Summer Read online

  By the same author

  Free Love

  Like

  Other stories and other stories

  Hotel World

  The whole story and other stories

  The Accidental

  Girl Meets Boy

  The first person and other stories

  There but for the

  Artful

  Shire

  How to be both

  Public library and other stories

  Autumn

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  Spring

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Ali Smith

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd., a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2020.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Carcanet Press Ltd. for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Fires” from New Collected Poems by Edwin Morgan. Copyright © the Estate of Edwin Morgan. Reprinted by kind permission of Carcanet Press Ltd., Manchester.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Smith, Ali, [date] author.

  Title: Summer : a novel / Ali Smith.

  Description: First United States edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2020.

  Series: Seasonal quartet.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020027016 (print). LCCN 2020027017 (ebook).

  ISBN 9781101870792 (hardcover). ISBN 9781101870808 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6069.M4213 S86 2020 (print) | LCC PR6069.M4213 (ebook) |

  DDC 823/.914–dc23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2020027016

  LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/2020027017

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Artwork on rear endpaper: Lorenza Mazzetti, Self Portrait, 2010, acrylic on canvas (100 x 60 cm). Copyright © Lorenza Mazzetti, courtesy Paola Mazzetti.

  Photo credit: Eva Krampen Kosloski.

  Ebook ISBN 9781101870808

  Cover image: English Landscape with Cottage and Stream (detail), by Edward Charles Williams. The Print Collector/Alamy

  Cover design by Oliver Munday

  a_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  for my sisters

  Maree Morrison

  Anne MacLeod

  my friends

  Paul Bailey

  Bridget Hannigan

  to keep in mind

  my friend

  Sarah Daniel

  and for

  my huckleberry friend

  Sarah Wood

  Contents

  Cover

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Frontispiece

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Acknowledgements and Thanks

  It was a summer’s night and they were

  talking, in the big room with the windows

  open to the garden, about the cesspool.

  Virginia Woolf

  Lord keep my memory green!

  Charles Dickens

  However vast the darkness

  we must supply our own light.

  Stanley Kubrick

  I thought of that person,

  him or her, as taking me to a country

  far high sunny where I knew to be happy

  was only a moment, a puttering flame in the fireplace

  but burning all the misery to cinders

  if it could, a sift of dross like what we mourn for

  as caskets sink with horrifying blandness

  into a roar, into smoke, into light, into almost nothing.

  The not quite nothing I praise it and I write it.

  Edwin Morgan

  O, she’s warm!

  William Shakespeare

  1

  Everybody said: so?

  As in so what? As in shoulder shrug, or what do you expect me to do about it? or I so don’t really give a fuck, or actually I approve of it, it’s fine by me.

  Okay, not everybody said it. I’m speaking colloquially, like in that phrase everybody’s doing it. What I mean is, it was a clear marker, just then, of that particular time; a kind of litmus, this dismissive note. It got fashionable around then to act like you didn’t care. It got fashionable, too, to insist the people who did care, or said they cared, were either hopeless losers or were just showing off.

  It’s like a lifetime ago.

  But it isn’t – it’s literally only a few months since a time when people who’d lived in this country all their lives or most of their lives started to get arrested and threatened with deportation or deported: so?

  And when a government shut down its own parliament because it couldn’t get the result it wanted: so?

  When so many people voted people into power who looked them straight in the eye and lied to them: so?

  When a continent burned and another melted: so?

  When people in power across the world started picking off groups of people by religion, ethnicity, sexuality, intellectual or political dissent: so?

  But no. True. Not everybody said it.

  Not by a country mile.

  Millions of people didn’t say it.

  Millions and millions, all across the country and all across the world, saw the lying, and the mistreatments of people and the planet, and were vocal about it, on marches, in protests, by writing, by voting, by talking, by activism, on the radio, on TV, via social media, tweet after tweet, page after page.

  To which the people who knew the power of saying so? said, on the radio, on TV, via social media, tweet after tweet, page after page: so?

  I mean, I could spend my whole life listing things about, and talking about, and demonstrating with sources and graphs and examples and statistics, what history’s made it clear happens when we’re indifferent, and what the consequences are of the political cultivation of indifference, which whoever wants to disavow will dismiss in an instant with their own punchy little

  so?

  So.

  Instead, here’s something I once saw.

  It’s an image from a film made in the UK roughly seventy years ago, not long after the end of the Second World War.

