Island in the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page A

instead of going to finishing school in Lausanne or taking a summer cooking course in Provence and meeting some young investment banker with his own town house in Chelsea, she fell in love with the son of a local solicitor and stayed in Surrey.
    â€œThey got married and lived in a red brick house with a tennis court and a swimming pool. I had a perfectly nice childhood: two older sisters, cricket matches on the village green, and monthly visits to London to see exhibits at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
    â€œMy writing teacher insisted I apply to Cambridge and surprisingly I got a place.” Lionel paused and ran his fingers over the shot glass. “I spent the first year studying the great essayists: Thomas Carlyle and William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. But I realized I didn’t have deep opinions on important subjects or a burning desire to share them if I had.” He swallowed the sherry. “I stumbled on the romantic poets and became enraptured by Byron and Keats and Browning. There were the answers I was looking for! Not about the fate of humankind or how we could improve society but why a man would plunge a knife in another man’s chest in the name of love. I grew my hair long and wrote poetry every moment I got. But no matter how I arranged the verses I felt something was missing.” He stopped and looked at Juliet. “Poetry has to hit you like an arrow in a bull’s-eye; if it lands just to the left it may as well never have been written.”
    â€œOne afternoon I was walking along the Cam and saw a couple of girls having a picnic,” Lionel mused. “They asked me to join them and I accepted. We sat on the riverbank and ate shepherd’s pie and one of the girls turned on the radio.” He rubbed his chin. “You’re going to laugh but when it came to popular music I was practically a virgin. I sat and listened to Paul McCartney and Bryan Ferry and Elton John and knew without a doubt if I set my poems to music they would achieve what I’d been trying to convey. From that moment I decided to become a songwriter.”
    â€œI would have thought someone like you listened to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones since you were a teenager. Didn’t your parents play their records on the stereo or didn’t you listen to the radio before you went to bed? I don’t remember a time that I didn’t turn on the Bangles when I started my homework,” Juliet mused.
    â€œWe weren’t allowed to listen to music after school, and my parents seemed to have missed the swinging sixties. The only time my mother wore leather boots was when she was saddling a horse.” He sat on a leather armchair. “But the minute I heard Elton John sing ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight,’ I packed my suitcase and took the train to London and arrived at the front door of Penelope Graham. She was my mother’s oldest friend and lived with her husband and twin boys in a three-story terrace house in Belgravia.”
    Lionel stretched his long legs in front of him and closed his eyes. He pictured the vast black-and-white marble foyer and heavy crystal chandeliers and walls lined with Holbeins and Turners. He saw Penelope descend the circular staircase in a Chanel suit and ivory pumps. He saw her study his battered suitcase and worn loafers and usher him into the kitchen.
    *   *   *
    â€œYou want me to let you stay here and not tell your mother?” Penelope opened the steel fridge and took out a carton of orange juice. She filled a glass and handed it to Lionel.
    â€œOnly until I find a job and can afford a place to live.” Lionel sat on a suede stool. “I’ll work as a valet or a waiter and write songs at night. My twenty-second birthday was last week, if I wait any longer I’ll be one of those old crooners with receding hairlines and bell-bottom pants.”
    â€œHardly a receding hairline, you could use a good haircut.”