A Big Storm Knocked It Over by Laurie Colwin

Author:Laurie Colwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

According to her birth book, with each day Jane Louise’s salamander was becoming more and more a human creature. The fact that this process was happening inside her was often so startling to Jane Louise that it caused her to lose her breath. Why? Even Sven’s wives had had babies, and Sven was a father.

Jane Louise and Sven both took their vacations in August. Sven and Edwina went to Martha’s Vineyard with little Piers and his half-siblings: Anik, who now studied at the Sorbonne, and Allard and Desdemona from San Francisco.

Anik was gorgeous, with white blond hair and very dark eyes. Her mother was also a great beauty. She lived with a French Marxist aristocrat.

“Her stepfather’s a count and her father’s a Jew prole,” Sven said of Anik.

Jane Louise said she did not think there was anything particularly Jewish or proletarian about Sven.

Anik was a very sensible girl who treated her father as if he were totally beside the point. Jane Louise enjoyed watching Sven get cut down to the size of a normal, boring parent.

Sven always brought Anik to the office. This was like the switch that threw many things into motion: the summer desk clean-up, the last wrap-up meeting, the pre-vacation lunch.

In August Jane Louise and Teddy would house-sit for Teddy’s mother while she toured the gardens of Britain with her old college friend. Teddy’s father had hated driving and touring. Although a Brit himself, he was firmly expatriate and never wanted to go back. He hated gardening, and as soon as he and Teddy’s mother had gotten divorced, he had moved to a suburban housing complex where he met his second wife, Martine. Eleanor had brought Teddy up in her mother’s summer house. There Eleanor gardened freely and joined the garden club and the Cottage Garden Society. She was perfectly happy to raise her child in the tranquillity of the country, where she was known to everyone and knew everyone. She only wished that Teddy’s father might have died so she would not have to bear the stigma of divorce.

Jane Louise and Sven always had lunch together before they went away. They would discuss the upcoming fall list, like good colleagues. Jane Louise never thought of these lunches without a kind of compelling dread. It would be bad news if Sven ever decided to focus on her.

On the day of the meal she went to find Adele for moral support, but Adele had already gone out to lunch, leaving behind on her desk a magazine called Consumer Bride.

Sven sauntered out of his office wearing a biscuit-colored linen jacket. He poked at the magazine as if it were a dead mouse. The fact that Adele was getting married was nothing to him.

They went to Sven’s hangout: a highly polished, old-fashioned saloon with sawdust on the tiled floor and really good food.

“So,” said Sven absently, surveying the menu. “You and Teddy—same as usual this summer?”

This caused Jane Louise to blush. This summer would not be quite the same as usual.

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