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There’s a telephone in front of him, but George can’t bring himself to reach out for it.
The room around him is still unfinished. Everything in the new house is still unfinished. He glances out the window to his right. The gardens at Friar Park are what sold him on the place. They’re vast and strange. With a little bit of work, they’ll be beautiful, too.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Pattie says softly from the corridor.
He turns to her, stopped in the doorway, smiling in at him sadly. She doesn’t know what to say to him. Hasn’t since he’s returned from his parents’. He offers something of a smile back, then looks back to the telephone. Like it might start ringing on its own. Like he’ll never even have to dial the numbers himself.
Pattie steps into the room, starts towards him slowly, carefully, like he’s something more skittish than he really is. She sits down next to him on the only piece of furniture in the room. Takes his hand and holds onto it in her lap.
“Who are you thinking of calling?” she asks gently.
George sighs, feels embarrassed by it, but admits: “Paul.”
She squeezes his hand tighter, then says: “I think that’d be good for you.” George just nods in response. She sighs, lifts his hand to her lips and presses a soft kiss to the back of his fingers. “He’ll know what to say,” she coaxes, but all she really means is that: she doesn’t. She isn’t enough for him, right now.
She kisses him on the temple and then leaves him be. It’s the privacy and encouragement that he needs, so finally, he reaches out for the telephone and dials Paul’s number into the rotary. As it rings, he realizes that he’d had one of Allen’s assistants find the number for him. It had been lost to him because Paul hadn’t wanted him to have it. He nearly cuts the line, but a small voice answers before he’s able to.
“McCartney residence, Heather speaking,” she says neatly, well-practiced and proud, the way young kids are when they do something they’ve seen their parents do. Somehow, it’s the best-case scenario and worst all at once, that it’s Heather he’s gotten.
“Oh,” he says, momentarily floundering as he racks his brain for the way that you’re supposed to speak to children. He realizes: my mother’s dead suddenly won’t go so well. “Hi, Heather,” he tries, wincing at how mechanical he sounds. “It’s George, d’you remember me? I’m an old mate of your Dad’s,” he says, and he’s endlessly grateful for her cutting him off with: “Of course I remember you, you wore the fuzzy boots.”
He laughs, despite himself, and remembers the days she’d spent with them all in the studio, sitting on all of their laps, playing all of their instruments, and how she’d taken a liking to the slippers he’d worn at Savile Row and had worn them herself for hours, the tops of them coming nearly all the way up to her knees instead of the ankles like they were supposed to. “Did Mum and Dad finally get you a pair of your own?”
“Oh, yes,” she muses. “I’ve got these nice great pink ones now, and --...” There’s another voice somewhere behind her and George finds himself holding his breath. It’s Linda; she’s asking who’s on the phone. Heather must answer her, but he can hardly listen to her as she returns her attention to him and recounts where exactly she got the boots, what she likes to wear them with. Then, she says: “Mummy wants to say ‘hello’,” and his heart is in his throat.
“George?” Linda asks as soon as the telephone’s to her ear and George can hear the way she’s trying to be polite because what she really means to say is too stark: what the hell are you calling for? For a moment, he goes bitter, wondering where exactly she gets off screening Paul’s calls for him, but he supposes: they’ve all made one another this way. They’ve built these defensive and protective people out of old friends.
“Linda, hullo,” he says; her name has always felt so strange in his mouth. Decidedly American, and decidedly Not Jane . He wants to feel like the whole thing happened so fast, like Paul was just Paul, and then was suddenly father Paul to mother Linda, husband Paul to wife Linda, but he realizes he’s known her for just about three years now.
“George, what are you --” She stops herself, reels it back in and instead goes with: “Is everything alright?” Because she knows just as well as he does that anything they needed to say to one another could be said between their lawyers. Except… Well, except the things that couldn’t. And those things were personal, they were painful and private, and had to mean that someone was hurt.
“Yeah,” he says quickly. “Is Paul in?”
She hesitates to ask again: is everything alright? because she must know it isn’t. “He, uhm…” She pauses just long enough to make George wonder if Paul’s right there with her, mouthing instructions to her about him not being home, about him not wanting George to ever call this number again. “We were about to put on a fire,” she says, and it’s too easy to be a lie, too specific to their way of life to be a fabrication. “He’s just outside.”
George tries to focus on that image of Paul in his head: the one in a burly sweater, probably still bearded, wielding an axe and gathering firewood, because it makes him smile. It’s easier to focus on that than to think about how Paul isn’t here , he isn’t where he needs him . “Okay,” he manages, but he must not manage it well enough, because Linda says again: “Is everything alright?” and she doesn’t sound suspicious, she just sounds concerned.
“Yeah, erm…” He pauses, swallows down the urge to just tell her everything. “If Paul isn’t too busy, I’d like to speak with him.”
There’s another pause down the line, but then Linda says: “Sure,” softly, soothing in a way, even though she doesn’t understand why he might need it.
Then, there’s some commotion on the other end as Linda sets the phone down. Muffled voices, a crack, like a door swinging shut, and then there’s just quiet. For a moment, George thinks about killing the line. He imagines Paul is thinking the same thing.
“Hello?” Paul finally says to him down the line, slow and cautious, like he’d never believed it was George to begin with.
George takes a deep breath, thinks he might let everything out of him in one go, starting from 1966 and ending here: alone, grieving, in a house that doesn't feel his yet, but all he can manage is: “Hi,” as if they’ve been in regular touch with each other, as if their love for one another was as apparent as it had been when they were twenty-one. It feels lacking and George is sorry about that. It feels trivial and shallow and he wonders what Paul might have hoped their first words to each other might have been.
“Linda thought something might be wrong,” he says and George hears what he means: that’s the only reason we’re speaking . “Is everything alright?”
“My mother’s died,” he says, without preamble. He doesn’t think he can manage small-talk, he doesn’t even know what that small-talk could be.
