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Paul Brownsey |
Paul Brownsey was once a newspaper reporter in Luton and is now a philosophy lecturer at Glasgow University. Recent work has appeared in Staple, Tears in the Fence, the German magazine, LitSpeak, and the Canadian journal, The Antigonish Review. He has work forthcoming in the Scottish literary magazines, Chapman and Cencrastus.
Getting To Know You
They began it, the friendship. The acquaintance. Whatever it was. Penny will always tell herself that but will always refuse to be indignant at being led up the garden path.
After-dinner coffee has just been set before her and David here in the very nice wedgewood-green drawing-room of Ram's Fell Country House Hotel, and Penny is feeling pleased that David said, "Thank you," for sometimes he asks why you should thank people for things that are yours by right on account of paying for them. The gaunt toothy woman who brought the coffee, one of the proprietors, wearing for evening a shiny flared maroon dress and peep-toe shoes with ankle straps, asks with genuine interest where they have been today. Penny's voice is grateful for the privilege of visiting beautiful places as she tells how they have been to Blackwell, a house built in the Arts and Crafts architectural style with an absolutely glorious view over Lake Windermere.
"We were there, too," calls the tall shambly untidy-haired one from another settee.
See, Penny will observe: they made the first move.
"How amazing we didn't see you!" she cries, and David is perfectly welcoming: "What time were you there?"
"The afternoon," says the other one, the one with large glasses to make his narrow face look less severe. She will always picture him in a bow-tie, yet will also know he never wore one throughout their acquaintance.
"But so were we!" she cries excitedly. "How could we not have seen you? David thought it was the most beautiful house he's ever seen." She is pleased that this secures him a smile of approval from the pair.
"We spent most of the time eating scones in the refreshment room. Jimmy's sightseeing priority. He even took one away to eat during the talk." The way the one with glasses says this, it sounds sour, but then he smiles affectionately at the other one, confirming that they are a gay couple.
David says, "When the curator was giving her talk, the sun was shining through her dress from behind through a window, like the famous photo of Princess Di with her legs outlined. Phwoar!"
"You learn so much more from a talk than a guide-book," Penny covers. "But if we were all at the talk it was even more amazing we didn't see you!"
"Not if everyone was sitting in concealed nooks and bays around the hall." That isn't really combative, it'll just be Jimmy's manner, and Penny feels the lift of rich promise you get when people are new. The ice is broken, the two couples chat away from their respective settees, and when it turns out that Elliott and Jimmy live in Stirling, only twenty miles away from her and David, this seems a sort of sign.
A sign that's confirmed the next day, when, without a word having been said about their plans, they discover they've all come to visit the slate mines. They keep remarking on the coincidence. A black labrador bounds along with the party until they reach the actual entrance to underground and then halts.
"It doesn't want to go," says Penny to the guide, a big salt-of-the-earth woman, who replies, laughing, "It's just waiting to round you all up." But all the time underground, in the big chill caverns hollowed out by those old-time miners working in horrible conditions with only candles for light, the dog stands with its tail down and seems grateful for pats and fondles, except from David, from whom, when he holds out a hand, it swivels its eyes away, whites showing.
Back outside, mist and cold wind are cheerful by contrast with underground. The dog gets excited and keeps barking for the woman to throw pebbles for it to retrieve. Penny says, "What a change. It needed to be close to people while it was underground."
"That's relationships. Clinging together in fear." Elliott.
Penny halts so suddenly that the heavy protective helmet that she, like everyone else, had to put on for underground continues moving with momentum and topples down her forehead. "You don't really think that!" She's pleased that, in this wind, David is out of earshot.
There's a sort of joint reply from Elliott and Jimmy, for they contribute phrases turn and turn about that interweave into a perfect whole: "Clinging together in fear can be the beginning, yes - but there's something else that you can't reduce to fear, dependency, habit, etcetera. - In love soul locks on to soul in a way that goes beyond need and using the other - though you may never be aware of it."
So Elliott's cynicism was just a joke. Suddenly there's a shifting and melting in the mist, green and grey distances reveal themselves on all sides, a line of walkers with rucksacks on their backs is heading straight up the sunlit shoulder of the opposite mountain like pilgrims en route to something wonderful. Penny wants to wave to them and does. It gets to be a highspot of the day - the highspot? - talking with Elliott and Jimmy in the drawing-room after dinner. The hotel was once a dower-house for an aristocratic old lady who was a friend of Dorothy Wordsworth's, and William himself sat in this very room, though not on these modern floral settees and armchairs grouped around little tables. On the wall historical prints of the house hint at continuity between the high insightful conversations of the Wordsworth days and the eager talk among the four over the hand-made petits-fours. They talk about absolutely everything - look how they talked about love and relationships at the mines. Politics, for instance. Elliott and Jimmy are active LibDems but they're critical of all political parties and just regard the LibDems as the best of a bad bunch for implementing their vision, you have to call it that, one that Penny is delighted to discover is hers, too, and also David's, a vision that's the starting-point for all decent politics. It involves profound acceptance and caring, stemming from real recognition of something people so often blank out today, putting their feet on bus seats where others will sit and get filth on their clothes - stemming from real recognition of the full reality of other people.
