He had been careful to plan things for himself as well, setting up a reading group for locals to share their love of Icelandic authors and their books. He was looking forward to that only slightly less than all the trips he had planned with Alex in the autumn.
That wasn’t all he’d planned, and the sight of his mother emerging from the shop with the white confectioner’s box, followed closely by his father with the champagne bottle and paper cups reminded him it was time.
Alex was already looking at him suspiciously. ‘What’s this?’
The burst of song from Magnús and his family confirmed her fears. She didn’t know the Icelandic words they were singing but she knew the tune, and when Magnús’s mother lifted the lid to reveal a cake with her name on it, she knew for sure this was a birthday ambush.
Her protest that it wasn’t her birthday for another week was met by the sound of Magnús’s dad popping the cork and everyone applauding.
‘Yeah, well, get used to it,’ Magnús told her as he unstacked the paper cups. ‘You’ve years of missed birthday celebrations to catch up on. This is only the first; next week, we’ll do it all again at our apartment-warming party. OK?’
‘Who wants cake?’ called out Mrs Sturluson, wielding a knife, and the little group gathered round for a slice. As they were being handed round in napkins, Jón carried on with his interview for the paper.
‘And if things go wrong this time?’ he asked, gently.
Magnús knew why Jón was asking. So did Alex. ‘They might,’ Magnús said, shrugging. ‘With this business model and in this district, I can’t see that happening, but still they might. And that’s OK.’
‘Things we can’t plan for will still happen,’ Alex added, before accepting her slice of cake with a practised ‘takk fyrir’. ‘And they’ll hurt too, no doubt, but the going wrong is never the end. There’s always the chance of starting again, if you’re brave enough.’ She squeezed her arm around Magnús’s back. ‘It’s only the end of the story when everyone’s happy.’
‘OK,’ Jón said, smiling, before hugging his brother and his remarkable new English girlfriend, and they all turned to watch the sign artist climb down her ladder. Above the shop doorway, resplendent in gold script, were blazoned the words: ‘Dagalien Books, Bed and Breakfast,’ and below it in bold black lettering: ‘Lestu, borðaðu, elskaðu, dreymdu.’
‘Read, Eat, Love, Dream,’ Alex said, smiling up at their new premises, her head leaning against Magnús’s as Jón raised his camera and captured the scene for his paper’s front page.
Epilogue
Two and a half thousand kilometres south of Reykjavík, a sweet, summer-warmed breeze blew Down-along, making the sails on the little girl’s windmill spin fast upon its pin.
‘Careful!’ her mother warned. ‘Nobody told me it would be this steep.’
Excited tourists tramped past them, gripping the fence posts and exclaiming to one another what a lovely day it was. Some trundled cases behind them, heading for the Siren’s Tail and a few nights’ dinner, bed and breakfast by the Atlantic, others carried crabbing nets and buckets, looking forward to dropping bait over the sea wall all afternoon.
‘Can we get an ice cream, Mum? Please!’ the child asked in an urgent tone, having spotted the bright flag of Mrs Crocombe’s Ice Cream Parlour lifting gently against a blue sky.
There was a decent queue outside. That meant the ice cream must be good. But her mother was looking at the GPS on her phone and turning this way and that.
‘Let me concentrate, it must be here somewhere.’
‘There’s only up or down, Mum,’ the girl reminded her. ‘Is this it?’
‘Hah! I suppose it must be.’
Between two dazzlingly white, freshly painted cottages there was a sharp turning to the right. The sounds of drilling and hammering resounded within the buildings on either side as they passed between them. Evidently the work of restoring Clove Lore continued even eight months after the world-famous flood.
The young woman dragged the case along behind them and the child shouldered her rucksack – which was stuffed to bursting with her treasures – as though she was used to carrying her life on her back.
They made their way through the passage, past the old sleds leaning against the painted masonry on either side of them. Entering the little square, the girl stumbled on the cobbles, which were freshly laid out in swirling patterns like a mermaid’s scales set in sandy-coloured concrete.
The paint smell, which was strong throughout the whole village, was especially strong here and it mixed with the scent of cut grass and warm soil and something good cooking way down at the pub on the harbour wall.
The woman set down her case and took in the squat little bookshop from its stone steps to its conical roof, squint like a wizard’s hat.
‘Bookshop! Bookshop!’ the child cried, running around the palm tree in its big terracotta planter standing at the centre of the square with its cracks visibly repaired with silvery mortar.
The child dodged in and out of the new tables and chairs of sky-blue metal (which matched the sky-blue shop door perfectly), set out in little clusters all over the cobbles as though the owners meant this to be an outdoor café or some kind of meeting place.
Overhead were strung white bulbs criss-crossing the square, and even higher above circled the gulls watching the latest arrivals in Clove Lore and laughing on the wing.
The woman tried not to think too much about how lovely it would be to sit there on a late summer evening and drink cold wine. She’d be far too busy for that.