Paul goes so still that George thinks he’s left him. He opens his mouth to speak, to ask if he’s still there, before Paul tells him: “I’m sorry,” in a voice George doesn’t think he’s ever heard. “I didn’t know,” he adds, but how could he? Nobody knew, really. Outside of Pattie and his family. He hadn’t even called the others yet. Though, he realizes, Paul is the only one who hadn’t known she’d been ill. He decides to call Rich as soon as he hangs up here.
“I thought that, erm…” George falters, because he realizes he’d been planning to invite himself up to Scotland and that isn’t what they can do with one another anymore. They’ve all lost that privilege.
“Shit, Geo,” Paul says over him. “I’m sorry ,” he says again, as though it matters more the second time, and maybe it does. Maybe it would only ever get easier the more people felt sad for him.
“It’s alright,” he manages, though they both know that it isn’t.
For a horrible moment, George realizes that Paul doesn’t know what to say, either. He suddenly wonders if there ever is anything to say. He feels empty -- out of words, out of feelings, out of everything, so he shuts his eyes and focuses on the weight of the telephone in his hand, the softness of the cushion on the settee beneath him, and Paul’s breathing down the line from Scotland.
“I’m up north,” George suddenly lies.
“Are you?”
“Aye, I…” He drops his forehead down into his hand and tries to pinpoint the moment that they stopped just saying that they needed one another. “I thought, maybe… Well, I’ve never seen the farm, have I?”
“No, you haven’t,” Paul allows, finally dawning into what George is asking of him. “Why don’t I send for a car?” Paul offers. “Maybe you shouldn’t be driving.”
“No, no,” George answers quickly. “The drive might be nice, actually.”
“Sure,” Paul says, allowing that to be true, too.
“I can be up there tomorrow evening, is that alright?”
“Yeah, of course it is,” Paul answers, quick, like it’s forced, but like it’s from their past, too. “We’ll build a bed for you.”
“Ta,” George answers.
“I really am sorry,” Paul says to him after they’ve said their goodbyes, just as George had been meaning to place the telephone back in it’s cradle.
“I know you are, mate,” George says back.
He lays the phone back down on the body and feels alone all over again.
That night, in the front hall in their sleeping bags on the floor, since the beds aren’t up yet, Pattie rolls towards him, peers at him through the complete darkness of their work-in-progress and asks: “Would you like me to go with you?” and pretends she isn’t disappointed when he shakes his head.
“I think we ought to have some time ourselves,” he says and it seems to make her understand.
She sends him off with a travelling mug of tea in the morning and a warm egg sandwich that he finishes before he’s even off the grounds.
The drive is long and quiet, but it’s what he needs. British summer days are long, so the sun stays up with him the whole way. He only stops for lunch, knowing the McCartney’s will have some tea and something to eat for him when arrives.
It should be strange that he hasn’t gone to Tittenhurst or Brookfield House, but he’s thirteen again, or at least he feels that way. He’s gripping the steering wheel of an outrageously expensive Aston Martin, rather than the handlebars of some bicycle that had belonged to all of his brothers before finally belonging to him, but still, he feels thirteen.
Or, whatever age Paul had been when he’d lost Mary. That’s what George feels like. That lost and quiet version of his friend that had put real fear inside of him. Growing up in Liverpool when they did, it wasn’t abnormal for a boy to lose one or both of his parents young, but watching Paul lose his mother, it had terrified him. It had made him endlessly gracious for the vibrant Harrison clan always downstairs, always cooking, always with a spot of tea or whiskey to spare.
He’d had the sort of family that felt like it would last forever. And it had, happily so. Even when his sister had moved halfway across the world to America, they’d held together. But Louise, his mother, she hadn’t moved away; she was gone. And, of course, it’s the end everybody expects, but it never makes it right.
He’s twenty-seven, newly motherless, and he wonders how Paul ever woke up every morning all those years ago. How did he ever get on ? He supposes it’s the answer to that question that’s got him driving towards the Scottish highlands. How did you get on, Paul? Teach me . It’s a question he hopes might erase the months of animosity between them. It’s a question he knows Paul won’t turn him away from. For a brief moment, he wonders if it's even fair to be asking it. With all the things between them, was it fair to be asking for something?
Paul’s outside when he pulls up the long drive to the farmhouse, hauling some burlap bag towards the barn. He tosses it inside, not bothering to organize it now that he’s seen George arrive. He scrapes his gloved hands down his denim-clad thighs, then waves at George as he puts his little car in park.
“You made it alright?” Paul asks as soon as George steps out.
“Long drive,” George observes.
“Oh, aye,” Paul agrees, smiling. “Bit of the point, that.”
George laughs, then reaches into the backseat for his duffel. Paul takes it from him, muttering something about being a guest and he shows him to the front door. George watches the back of his head as they go. They haven’t even really properly said ‘hello’ to one another; he realizes neither of them really quite know how to.
“Lin!” Paul calls deeper into the house as soon as they step inside. “George is here,” he announces. George toes out of his sneakers, Paul walks right in. He gets to a chair to start untying them as soon as Linda appears from the kitchen. She smiles at him sympathetically; George realizes that she and Paul are still telling one another everything.
“George,” she says softly.
“Hiya,” he mumbles.
She steps towards him, gives him a kiss on the cheek, then turns back towards the kitchen. “I’ll put on some tea,” she decides. “You must be hungry.”
“Thanks, love,” Paul mumbles as she passes him. She pauses just long enough to reach out and hold the hand he offers out to her. They hold there, Paul looking up at her and Linda looking down at him and George realizes that there isn’t a day that Paul wonders if he made the wrong decision.
Heather sweeps into the sitting room like a storm, clutching a doll to her chest, shouting something to Linda, then she stops dead when she realizes they have company. Paul chuckles to himself and urges her: “It’s alright, Heather. You remember George, don’t you?” She nods shyly.
“Hullo,” George says for her. “We spoke on the phone, actually.”
“Did ye?” Paul asks, smiling. “You’re answering phones now?” he teases. “Paul…” George hears Linda warn from the kitchen, so Paul lets up and holds an arm open for Heather to slot herself against his chest. She’s gone shy; it makes George smile because she’d been so rough-and-tumble on the phone.