Elliott and Jimmy seem to know a lot of people. They mention a Martin, a rather inadequate person who seems to define himself as the person dumped by Norman six years ago: he's always round at their place moping, even angled to come on holiday with them. There are Marie and Bob, to whose two girls they are godparents, but Bob is virtually an alcoholic (like that college friend of David's) and sometimes Marie has to 'phone and ask if the girls can stay at Uncle Elliott's and Uncle Jimmy's (that's really sweet!) for the night - inconvenient but they never refuse. They seem to see a lot of Kara, who works in Jimmy's bank (where, despite looking like a fumbling teddy-bear, he is actually quite senior): she has a house-decorating obsession and is always 'phoning in sick when she's really staying at home for the decorators. Elliott and Jimmy wouldn't sneak on her but do try to get her see that if she goes on like this she could end up out of a job.
But there don't seem to be any special friends, a couple of their own stature. Penny ventures, "I know how you feel. Some of our friends... Isn't it funny how some people attract lame ducks? Isn't there a character in an Angus Wilson novel who has lame ducks?" and Elliott says, "Yes, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot," and they all laugh in sudden glory, a sign that each couple can be, for the other, the friends one always wishes for who aren't lame ducks.
Penny is pleased when David shows he doesn't have any prejudice by asking, emphasising gays, "So how do you gays recognise each other and link up as a couple? What's the signal?" The whole room awaits the reply, not out of prurient curiosity, not at all, but because what's going on in the drawing-room is a kind of joint enterprise of sharing and learning whereby people's best selves are enlarged and their humanity nourished. Apparently, Elliott was executor for someone who died of AIDS before it could be controlled - oh, they weren't together, Elliott and this other one, they'd be just friends - and as executor Elliott had to deal with the bank and Jimmy expressed sympathy in a way that let Elliott know, and after the business was settled Jimmy suggested a drink, and it went on from there. Penny smiles round at the other occupants of the drawing-room, congratulating them on receiving an interesting and educative lesson on how relationships begin when you can't make assumptions about the other person's inclinations, as ordinary men and women do when they meet. There's a fierce-looking old woman, big and stiff, who goes on about "my daughter" as though her husband had nothing to do with it, but he did because once she referred to "her father here", and he, poor soul, beamed round at everyone like a wee boy - well, even the face of this fierce old woman forms into a genuinely benign smile as the story of Elliott's and Jimmy's meeting is concluded.
Penny's pleased, too, when David responds, "Then I'd better tell you how we got married." There's a jokey edge to "married" - typically male! After relating how they'd known each other slightly at school, he says, "I was always too scared to approach her because I was short" - "You still are," jokes Jimmy - "and she's tall and beautiful and I didn't think she'd look at anyone who could make her look ridiculous, and I only plucked up courage three years ago when we met at a school reunion." Penny nudges him and says, "Silly," and looks round at the other guests like someone embarrassed, and David continues, "And anyway, as a girl she was totally besotted with some skinny geek in glasses called Raymond Gardiner who ran the Christian Union."
"Well, I still believe in something, in spite of everything," she says, smiling comfortingly at David. And there they all were, their stories told in public.
"Something." Elliott puts inverted commas around it and it leads to a conversation about religion in which, there in front of everyone else, totally unself-consciously, the four cut right through the usual polite reticences and embarrassments. You marvel at how the human frame - Jimmy's beefy and somehow lop-sided, Elliott's stringy with middle age rather than slim with youth - can contain such soaring perceptions. In its display-case the beautiful red and green dinner-service that was made in China in the eighteenth century for the aristocratic old lady glistens with a secret about the oneness of all times and all things.
Unconsciously the four have conducted the latter part of their discussion in murmurs so as not to disturb the other guests, all of whom have departed the drawing-room for bed. Suddenly, simultaneously, without a prior word - proof of their deep affinity, like their coinciding at the mines - they rise and look out through the large bay window. Moonlight is shimmering on Clough Water beneath the black jagged fells outlined against the sky's milkier darkness. Wordsworth saw this. They have the strange sense that they are gazing on the scene when no-one is looking at it, not even their privileged selves, and Penny gets a better lesson than any she got at university about how Wordsworth could see ordinary scenes shot through with intimations of another order of things. She has glimpsed a hidden landscape in which their four souls have always known each other and always will.
