Work Text:
Downton Abbey, 28 December, 2001
The chair he’s standing on is probably very valuable, precarious across rug and floorboards, as he tries to pull a suitcase down from the top of his grandpa’s wardrobe.
‘Careful, don’t scuff it!’
It’s already very scuffed and covered in dust.
‘I still don’t know why you never thought to tell me,’ says Matt, ‘obviously I would be interested that Downton had a gay butler.’
‘I’m old, I forget things. And you’ve never been especially interested in the history of this family,’ George waves a dismissive hand as Matt continues to struggle.
He could ask someone else to help, of course, but he wants his first look at Thomas and Richard to be his alone. After they talked about it over dinner the rest of his family lost interest and it’s clear they all think it’s ridiculous, his preoccupation with these men he’s never met.
‘You’ve not been old the entire time I’ve been alive, grandpa, you can’t use that as an excuse. What about when I came out? I told you before I told anyone,’ Matt heaves the suitcase down and steps gingerly to the floor, overbalanced by the weight of it, ‘I would have been interested then.’
‘I wouldn’t want you to think I was patting myself on the back. There was nothing special about my acceptance of Thomas; it was just the way things were, I never really thought about it.’
Matt looks at George, his weathered face and white hair, a stalwart figure, and an unchanging feature of his entire life and thinks, this is the moment I realise he’s a person not just my grandpa , and this is the reason I told him before I told anyone else . Deep down he knew George’s acceptance would be easy and he would need it to face the rest of them.
He sets the case on the luggage rack by the window and George smiles, fusses over to it, ‘I’ve never read any of the letters, I’ll leave that to you. But there should be some interesting things in here.’
23rd July 1927
Dear Mr Ellis,
I wanted to express my gratitude for all your help during H.M stay at Downton. It could not have gone better and that is in large part down to you.
I also wanted to thank you again for the personal service you afforded me in York; I will not forget it.
I hope we can meet again, as you say. In the meantime please know I hold you in the highest regard.
Yours,
Thomas Barrow
Matt clicks open the lid of the case; inside is a jumble of things, a clock, some books, haphazard now they’ve been shaken about. He picks one up at random and flicks to the flyleaf and the plate which declares the book belongs to the 7th Earl of Grantham and in the corner, written in a defiant hand, Thomas Barrow.
‘Cheeky bugger,’ says George when Matt turns the book towards him, ‘I had forgotten I had to steal these back after he died.’
‘Did he leave you anything?’
‘No, he passed away a few years before Richard and when Richard died he left the house and everything else to some friends, their community in York, I think. After the funeral at Downton they kindly let me take some momentos.’
‘It seems strange that Richard would want to be buried here. If he had family in York wouldn’t he want to be buried with them? If he had friends there?’
George looks thoughtful, ‘he didn’t jump at the idea when I suggested it just after Thomas died but I think he realised they had more of a chance of being buried together if he let me take care of it.’
‘What do you mean?’
George lifts out the clock, turns it over in his hands before setting it reverently on the dresser, ‘you have to remember this was the mid-seventies. There were some raised eyebrows in the village, I can tell you, when I requested a double plot near the family graves, to bury a servant no less. And then two years later to bury his partner, another man?’
’You did it though, took a stand.’
‘I had the money and the influence, dare I say the privilege to get it done. I made a promise to Richard and I kept it.’
‘But they’re still there, no one cares now.’
‘No, no one cares now. But we did have to deal with some vandals in the 1980s, even the 90s. Burying them together was one thing, to acknowledge on the headstone what they meant to each other was quite another.’
Matt remembers visiting Downton as a child in the 80s and as a young man in the 90s, oblivious to all this. He first told George, tearfully, as if making a terrible confession, that he thought he might only like boys when he was 14 years old, expecting that his grandpa would still love him, hoping that he might understand. And all the while George had been quietly honouring two men who made a life together under far harsher circumstances, helping where he could.
All the books are in an unsteady pile on the bed now and in the bottom of the suitcase are papers, envelopes and hopefully, photos. That’s what he wants, after having read the letters and spoken to George, to see the faces of these men, to see if they’re as he has imagined them.
