Harrisong’s Folly
time spent with ‘the quiet Beatle’
Let’s face it, Mary was a striking, raven-haired woman from the west country, Wiltshire, the mystical and mysterious shire of golden wheat fields and chalk hills and ancient geoglyphs, and she was upper class too, always talked of “mummy and daddy” in that affected way they use to signal status, to signal that they know the code, so what could she possibly see in a low-life me except the occasional bottle of nice wine and ceaseless admiration and now and then the obvious?
Nonetheless, I knew she was fond of me. She was breaking up with her boyfriend who never paid her any mind and she liked it that I held the door open for her and always paid for dinner. For my part I liked how her face looked in the morning when I stayed over and the sound of the gate when she came back from the corner store with breakfast and The Times. We had to be careful of course, we both worked in the newsroom and consorting was frowned upon. She was much better at that stuff than me. I didn’t really care who knew. It seemed to me that an ordinary rhythm to our life was already emerging. So why didn’t she want to come?
“Look,” I said, “I’ve never had a chance to look around a real folly before, never been inside one, and he tells me he’s fixing this one up just like it once was. I hardly know him at all but he seems lonely. If you…
