Hello, you're listening to audio-long reads from the new statesman. The best of our reported features, essays, and fiction read aloud. In this episode, Summer of Light, a short story about a prize-winning novelist Jonathan Coe, read by me, Tom Gatti.

This was first published in the 28th of July 2023 issue of the new statesman magazine. The link to read the story online is in the show notes.

It is not a small thing to fall into a Venetian canal. The consequences can be serious.

In the film Summer Time, Catherine Hepburn falls into the canal which runs alongside the Campo San Barnabha.

The director of the film, David Lee, a notorious perfectionist, made her perform the stunt multiple times, and as a result, the actress developed an unpleasant eye infection, which be deviled her for the rest of her life.

The canals in Venice are not clean. They contain a number of ingredients besides water, including human sewage.

Summer Time was filmed in the summer of 1954. Neither Lee nor Hepburn knew it, but 30 years earlier, an Italian painter had fallen into the same canal at the very same spot.

Fortunately, in his case, the experience did not induce a lifelong ailment. However, it was undignified and brought to a messy end an evening which walked to have consisted of pure triumph.

The circumstances of his fall had remained unclear until now.

The accident in question took place in 1924.

Two years before that, Livia had learned that she would soon be leaving on Edifonte, the village which had been her home for the first 17 years of her life.

Her father had decided that there was no future for himself or his family in this tiny backwater, and announced that they were moving to Bessana del Grapa, where there was surely more work to be found.

Later, after they had moved to Bessana and she had made friends with Seraphina, Livia would tell her about that last summer in the village, the summer of 1922, revisiting it again and again in her memory, and always referring to it as the summer of light.

The two girls would sit on the low wall which ran along the pathway above the river Brenta, and Livia would tell her friend the story of the painter who lived in the little house on the edge of the village, and now he had seen her sitting by the fountain one day, and asked if he could paint her portrait and everything that followed.

Since Livia and her family had arrived in Bessana, she and Seraphina had become firm but unlikely friends.

Seraphina was a classical northern beauty, with long dark hair, flawless tawny skin and immaculate figure, already boys were swarming around her, but on the whole she did not take me seriously and made it her practice to flick them away like so many flies.

She was a smart and quick-witted girl with a burgeoning contempt for the male sex.

Livia, on the other hand, was taciturn and inward looking, with her granite face in habitual silence, masking a dry sense of humour, which was known only to those who were closest to her.

For some reason she had reddish hair, and she had no idea what to do with it. After years of failed experiments with buns, plats and pigtails, she had simply cut most of it off, and now wore it in a managed short back and sides.

She was aware that she was not pretty, and was beginning to understand, although the full truth of it had not broken on her yet, that this was going to disadvantage her for much of her life.

But she did not resent Seraphina for her beauty. She valued her, instead, for the friendship she had extended to her from the day they met.

The sun showed no mercy that day, Livia told her friend as they looked down towards the firm incurrence of the river. I was sweating waterfalls. The whole summer had been the same, but that day was especially bad.

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