  The film was made in London by a young artist who arrived in the city from Italy when London was one of the many places having to rebuild themselves in those years nearly a lifetime ago, after the tens of millions of people of all ages all across the world had died before their time.

  It’s an image of a man carrying two suitcases.

  He’s a slight man, a young man, a distracted and tentative kind of a man, dapper in a hat and jacket, light on his feet but at the same time burdened; it’s clear he’d be burdened even if he wasn’t carrying two suitcases. He is grave, slim, preoccupied, terribly keen, and he is silhouetted against the sky because he’s balanced on a very narrow brick ledge which runs round the edge of a high building, along the length of which he’s doing a joyous and frantic dance with the beaten-up rooftops of London behind him; no: more precis
ely, those roofs are way below him.

  How can he be going so fast and not fall off the edge of the building?

  How can what he’s doing be so wild and still so graceful, so urgent and blithe both at once?

  How can he be swinging those cases around in the air like that and still keep his balance? How can he be moving at such speed next to the sheer drop?

  Why is he risking everything?

  There’d be no point in showing you a still or a photo of this. It’s very much a moving image.

  For several seconds he does a crazed but merry high-wire dance above the city going far too fast along the zigzagging path of a ledge that’s the width of a single brick.

  So:

  Whether I shall turn out to be the heroine of my own life, Sacha’s mother says.

  Then she says, Sacha, what is that? Where’s it from?

  Sacha is having breakfast reading her phone in the front room. The TV is on with the volume turned up several notches too high and her mother is shouting over the top of it.

  Don’t know, Sacha says.

  She says this at normal volume so it’s perfectly possible her mother didn’t hear her say anything. Not that it makes a difference either way.

  Heroine of my own life, her mother is walking up and down the room and saying it over and over. Heroine of my own life, then it’s something about a station, a station shall be held. What’s it from?

  Like it matters.

  Sacha shakes her head without shaking it enough to be noticed shaking it.

  Her mother has no idea.

  An example of this is what happened last night about the quote Sacha found online for the essay about forgiveness she had to write for Merchiston’s class later today. To mark one week since Brexit they’ve all been made to write an essay on the subject of ‘Forgiveness’. Sacha is deeply suspicious of forgiveness. The act of saying I forgive you, it’s like saying you are less than me and I have the moral or superior upper hand.

  But that’s the kind of truth-spirit that’ll get you a B instead of an A from Merchiston, to whom the whole class now knows exactly how to respond in the way that gets the required marks.

  So, late last night, because it has to be handed in today, she looked up some quotes on the net.

  As a writer from the last century so devoutly said, Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.

  Her mother had come into her bedroom without knocking, again, and was standing reading the screen over Sacha’s shoulder.

  Oh, that’s good, that quote, her mother said, I like that.

  I like it too, Sacha said.

  Is devoutly the right word? her mother said. It sounds more philosophical than devotional. Is it a devotional writer? Who wrote it?

  Yes, it’s a devotional writer, Sacha said though she’d no idea, didn’t know who wrote it and had written the word devoutly because devoutly sounded good in the sentence. But now with her mother breathing down her neck and holding forth about who, she brought up Startpage and typed in the words irreversible, flow, history. The quote came up.

  Someone european-sounding, she said.

  Ah. It’s Arendt, Hannah Arendt, her mother said. I’d like to read Arendt on forgiveness, I’d like that a lot right now.

  Ironic, Sacha thought, given that neither her father nor her mother looked likely to forgive each other anything any time soon.

  Though I don’t know that I’d call her a devotional, her mother said. What’s the source?

  Brainyquote, Sacha said.

  That’s not a source, her mother said. Does it give the original source? Look. It doesn’t. That’s terrible.

  The source is Brainyquote, Sacha said. That’s where I found the quote.

  You can’t just put down Brainyquote as your source, her mother said.

  Yes I can, Sacha said.

  You need better source reference than that, her mother said. Otherwise you don’t know where what Hannah Arendt said comes from.

  Sacha held the screen up. She turned it towards her mother.

  Brainyquote. Quotepark. Quotehd. Azquotes. Facebook. Goodreads. Picturequotes. Quotefancy. Askideas. Birthdaywishes. expert, she said. All these places come up when you type in bits of this quote. Those are just the top sources. There are masses of sites quoting her saying it.

  No, because if these sites are just saying they’re quoting her, that’s not good enough, her mother said. You’d have to go through all those sites until you find what it is they’re actually quoting from. Context. It matters.

  Yeah, but I don’t need to know that, Sacha said.