“What’s the doll’s name?” George ventures and that seems to put her a bit at ease. She steps towards him to show off her toy, explaining her clothes, her life, and George just happily listens -- Paul does too, George catches it -- until Linda returns with a tray of tea and some sandwiches. They’re heartier than what you’d get in England and George is glad for it.
Linda sits down on the sofa opposite Paul, though it looks like they’d still like to keep touching one another. Heather folds herself down on the floor at George’s feet and plays with the toys left about. She holds her tea close to her chest; helping the conversation along when it starts to slow. She’d been good at that, even in the studio days. Sometimes, he even forgets that she’s there, and he assumes that’s exactly how she means to make him feel.
Upstairs, a baby starts to cry.
“Oh, no,” Paul immediately mumbles. He and Linda share a look. They both seem to move at the same time.
George feels something go tight in his throat. He knows it’s baby Mary; he’s only seen her a handful of times and the thought makes him sad.
“I’ll get her,” Linda mutters and Paul whispers something back that George doesn’t catch. But, it’s decided that they’ll both go and that leaves George with Heather, which he doesn’t mind, it just makes him wonder how well this whole thing is going.
“Does she cry all the time?” George asks Heather good-naturedly.
Heather shrugs and says: “Not really.” She brushes back some of her doll’s hair and adds: “Mummy says she’s a perfect baby.”
“Next best to you, of course,” George adds.
It makes Heather blush, then she argues through a shy smile: “You didn’t know me when I was a baby.”
“No, but I can guess,” he says, which makes her laugh.
Upstairs, slowly, George can hear Mary start to calm down, until it’s nothing. They’re good parents, George decides. Heather and Mary are so lucky to have them both. He slinks down to the floor and picks up one of Heather’s toys. She immediately grabs for it back.
“No, no,” she instructs. “That one isn’t in this game.”
“Isn’t it?” George pokes.
She shakes her head emphatically and explains the rules to a game he hadn’t even been aware she’d been playing. She hands him a proper toy and tells him what to do with it. Thenm, there’s a figure in the doorway to the sitting room. George glances up and it’s Paul, standing there, watching him, with a smile on his face. He shouldn’t feel embarrassed about speaking to a child the way you’re meant to speak to a child, but he does anyway. He smiles back at Paul, but feels his cheeks going hot and pink anyway.
“Can I take George away from you there for a mo’?” Paul asks gently, stepping back into the room. When she doesn’t answer, Paul presses: “Heather?”
On the floor, Heather reaches for another one of her dolls and shrugs, keeping her eyes down on the thin carpet. It’s a ‘yes’, but she isn’t happy about it, so George looks back at Paul to see what he should do, but Paul just nods over his shoulder at the back door through the kitchen, so George feels alright leaving her there with her toys.
Linda’s back downstairs now too; George passes her as he heads for the back door. She squeezes at his elbow as he goes and it makes him feel both special and common all at once.
“I don’t know the state of the earth,” Paul grumbles once they’re there, together, standing on the ratty running carpet where, seemingly, the entire family keeps every pair of shoes they’ve ever bought, all caked in varying amounts of muck. Paul’s stepping into a pair of sturdy Wellington’s and George suddenly feels embarrassed about the sneakers he’d brought with him to a bloody farm. “I’d wear those, maybe,” Paul continues, gesturing towards a pair of hiking boots that look more well-worn than anything George has owned since becoming a Beatle.
“Right,” George mutters. For a moment, he wonders if the boots belong to Linda, but they fit too well to be hers. It serves as a time capsule, wearing something of Paul’s. He can’t remember the last time he’s done it. They’d swapped in and out of each other’s wardrobes for years, but that had slowed considerably in the latter half of the decade. It’d been more John’s department anyway, leafing through any wardrobe that wasn’t his and picking out a few favourites. In ‘67, George even bought two copies of the same shirts if he particularly liked them in case John got his hands on one and he never saw it again.
Crouching down to tie up the hikers, George catches a glimpse of an amber bottle in the pocket of Paul’s thin jacket and feels his heart jump up into his throat. He knows that Paul must mean business, taking him outside, away from Linda and the kids, a warm half-empty bottle of whiskey between them. It’s the sort of thing the three of them -- John and Paul and him -- might have done back in Liverpool: knick a bottle of something from whoever’s Da’ was out that day and drink in the park to feel like a proper adult, to feel some semblance of a hold on your life again.
George had always just joined them; he’d never really suggest those types of days. It was John usually, who suggested it, and Paul who supplied the whiskey because Jim was always out. They’d needed something to feel adult about, George had just liked spending time with them.
When they step outside, the breeze is cool; cooler than it ought to be for summer evening, but it’s nice. The sun is still shining the way it does on summer nights, golden and weak and beautiful, made even more so by the rugged land around them. George slows to a stop and just looks . He looks at the way the sunlight goes a bit purple and blue towards the horizon, at the way the long grass follows the wind, and hears the animals for the first time: the low bleating of sheep somewhere far-off, an endless cacophony of birds everywhere around them, and a dog barking.
Paul has slowed to a stop next to him as well. He smiles when he sees what George is seeing. He dips into his pocket, uncaps the whiskey and takes a long sip. He hands it off to George, who does the same, and he doesn’t feel like he’s drinking to numb anything, he feels like he’s doing it to open the floodgates. And maybe that’s all John and Paul were doing too, all those years ago.
They walk quietly with one another, splitting the bottle until it’s nearly empty. George pauses, sitting down against the wooden perimeter fence to retie one of his boots, and Paul joins him, setting his elbows down on the highest rung and looking out across the Scottish farmland, as though it’s his first time all over again.
“You don’t have to talk about her if you don’t want to,” he suddenly offers. George freezes and nearly loses track of everything, nearly forgets how one ties a boot in the first place. He looks up at Paul, framed by the soft sunlight, and wonders when the last time he might have looked up at him like this was. “I know you’ve come here and you might feel like you’ve got to say it all to make it all worth it, but you don’t.”
