They had no idea, and never did work it out for themselves.
6
LEAVING ICELAND
My mother didn’t want to be a mystery. Like most real mysteries, she just wanted to be left alone. In writing this book, I am merely the latest in a long line-up of friends and relatives who’ve sought to understand the overlap of her peculiar combination of qualities: shyness, generosity, and restlessness. They all somehow found a home in her treatment of my father, but also in the very intense bond that developed between her and me, especially during our early years in Iceland, when our sense of his absence still defined what we shared, rather than how we differed.
The truth is that, like all stories, this one has its limitations. Stories make grand claims about helping us order and understand the past and, yet, so often all they really do is create a sense of order around puzzles that will survive all the literary treatment you can throw at them. Just when I am ready to discover a reason for this or that, real life reimposes its uncertainties, and I am left with guesses. Actually, I haven’t done much besides lay a claim to a truth about my mother. But my guess about her motives is better than hers: I believe she was in love with Gísli, even though she has always said that love had very little to do with it.
The point, of course, is that one day I hoped to take a different path from the one my mother had chosen. We had our own individual reasons for thinking the way we did about Gísli. She eventually tired of him, while at the same time she promised to protect him. I hoped to find him, and eventually be open about who he was to me. I couldn’t give up on my father. I think my mother always understood this about me and was waiting for the day I took a different approach to hers.
To others it might have seemed a contradiction, but my mother thought she could work out a way of being honest and secretive at the same time. True, it was a difficult combination, and virtually impossible in Iceland, where it was always assumed that everyone should be known, and that all things were knowable. But it was how she reconciled herself to her new world, one in which she felt at once proud of me and guilty about Gísli. The combination comes through most clearly in the story she tells about my birth, and how the government forms, which were all about the appearance of openness, forced a kind of deceit that was to haunt me for years.
It was mid September, 1972. After months of total light, a short night announced the arrival of autumn. The first really cold snap arrived, marking the beginning of my mother’s second winter in Iceland. At around ten in the evening, when the day ended over the south-western shore, green pulses of light arrived, each one as urgent as those seen the year before. They were the northern lights, which called people back from their holidays abroad or their time on the farms, and heralded the time when tourists left and the most exquisite time of year began.
In the three months leading up to Christmas, life in Iceland becomes more internal, moving from the fields and parks to the concrete, earthquake-proof homes; from the social and unexpected to the private and familiar. It is also a busy time. Children spend their days behind triple-glazed windows at school, while their parents take on extra jobs to keep up with money problems.
My mother was heavily pregnant, and Patricia was worried that she wasn’t getting enough help. The problem with Susan, Patricia said, was that she kept everything too close to her chest—that was her way. Patricia insisted Mum come and stay at her place for the last few days. Mum could have the spare room, eat Australian food, and they could begin the final wait together. It was the least she could do as a fellow Australian.
So my mother moved in to Patricia’s attic apartment above Bergur and Rut’s. The following Friday evening, there was a knock on her door.
‘I’m Ed,’ said a bearded man on the doorstep. ‘Brun-jul-pur said I’d find her here.’
‘Who? Who did he say you’d find?’
‘Susan Reid. My wife.’
‘Wait here.’ Patricia closed the door. She wasn’t going to let a man in just because he claimed to be Susan’s husband. She walked inside and looked at Mum and said, ‘Ed?’
‘Ed? Really?’ Mum replied.
‘Yes. Your husband, apparently.’
‘Yes, my husband.’ Mum began lifting herself off the couch but it was a slow and cumbersome process. ‘Sorry, Patricia.’
‘You stay there,’ Patricia said, looking back to the door. ‘I’d better get him, then.’ When she returned with Ed, she pointed to Susan and declared, ‘You can squeeze on the couch in between us.’
‘You look fabulous,’ said Ed. ‘I bought you these.’ He reached over to his duty-free shopping bag and extracted a box of chocolates that were too big for Mum to hold, so he took them back to hold them for her.
After a while Mum announced they were going to stay in her flat in Sólvallagata. She couldn’t impose the two of them on Patricia. There were protests from Patricia but none from Ed, who understood that he had entered a hostile environment.
‘No, I’m calling a taxi,’ insisted Susan, asking Ed to fetch the phone.
On the way back to my mother’s apartment, Ed explained that he was glad to be in Iceland: he’d been reading Njál’s Saga.
‘Well,’ replied Mum, ‘you’ll be glad to know that I’m going to call the baby Kári if it’s a boy.’
‘After Kári the avenger,’ said Ed.
‘I’m not sure what he does. I got the idea for the name from Patricia’s landlords. They called their son Kári.’
‘It’s Kári who takes revenge for the deaths of Njál and his family. Kári kills all of the burners and then reconciles with the leader Flosi.’
Ed had his Penguin Classics copy of the saga at the top of his pack and that night, as my mother’s contractions began, he pulled it out to read to her, to show her just who Kári was. He would leave his copy with her after he left, and she’d have it on her bookshelves until I finally discovered the saga when I was eighteen, after returning from my meeting with Gísli.
