The World Spinning Round (Beatles/Paul McCartney)

7. Early Bird Gets The Worm (Pt 2)

June 1968
Paul

When Alice opened the door and said my name, the past and present collided.

I was assaulted with a memory from when Liss had taken me to her grandmother's house the year prior. It was a spur-of-the-moment sort of thing since we were driving from Liverpool, where we'd celebrated my brother's engagement with a raucous party.

The Dowager Viscountess was delighted to see Alice and almost as chuffed to see me tagging along. Despite my protestations, she insisted on calling me Mr. McCartney, but she said it in a way that made me think she was firmly in my corner.

The three of us got into a bottle of apple brandy that may have been sitting around for too long because it was dangerously potent. Soon enough, she and Liss were giggling over a particularly dim-witted comment that Alice's sister-in-law had said at a family dinner. I watched them, suddenly aware that they were cut from the same fabric. While the rest of the world might think Alice got her independent and rebellious streak from her French mother, I knew it came from her granny.

Lady Edwards asked all the right questions about Mike's engagement and began reminiscing about the late Viscount. Their marriage had been, as she put it, a love match. I posited that all marriages should be love matches, and she and Alice laughed as if my peasant notions were such a breath of fresh air.

After a while, they'd gone into another room because Lady Edwards wanted Alice's opinion on a recent acquisition from an auction. By that point, I was hungover from the previous night's festivities, half-high on the half-joint that Alice and I had shared on the way down, and very well on my way to drunk on overly fermented apple brandy.

So, as one does, I lay on the Oriental rug and tucked my hands under my head. A fresco decorated the ceiling, surrounded by intricate molding. There was a cherub in the middle--probably painted by an Old Master--pointing a chubby finger towards a slender shepherdess dressed in blue. At least, I suppose it was a shepherdess--if that's even a thing--because she held a staff in her hand, and a fluffy lamb sat by her side.

Half-stoned, half-drunk, and half-asleep, I stared at the expression on the woman's face. He's waiting to take you away, I thought, the phrase going through my head repeatedly as I lost myself in a melody backed by trumpets.

"Paul?"

Alice was back, thankfully without the Dowager Viscountess, who, despite being relatively hip, would've been horrified to see me lying on her carpet like the commoner that I was.

"Paul?" she asked again with a mixture of surprise and bemusement as if I couldn't be trusted to be on my own, and that fact made me all the more loveable. Something about how she said it made me want to tell her that I loved her to bits, but I hadn't.

The memory transformed into another:  a dusty hut on a sweltering day in India after hours of smoking grass and songwriting. Everything felt cozy it felt impossible that evil existed in the world. I'd glanced up at John and stilled. He didn't need to say anything; we rarely needed to say anything out loud to each other in those days. There had been a look of naked affection in his eye for the briefest moment, and then it was gone. I love you, too, you know, I wanted to say, but I didn't.

Instead, I panicked. I sat up and ran a hand through my hair, trying to shake off what felt like a haze of adoration. It wasn't supposed to happen like this.

"Paul?" John had said, and something about his tone reminded me of the moment with Alice at her grandmother's house. He squinted his eyes at my haste to get out of there, then looked mildly bemused as I tried to laugh it all off for both our sakes. We both ignored the thick layer of hurt overlying it all.