Paullina Simons: The Summer Garden

PAULLINA SIMONS

THE SUMMER

GARDEN

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2006

Copyright © Paullina Simons 2005

Besame Mucho Written by Consuelo Velasquez © 1941 & 1943 P.H.A.M., Mexico Latin-American Music Pub. Co. Ltd, London. Used by permission

Paullina Simons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007162499

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780007390816

Version: 2017-09-25

For Kevin, my own mystic guide

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,Yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst …For there, they that carried us awaycaptive required of us a song,And they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,Sing us one of the songs of Zion.How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?Psalm 137

The song of songs, which is Solomon’s.The Song of Solomon

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Book One: The Land of Lupine and Lotus

Chapter One: Deer Isle, 1946

Chapter Two: Coconut Grove, 1947

Chapter Three: Paradise Valley, 1947

Chapter Four: Vianza, 1947

Chapter Five: Bethel Island, 1948

Chapter Six: Jane Barrington, 1948

First Interlude: Saika Kantorova, 1938

Pasha

Book Two: Ithaca

Chapter Seven: Conjugal Compromises

Chapter Eight: The House that Balkman Built

Second Interlude: The Queen of Spades

Cousin Marina

Book Three: Dissonance

Chapter Nine: The Five-Year Plan

Chapter Ten: Blockade Girl

Chapter Eleven: Blue Christmas

Chapter Twelve: Gone Astray

Chapter Thirteen: The Summer Garden

Book Four: Moon Lai

Chapter Fourteen: The Man on the Moon

Chapter Fifteen: The Queen of Lake Ilmen

Chapter Sixteen: In the Heart of Vietnam

Chapter Seventeen: Kings and Heroes

Chapter Eighteen: Crossroads

Coda

One

Two

Three

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

The Lotos blooms below the barren peakThe Lotos blows by every winding creek …Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an enqual mind,In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclinedOn the hills like gods together, careless of mankind.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

The Carapace

Carapace n. a thick hard case or shell made of bone or chitin that covers part of the body of an animal such as a lobster.

Once upon a time, in Stonington, Maine, before sunset, at the end of a hot war and the beginning of a cold one, a young woman dressed in white, outwardly calm but with trembling hands, sat on a bench by the harbor, eating ice cream.

By her side was a small boy, also eating ice cream, his a chocolate. They were casually chatting; the ice cream was melting faster than the mother could eat it. The boy was listening as she sang “Shine Shine My Star” to him, a Russian song, trying to teach him the words, and he, teasing her, mangled the verses. They were watching for the lobster boats coming back. She usually heard the seagulls squabbling before she saw the boats themselves.

There was the smallest breeze, and her summer hair moved slightly about her face. Wisps of it had gotten out of her long thick braid, swept over her shoulder. She was blonde and fair, translucent-skinned, translucent-eyed, freckled. The tanned boy had black hair and dark eyes, and chubby toddler legs.

They seemed to sit without purpose, but it was a false ease. The woman was watching the boats in the blue horizon single-mindedly. She would glance at the boy, at the ice cream, but she gawped at the bay as if she were sick with it.

Tatiana wants a drink of herself in the present tense, because she wants to believe there is no yesterday, that there is only the moment here on Deer Isle—one of the long sloping overhanging islands off the coast of central Maine, connected to the continent by a ferry or a thousand-foot suspension bridge, over which they came in their RV camper, their used Schult Nomad Deluxe. They drove across Penobscot Bay, over the Atlantic and south, to the very edge of the world, into Stonington, a small white town nested in the cove of the oak hills at the foot of Deer Isle. Tatiana—trying desperately to live only in the present—thinks there is nothing more beautiful or peaceful than these white wood houses built into the slopes on narrow dirt roads overlooking the expanse of the rippling bay water that she watches day in and day out. That is peace. That is the present. Almost as if there is nothing else.

But every once in a heartbeat while, as the seagulls sweep and weep, something intrudes, even on Deer Isle.

That afternoon, after Tatiana and Anthony had left the house where they were staying to come to the bay, they heard loud voices next door.

Two women lived there, a mother and a daughter. One was forty, the other twenty.

“They’re fighting again,” said Anthony. “You and Dad don’t fight.”

Fight!

Would that they fought.

Alexander didn’t raise a semitone of his voice to her. If he spoke to her at all, it was never above a moderated deep-well timbre, as if he were imitating amiable, genial Dr. Edward Ludlow, who had been in love with her back in New York—dependable, steady, doctorly Edward. Alexander, too, was attempting to acquire a bedside manner.

To fight would have required an active participation in another human being. In the house next door, a mother and daughter raged at each other, especially at this time in the afternoon for some reason, screaming through their open windows. The good news: their husband and father, a colonel, had just come back from the war. The bad news: their husband and father, a colonel, had just come back from the war. They had waited for him since he left for England in 1942, and now he was back.