The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

96 ‘The Songbird of Spring is Here!’ 1945

And what then could be said of the evil curse which, like a spear of darkness, pierced every hour that passed in this greatest residence in the land?

My father and I went on long walks, trying to escape the hundreds of black rats that followed us from one room to another. Maybe they would lose themselves along the shore? We walked out to Rani and sometimes even as far as Gálgahraun. The wind blew sunrays against our faces and corrugated folds across the Lambhús Lake, bringing a glow to the late summer hay. We talked about everything but what we needed to talk about. He told me about his summer evenings in Vejle, Denmark, and taught me about shellfish. One day we decided to take a stroll on the shore to look for mussels, despite the warnings from Elín, the housekeeper.

‘There’ll be no slimy shells going into this pot!’

On the path of the Bessastadir Peninsula we met Grandad and our cousin Lone. She had arrived the day before and they were now returning from a stroll. ‘The Songbird of Spring is coming on Friday!’ the president had announced from his office during the week, like a chirpy scout. I glanced at Grandma who was knitting in a deep armchair in the living room. ‘Who?’ she swiftly quipped, knitting her brow.

It had been many years now since the singing bird had made an appearance in their home. Lone Bang had lived in London throughout the war, rubbing shoulders with mammoth celebrities like Sigmund Freud and Elias Canetti, who many years later won the Nobel Prize for literature. She had performed several times in the famous lunchtime concerts of the National Gallery where there was nothing on show but songs. But now she had come home; the war was over and there was no peace any more.

The president was wearing a coat and hat, Lone a black coat with hair that flickered like a candle in the wind.

‘Good morning!’ said Dad vigorously. ‘Did you walk down to the shore?’

They blanked us and walked past in grave silence, like a presidential couple following a hearse. Yes, of course, they made an elegant couple.

Despite everything that had preceded this, this was probably the most painful moment I shared with my father. I had seen him and his father chatting at the table in Bessastadir, but once Lóa had arrived their communications were severed. And here the father had virtually repudiated his son in front of his daughter, under the influence of his lover. We carried on walking towards the tip of the peninsula where the grass swayed to and fro like a demented soul. I took my father’s hand, like a mother leading a child, and tried to say something to raise his spirits, something about the Arctic terns and mussels, but he didn’t answer. I glanced back and saw the unofficial presidential couple of Iceland embark on the path back to the house – he furtively squeezed her hand. The backdrop to this moment was the residence, with its red roof and white facade that suddenly looked like Grandma’s face.

When we reached the end of the peninsula, I realised we’d chosen the right time. The tide was completely out and the shore was covered in slippery, slimy seaweed. But there were no mussels or other shellfish in view. We had to struggle not to fall, but Dad stepped over the seaweed, staring straight ahead, advancing another two hundred metres, as far as he could go, to the border between land and sea. Stood there for far too long for my taste, with his back turned to me, gazing at the fjord and beyond it where the brand-new Reykjavík airfield had been built. But finally he decided not to drown himself on that day and turned around.

What did that woman know about Dad’s fate? What right did she have to scorn the son of the woman who was the wife of the man she secretly loved and what’s more, her maternal aunt? Who was she to judge, from her pseudo-Jewish standpoint? Grandad’s destiny was to stand between fires. The president, who had seen through the divorce between Iceland and Denmark, was eternally trapped between his mistress and wife, and his roles as a lover, husband and father with a chronic lack of courage.

And why the hell couldn’t he have chosen an Icelandic mistress?

As I look back on that image through the telescope of time – that furtive touching of hands by secret lovers on that blustery sunny August day of 1945 – I can see how it encapsulates the curse of a whole family. Those who live in hell breathe fire, the old people on the islands used to say, and Grandma had certainly lived in hell for half her life. And the effects were felt by her children, children-in-law, grandchildren…

Would my father have deserted the family nest had the house been whole? Had he embraced Nazism in response to the self-crowned ‘queen of the Jews’?

Sometimes the king’s love is the curse of the court.