George nods graciously. “I’ll come ‘round to it eventually,” he allows, and Paul nods, knowing that to be true. “It just feels like… Like it isn’t real.” He itches for a cigarette. “Nothing does, really.” Paul nods again, then he turns to look down at George and his eyes are wide and vulnerable and it makes George wonder what Paul’s needed all these years, what he’s needed that nobody bothered to give him when he was a kid. “I reckon it’ll be alright,” George allows and that actually feels true . “I feel, I dunno… Equipped , I suppose, it’s just…” He flounders. It’s… what? It’s everything and nothing all at once. It’s the whole world and the little corner of it that his heart takes up.
“It’s hard,” Paul finishes for him, so George just nods, because as simple and stupid as it all sounds, that’s really all it comes down to. “I’m sorry for it,” Paul promises him. Then, he looks away again, hanging his chin slightly down towards his chest. “I didn’t even know she was ill.” George watches Paul toe at the dirt along the fence, really tearing it up. It must have rained recently and he realizes that Paul isn’t saying it to guilt anyone but himself. He’d loved Louise Harrison the way George loves Jim and Mike McCartney; he grew up around them, was cared for by them.
“It happened very quickly,” George tells him, but it really only brings to light how different things are between them now, had been for years. They’d lived so closely with one another, intertwined, for better and worse, for so long, the fact that they might not know each other anymore frightens them, leaves them wondering whose fault it is.
It’s The Beatles’ fault, which George had always decided and which Paul would never accept as truth. Well, until perhaps now, George realizes.
“I’m sorry,” Paul says again and George knows he means he’s sorry that it’s happened at all, sorry that they were in such a mess to not have had one another to lean on, sorry for knowing firsthand that he can’t do or say anything to make any of this better. It’s a horrible apology; it’s one George thinks he both deserves and would rather bury than accept. Paul blinks, then looks down at George and asks: “Does John know?”
“No.” Paul inhales deeply, so George adds: “Richie knows,” like it might make him feel better to know George hadn’t been holding onto all of this on his own. “I’ll tell him too --” George starts, meaning John, but Paul speaks over him.
“You should tell John,” he says, keeping his eyes elsewhere. “It’s good to have a friend who knows how you feel.”
George feels something like a stone in his stomach. He wants to ask: what do you think you are? But he realizes that Paul doesn’t know, and neither does he, frankly. It hurts to have this much love for someone and not know what to call them. To have so many years shared with another human being and not know if they’re fond or not.
“Yeah, I’ll tell ‘im,” George repeats, though he thinks it ought to matter more that he’s here , telling Paul first. Paul nods, looking more secure that George will have someone to share this with out of love rather than obligation. He realizes that Paul had believed him when he’d said he was up north anyway, that he was here because it was convenient and made sense. He thinks of he and Pattie that morning, blinking blearily at their alarm clock on the floor, pulling himself out of bed at six o’clock in the morning just to drive as north as he can manage to see an old friend who might be able to touch him and bring him back to life.
This wasn’t convenient; being here didn’t make sense .
There’d always be John between them. It’d been that way since they all met one another. Always fighting over who John might like best. In George’s mind, it had always been Paul. The thing between them was just too heavy. But he realizes that Paul thinks it had always been George. At least in the years that mattered.
“Have you heard from him?” George decides to ask, though he knows it’s like picking at an old wound that’s never healed over.
Paul sighs heavily and George knows that’s a ‘yes’ before Paul even tells him: “I spoke to him on the phone a few months ago.” George nods. “It’s just been letters since then,” he admits, and George sees Paul scribbling long letters in the dark, maybe with this same amber bottle next to him, reading John’s letters back, trying to make sense of them, trying to see where there might be some love left. “We’ve finished, you know,” he continues, and George realizes that it means he hadn’t found any. “Whatever we were, it’s finished.” George sighs, though he finds it comforting that even Paul doesn’t know what to call the thing between him and John. He doesn’t know what to say; it’s too many things: it’s sad, it’s relieving, it’s dreadful and fresh. “We’re very tied together, him and I,” Paul says, his shoulders sagging downward with every word. “Legally, I mean,” he adds because he supposes they’re tied together in many ways. “With our songs and all that.”
“Right,” George says. He takes the whiskey from Paul and takes a long pull of it. He realizes he’ll need it considering where they’ve headed.
“So, I’ve asked him to just sign these papers, you know, end it all properly, make it clean,” he says, rambling in that way Paul does when he isn’t sure he’s right.
“What did he say?”
“He said he’d think about it,” Paul says and that seems too easy, so George just waits him out, waits for the thing that Paul’s keeping from him. Paul glances at him, must realize that George isn’t buying what he’s selling because he sighs, turns, and sits down on the lower rung of the fence to mirror George. “If I could get you and Rings to sign ‘em first, he says he’ll think about it.” George chuckles to himself, feeling something like bitterness rising up inside of him. He’s back in the middle, like some poor child between two parents who fell out of love with one another. He suddenly feels more like leverage than he does a person. “Would you sign it?” Paul asks, missing it, missing everything . When it’s something he needs, he just doesn’t notice the people around him.
George shakes his head, suddenly regrets leaving Pattie back in London. He thinks he’d like to leave Paul here alone, in the wilderness of his own farm, hop back in his car and spend the night with Pattie in a nice hotel. She might not understand him, but she’s never made him feel like anything other than a human being.
“Sure, I’d sign it,” George answers, keeping his eyes on Paul, making him look at him. “Can’t say it’d change anything. We’ve all wanted it finished before, it’s hard to take anybody’s quitting quite seriously.” Paul sighs pointedly, looks like he might say something petulantly, so George asks: “Why should it stick now? Now that it’s you who wants out?” Paul shakes his head solemnly and George thinks he looks tired enough to have that be the punishment itself, but he’s tired too, and he’s just lost his mother and he thinks there ought to be somewhere to put all of this, and maybe it isn’t directly in Paul’s lap, but it’s Paul in front of him right now anyway and he can’t hold onto it all anymore. “Do you see now?” he asks. “How we were all feeling when we each left?” Paul sets his jaw to keep from saying ‘yes’, to keep from admitting to an error. “You fought tooth-and-nail to bring us back because you loved being a Beatle --”
“I loved making music with my mates,” Paul counters.