3rd August 1927
Dear Richard,
I do hope you have a pleasant time at Bolton Abbey. Old Lady Grantham says V.C is much changed since his stroke in ‘25 and can be very difficult to deal with.
It is a shame you’ll only be a few hours away and won’t be able to visit. Are you sure there won’t be a moment you can be spared? I think of you often and would make time to see you.
One bit of news from Downton: Daisy and Andy tied the knot. It was all a bit of a rush but Daisy finally made her mind up and got the thing done. It was a simple wedding in the end, but charming, although I don’t go in for that sort of thing usually. Andy is beside himself.
I never know what to write. My days are much the same as each other, I don’t dash about from pillar to post like you do. It can’t be very interesting to hear about.
Yours,
Thomas
‘There wasn’t much left when I made it to the house in York,’ says George as he sifts through the suitcase, ‘not that I wanted anything valuable. Just something here and there to remember them. I cleared out the desk in the study, papers and things, letters, but there will be some photographs too. Thomas’s medals from the Great War should be in there somewhere, ah, here.’
George picks up a little cardboard box, three medals inside, nestled in bright ribbons, ‘he was injured and he admitted to me when he was an old man he’d done it on purpose. Held his lighter up over the trench so he’d be shot in the hand and sent home. After two years at the front, who could blame him but he still felt guilty about it, all those years later.’
‘You make him sound so complicated,’ says Matt.
The way his Grandpa talks makes Thomas out to be a tragic figure but the letters he’s read so far are full of hope, even if they’re not naive about the realities of their lives. Everything he knows about them is from a handful of love letters and memories coloured by the nostalgia and affection George has for his childhood; there are gaps and he can’t help but fill them with his own ideas about being gay, about being in love.
‘Everyone is more complicated and more simple than they look from the outside,’ says George, 'why don't you spread everything out over here?'
Matt gathers everything up from the bottom of the case and tips it all on to the bed, sorting out letters from envelopes of photos, straightening out the few negatives that have curled around each other. He spreads them out before dragging over the chair for George to sit on, kneeling on the floor beside him. Nothing is chronological, a whole life from sepia toned black and white to shiny, over exposed colour photos from the seventies.
The first photo he picks up is one of the most recent, a whole group of people, all ages, in a wood panelled room, looking like every disco stereotype, terrible flares and feathered hair. They’re all smiling at the camera, the flash glaring off the picture frames behind them, hazy from the cigarettes almost all of them seem to be smoking.
‘Who are these people?’
George turns the photo over but there’s nothing written on the back.
‘That’s Richard there,’ he points to an elderly man sat at the front, ‘that must have been taken not long before he died in 1975. I would have met all his friends at the funeral. They took Downton by storm, we didn’t know what had hit us.’
It’s difficult to connect the 80 year old in the photo to the young man who wrote to Thomas, betraying himself over and over again to declare his love in no uncertain terms, just as it’s hard to imagine his grandpa as a young man falling in love with his grandma in the middle of a war. The stakes seem so much higher than meeting Chris their last year of uni, falling into bed and muddling through until they had found themselves in love.
26th October 1927
Dear Richard,
Mrs Hughes is likely to say she doesn’t much care what your opinion is of Scotland but I know truthfully she misses the place sometimes.
How did you find the shooting in the end? You’re right I do enjoy it even if I don’t get to fire a gun myself. It’s the patience of the thing, the shooting party must work as a well oiled machine, towards a common goal or everyone loses out. The disappointment comes when downstairs doesn’t get a share of the spoils.
All I know of Norfolk is that it’s flat for miles on end. I’ve been in Yorkshire so long I think I’d feel strange without a hill on the horizon somewhere.
If you felt the urge to write me poetry I wouldn't disabuse you of it. I warn you, though, my choice of reading material doesn’t often tend to the romantic so I can’t promise to understand any of it. I won’t attempt to respond in kind but safe to say, I miss you and I wish you were beside me so I could tell you these things instead of writing them.
Yours,
Thomas
P.S please find enclosed a photograph I had taken recently should you need to remind yourself of what I look like.
