Blue-Remembered Hill (Kiss Me at Midnight)

by Paul Brownsey

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Book Details

  Blue-Remembered Hill

  About the Author

  Blue-Remembered Hill

  Paul Brownsey

  Kiss Me at Midnight

  Toby has every intention of breaking up with his boyfriend during a trip to the countryside where Toby grew up. But a particular place pulls together past and present to make him wonder whether what he wants is skewed by illusion.

  Book Details

  Blue Remembered Hill

  Kiss Me at Midnight Collection

  By Paul Brownsey

  Published by Less Than Three Press LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.

  Edited by Michael Jay

  Cover Illustration by V. Rios

  This book is a work of fiction and as such all characters and situations are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental.

  First Edition January 2013

  Copyright © 2013 by Paul Brownsey

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 9781620041796

  Blue-Remembered Hill

  Or blue remembered hillock. Or, at least, an upswelling of the heath high enough to draw the distant eye. On a perfect summer's day, it's blued in tranquillity against the late sun. There's a dwelling-house enfolded in the hill, turned away. Whoever lives there possesses happiness from which one is forever separated; possesses one's own happiness ...

  *~*~*

  Mrs Talliefur has white hair like a frilled cap and must be in her seventies but has insisted on carrying one of their bags upstairs. Her hips, in a pleated skirt of scarlet and blue stripes, swing jauntily ahead.

  "That religious picture in the hall—this will be one of those Christian places." Toby speaks loudly enough for her to hear. If other people don't like what he says, that's their problem. "We won't be allowed a double bed."

  Edward, carrying the other suitcase, whispers, "It's only for two nights."

  "It's the principle. I want this weekend to be perfect." Toby says the last word fiercely but can't imagine what a perfect weekend with Edward would be like.

  The room Mrs Talliefur takes them to has a double bed.

  "Probably heard what I said," Toby says after she's gone.

  She'd patted the bed, saying, "I hear you'll be very comfortable at Dingle Cottage." Her voice is rich and swoopy and seems to linger. From the window, Toby can't see any familiar features despite his teenage years of dawdling walks in the New Forest, staring at things as though looking for something he knew wasn't there.

  He is aware of a tiny nugget of compassion for Edward, who, unpacking, is unaware of what is to come. Edward wants to give Toby a nice weekend back where he grew up before the hassle of selling their flat and buying a house with a garden. Toby has yet to make the announcement that he will take his half of the money from the sale of the flat and not put it to the joint purchase of a house with a garden.

  But the compassion is isolated from everything Toby intends. It turns no wheels.

  In the dining room Toby demands, "Is there a vegetarian option?" They're eating here tonight because they hadn't been sure they'd make the journey from Manchester in time to go out for a meal. The table is set for three.

  "I wonder if there is." Mrs Talliefur might be a fellow diner speculating, not the B&B owner. "I'll try and find out."

  After she's gone, Edward whispers, "You're not vegetarian."

  Toby's shrug challenges Edward to make something of it.

  The trouble with Edward is that he lacks potential. Toby has a well-rehearsed speech about this which he has never yet given to the world. Oh, he doesn't mean potential in the ordinary sense of the word—potential to reach the top of a profession or to be brilliant at something or to make a fortune; nothing so crass as that. The thing is, he would say—will say—is that where love is concerned you need to feel that the other person contains the whole world and gives you a heightened connection to all its people, all its treasures, all its beauties. Dante or Petrarch, one of them, loved someone—was it Laura or Beatrice?—who led him from the limitations of this world into a heaven where he achieved his full stature and melted into complete knowledge, perfect love, pure beauty.

  But Edward is only himself, doesn't contain multitudes, doesn't thrill to possible worlds beyond the drab sensible one he seems so content to occupy. What You See Is What You Get.

  Mrs Talliefur returns. "Take it from me, it'll be a mushroom omelette."

  "Whatever," says Toby, and Edward covers, "Sounds good. I'll have it, too."

  Toby decides to make his announcement before she returns with the food. The need for decorum in the dining-room, at least in Mrs Talliefur's presence, will prevent Edward from crying, etc, and a quiet melancholy day tomorrow, imbued with farewell, could be fairly enjoyable.

  "Look, about the house …" Toby begins, but here's Mrs Talliefur with the soup. She places a bowl in front of each of them, a third bowl in the third place. She sits down and takes up the spoon. Toby stares at her with amplified astonishment and indignation; Edward says pre-emptively, "That's an interesting picture in the hall."

  Toby's indignation spends itself on Edward for not recognising the print. "It's the Dali Christ of St John of the Cross, from Glasgow Art Gallery."

  "It was a present," Mrs Talliefur says between enthusiastic spoonfuls of soup. "From regulars. Yes, from Glasgow they were. Strange picture, isn't it?—I suppose it had to be put up, else they'd be offended. It can't be easy, running a place all by yourself."