“That’s shite,” George tells him and he feels a bit self-righteous with it, but he supposes it has to be his turn. “I’m sorry,” he says genuinely, “I feel bad for you now, I do. Because I know how you’re feeling. I’ve been there. But you didn’t drag any of us back in because you loved us.” Paul shakes his head, so George gives him a little credit. “Maybe you loved some vague idea of us. The versions of us in Beatlemania, or before even, Hamburg, or whatever, but we’d all changed. None of us wanted the same things anymore. And that frightened you.” Paul’s eyes snap up to meet his and George thinks he ought to look angrier; he just looks caught in something. “It frightened you so early as 1966,” he continues, knowing he must be on to something. “Maybe that’s when we all knew, anyroad. That it was just a matter of time.”
That hurts. Paul looks away. To think he’d spent so many years just waiting for something to die. Some of the anger leaves him because he realizes it was Paul who tried to breathe life back into this thing they loved. And he’d failed. And he’d known it. It’s a failure of a man in front of him and he realizes that Paul isn’t embarrassed about being afraid, he’s just afraid all the same. He thinks he ought to be softer on him.
“You can’t keep four people living that way for so long and expect them not to tear into one another,” he allows, as if this -- the sorrow, the loss, the heaviness -- was inevitable. And maybe it was. “We should have gone solo then , you know,” George says, allowing himself a moment to imagine the lives they might have had if it had all ended before Sgt. Pepper . He thinks he’d remember it all more fondly. “I don’t know why we didn’t.”
“Because we were miserable,” Paul says, using ‘we’ when he really just means ‘I’. Though John had been miserable, too. Rings, bored to tears.
“I felt fine without you lot in my pockets,” he says, remembering the months he spent in India with Pattie. It was the calmest he’d been in years. They’d fallen in love with each other all over again.
“You’d be the only one, then,” Paul pokes and George has to give that to him.
“Maybe that’s why this is easier for me,” he says and it feels true as soon as it leaves his lips.
“This is easy for you?” Paul asks and he realizes Paul’s asking his same question right back: how do you get on?
And maybe ‘easy’ isn’t the right word, George realizes, so he says: “It’s just the way that it is, you know. What’s easy for me is accepting it. You can’t accept it,” he says, jabbing Paul in the ribs with an elbow. Paul smiles at him sheepishly, so George adds: “Neither can John, frankly.”
“The band was everything to us,” Paul allows.
“Maybe that’s what was so wrong about it,” George suggests and it goes about as well as he’d thought it might. Paul narrows his eyes at him, ready to fight back. “There are more important things,” he tries to explain. “Or, there should have been, maybe.”
“I don’t understand what’s so wrong about loving what you do,” Paul argues, though he must know it’d been more than that.
“There isn’t anything wrong with it,” George tells him. “Inherently, no. But it started to come first. Before us. Before yourself. Before everything.” Paul just sighs again, so George thinks he must be getting somewhere. “You mellowed when you met Linda,” he allows. “Because there was something more, you see? There was Heather. And Mary, too, shortly.” Paul’s shoulders drop. When Heather had first come into the studio, George had wondered how long it took for Paul to love her and treat her like his own child; he suddenly decides it had happened the moment he saw her. “Before them, you had to get it perfect. It all had to be perfect because that’s how you knew you were good.” Paul swallows hard. Being a good father, a good husband, means more to him than George had ever allowed it to. “And not just as a musician,” he says, feeling sorry for the way that Paul had calculated his own self-worth all those years. “It’s how you knew you were good enough, in general, worth spending time on.” Paul can’t look at him. George knows he’s right. “And maybe we should have made you feel like you were good enough more, outside of music, I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer is,” George says. “But you never spared us that sort of treatment, either.”
“No,” Paul says, quiet, as though it’s blanketed with the weight of the world.
“We loved each other too much,” George decides. “We’d tipped over the edge.” Next to him, Paul digs into his pocket for a cigarette and George thinks: finally . “You loved me so much, you knew exactly what to say,” George says, accepting the cigarette that Paul’s offering. “Right?” Paul smiles knowingly, has to nod. “And you used it. We all did.”
“Yeah,” he allows.
“The best thing we can do for each other now is give ourselves space, I agree with you there,” George tells him and Paul sits up a little straighter for it. “But maybe I see John’s side, too.” And there he is, between them again. “Maybe we can leave all the legal shit out of it and just allow that space to exist.” Paul shakes his head. “Why do we have to sign a piece of paper? When it could say that we’re not just giving each other space now, we’re doing it forever ?” Paul sighs and it makes George realize that it’s always been about forever.
“He’d quite like forever,” Paul says, meaning John. George tsks at him before he can stop himself. “He would , you know,” Paul persists. “He’s told me.”
“Well,” George says, taking a deep drag of his cigarette. “You never listen to what John tells you , Paul. You know that.” Paul taps some ash between them. “He isn’t signing the papers. That says more, I think.”
“It isn’t easy,” Paul tells him, resting his elbows down on his knees. “To not listen to him. He knows just as well as you how to say the things that really hurt.”
“I know he does,” George concedes. John probably knows it better than anyone.
“He’s always at me,” Paul laments quietly, then he glances at George and seems resolute in something. “But I suppose that’s the way you lot like it.” George furrows his brow at him, expecting some sort of explanation. “If he was cross with me, he wouldn’t be cross with you, that’s why you all always wanted me to set him straight.” George sighs. He supposes that has to be true, in it’s own way, maybe not quite so maliciously as Paul sees it, but John and Paul had always been different. There was something different between them: a plane from one to the other that only they could cross and come back from. He supposes it’s true: that they had left it up to Paul at first, to tell John when he’d gone too far, and Paul answers his next question for him: “And I think that hurt us.” He watches Paul start to pick at the dirt beneath his fingernails and shrugs helplessly. “Nobody else would say it , when things go bad, and you knew, if you let it go on long enough, I’d be the one to do it. And it hurt us because he didn’t want to hear it from me any more than I wanted to be one saying it. I loved him and you all wanted me to tear him down.” George swallows the urge to tell him that he’s sorry because it’s still too soon to accept fault, for any of them. “We’ll never fix that, now,” Paul says and George isn’t sure that that’s true, but the possibility of it devastates them both quietly.