The following morning, my mother was squeezed with her box of chocolates into the doctor’s car and they sped through the arched streets of the Valla area. When they arrived at the hospital the midwife ushered my Mum towards the lift, looking quizzically at the chocolates.
‘Am I supposed to carry these?’
‘My husband gave them to me,’ Mum said. ‘He said I should bring them.’
‘What do these men think? You’ll have to help me hold them. I’ve got a form to fill in.’ The midwife rested the chocolates half on her own arm and half against Mum’s side and, with her free hand, she began to fill out the admissions form. It was awkward, but she wanted to make a start on the paperwork before they arrived at the ward.
‘Husband’s name?’ she asked.
‘Edwin Reid.’
‘Edvin Raid,’ she said. ‘Have I spelt it right?’ My mother looked down at the form.
‘Yes.’ And there it was.
Mum hadn’t meant it to happen, but that was how Ed had been given as my father, and when she woke up after the birth and scanned the forms by her bed, she saw that not only was the real father hidden, but that he was hidden by her ex-husband.
Ed was rather pleased with all this. Like Bergur before him, he would be happy to see his name on the forms. There were now two men who wanted to be my father, while the real one couldn’t even manage the sight of my mother. And, then, there came a third. Gísli’s brother, Pétur, added himself to the line of those offering their names for the forms. But Mum refused. What was the point in lying? All she wanted was to be allowed to not say who the father was.
Was silence such an unbearable thing? In Iceland, yes. Icelanders had been keeping close records since settlement eleven hundred years before, and they weren’t about to give up now. They demanded completeness from Susan Reid—she was foreign, yes, but she was having her child in Iceland and she needed to
play her part in the national project of tracing the connections between all Icelanders of all time. The minute relations between everyone, living or dead, were the essence of what it meant to live here.
The patronymic system, which produced a second name out of your father’s first, was and still is alive in Iceland. The patronym is formed by adding son or daughter’s name to the genitive form of the father’s first name, with the result that each generation has a different second name. I ought to have been called Kári Gíslason—Gísla being the genitive of Gísli. Instead, I was given Ed’s surname, as Mum had kept her married name. Indeed, the two hadn’t yet legally divorced.
She was told priests could correct birth certificates, and she found one who was prepared to leave blank the space in the ‘father’s name’ column. As it turned out, the law was ahead of her and her futile attempts at silence. It said that, in the absence of a declaration of fatherhood, the mother’s husband was deemed to be the father. So, even though the first physical copy of my birth certificate was made enigmatic by a kindly cleric, by law I was deemed to be Ed’s child—the reprints of my birth certificate contained the addendum. I was Kári Reid.
Sometimes I’m asked what I think about what happened at that point, when I was born and the father’s name was first called for. The question assumes that my mum was at a defining point in her relationship with Gísli. I think my mother would reply that she hadn’t seen him since she’d fallen pregnant, and had no reason to think that he’d ever come back into our lives. Where was the gain for either her or me in naming a married man as my father? I think she just wanted to get on with being a mother.
Even without a local scandal, this wasn’t going to be easy: she had only five weeks’ maternity leave before she returned to full-time work at T & J. At the time she lived in a basement apartment that felt even more confined than usual in the approaching winter months with a baby to care for. Her parents in Australia were not the sort to visit, and her friends in Iceland were somehow missing the point about her. Why add Gísli to all this? There was, after all, a hidden danger in revealing him as the father: she could end up with him.
No, it was better to be alone.
A few weeks after my birth Ed left, chasing news that his girlfriend was now in England and ready to be pursued again. He left behind him a dozen sketches of Iceland and scenes that he recreated from Njál’s Saga. My mother covered the walls of the apartment with them and, from then on, his fine sketches accompanied us around the world, in each place forming a link to our basement studio in Reykjavík, as well as a roving exhibition of the work. Ed disappeared from our lives and we wouldn’t see him again until I was a young man at university, reading his copy of the saga he’d brought with him to Iceland.
My mother hadn’t wanted Ed back, but neither was it easy to see him leave once more. She was alone again, just as she had been when Ed had left the marriage three years earlier. Gísli still hadn’t come to see us, and nor did she think he ever would. She detected a new distance when she made her phone calls to her father in Australia. He seemed to find a border to erect between them. This, then, was what it meant to have a child: you gave yourself completely over to the child, while everyone else ran away. She’d never really known what she wanted from the men in her life, but it couldn’t have been this. And so she let Gísli back in when he came around, as free of obligations to her as when they’d first met.
Gísli had been in love with my mother, as he had confessed to me seventeen years later. After I was born and he realised she wasn’t going to name him, he began to relax a little and started visiting Mum again. We spent the first five years of my life in Reykjavík, and for all of that time I didn’t once see Gísli. He worried that I might recognise him in the street. But he visited Sólvallagata in the evenings, after I’d gone to sleep. Mum says that he liked to stand over my bed, talking to me while I slept. That was the extent of our early contact.