That moment of illumination by the window is subtly complemented next morning in a down-to-earth practical way. Penny has been hoping she can get David out onto the fells, and has found a guide-book in the hotel giving details about one called the Grisedale Pike. It's pointed like a mountain should be and there's a path all the way up. But at the breakfast exchange of plans for the day she has to mention that the mountain idea is out because their Peugeot has developed indicator trouble and needs to go into a garage at Keswick.
They made the move, that will always be clear: she and David just responded.
Without any detectable consultation with each other - no glances exchanged, raised eyebrows, miniscule nods - and speaking in their alternating dovetailing way that makes it impossible to remember who said precisely what, Elliott and Jimmy say, "Well, we could take you in our car - and arrange to pick you up again later - or if you don't mind the company - we could climb the mountain with you."
The offer is so perfect that it would damage the world if she began the oh-we-couldn't possibly-impose routine, and anyway she is saved from replying when David, bless him though she'd have put more appreciativeness into it, says, "Terrific."
The path starts through bracken, and the warm crushed sweet smell announces this to be one of those days when all things are well. Sunshine is here forever - you just can't believe there's ever been rain and cloud in the Lake District or ever could be. Distances amaze with the reality of detail they present, colours are ripening by the second into richness never achieved before. Neither Elliott nor Jimmy has suitable footwear, and Elliott gets blisters and briefly seems a bit complainy, but the best is yet to come, for at the airy summit the pair produce the most memorable picnic the world has ever known: smoked salmon and pate and melba toast, local goat's cheeze and local oatcakes and Grasmere gingerbread, apples, grapes (both green and red), and, packed in a chiller and served in real wineglasses, a bottle of lovely wine whose label reads "2001 Condrieu Les Terrasses de l'Empire" and which Penny's researches will later discover to be very expensive. As the four tuck in, the surrounding peaks raise themselves still higher into the blue heavens, and the green valleys deepen towards something infinite that calls out all your tenderness. Upon Penny is precipitated a blessing so complete that David's prostate cancer, he so young to have it and to have had it for five years, just does not matter, and this is not a cruel thought.
Elliott and Jimmy know about music and art and talk about them during the tucking in. Penny discovers that she and David have opinions that really matter. She resolves that she and David will go to more concerts and exhibitions and things, and since Elliott and Jimmy live so near, why not with them? As the four, descending now, are slithering on their bottoms over a little rocky outcrop, Penny says, "Elliott, your name reminds me, the leading man is called Elyot, Private Lives is being done at the Citz in Glasgow this autumn. We could all go together."
It's Jimmy who replies. Their interweaving way of talking shows an amazing growing-together that many ordinary married people would envy. He's off the rocky bit and stands slapping dirt off his backside as if he's not quite sure it's part of himself. Nodding across the deep trough of Coledale towards the rearing point of Causey Pike, Coledale Beck just a line far below, Jimmy says, "Mahler once pointed to a view and said, 'I have composed that.' "
On Penny's and David's last night, before going down to dinner, she writes out their address on a sheet of Ram's Fell Country House Hotel writing-paper from the plastic folder in their room. Once again the four are last up. Around the drawing-room coffee-cups and settees and chairs, abandoned in disarray, do late service as proxy listeners. An ideal of honesty and respect and loving discovery, striven for by the thousands of transients who have sat here for a night or a few nights and passed back into the world, has been finally and radiantly perfected in the conversation of the four.
"So," Penny says.
"Here's our address," she says.
Gaily, she waves the sheet of writing-paper, unreached for.
She will always refuse to think that she and David went wrong somewhere. She will tell herself that, really, Elliott and Jimmy were absolutely right, and her only regret will be that she can't tell them how much she agrees with them, never daring to use the 'phone number that she got next morning by peeping at the hotel's paperwork when she was paying her and David's bill and the toothy woman popped out of the office for a moment to speak to a cleaner.
She will always know that there was genuine regret in their interweaving voices. "We shall not see you after you leave here - because what we have had from you these past few days - and you have had from us - is the perfection of friendship. - After this everything would go downhill. - You would see us with feet of clay - a bullying oaf and a needy neurotic, inadequates both. - And how awful if we came to think that you weren't the gods you've been in these days - enchanting us with your love for each other - your intelligence and strength - but that you were, to speak purely hypothetically, exploiting each other's weaknesses and liable to exploit us, too. - Oh, we don't at present believe that - we do not - but time and familiarity sink everyone's perceptions of the people they know - the gods we have met would withdraw, and we should be left with more lame ducks - and Jimmy and Elliott would become another of your charity cases. - But seeing you no more, we shall always be there for you - and shall treasure these days when we made dear friends at Ram's Fell Country House Hotel."