  Yeah but you do, her mother said. Check and see if any of those sites mentions a primary source.

  The internet is a primary source, Sacha said.

  Her mother went away.

  Everything went quiet for about ten minutes.

  Sacha began to breathe normally again.

  Then her mother who’d clearly been on the kitchen laptop looking up Brainyquote Quotepark and so on shouted up the stairs as if she’d been personally insulted by Brainyquote Quotepark and so on:

  None of these sites, not a single one, gives a primary source, Sach. I can’t find where Arendt wrote this. So you shouldn’t use the quote. You can’t.

  Right, thanks, Sacha shouted back from her bedroom.

  Then she continued doing what she was doing regardless of her mother.

  It might not even have been said by Arendt, her mother who’d come halfway up the stairs now was shouting.

  She was shouting like nobody could hear her.

  It’s not trustworthy, her mother shouted.

  Who needs a school homework assignment to be trustworthy? Sacha said.

  I do, her mother shouted. You do. All human beings who use sources do.

  Worrying about stuff like this was what her mother’s generation did as displacement activity from worrying about the real things happening in the world. Still, just in case her mother had a point –

  How about if I note at the end of it that the internet says it’s by Hannah, uh, Sacha said.

  She looked online again to get the second name of the person who said it.

  Not good enough, her mother shouted coming into the room unasked again. Because there’s no proof Hannah Arendt ever said it. What if it was someone else, someone who isn’t getting the credit? Or. What if nobody said it in any original source and someone somewhere just made up that Hannah Arendt said it, typed it into the net and then it spread through all these sites?

  Then Hannah Arendt, whoever she is, would be pleased, Sacha said (at normal volume so her mother would realize her own loudness). It’s a good thing to have said.

  You can’t speak for Hannah Arendt, her mother said (yes, less shoutily, good). How would you like it if the internet quoted something or other then said that Sacha Greenlaw said it?

  I wouldn’t mind. I’d be pleased that someone somewhere thought I’d said something good, Sacha said.

  Oh I see. Approbation’s what it’s about. You’re acting like you’re Robert’s age, her mother said.

  No I’m not, Sacha said. If I was still only thirteen, or happened to be Robert, please God no, I’d have said: return yourself forthwith to the age of pointless educational pedantry.

  Come on, Sach, her mother said. Source. It matters. Think why.

  What I think, Sacha said turning to face her mother. Is that I’m working at the correct acceptable level.

  The level of attention I’m talking about is necessary for everything, her mother said getting louder again (like louder meant she was more right). And what you call the correct acceptable level is nothing but a social stratagem.

  Now her mother was waving her arms about so much in the air in Sacha’s room that she actually knocked the lampshade swinging.

  W
hat if you woke up one day and found that it said all over the net that you’d said something you’d never say in a million years? her mother said.

  I’d just simply tell everybody that I never said it, Sacha said.

  But what if you went online and found thousands of people angry at you regardless? her mother said. What if something like what’s happened to your little brother happened to you?

  You can’t do anything about that kind of pile-up, Sacha said. So I don’t care who thinks what. I’d know I was telling the truth. And I am the source of me. Go and bother him. I don’t have time for this.

  I would. But he’s out, her mother said.

  It’s ten o clock, Sacha said. He’s thirteen. What kind of a parent are you?

  One that’s doing her best for both her children against insurmountable odds, her mother said.

  This has to be handed in first thing, Sacha said.

  What if your reputation was ruined and you couldn’t go anywhere because everybody was calling you a disgrace and a liar? her mother said.

  I’d forgive them, Sacha said.

  You’d what? her mother said.

  Forgiveness, Sacha said, is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.

  There was a short pause, almost like when people pause in a play at the theatre. Then her mother laughed out loud.

  Then Sacha laughed too.

  Her mother came and gave Sacha a hug at her desk.

  My bright girl, her mother said.

  Sacha’s chest filled with the kind of warmth that once when she was really small she’d asked her mother about because it felt so nice and her mother’d said that’s your inner summer.

  But you’ll have to be brighter even than that, her mother said now still hugging her tight. Bright girls have to be brighter than the, the.

  Correct acceptable level of brightness, Sacha said into her mother’s side.

  —

  That was last night. This is next morning. Sacha’s come through here to try to have her breakfast in peace while checking the news and everybody’s posts on Facebook on her phone. But there is no peace. Her mother is maundering round the front room shouting words and waving a cup of coffee whose contents sometimes spill over and hit the parquet; Sacha has had to move her bag a couple of times.