  It's suddenly clear that talking as though she's someone outside herself is habitual with Mrs Talliefur. So she's a character. Toby will have a story to tell about coming across this character doing B&B all by herself in a dilapidated Art Deco cottage in the back of beyond, and from then on things relax. Toby leads her on to say more things about herself like she's another person. Edward joins in; at least, his responses allow Toby to work up a pretence that they are confused about today's date, all to allow Toby to fix his eye on a cardboard calendar on the wall advertising Kaylee's Hair Salon in Ringwood and to say to Mrs Talliefur, just to hear how she'll refer to herself. "Oh, but your calendar isn't this year's calendar, is it?"

  "My godfathers, it's not!" cries Mrs Talliefur. "Giving the impression no-one's been to Dingle Cottage since last year. You'd think someone would realise that that can't be good for business."

  Purely in his head, Toby gives Edward a triumphant thumbs-up.

  "Oh, but it's the good care you take of people that's going to be the key thing in bringing people back," says Edward to Mrs Talliefur, and Toby finds he's admiring Edward's ability to keep an absolutely straight face as he says it. And the result is that Mrs Talliefur smiles and blushes like a young girl.

  In all this, Toby and Edward sound a harmonious and enviable couple even to Toby, and when they go up to bed and Edward is very understanding about its having been too long and tiring a day for sex, Toby finds that the rapport over Mrs Talliefur has ruined the atmosphere for the announcement. Instead, they have a fairly pleasant conversation about whether Dingle Cottage really does have Art Deco features, as Toby insists, what Art Deco features are, and where they'll go tomorrow. Still, a day revisiting places where Toby was unhappy can't but create an opportunity for the announcement.

  Near Linwood, a sturdy posh lady used to live out on the heath in a converted lorry, claiming squatters' rights and being rather splendidly dismissive of Toby's enquiries whether he could do any
thing for her when his walks took him her way. He had sometimes sensed that Miss Hamilton was an ally, though he could not have said in what, and their conversations had been confined to trivialities like school and the donkeys she bred. Edward is eager for Toby's sake to find lorry and lady, but their search is in vain.

  Later, in woodland near Lyndhurst, the sun's heat draws a taunting scent of resin from pines on a sandy ridge, and Toby is at once nostalgic for sparkling sea and sparkling people on a Mediterranean shore he has never visited, where the same dazing summer heat closes up all the gaps through which fulfilment leaks away.

  They find the isolated country pub, now a private house, which Toby's divorced father failed to make a go of two decades ago. "Of course, it was my fault."

  "Don't be silly," says Edward, naturally failing to appreciate Toby's irony, reaching out a would-be comforting hand that Toby ducks away from.

  "I was seventeen, it was the morning of New Year's Eve, preparations were going on for the pub's New Year's Eve party. Yes, I got caught up in the feeling that goes around then, that there's going to be a new beginning at midnight, total renewal with the New Year, things born again. But also I felt totally despairing because I was, like, totally outside that feeling even while I was aware of it. I could see absolutely no way in which things could get better for me, because I could see no way I'd ever find the, like, love I realised I wanted more than anything. It all felt so cruel—"

  "But it's totally arbitrary, treating December 31 as belonging to one year and the next day, January 1, as starting a new one," says Edward, showing total insensitivity to what Toby is trying to say. "You can regard a year as starting any time. The Jewish new year starts in the autumn and the Chinese new year in—"

  "Okay, okay. But I was feeling awful and it was because it was New Year's Eve. And that day the hunt were out, hunting pink, horns, hounds, the works. They'd chased a fox to our field at the back, which my Dad had been trying to develop as a beer garden and camping site. Apparently the fox had gone into some hole in the ground and they wanted to dig it out from the beer garden. I'd always been vaguely anti, but that morning I went absolutely hysterical—at seventeen. I was kicking things and screaming it was wicked and cruel and murder and picked up a brick and deliberately banged my head against a wall and was bleeding, and in the end my Dad told the hunt they couldn't do it.

  "From then on his difficulties had nothing to do with the booze, oh no. He'd tell anyone it was all because of the revenge of hunt people influencing the licensing board and the planning authorities against him. And there was publicity in the local paper, because the antis took him up as a hero and there were letters, and he claimed this spoilt trade because people don't want to go out for a drink in a country pub and get caught up in rows."

  "Well, things turned out all right for you. You found the love you wanted," Edward says cheerfully. He grins at his own cheek in implying he's been the answer to all that old angst. He doesn't seem to show any admiration for Toby's stand.

  Toby says, carefully, both as another test of Edward's sensitivity and as a kind of segue to the announcement, "I think I, like, identified with the fox. He was trapped in a hole in the earth and doom was digging down to him, and I felt trapped and doomed, too. Which felt worse on New Year's Eve. That feeling of being hopelessly trapped ..."

  Edward says briskly that it's time to be driving on if they're to have time to see the medieval church at Christchurch where a beam that was too short one day was long enough the next, on account of an anonymous Carpenter among the workmen. Toby's 'okay' is sighing and begrudging. When Edward looks hurt—only briefly, of course—Toby realises that his having been generally difficult and disagreeable since they arrived is in fact a kindness to Edward, preparing him for the announcement instead of springing it on him after being allowed to think he's having a happy time. So Toby's compassion is effecting something after all.

  On the drive back, Edward stops the car near some Forest ponies and gets out to look at a foal, shaky on long bewildered legs. He calls, "Isn't it a bit late in the year for new-born foals?"