He wasn’t an unfeeling father, I am sure of that. But from the very beginning, our resemblance terrified him. And you have to concede that it was a cruel irony for him to have produced his double in this way. But to have denied himself the sight of his child looking at him is a bewildering thought to me. My two sons are both under five, the age I was when the affair between Mum and Gísli ended, and I can’t imagine that I could ever have been as disciplined as he was. I would have woken the boys, or at least made one visit before bedtime. But such is the disgrace of an affair, isn’t it? He was betraying his other children, and he made a choice about how to protect them from the truth.
By the time of my fifth birthday, Mum had had enough. She says it was just going on and on. He wasn’t going to leave his family and, in a way, I think she admired him for it. He had a sense of loyalty, even if it was a conflicted one. And every time she asked herself the testing question—what would she do if he left his wife?—her answer was always the same: I’d run a mile.
I’ve often wondered why. Can it be that, after seven years, she didn’t want him to herself, and that she feared rather than hoped that he might leave Ólöf? I think so. I’m not going to disagree with my mother on this one, because seven years would be enough time to spend in the company of his fears, even if you were in love. He wanted closeness and distance combined, intimacy and borders—for Mum and me to be nearby, but for no-one to know—and this left her with very little. In the end, the only way to stop it properly was to move back to Australia, to Sydney, and the shark net at Balmoral.
She had not become bitter through the experience of living in Iceland, because she had come to believe the Icelandic position on parenthood, which is that it was always a gain. And she has always refused to see herself as a victim of men in general, or Gísli in particular. It was her choice, she says. She didn’t want Gísli’s help. Being a single parent in Iceland wasn’t all that bad. But I have often wondered whether that was true, especially when I think about Sóley, my mother’s friend who was also a single mum.
They became close because they both struggled as a result of the men in their lives, but Mum thought Sóley’s position much worse than hers. Sóley, she’d said, didn’t have any contact with the father of her child. She was a local girl that everyone had known before she fell pregnant, the father a foreigner. The father was black, and Iceland was still racist. Sóley was worried about money even more than my mother was. All this made it harder for her to cope. I am not in a position to judge as I can’t really ever know what Sóley and my mother went through, or how self-reliant they were. But I often return to questions about their lives back then because Sóley, the only person who understood my mother properly and deeply, took her own life when her son was very young.
My mother was grief-stricken. But she was also angry, and I suspect that is because my mother understood the temptation. I remember that Mum sometimes spoke about a long swim she would have liked to take, out beyond the current of her worries in life. What exactly those worries were, I was never sure, and even now I find that I’m still guessing. Money, yes, I understood that. But, as a child, I sensed that money problems veiled a more acute pain, one that was tied to the knowledge that there was no help coming, and never would be. Gísli was a lost cause, and she had a line to maintain: that she didn’t want his help, anyway.
Despite the talk of a long swim, she was never going to leave me, of that she was sure. Instead, we went on our swims together at the big pool at Laugardalslaug, near the Reykjavík camp ground. Some days, we would walk down to the pool during her lunch break—it meant meeting in her office facing Mount Esja, and crunching along the ash-covered snow towards the sea and a valley of hot springs where the modern pool had been built. She would swim a leisurely breaststroke, while my aim was always to sprint ahead towards the deep end, where the water was cooler. But we were inseparable. For the first time in her life, she had someone who depended on her, someone who wasn’t needing to leave.
When it came time to l
eave Iceland, the Army of Foreign Secretaries, never convinced by my mother’s assertion of independence, wished her well in the pursuit of a rich new husband and predicted that, like all Icelanders, I would one day be back. When that time came, they would surely have another chance to solve the mystery of who my father was.
7
WIRRAL RATS
In 1982, three years after we’d moved back to Reykjavík from Sydney, we moved yet again. In a way, it was another step back, to her birthplace and the home comforts she imagined in Oxford. But, in retrospect, I wonder whether it wasn’t just England’s turn again. After all, we’d tried Iceland twice, and Sydney. There was still something missing, indistinct but quite possible just over the horizon, too. I was ten now, and becoming more aware of the true nature of our situation, and indeed Mum’s character. But, all the same, on a British Rail train trip I bought coffee for a stranger and, returning to my seat, told Mum that he would have to buy her one now. However mysterious my mother’s search might have been, mine remained a transparent one.
Sales representatives who visited T & J from England had assured Mum that she would pick up work easily if she returned to her birthplace. But when we arrived, we found the country was heading into recession and, for the first time in her life, my mother couldn’t find a job. Anyone, it seemed, could be a secretary these days. The IBM golf ball just about typed your letters for you. Bosses were surprised when you told them you had shorthand, as though it were an anachronism to have such a useful skill. So she moved from one temp job to the next while we stayed in B & Bs, with old friends or with Mildred’s family in Yorkshire. It was hopeless. We had lost Iceland, and what for? The damp life of English itinerants; Iceland without the wind and the social support.
The Promise of Iceland Page 7