At that moment the doorbell rang.
III
Una heaved a sigh of relief when, after two days’ driving on bone-juddering roads, she finally reached the fishing village of Thórshöfn on the north-east coast, the gateway to the Langanes Peninsula and the last settlement of any size before Skálar. The place felt small and remote enough in its own right; nothing more than a handful of houses scattered along a curving sweep of black sand, a striking white-roofed church and a picturesque harbour with a few colourful fishing smacks. Finding a kiosk open, she stopped for a drink and a snack, and took the chance to consult the map again. From now on she would be travelling another thirty kilometres out along the mysterious Langanes Peninsula, a place so far away from Reykjavík that Una didn’t know anyone who had actually visited it. To get to Skálar, she would have to drive almost as far as Fontur, the headland at the very end.
It was with a sinking feeling that she embarked on the final leg of her journey, as though she wasn’t quite sure if she really wanted to reach her destination. She kept telling herself it wasn’t too late to turn back. The sky was overcast, the sun hidden behind a seamless, grey layer of cloud that weighed heavily on her spirits. To make matters worse, her old yellow Toyota Starlet, which was fine for nipping around town, proved hopelessly inadequate when faced with the rough dirt road. The views didn’t provide much compensation either: the treeless landscape was desolate and featureless, nothing but rocks and grass, though at one point early on she did pass a pretty country church, with walls clad in white corrugated iron, and a red roof. All she knew about Langanes was that a polar bear had come ashore there from the sea-ice during the Great Frost Winter of 1918 and almost killed a man. She’d heard the story from Sara: it was yet another piece of information her friend had picked up from the TV report about Skálar.
For the most part, the road hugged the coast, passing a succession of grey, stony beaches littered with great piles of bleached driftwood, which no one seemed interested in collecting. A few Whooper swans shone white here and there among the waves. But before long all Una’s attention was focused on the road, which grew steadily worse until she became seriously alarmed. Although she did her best to swerve round the deepest potholes, in the end, inevitably, she drove straight into one, with a sickening lurch.
Switching off the engine, she sat there trembling for a moment, sure she must have got a puncture and bracing herself to have to change the wheel. But when she got out to inspect them the tyres looked fine. Flooded with relief, she paused to take a lungful of fresh, salty air and examined the map again to reassure herself that she was going the right way.
But when she started the engine and moved off again, she immediately noticed a strange clattering noise. Worried that it was the exhaust or gearbox, she drove on, never going above second gear, desperate not to break down on the final stretch. The landscape became hillier, cliffs reared up from the sea, and finally a long, narrow headland appeared in front of her, presumably the famous Fontur. Beyond it was nothing but the vast, empty ocean. When she reached a junction with a signpost pointing to Fontur on the left and Skálar on the right, she was aware again of that cold, sinking feeling. I don’t want to live here, she thought. But there was no turning back now, especially with the car limping along and the clatter growing ever more worrying.
As she was approaching Skálar, fog rolled in without warning, blotting out the landscape and merging sea with sky. It felt like driving into an Impressionist painting, in which her destination kept receding as fast as she approached it; like entering a void in which time had ceased to have any meaning. Maybe, in a sense, this was true: maybe time was less important there; it mattered less what day it was, what hour it was, out here where people lived at one with nature.
When she finally reached it, the tiny hamlet of Skálar was wreathed in dense cloud. And now the feeling was more like being in a folk tale, an ominous, supernatural tale, set in a vague, shifting world. There was nothing solid, nothing real about her surroundings. Just as there had been nothing natural about her decision to turn her life upside down and promise to spend nearly a year out here, at the edge of the habitable world. But she must put a brave face on things: it wouldn’t do to pay too much attention to first impressions.
She had passed a pinprick of light a little way back and remembered Sara saying the TV programme had mentioned a farm that counted as part of the village. And now she saw the dark shapes of houses looming through the billowing veils of grey vapour. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought it was a ghost town. But there were people living here, she knew that. She began to have a powerful sensation of being watched; that here and there eyes were peering through the gaps between the curtains, curious about the identity of this newcomer.
It was only an illusion created by the fog, Una told herself; just as it was the fog that was to blame for her impression that the place was deserted; that no one had lived here for decades. Of course that happened sometimes: whole villages vanished – the fish disappeared and the population upped sticks and left. Yet here ten stubborn souls had clung on, and she was about to increase their number by one. Now she had seen it for herself, she had no intention of settling here. One winter, she told herself, then she