  "I wouldn't know."

  While Edward stalks it, hand outstretched with the lust to stroke, Toby leans against the car, arms folded.

  He needs to get the announcement over with so that its looming necessity doesn't spoil their meal tonight at the world-famous sea-food restaurant at Lymington that couldn't confirm a reservation but said there would probably be a cancellation. To pave the way, his compassion helps again. "Be careful you don't tread on an adder," he sneers, making it an accusation of all-too-predictable stupidity or even misconduct. Soon he says, "We'd better move. The restaurant." He starts round the car to the passenger seat.

  "Christ, the hill!"

  Edward swivels to see what's caused the cry; the foal skitters behind the mare. It stares solemnly away, thus disposing of all danger.

  "It's the place," Toby adds. He points to an upswelling of the heath where one could believe high purposes are being fulfilled as a perfect summer's day dips towards evening.

  "Well, yes." Edward's tone is uncomprehending.

  It's best told brutally, like someone confessing recent infidelity prompted and justified by Edward's inadequacies.

  "I was nineteen. I got the bus down to the ferry to Studland Bay beach. I'd never experienced anything like it. I was sucked off three times, by three different people. It was a new beginning, total renewal, born again. I left myself behind entirely, I was naked, filled with power and joy. I could do anything, be anything. Getting the bus back home was like putting myself away again, back in the box.

  "From the bus stop I had a long walk to my Dad's. It must have been somewhere along here that everything I'd felt at the beach just fell away. I felt horribly empty, felt this vast yearning need for another person, I just couldn't exist without him. And whoever he was, he'd have to be huge—"

  Edward giggles.

  "Oh, for fuck's sake, not in that way, Christ, why won't you take talk about feelings seriously?" This is nicely working up anger that will carry him through into the announcement. "I meant huge in the sense of, well, someone who could make everything mine at last; life, people, everything there is. And then I looked up and saw this hill—that hill—against the sunset, and the little house in it, and it was like the hill was another world where there was timeless happiness, but it was going its own sweet way without me. I was shut out from that house." Edward's fault again.

  "But it's Dingle Cottage." Edward's voice is flat, unappreciative of the exquisite subtleties of what Toby experienced. Edward has spread the map on the car bonnet, demonstrates that here on the map is where they are and there is Dingle Cottage, so the house nestling in the hill is ...

  The foal has tottered out from behind its mother, as though to catch the details.

  Edward adds, "You were just looking for a proper relationship."

  The squeeze of his comforting hand on Toby's neck fills the moment if you isolate the moment. But it's a blind touch, weighted like earth. It turns no wheels, it is forever cut off from the promise of the blue beguiling hill and, what is inseparable from that promise, Toby's irrevocable intention, once the flat is sold, to take the money and run.

  Oh, just his half of the money, of course. He'll be scrupulously fair and honest.

  Run where? Oh, to what's lain for so long withheld in the turned-away house on the hill, the fulfilment of every yearning, known and unknown.

  He's silent as they drive back to Dingle Cottage. The empowering flow of anger that was going to lubricate the announcement has dried up in hopelessness. Edward will never, ever, be metaphysically staggered by the coincidence of their B&B turning out to be the turned-away house of happiness on the blue remembered hill.

  And making Mrs Talliefur into a character and a story is suddenly disgusting.

  And, they discover, the world-famous restaurant hasn't had the expected cancellation and they're somehow too subdued to try other places, so it's to be dinner
from Mrs Talliefur—no doubt with Mrs Talliefur—again.

  As soon as they are in their seats at the table that, yes, is laid for three, while she's still in the kitchen, Toby says, "Look, about the house."

  "Be with you soon, wouldn't you say?" she calls.

  He exchanges glances with Edward to register this, and as he does so his eye alights upon a this-year's calendar newly hung on the wall in place of last year's that hung there yesterday courtesy of Kaylee's Hair Salon. This time the calendar is a gift from Outdoor Epic Pony-Trekking Centre advertising rides all over the New Forest, and the picture on the newly-posted this-year's calendar is of a hunt: hunting pink, horns, hounds, the works. His eye is followed by Edward's, who says, "Oh, she's put a new calendar up. By the way, the horn on the car is a bit dodgy. I'll need to take it to the garage when we get back."

  Toby continues urgently, "Yes, the house. Not a big garden. We don't want something that will be unmanageable when we're old."

  About the Author

  Paul Brownsey has been a newspaper reporter and a professor of philosophy at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He worries, sometimes, that his literary prose may too much resemble academic writing, where the doctrine of show, not tell is by no means mandatory. But he does like trying to embody philosophical problems, or at least philosophical allusions, in his stories, as in his The Possibility of Altruism, forthcoming in The Dalhousie Review, and his Duncarnock Hill here. He lives with Jim McKenzie, his partner of about 38 years, in a bungalow in Bearsden, a wee town on the northern edge of Glasgow. In the West of Scotland, “bungalow in Bearsden” denotes, or perhaps connotes, not just a type of house and a location but a lifestyle: cosy, settled, unadventurous, having no truck with happening people and events.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page