Seating Arrangements

Maggie Shipstead graduated from Harvard in 2005 and earned an M.F.A at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was also a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Seating Arrangements is her first novel and was awarded the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2012, the largest award in the world for writers under 30. She was also awarded the LA Times Book Award for First Fiction. She lives in California.

The Van Meters have gathered at their family retreat on the New England island of Waskeke to celebrate the marriage of daughter Daphne to an impeccably appropriate young man. The weekend is full of lobster and champagne, salt air and practiced bonhomie, but long-buried discontent and simmering lust seep through the cracks in the revelry.

Winn Van Meter, father-of-the-bride, has spent his life following the rules of the east coast upper crust, but now, just shy of his sixtieth birthday, he must finally confront his failings, his desires, and his own humanity.

‘Irresistible … her prose is joyously good’

DAILY MAIL

‘A ferociously clever comedy of manners’

GUARDIAN

‘A wise, sophisticated and funny novel about family, fidelity, class and crisis’

MARIE CLAIRE

‘Well-observed, hilarious, yet moving’

WOMAN & HOME

‘Definitely one to watch’

GRAZIA

‘Maggie Shipstead is an outrageously gifted writer’

Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls

‘Startling beauty’

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

The Borough Press

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2012

Copyright © Maggie Shipstead 2012

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013. Designed by Stuart Bache.

Maggie Shipstead asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

‘The Waste Land’ taken from The Waste Land and Other Poems © Estate of T.S. Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007467730

Ebook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007425235

Version: 2015-08-03

To my parents, Patrick and Susan,

pillars of everything

The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.

And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;

Departed, have left no addresses.

T. S. ELIOT, “The Waste Land”

Contents

Cover

About the Author

About the Book

Praise for Seating Arrangements

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Thursday

One · The Castle of the Maidens

Two · The Water Bearer

Three · Seating Arrangements

Four · Twenty Lobsters

Five · The White Stone House

Six · Your Shadow at Evening

Seven · The Serpent in the Laundry

Eight · A Party Ends

Friday

Nine · Snakes and Ladders

Ten · More than One Fish, More than One Sea

Eleven · Flesh Wounds

Twelve · Fortunate Son

Thirteen · A Centaur

Fourteen · The Sun Goes over the Yardarm

Fifteen · Raise Your Glass

Sixteen · A Weather Vane

Seventeen · The Maimed King

Saturday

Eighteen · The Ouroboros

Acknowledgments

Read on for an exclusive extract from Maggie Shipstead’s new novel

About the Publisher

By Sunday the wedding would be over, and for that Winn Van Meter was grateful. It was Thursday. He woke early, alone in his Connecticut house, a few late stars still burning above the treetops. His wife and two daughters were already on Waskeke, in the island house, and as he came swimming up out of sleep, he thought of them in their beds there: Biddy keeping to her side, his daughters’ hair fanned over their pillows. But first he thought of a different girl (or barely thought of her—she was a bubble bursting on the surface of a dream) who was also asleep on Waskeke. She would be in one of the brass guest beds up on the third floor, under the eaves; she was one of his daughter’s bridesmaids.

Most mornings, Winn’s entries into the waking world were prompt, his torso canting up from the sheets like the mast of a righted sailboat, but on this day he turned off his alarm clock before it could ring and stretched his limbs out to the bed’s four corners. The room was silent, purple, and dim. By nature, he disapproved of lying around. Lost time could not be regained nor missed mornings stored up for later use. Each day was a platform for accomplishment. Up with the sun, he had told his daughters when they were children, whipping off their covers with a flourish and exposing them lying curled like shrimp on their mattresses. Now Daphne was a bride (a pregnant bride, no point in pretending otherwise) and Livia, her younger sister, the maid of honor. The girls and their mother were spending the whole week on the island with an ever-multiplying bunch of bridesmaids and relatives and future in-laws, but he had decided he could not manage so much time away from work. Which was true enough. A whole week on the matrimonial front lines would be intolerable, and furthermore, he had no wish to confirm that the bank would rumble on without him, his absence scarcely noticed except by the pin-striped young sharks who had begun circling his desk with growing determination.