Successful artist Jonah Briggs is a man who has made mistakes. Aged just eighteen, he was sent to prison for two years, leaving his family shattered and his first love, Sally, to wait for his return.
But at eighteen, two years seem like a lifetime, and some promises are hard to keep.
When Jonah reappears in her life, Sally finds herself torn between him and Ewan, the young Cornish farmer she has married, divided between loyalty and passion, duty and love.
Over the course of almost two decades, through meetings and partings, secrets and revelations, and two momentous summers, Jonah will have to confront his past and heal old wounds, while Sally will face the consequences of her choices – whether to follow her conscience or her heart.
Thank you to Michela for providing an excerpt from A Summer of Love -
Summer 1998
“How do you spell door, then?”
Jeanny stopped and thought, biting on the end of her pencil, her dark eyes glancing up in the air as if inspiration could come to her from above.
It was endearing watching her, Sally thought, as they both sat at the large kitchen table, practising Jeanny’s English homework.
“Is it… D, O, O, R?”
“Well done. Yes.” Sally smiled, rubbing her wet hair into a towel, fresh from the shower, in her old baggy T-shirt and tatty comfy jeans. “Now, a really hard one. If you spell this right, you’ll get double pudding tonight. Spell window.”
“That is W… I… N… D…” Jeanny started, but she was soon interrupted.
“Let me just get the door, sweetheart. How do you spell that again?”
“D… O…”
Sally listened to Jeanny sounding out the letters as she walked to the hall and opened the front door, a proud smile pasted on her face at her daughter’s progress.
A tall figure was standing with its back to her and turned around as she appeared in the frame.
Sally’s smile died instantly.
Many times she had dreamt of opening the door and finding Jonah standing on the other side.
For a moment she thought she was imagining things, but it had to be real, for he didn’t look as she had pictured him all those years, as she remembered him. He was older and more handsome than the young guy who lived in her dreams. His jeans were not faded and baggy, but new and fitting him perfectly. He wore no old sweatshirt, but a pale blue shirt, unbuttoned collar, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His hair wasn’t long and scruffy, but well cut, falling softly just above his grey eyes. Only those hadn’t changed and she recognised in them the depth she had once known so well.
As she considered how well he looked, she became suddenly aware of her own appearance, old clothes, wet uncombed hair, no make-up…
His gaze was revealing different thoughts and emotions, surprise, confusion, delight.
Did he find her changed too, Sally wondered?
“Hi.” He barged into her considerations.
Seven years!
He had disappeared for seven years, without so much of a word to let someone know where and how he was and now he turned up at her door without a warning, and said hi, as if they had only seen each other the day before.
Sally lifted the towel she was still holding in her hand and hit him. “You bloody arsehole!”
Jonah moved backwards a couple of paces, startled by her reaction. “And good morning to you, too.”
“How dare you appear out of nowhere just like this?” Sally trembled. “After all this time? We thought you might be dead.”
Jonah didn’t speak, just stood there, looking at her from the great distance of space and time that had separated them, and she shook her head, moved towards him, then hugged him.
He remained on his feet as she held him in a frantic embrace, his arms hesitating in mid-air, till he finally placed his hands on her shoulders.
“Where have you been?” She was still shaking. “We tried to find you.”
“We?” Jonah enquired.
Sally moved away from him, confused by how familiar his smell was. It brought back memories she had relegated to the most hidden part of her mind.
“How are you?” she asked, at last. “What happened to you? Oh, my God, Jonah! When did you come back? Why?”
Jonah didn’t answer. “May I come in?”
Sally’s reply remained stuck in her throat, blocked by the thumping of her heart and the little voice that floated in the air at her side. “Mummy…”
***
Jonah stared at the little girl who had appeared at the door. Almost at the same time his eyes fell on Sally’s left hand and he spotted the wedding ring.
He was surprised at the intensity of his emotions, as if the existence of a daughter and a marriage were news to him. He had learned about it all long before; there was no reason for him to feel so unsettled.
Sally switched her gaze from him to Jeanny and back again. “Yes,” she finally replied to Jonah’s question. “Yes, of course. Come in.”
“Is Ewan here?” Jonah asked, as the three of them walked into the house.
“No, he’s still out. But he’ll be back for lunch, I guess. Why?”
“I’ve come to see him.”
Sally studied him, seemingly puzzled. “What makes you think Ewan would want to see you?”
“Why shouldn’t he?” Jonah’s tone changed to miffed. “What have I done to him? He’s the one who stabbed me in the back, if I remember well.”
“He did no such thing.” Sally got defensive.
“Perhaps not,” Jonah conceded. He didn’t want an argument with her. “Anyway, I need to speak to him about something important.”
“Oh…” Sally looked suspicious. “What’s that then?”
“I’d rather speak to him directly, actually,” Jonah replied. “Shall I come back later?”
“He can’t be much longer. You can wait here, if you like.”
“Well… if you don’t mind.”
Their eyes met and a mute dialogue seemed to move between them, words and emotions they could not bring themselves to express, made of things lost, but not forgotten.
Instead, they slipped into an ordinary conversation.
“Please, sit down.”
“Thanks.”
“Would you like a drink of something? Tea? Coffee?”
“I’ll have tea, cheers.”
“Milk and sugar?”
“Milk, one sugar.”
It was depressing, Jonah thought, that meaningless chit-chat. What had happened to them?
[…]
“Can I smoke?”
“Not in the house, if you don’t mind.”
“I’ll go outside then. I need a cigarette.”
Jonah stepped out into the farmyard and lit one.
He scanned the once familiar place, trying to remember exactly how it had looked, so that he could notice the changes, but things were blurred in his memory and he could not recall the details. Had the big flower pots always been by the doorstep? Did the morning glory already climb the side of the house? Were there potholes in the drive back then?
If you wait long enough, he considered, everything fades from your mind, even the pain. That’s what he had to do, just wait.
Maybe one day he would be able to hear about his father without feeling angry and guilty and filled with the same longing and hate that always mixed inside him when the subject came up.
He had painfully managed to cut off all the ties with his past, distancing himself from everything and everyone, and now that he had finally started living again, the past was crawling back.
Now his father was finally calling.
Was it just so that he could lay a weight off his conscience, or did he actually care?
Jonah smoked the cigarette all the way down to the filter. He threw the butt on the ground and quashed it with his shoe, wishing he could do the same with all the thoughts that had troubled him in the past few weeks. There seemed to be a new problem to face at every turn. No wonder he’d had difficulty sleeping recently, lying in the darkness, trying in vain to empty his brain of all the images, voices and noises that kept chasing each other in his head.
He took one last big breath before going back into the kitchen to be with Sally again.
Eventually everything fades and disappears, he repeated to himself.
A time would come when he would manage to sit in Sally’s kitchen and talk to her, listen to her voice, look her in the eyes without dying to close her in his arms again and never let go; a time when he would finally stop loving her.
Read my 5* review of Michela's first novel,Playing On Cotton Clouds
- Format: Kindle Edition
- File Size: 478 KB
- Print Length: 303 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1908910704
- Publisher: Crooked Cat Publishing (20 Jan 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00B3MKEQ4