“You can always fix it,” George answers because he thinks he ought to say it out loud, make it true in the universe around them.
Paul laughs humourlessly, sucks on his cigarette and says: “We are talking about John Lennon , now, right?” George smiles, so Paul smiles back. “That John?”
“Yeah, well,” George mumbles ruefully. “I never said it would be easy.”
“Well, I’m saying to you now: it’s impossible,” Paul promises.
“Why?” Paul just scoffs. “Why is it impossible? Did you think it was impossible to have had a proper conversation with me before I came here?” Paul goes looser with that; he had, of course, George had too. “Is it impossible or are you just afraid?”
“You’re saying I should drive down to Tittenhurst, then?” Paul bites. “Surprise ‘im? That’ll go over well…”
“I’m not saying that and you know it,” George tells him. He thinks he might have let Paul get away with too much for too long. “I’m asking why ? You’ve said you love him, why is it so impossible to just speak with him?”
Paul looks away, out across the long grass. He keeps his voice low because it’s something so close to his heart. “You’ve just answered your own question, haven’t you?”
George sighs and wonders when the last time Paul told him he loved him was. He supposed it had to be true, even at the end, but when was the last time he’d actually said it? Or, to Ringo? Though, Ringo brought those words out of everyone easily. Either way, it was rare. Paul hoarded all the love he had inside of him, deathly afraid of handing it out to the wrong person. He’d always seemed to pick right, for the most part, but still, it built this habit that he’d never been able to break.
George suddenly wonders what it must have been like to grow up in a house full of men. It’s nice, George muses, that he’s now surrounded by women.
“Do you shut down with Linda about it too?” George asks gently, hoping this new life, surrounded by babies and animals and music, has helped to chip away at that wall.
“No,” Paul says, though George isn’t sure he believes him. He allows him to get away with it. Again.
“Doesn’t it feel better to do that -- to tell her -- than whatever it is you and John have got between you?” George presses.
“It’s…” Paul says quickly, then must decide against it. He shakes his head and lands on: “Different.” George takes a deep, but he stays stoic, he decides to make Paul say it . “Linda’s my wife,” Paul tries. “I’m meant to tell her that I love her.”
“And you’re not meant to tell John?”
“No,” Paul says emphatically and George feels the air between them go electric. Paul looks back to him and they hold still there, like any movement might cause a lightning storm.
Years stretch out in front of them both: Hamburg and Paris, hotel rooms and Cavendish, it all comes up around them. It’s different , George hears again, and he realizes he’d always known that it was, but never allowed himself to examine it. For no reason other than it not being his business and if Paul or John ever wanted to explain it to him, they would, and he’d listen and accept it, but he’d grown used to the idea of never being told , of never being let inside . As much as it had frustrated him, he felt safe inside of it. He’s suddenly pulled open a locked door and he’s been met with a torrential downpour.
John had given him plenty of reason to suspect he might be interested in men. Stuart had sparked his curiosity and Brian had all but confirmed it. There had always been an itch at the back of his mind: where did Paul lie on that line? Though, in that question, Paul had always been the object, he’d never allowed the idea that Paul could ever show any interest back.
He realizes he’s been urging Paul to tell his friends that he loves them, but Paul had been speaking about something else entirely. He must see the misunderstanding between them too, because he’s goes red with it, stares down at the long grass between his feet and says: “I’m not meant to tell him. That much I know,” and it makes him question everything he’s ever thought about love: how it was endless and healing and affirming, because it’s suddenly something devastating, something unfair and cruel and shameful. He knows it isn’t, not really, but it hurts to see love feel that way to someone he cares about.
George thinks of John back in England and wonders what they’ve told each other, wonders if John knows he was loved back.
“Oh,” Paul suddenly says, sounding soft and young. He points across the farmland and says: “A merlin.” George sees the bird he must mean perched on the fence surrounding the sheep. It’s a hawkish-looking thing, though a bit smaller and darker. It hops along the fence, hardly noticing them, looking for mice who have ventured too far from the barn. It must not find what it’s looking for because after a moment of stillness, it takes off, leaves them there with nothing but themselves again.
“Nature’s been quite good to me,” Paul admits. “I find it very healing.”
George nods. “That’s good.”
“It makes the world so much bigger,” he says and George knows what he means. “Like the broken bits are so small, it’s hardly worth fussing about.”
“Yeah,” George says, though he doesn’t know if they’re talking about Beatles or John or missing mothers.
“I took to bird-watching when I was a kid,” he says; he means to make it sound like a story, but it sounds more like a confession. “When Mum died. I don’t know if I ever told you that.”
“You didn’t,” George says, though he offers it, rather than accuses.
Paul shrugs, looking slightly embarrassed. “I’m not sure that I knew it was helping, but I had that same same urge then that I have now: to be out in nature.” His eyes are locked out on something in front of him. It’s funny, Paul was the city boy among them, but here, with his long hair and practical shoes, he looks most comfortable with some dirt on his hands. “I suppose it’s that same bit inside of me that was screaming out, you know, in real pain, but when you’re out in the world, you realize it’s only small and that it will be mended because the world’s going on, you know,” he muses. “Every day, it’s going on and you are too. Without realizing it. Somehow, you’re going on.”
George laughs meekly. He’s asked the universe for answers or signs before, but he doesn’t think he’s ever received one so clearly.
“What?” Paul asks because he’s a bit afraid George might be laughing at him.
George just shrugs, shaking his head. “I just know what you mean.” Paul smiles graciously back. “You should see the grounds at Friar Park,” he says. “The gardens, I mean. It’s like this,” he gestures out at Paul’s own fields, “a smaller pocket of it, but paradise all the same.” Paul nods in agreement. He scrapes out his cigarette against the fencepost and tucks the butt into his pocket to be disposed of properly.
“I’d like that,” Paul decides, though he sounds nervous about it. “To see the house, I mean,” he says and it feels like it ought to be the beginning of something, or the rebirth of it.
