I’m thinking that we should maybe go back to Iceland,’ she said. ‘I do miss it.’
‘Okay.’
‘You won’t mind?’
‘It won’t matter, Mum, as long as we’re together.’
That, says Mum, was enough to sea
l it. She would take us back to Iceland, back to where her thoughts had been tending since we’d left two years before. It was time for her to try again.
2
THE ROAD TO REYKJAVÍK
It’s a long way from Australia to Iceland, but then my mother, Susan Joan Diggons, had always dreamt of being as far away as possible. Like her father Harold, she was the sort who was never entirely satisfied; the one who needed to get away before she felt like she was reaching home. So why not Iceland? That’s how it went with her—‘Well, why not?’—and then the decision to move was made.
It’s one of the things I like most about her. In that nonchalance existed a type of bravery I have often wished I had more of myself. In me, it comes paired with my father’s sense of caution. In my mother, it was a replacement for other kinds of courage that she didn’t have. She could be achingly shy. And it could also cloak more serious attachments, especially in the case of Reykjavík. We weren’t going back just because there had been a letter from her old employers in Iceland. We were going back because she thought she had found a solution to her restlessness.
She had been shifting about constantly, more or less, since she was ten. This was when her family—the Diggons—migrated from their modest, unsettled life in Berkshire to Thumb Creek, then a desperately vacant valley in central New South Wales, about an hour’s drive from the coastal town of Macksville. Harold had great hopes in the migration—a chance to escape the disappointments of postwar England.
But they felt Australia was hostile and unpromising, and much inferior to what they’d left. Perhaps in 1951 it was. Susan shared in her father’s distress; the very day after they arrived in Thumb Creek, she solemnly swore to herself that she would leave the first chance she had. It happened like this.
She was set atop an old horse called Bluey, of all things, and was told to follow a thin track winding through a valley of creek beds to Thumb Creek School. She was scared. She was shy. She was awkward about being tall for her age. She knew she seemed foreign to others, as indeed she would be from then on, no matter where she lived. She was not Australian. She was already not quite English, either. The world around her was menacing, and she loathed the idea of joining a new school. But within her she had something that she’d discovered on the voyage from England.
The Promise of Iceland Page 2