Carnival of Light || Paul McCartney/Beatles

34. Welcome To Kinfauns

Carnival of Light

34.

I finally went home to do some work the day after our misadventure to Wiltshire. Mrs Fitz had been about ready to send a search party since I'd not been home in over a week. She had messages from my agent asking me to ring them back as soon as possible. They had requests for me to do readings and talks all over the country, which I immediately declined. I wanted to focus on my new book, not my old one. Their more exciting news was that the Royal Court Theatre wanted to stage a play of my short stories in four parts and were keen for me to meet with their writing team about it.

Mal rang to let me know Paul was with Donovan at EMI and they were going for a drink at the Scotch if I fancied joining them. After twelve hours in front of my typewriter producing nothing but solid gold, I found I did quite fancy a night out with Paul and Donovan.

We stayed at Montagu Square again and I went home to work again in the morning, but I was out again with Paul in the evening. It seemed pointless not to see each other when that was what we both wanted. It also seemed pointless to pretend we weren't seeing each other when it was obvious to anyone who looked at us that we were. This was swinging London after all. Free love was in the air and people were having affairs right, left, and centre. Also, it wasn't as if either of us were married.

Those were just some of the excuses I gave myself for shamelessly carrying on with Paul out in the open, and we were openly out together in London all the time.

We went for dinner with David Hockney before a screening of Ingmar Bergman's new film Persona at the Kasmin Gallery. We went to a party at the American Ambassador's mansion on Park Lane, hosted by his bohemian aristocratic children, the Ormsby-Gore siblings. Paul brought Martha and fed her fillet mignon off his plate. We went to the opening of a new club called Samantha's with Tara and Suki. We went for for dinner at the Tratt with John Crittle and his girlfriend Eva. We went to a party at Sir Mark's modelling agency, English Boy — Poppy was in Italy on a shoot and Sir Mark missed her terribly.

One evening, we went to the Scotch to meet up with the Beatles' mate from Hamburg, Klaus Voorman, who introduced Paul to a director called Peter Goldmann. He was Swedish and interested in the avant garde, just like Ingmar Bergman, so Paul immediately recruited him to direct the Beatles next promotional clip without seeing his work.

The next day Paul asked me to go out to Esher with him to see Pattie and George for dinner and I said yes without questioning it. By "dinner," Paul actually meant the northern version of lunch — a dinner style meal served in the middle of the day, followed by a lunch style meal in the evening known as "tea" — but since Pattie and George were night owls "dinner" happened somewhere around six o'clock, thus making it very close to a normal southern dinner.

We drove out to Surrey in the Aston Martin that afternoon, discussing the nuance of British dining in the north and south.

"But you eat dinner like a normal person," I pointed out.

"A southern person, not a normal person," Paul grinned. "That's because I'm surrounded by bloody southerners in London. You all go for dinner when I'd rather be having my tea."

"Your tea," I scoffed. "I've been for dinner with you loads and I've never heard you call it tea. I think you've adapted to the south and you quite like it."

"I'm northern, love," Paul shot me an amused look. "I just put up with your southern nonsense to save meself the hassle of explaining dinner and tea every time I want something to eat."

"Well, you live off toast as far as I can tell," I said, making Paul laugh.

Pattie and George lived in Esher, which was just around the corner from Weybridge. Like John and Paul, George had a massive wooden gate with an intercom installed at the top of his driveway. It was set into a high brick wall with a line of fir trees behind it, hiding the house from view. There were a pair of girls hanging about the gate. They both perked up when they saw the Aston Martin pull up.