“Of course,” George tells him. He decides to ignore the idea that it might just never happen and instead, thinks of the way that Pattie will smile at him when he gets back home and tells her that Paul is planning to visit them.
“Hmm,” Paul hums. George looks up at him, then, follows his gaze across the countryside and doesn’t have to be a farmer to know a stormcloud when he sees one. “We should head in,” Paul tells him anyway. “That’ll drench us.”
--
They end up in Paul’s music room with some tea. It’s soundproof, so Paul lets him tinker at one of his guitars even though Mary is asleep upstairs. It’s gone dark outside, so they’re singing to one another by lamplight and candlelight. George on the only right-handed guitar Paul’s got and Paul behind the piano.
They mostly stick to fifties numbers, the stuff they played together when they were kids. It’s remarkable how well you remember the things you learned when you were fifteen. Each tune sparks another memory, which leads into another tune, and so on and so on. It feels like one of their lazier days in the studio, when nobody felt much like working but they didn’t much feel like doing anything else either. Paul’s good on his own, his album proved that, but he’s even better when he’s got someone to play with.
He makes George laugh with his impressions with his low notes into the higher ones. He sits quietly when George rolls into one of the songs he’s working on right now, for the new album.
“You have so many,” Paul observes once George has finished another. “They’re good.”
George shrugs, holds himself back from saying: I told you so , because he’s said that enough times, he thinks it’d make his hoarse if he said it again. “I held onto a lot of them,” he confesses. Paul blinks up at him. That thought had clearly never occurred to him. He’d assumed that everything George had brought to the table was everything he’d had. “Some of these songs on the album are two -- three -- years old.” He shrugs again. “They fit a solo album better than they would a Beatles record anyway.” He bums through an old solo he’d learned when he was first starting out. Paul watches him. He’s trapped in some thought somewhere and it’s no good, it’s only a spiral, so George asks him: “Did you like playing alone? Recording everything yourself.”
Paul swallows hard and looks to come back to himself. He tinkers at the piano and George realizes he’s playing the solo back to him, softer and slower, up an octave higher. “Yes and no,” he admits. George just nods, would like to hear more. “I missed having a band, but everything came out just like I’d hear it in my head.” He glances up at George, gauging his reaction. Music not sounding the way it did in his head had caused a thing or two between them. “Which was nice,” he mumbles.
“I couldn’t play by myself,” George decides, though he’d never once thought to pose the question to himself. “I like having the other musicians there, knocking in their two-cents, you know?” Paul goes stiff, his fingers hardly touching the keys. “They’re experts on their stuff, right?” George pushes. “I like hearing what they have to say.”
Slowly, Paul lifts his hands from the keys and sets them in his lap. George watches his shoulders set. It’s the fundamental musical difference between them. It’s the thing they ignored until it blew up in their faces. It’s something George thinks Paul ought to apologize for.
“Makes sense,” is all he says, so George sighs at him, pointedly. Paul turns on the stool to face him and says: “What? What would you rather I say?”
“Do you think you were right about everything?” George asks. “There isn’t a single moment where you think one of us might have known better?”
“I don’t know,” Paul says, waving him off dismissively. He twists back towards the keys. “I don’t remember specifics.”
“So, you were usually right then,” George says to his back.
Paul’s shoulders set. He turns and this time he’s angry. “Obviously not,” he snarls. “Everything horrible we did was my idea, too,” he says, meaning the flops, meaning Let It Be and Magical Mystery Tour and anything else people might have hated. “ Obviously I wasn’t usually right,” he says, turning away again, whenever it’s convenient for him. “We’re breaking up for it, aren’t we?”
Paul starts to play a rockabilly tune; it’s harsh and louder than it ought to be. He’s finished, but George isn’t.
“We’re breaking up because you’re asking us to sign the papers,” he says and the music stops .
“No,” Paul says, turning back around, both feel planted firmly on the ground, pointed away from the piano. The music’s forgotten . “That isn’t true and it isn’t fair,” he says and George feels too much like he’s being scolded, so he goes cold with it. “Klein was terrible to me --”
“Oh, aye,” he says, rolling his eyes, and he sees it hurt Paul. Not being taken seriously hurts him.
“Never mind,” Paul mumbles.
He means to turn away again, but George doesn’t want him to. “We’d never be managed by your in-laws, Paul.”
“I said ‘never mind’,” Paul insists.
“Klein’s alright,” George tells him, though it’s about as close to praising as he thinks he’ll ever get. “You care too much about the business. He’d make you enough money. You’d be fine.”
“He’d rob us blind is what he’d do,” Paul argues. “You don’t care enough about the business.”
“Maybe I don’t,” George says with a shrug.
“No,” Paul tells him. “That was always my job. Again. The dirty work.”
George rolls his eyes again and he thinks he ought to stop doing that. “You don’t have to martyr yourself over it, Paul, that’s all I’m saying.”
“If you’d like me to apologize for caring about the work we did as a band, I won’t,” he says and George knows he’ll stick to that promise. “Or, or liking doing that work with people we actually cared about . I won’t do it.”
“We were never going to replace Brian,” George tells him, because it always seems to come back to that. They were alright, and then they weren’t. Brian was here and then he wasn’t. It’s coming up on three years without him, but it still feels so fresh, for all of them.
“No,” Paul agrees. “But we might have found something close, though. And I don’t mean my in-laws. Anybody,” he insists. “John was just so hung up on Allen,” he laments. “He’d said the right things to him. He’d made Yoko think he was good for us, which, well…” He shrugs because that remains an enigma to them both, still, after all these years they’ve tried. He sighs and starts over: “If we sign the papers, you lot can go right on liking him, I don’t care. I just don’t want to have to like him too.” He turns back to the piano, so George listens closely. “Not after he spent months harping on me, cornering me in offices.” He hits a few keys softly. George inches up towards the edge of the couch. He hasn’t heard that one before. “It’s why I stopped even going in. It was horrible.” George sees him shake his head and it makes him wonder what Allen ever said to him. “And that fuckin’ producer of his ruined my song,” he adds.
He sounds petulant about it, so George warns him: “I brought Phil in. Not Allen.”
