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Authors: Sebastian Faulks

On Green Dolphin Street

BOOK: On Green Dolphin Street
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Acclaim for
Sebastian Faulks

s
On Green Dolphin Street

“[A] thoughtful love story [and] a melodic mood piece.”


The Oregonian

“Faulks has given us immensely appealing people, and only the hardhearted can fail to respond to their experiences with sympathy.”


New York Post

“[A] vivid novel of New York.… Seductive and radiant prose.… Faulks captures beautifully the cadence of the United States 40 years ago.”


Rocky Mountain News

“Exquisite.… Tragic.… [Faulks] displays to good advantage his considerable powers in describing the story’s various landscapes.”


The Seattle Times

“Gripping.… Startling.… Vividly told.… [Faulks’s] imagination soars.… The heart has its own history and no better chronicler than Faulks.… No contemporary author writes with more power, more eloquent simplicity.”


San Francisco Chronicle

“Faulks’s achievement is that he renders the period and places so convincingly that they become intimately familiar.”


Daily News
(New York)

“[
On Green Dolphin Street
] makes readers care about its characters and see the world they live in.… For readers who need plot, there’s plenty to spare—devastating flashbacks to an emotionally crippling war, shadowy coincidences, diplomatic savagery, a heart-quickening series of cinematic scenes toward the end that makes guessing the final outcome outright impossible. For readers who like to sink into unapologetic romance, it opens its arms.”


Chicago Tribune

“Fans of Faulks … will find plenty of period atmosphere on which to hang their snap-brimmed fedoras.”


People

“This wonderful novel … makes being a grown-up seem enviable, stylish, seductive.… A joyous book with a glow of pleasure.”


Book

Sebastian Faulks
On Green Dolphin Street

Sebastian Faulks is best known for his trilogy of novels set in France:
The Girl at the Lion d’Or
,
Birdsong
, and
Charlotte Gray
, the latter two of which were bestsellers. After a period in France, he and his family now live in London.

 

Also by Sebastian Faulks

A Fool’s Alphabet

The Girl at the Lion d’Or

Birdsong

The Fatal Englishman

Charlotte Gray

The Vintage Book of War Fiction
(editor, with Jörg Hensgen)

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JANUARY 2003

Copyright ©
2001 by Sebastian Faulks

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Hutchinson, a division of the Random House Group Limited, London, in 2001, and in hardcover in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of a few well-known historical figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. Where real-life historical figures appear, the situations, incidents and dialogues concerning those persons are included for purposes of plot and are not intended to change the fictional nature of the work.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:
Faulks, Sebastian.
On green dolphin street / Sebastian Faulks.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-375-50225-4
1. British—United States—Fiction. 2. Diplomats’ spouses—Fiction.
3. Washington (D.C.)—Fiction. 4. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.
5. Married women—Fiction. 6. Cold War—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6056.A89 O5 2002
823’.914—dc21
2001041753

Vintage ISBN: 0-375-70456-6
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-5362-1

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

To Richard and Elizabeth Dalkeith

Chapter 1  

T
he van der Lindens’ house was distinguished from the others on the street by the creeper that covered half the front, running up to the children’s rooms beneath the eaves, where at night the glow from the sidewalk lamp gave to Number 1064 the depth and shadow of a country settlement, somewhere far away from this tidy urban street. Among the row of new Cadillacs, their tail fins glinting like a rumor of sharks, Charlie van der Linden’s two-tone 1953 Kaiser Manhattan, maroon with a cream roof and a dented rear fender, struck a doubtful, out-of-town note.

The house dominated its plot, the architect having sacrificed half the backyard to the status two extra rooms would bring a man. The lawn that remained was part paved, with a brick barbecue and a basketball hoop left by a previous tenant; at the end of the grass was a child’s metal swing which Charlie had assembled after a summer cookout, to the amusement of his children, who had left it to rust unused. Where its neighbors sank their near-identical roots into the earth, this house gave off an air of transience; and when at night the bedroom lights went off along the street,
like candles on an old man’s cake, the lamps in the van der Lindens’ house would often start to blaze again as a party spilled into another room. The guests’ cars were parked along the street as far as Number 1082, home to the Washington correspondent of a French magazine that no one had ever seen.

In their rooms, Louisa and Richard stirred occasionally in their sleep as a shriek of mirth came up the stairs or the gesture of some exuberant raconteur sent a glass shattering on the tiled floor of the hall. If the party wore on too long, Mary would go upstairs to check on them, leaning across their beds, fussing over the blankets and tucking them in; sometimes in the morning the children had a memory of her scent, lipstick, gin, and words of love pressed into their ears and sealed with the touch of her fingers.

That December evening, the van der Lindens were having a party. It was to be their last of the decade and it marked the anniversary of their wedding eleven years earlier in London. It was a change for them to have a private pretext; it was a relief not to have to feign interest in a visiting dignitary, a national day or a harassed politician who was passing through Washington in a daze, uttering solemn pleasantries. The guests were a favored variation of the regular diplomats and journalists; there were one or two neighbors, either the most genial or the ones who would otherwise complain; there was also Weissman, Charlie’s doctor, and his Haitian bride.

“To Scottish national day,” said Charlie, flushed and off-duty as he unscrewed a bottle of scotch and poured three fingers of it over ice for Edward Renshaw, his closest ally at the British Embassy. “Tell me, how’s your economy doing these days?”

“It’s a wreck. Chin-chin.”

Mary van der Linden stood in the sitting room, her dark hair alive in the electric glow of the table lamp behind her. Her doting brown eyes returned to Charlie. Here was the fountain of her happiness, her repeated glances seemed to suggest: erratic, flawed, but, in his way, dependable. Mary’s smile was not a thing anyone could predict; she was not the diplomatic
wife in all circumstances. To begin with, she was too shy and found each function a trial of her resolve, but she seemed to have a resource of contentment that was stable, beyond the irritation of the day, and when her smile came from that depth, her face was lit with such serenity that people stopped for a moment to watch.

In the kitchen, Dolores, the resident Puerto Rican maid provided by the Embassy, was cutting Wisconsin cheddar into cubes, then impaling them, with olives, onto plastic cocktail sticks. With these and dishes of pretzels, nuts and clam dip with saltine crackers, she loaded another tray and squeezed her way through the hall.

Charlie put a samba record on the phonograph, took a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and inhaled the smoke as he gazed upon his party. His face, though flushed by broken capillaries and patchily shaved beneath the chin, retained some youthful beauty; his rumpled hair and sagging tie gave him a schoolboy look that the creeping fleshiness about his jaw had not quite dispelled. He saw Mary, now in the doorway to the hall, and smiled at her. It was a complicit smile which acknowledged the joint effort that their days consisted of—the compromises of the guest list, their shared jokes and fears about this man’s wife and that man’s drinking; the daily division of irksome duties, the labor of managing children and the pleasure of having dispatched them, just in time, to bed. Charlie van der Linden was in trouble, not just with his health, but with his life; yet as he caught his wife’s eye he felt he could postpone a reckoning indefinitely, that three more glasses of scotch, a quiet weekend in the rustic inns of the Shenandoah Valley and maybe some hard thinking would see him clear.

BOOK: On Green Dolphin Street
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