‘Here, this is more like it,’ George hands him a photo, on card, of rows of men and women in front of the house; standing to attention in aprons and caps, smart livery and serious expressions. Matt scans the faces, wondering if he can guess which of the men is Thomas, but rather than illuminating anything the stiff, blurred faces make them all seem even more like figures from the past.
‘Let me see, that’s Mr Carson, he was the Butler before Thomas, and Mrs Hughes, the Housekeeper. They got married eventually. Anna, she’s only a housemaid there but she was lady’s maid to my mother and then Housekeeper after Mrs Hughes retired. She married Mr Bates, my grandfather’s valet, that’s him there. Both of them spent time in prison, I believe.’
‘What?!’ Matt is never sure whether to take George seriously when he says outlandish things like that.
‘Oh, I was assured by my mother they were both innocent. I can’t remember the exact details it was before I was born and then when I was very small.’
‘You can tell me about it later and I’ll see whether I believe you. Which one’s Thomas?’
‘There,’ George points to a young man, with dark hair and a pale face. He looks serious, his mouth a severe line, but maybe that’s just the nature of old photos. Matt had thought that getting a look at him, properly, would reveal something, that he would feel a kinship and a connection with the man but he just seems like any extra in a period drama, and he can’t stand those.
‘He’s probably younger than you are now in that.’
‘Isn’t there a better one, just of him.’
The next photo George hands him is better, it’s still a formal portrait, but it’s only of Thomas and he looks less stern, a smile caught somewhere in his eyes. The back is inscribed in pencil For Richard, 1927. Matt likes him, he’s attractive, with dark hair and high cheekbones; the soft focus of an old photo making him seem romantic somehow, wistful.
‘You never told me he was so fit,’ says Matt, grinning.
‘Matthew! Don’t be vulgar,’ George takes back the photo reprovingly.
Matt rolls his eyes, ‘handsome, then.’
‘1927; that would have been the year he and Richard met.’
1927 to 1973 feels like a lifetime, 46 years, even his parents haven’t been together quite that long; he wonders how long he has to look forward to with Chris.
12th November 1927
Richard,
Old Lady Grantham died today.
It feels with her passing as if nothing will ever be the same again, here or anywhere.
Daisy and Andy are leaving to take on Mr Mason’s farm. Mrs Hughes says to wish them well and accept that things are changing but I can’t see things changing for the better for me, for us.
I don’t imagine that Anna and Mr Bates will stay for much longer either. She’s just told us she’s expecting again. Johnny is over the moon at the idea of a little brother or sister so I am trying to find happiness in his joy but it can be a struggle.
Thomas
‘Ah, now look, here’s a good one.’
The photo is of Thomas, older now, sat in an armchair, looking down at a tiny infant, one finger caught by a little hand. Richard is perched on the arm of the chair, not looking at the lens or for that matter the baby, but at Thomas, with such unabashed adoration it makes Matt feel a little awkward to be looking at it.
‘That’s your father,’ says George, ‘I must have taken this photo.’
‘But dad said he never knew them?’
‘No, this was the only time they met. It must be early ‘46. Ellen and I took Robbie to York just after I asked Thomas to come back to Downton as Butler.’
‘You asked him to come back? But he said no?’
‘It was unfair of me to ask him really, just the usual upper class entitlement, after he’d made the decision to leave but I was only 24, back from the war, a baby on the way and a new title I didn’t know what to do with. I wanted someone familiar to help me steer Downton in the right direction.’
‘He was nice to you when you were young, it makes sense.’
‘Yes, but he wasn’t particularly happy here. Rubbed people up the wrong way, not entirely by accident. But that was never my experience with him. He was lonely, you know, until he met Richard, and as children we never judged him.’
’I’d probably be a bit of a bastard if I couldn’t be myself, if I had to lie all the time about who I was.’
‘Language, Matthew. I expect you’re right to an extent. But he could be difficult, stubborn, even in his old age.’
‘He stayed here for nearly ten years, though, before they moved in together?’