To his credit, Paul does shift slightly, he looks over his shoulder with something of an apology on his face. “I didn’t mean anything by it,” he offers. “He must be good to your stuff if you’ve kept him around. I just…” He hits a few notes, ones George knows. “It was a heavy song, you know, and I didn’t want anybody’s hands on it.” He plays a few more notes, still remembering it so clearly. “I just had this picture in my head of the two of them,” he admits, meaning Phil and Allen, then decides against it and just says: “I don’t know…”
“What?”
Paul sighs sadly and decides to go for honesty. “Hearing the song and laughing , I don’t know.” George feels something ache inside of him and he can’t quite put his finger on what it is. “Putting those strings on it like they were doing me a favour, not letting anybody hear how pathetic I was.”
“They weren’t,” George says, though there’s a part of him that suddenly decides that that wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility. It’s an ugly realization about people he’s always thought of as friends.
Paul just shrugs; it is what it is by this point, they both know that. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to think about, especially now that George knows that the thing between Paul and John had been just as unspeakable between them as it had felt to him. He sees everything that happened between them all as if it’s something he’s looking at through a new piece of glass. It tinges everything. It finds root at the bottom of everything Paul’s ever said and makes it change its meaning. It makes everything heavy; George suddenly sees the years of carrying all of this weight, bearing down on his friend.
“I’ll sign the papers, Paul,” he offers. “If it makes it any easier.”
For a moment, Paul doesn’t even seem to react. It doesn’t make anything any easier. That strikes them both. So, Paul just sighs, nods his gratitude, but looks like he’s wondering why he even asked in the first place. He turns back to the piano, tinkers a few notes and then falls into a Ray Charles song they knew when they were eighteen. He’s lost him, George realizes. The conversation is over and the harsh line across Paul’s shoulders tells him that Paul thinks he’s said too much.
He’s always turned to music like this. If there was an emotional moment to be avoided, Paul would turn to music. George supposes he just has to allow for it. It’s too much, anyway. It’s too much for him, too, when he thinks about how broken things really went between them all. There would never be the right way to say it all. George plays along with Paul’s tune and they fit together well, like they always have. And he realizes that maybe Paul’s way is alright. Maybe they’re saying enough to one another right now.
Paul lifts his hands from the keys unceremoniously; it’s so sudden that George even keeps playing a few moments before he realizes he’s alone. He looks up and Paul has turned on the stool and he’s watching him play. When he realizes that he has George’s full attention, he says: “I’m glad you’ve come.” George swallows hard, feels his throat go dry. He imagines the years that might have passed between them if he hadn’t. “I’m glad you’ve spoken to Linda properly.” George nods. “The kids, too.” George smiles, thinking of Heather all over again. He’d fit well into their little family; they’d accepted him in quickly.
Paul takes a deep breath; he must suddenly remember that George hadn’t just come here to say hello. He’d come to fix a crack down the middle of his chest.
“I still miss my mother, you know,” Paul confesses. “I miss her more now that I have my own children.” George blinks and looks away. He wonders how this feeling inside of him could possibly get worse . “And I still don’t think it’s fair. I just think it’s life,” he says. The resignation is obvious; he’s spent too long angry, devastated. Acceptance feels better, even if sometimes, it sounds flippant or cruel. It’s life, it’s death; and the world goes on. “If there’s anybody who can understand that, I reckon it’s you.” Paul edges forward on the piano stool, far enough that he can reach out and touch his hand to George’s knee.
“Yeah,” George manages, and his hands suddenly itch to play some more music. He understands Paul down to his boots in this moment. He’s lived this way, missing his mother, feeling so heavy, for almost as long as George has known him. No wonder he couldn’t speak.
Then, Paul’s pushing himself to his feet. George looks up at him as he takes the few steps over to join him on the sofa. It’s all Linda; George suddenly looks at Paul and doesn’t Jim or John, he only sees Linda. Paul reaches out for the neck of the guitar, tugs at it, and George just lets him. Lets him set the guitar down against the arm of the sofa.
They’d hugged all the time when they were kids; mostly at George’s beckoning. He can’t remember the last time Paul might have initiated it. He can’t remember the last time they did this at all. The thought makes him sad, so when Paul’s slotted himself right against him, his arms around his back, he hugs right back. If he shuts his eyes, he can pretend they’re back in a year where this might not be strange, might not be foreign to either of them.
Paul pulls away first and neither of them make fun of themselves for it. He thinks they might have at one time, but they don’t now.
Paul shows him to a guest bedroom. It’s clean and cozy; a perfect bedroom in a perfect farmhouse. There’s a little lamp on the nightstand offering the only light left in the night. It’s so dark outside the window, it makes George get excited all over again for his new home, how theirs it will feel: private and sliced off from the rest of the world.
“I should ring Pat,” George says after he sets his bag down at the foot of the bed. Paul’s already nodding before George asks him: “Can I use the telephone?”
George sits down on the small wooden chair beneath the telephone in the kitchen. It makes him feel like a kid. He imagines Paul sitting just here yesterday, hearing from an old friend for the first time in months.
Pattie answers on the second ring. “How is it?” she asks him.
“It’s gone good, yeah,” George answers, and he can hear her grinning him over the phone.
“Fantastic,” she whispers. “And you? How are you?”
“I’m alright,” he allows. “We had good chats. I feel like…” Pattie holds her breath. “I don’t know, we’ve said a lot of things we ought to have been saying to each other all along.”
“Well, that’s good,” she assures him. “I’m glad you’ve gone,” she tells him, and he suddenly thinks she might have convinced him of it even if he hadn’t lost his mother. He wonders if Linda might have done the same for Paul. He realizes that there are good women in their lives, women that they ought to listen to more.
He crawls into bed feeling stronger for the day he’s just had. He feels fuller, like missing pieces have been replaced. He hears Linda make Paul laugh in the next room and thinks: we’ll be okay , and he doesn’t feel like he’s forcing it, like he’s brushing things under the rug to believe it.
He falls asleep to the sounds of animals shifting quietly outside, to an old house creaking back into place.