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)

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.