‘After the King died Richard felt he could leave service. I don’t think it was a difficult decision for Thomas to go with him. Before that, who knows, in those days once you were a servant it was hard to imagine anything else.’
‘What did he do? Richard - in York?’
‘He worked for the Post Office, some managerial position.’
‘I guess even a dead king as a reference is a pretty good one.’
George gives him a quelling look but Matt can tell he’s trying not to laugh.
8th May 1930
Dear Richard
You are right that my soul is rooted at Downton, this place has shaped me from boy into man and I have known the majority of my life here, but to be with you, anywhere, in a place we can call a home? It’s all I want, I promise.
I’ve tried to leave service many times but it has always pulled me back and now that I’m butler here I have a responsibility to the people I lead. And I know it wouldn’t be simple for you to leave H.M either.
We can make plans, things are changing every day, but I won’t hold you to them. You know as well as I do that our lives are not really our own. One day perhaps.
With love,
Thomas
‘Do you think he was happy, in the end?’
While Matt was looking at the photo of his dad George has managed to put the others into some sort of order. Most of them are more candid, Thomas sat on a beach, squinting into the sun, a hand shadowing his eyes, Richard in overalls at an allotment, one foot up on a spade, both of them on a street of terraced houses strung with bunting, laughing with their arms around each other. This is what he wanted, he probably has a picture just like it somewhere of himself and Chris, evidence of a happy life, lived together and no less vibrant, even in black and white.
‘Yes, I believe he was happy.’
‘But what about the risk?’
‘The risk?’
‘Two men together, wouldn’t people talk? Wouldn’t they be in danger?’
‘It was Richard’s house, they put it about that Thomas was his lodger at first and then they were just Thomas and Richard, who’d been there so long no one questioned it.’
‘Is this where they lived? It could be York,’ Matt holds up the photo of Thomas and Richard on the street. They’re raising bottles to the camera, grinning so wide it looks like it would hurt, the bunting above them fluttering in the breeze.
‘At the end of the war, perhaps. They look happy there, don’t they?’
Matt feels embarrassingly like he might be about to cry so he just nods and George pats his hand, slowly getting to his feet, ‘I’ll leave you to read the letters on your own shall I?’
‘Yes, thanks, grandpa. For everything.’
At the door George smiles, kindly, ‘don’t forget to tidy up.’
When he's read through them all, looked his fill, Matt gathers the letters and photos neatly, keeping them in order as he puts them back in the suitcase. The clock he leaves on George’s dresser but he puts the books back too; they should probably be returned to the library but he feels that Thomas stole them fair and square, so they can stay where they are. He leaves out the photo of them together, on the street in York, a reminder to keep them in his thoughts.
Just as he’s hopping down from the chair, dusting himself off, he sees an envelope under the bed, of course he’d only notice it when he’d already heaved the suitcase back on top of the wardrobe. He kneels down to reach it, sitting cross legged on the rug; it’s addressed to Thomas.
The envelope is lumpy, containing more than a letter and he tips it up onto the floor, a silver chain sliding out. It’s old, tarnished, Matt rubs his thumb over the shield at the end, the grinning half moon shining in his palm.
He unfolds the letter and begins to read. This really is the last word, from either of them, any other letters they sent or hid or kept safe are long gone, lost now.
1 January 1928
Dearest Thomas
Happy New Year.
I managed to visit the sea between Christmas and New Year; it was cold and the drizzle will have no doubt gotten into my bones. I’ll be laid up for a week, mark my words, but it was beautiful and I felt like I was the only man on earth.
Except of course my thoughts kept returning to you - your smile, your hands (yes both of them!), your neck and your chest and your _____
I wanted to hold you here and look at the sea while we dream of all the possibilities together.
I love you, too.
It’s never too soon to say it, if you truly mean it.
Richard
Matt folds the letter away, climbs up on the chair to slip it into the suitcase without getting it down, but the chain he puts into his pocket as he sets off into the house to find Chris. He’s spent the last few days preoccupied with the past, with proof that men like him have always existed and always will, even at Downton, but now he needs to find the man he loves and tell him so, to remind them both how lucky they are and how many possibilities are open to them.