The Sea Grape Tree Read Online Free PDF Page A

into the lid of the suitcase. On top of the clothes she added two pads, one for sketching and one for watercolor painting. (Jamaica, she’d known instinctively, would call for the hues and subtlety of water rather than acrylics.) A separate bag she started packing with her paints and new paintbrushes.
    â€œAren’t you taking a swimming costume?” It was Penny, leaning on the door frame, her very existence filling the small room.
    Sarah tucked a lock behind her ear. “I don’t actually have one, come to think of it. The sun and my skin—”
    â€œNonsense, I’ll lend you mine.”
    â€œI probably won’t wear it,” Sarah muttered, following Penny to her room. “I’m not a great swimmer, didn’t even get my twenty-five-meter badge. I’ll just sit in the shade.”
    â€œYou can’t sit around in the shade the whole time you’re in Jamaica, you know. You’ll miss the point of going.” After digging in the bottom drawer of her dresser, Penny handed her a bathing suit. “Here, it’ll match your eyes.”
    â€œNot much to it, is there?” Sarah said, holding aloft what looked like three strings of vivid green, imagining her ample breasts spilling out of the top.
    â€œWhat do you expect? I bought it in the South of France last year to fit in.”
    It was a flippant remark, because Penny knew she always fit in and wouldn’t need a dye job to do it. Everyone wanted to be around her, attracted to the pleasurable ease with which she moved through life. Sarah had come to the conclusion that marketing people were successful because they had personalities like Penny’s that others wanted to buy.
    â€œI’ll put the kettle on,” Penny said, sashaying down the corridor. “When you’re finished, come for a cup of Rosie Lea.” Their name for tea, courtesy of Gladys, their sometime cleaning lady.
    The kitchen was the brightest place in the Camden flat, its mustard-yellow walls and potted plants making it a cozy gathering spot for whoever was around. It felt best to Sarah, though, when the two of them were alone together, sipping Earl Grey or cocoa, tattling about the latest man, always Penny’s, or the royals. That was the time when Sarah laughed the most, when the messy bathroom didn’t matter.
    When she’d moved in, the artist had hoped that some of her flatmate’sjoie de vivre would rub off on her, but it hadn’t and she’d reconciled herself to being who she was—reserved, unwitty, a bit of a bore. And she’d become comfortable with that and allowed her art to speak for her.
    Departing her tiny flat in Maidstone and moving to London two years before had been a new phase of life for Sarah, who’d spent all of her thirty-two years in quiet Kent, south of London. At first she’d had minor panic attacks thinking about her survival ( Suppose Penny gets married and sells the flat? Suppose nobody buys my paintings? ), which had soon lessened. Thus far Penny had not found the right man to marry and didn’t even seem inclined, and a few of Sarah’s paintings had actually been sold by Eccentricity Gallery, enough, along with waitressing, to pay her rent.
    The fame and fortune that Penny had said awaited her had not appeared, but it was enough to be in London. There were galleries and museums to browse, hundreds of parks and public spaces to sketch in, endless churches to photograph, and people to watch. When she sat on the Tube, she’d count the number of races on the bench facing hers, examine the national costumes, eavesdrop on the languages. Her favorite coffee shop (with coffees from thirty-six nations) became her window on the behaviors of lovers and parents and students. It was an ever-changing scene, this city. She was at the center of things in London, she’d told her mother; one never knew what to expect.
    The move had been Penny’s idea. “You can’t