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Chapter Text

Fifteen years ago she had gone under. It was nothing you could put your finger on; there had been no scene, no snap; only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into his.

- Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

1983

Linda is tired.

She folds her arms on the table and rests her head on them. She inhales, breathing in her own comforting scent, letting her soft arm hairs brush her forehead.  She could easily fall asleep here. 

Somewhere behind her she hears the sound of little footsteps. The day has not ended; it never ends. She gets a sudden urge to slide under the table and hide, but fights it, raises her head to see James walking in, a thumb in his mouth. 

“I’m thirsty.” 

His round eyes look up at her.

It’s eleven-thirty at night. Her day started sixteen hours ago, chopping fruit and toasting bagels for breakfast. She dressed James and brought him, Mary and Stella to school before she saw Paul emerge, asking if there was any papaya. She made lunch for him, Heather, some musicians playing at the studio and three workmen doing renovations on the cottage - twelve people in total. Washing up the lunch, checking on the horses, walking the dogs and starting on the children’s dinner took her through to four o’clock. Paul came with her when she collected the children but he made her late because he was looking for a particular jacket he wanted to wear. The children were fractious in the car and she had to work hard not to snap at them. Back home, everyone raced off as soon as dinner was eaten and Paul went out on a horse ride, asking her to join him when she was ready. She knew he would not want to wait long for her and she wanted to go anyway, so she got through the washing-up as quickly as she could before saddling up Cinnamon and joining him in the woods. They shared a joint and she felt relaxed for the first time that day. When they got back she helped the stable staff take off the horses’ tack and brush them down, but Paul was eager for her to return to the house so they could have family time. They watched TV and the younger children played and argued among themselves. Heather wanted to be alone in her room but Paul made her join them. They both did bedtime although it was Linda who returned upstairs to settle James when he got out of bed a couple of times. Paul went to the studio and Linda thought of ways to get out of the laundry that he wanted her to do. It was during this thought experiment that she started falling asleep on her arms, when James appeared, apparently not done with the day.

It is a day like any other: busy, full of children, animals, food and housework. An ordinary day, an ordinary wife looking after her family, just like she has always wanted to be. But on this evening, with James’ innocent blond head hoving into her blurred vision, she finds herself having one of her treasonous thoughts.

They have been more frequent of late, these thoughts. She is good at knocking them out of her head as quickly as they come in, but that doesn’t stop them coming. Linda has never been one to examine her thoughts too closely. Most of the time she thinks things, they pass, and she isn’t troubled by them again. But the frequency of the treasonous thoughts means she can’t ignore them as she used to. Tonight’s treasonous thought is: Why won’t this day ever end?

Why would she think that? It was a happy day, like so many others. Tomorrow will be just the same. She spends time with her beloved children, her beautiful fascinating husband, the animals that mean as much to her as the people in her life. She can see the Sussex hills from the window and watch the plants growing in the garden. She has everything she could ever have wanted. Why does the treasonous thought tell her that she doesn’t want to do one more day of it? 

When she is bone-deep exhausted, it is harder to be patient. It is harder to reflexively put her own thoughts aside and exist in the moment, only thinking about the activity she is doing - chopping vegetables, picking up shoes, lighting a joint, feeding the chickens. The more exhausted she is, the more her mind swirls and unfamiliar feelings like resentment and frustration cycle around her brain and find words.

So high I can’t get over it, so deep I can’t get around it

1968

In the early days, Linda holds on to Paul all the time. She must have an arm around him, a head on his shoulder, a hand on the back of his neck at every moment. She cannot not be touching him. Every time someone takes their photo, she instinctively wraps an arm around his stomach and lowers her head into his chest or shoulder, looking out at the camera. She can’t help herself, and he likes it. Likes it so much in fact that he insists on it, even when they are alone. 

She holds on to him partly because she is still not sure if he is going to go away. Everything about their relationship feels provisional in those first few months. He calls her from LA, she quickly arranges a sitter for Heather and flies over at her own expense. High-pitched voices surround the bungalow complex at the Chateau Marmont, belonging to the countless girls desperate to get a glimpse of their god. People - journalists, other musicians, assorted hangers-on - keep appearing in her path as she makes her way to his side. With a brutality she didn’t know she possessed she pushes past them all, raising her voice and emphasising her WASP accent to bamboozle them. She doesn’t know if she will see him again after this weekend, but she knows she must attach herself to him as literally as possible. 

A beautiful actress cries out to him as they leave the bungalow for the boat trip and he turns away guiltily. Linda has met Paul before - they have hooked up - but now he is specifically seeking her out and she must not let the opportunity go by. There are no thoughts in her head but Paul, Paul, Paul. She doesn’t even see her own face in the mirror in the morning, but instead his, long and pale. She doesn’t hear her own voice when she speaks. Instead, his insistent, mid-range tenor unspooling long and complicated sentences comes out of her mouth. She finds herself trying to imitate his accent. 

Heather barely crosses her mind during that weekend and she is washed with guilt when she realises this. But she cannot move herself from this path. She will go anywhere and do anything he asks of her. He tells her about his troubles - the tension in the band, the arguments about new management, the horrifying complexity of Apple, the world’s most consequential attempt at a tax dodge. She quickly identifies her in - the way she can make herself indispensable. 

Linda has never been someone who worries too much about the future. She lives moment-to-moment and often doesn’t realise for years what her intentions and motivations were in the past. When she suggests that Paul speak to her father and brother about his business troubles, she does not consciously think that she is doing this in order to connect him to her family and thus to herself. Looking back, years later, she sees that it was a strategic move, but she genuinely does not think of it in those terms at the moment. It is the spoken equivalent of her long arm cast over his body.

Paul prefers it that way; he is precise and strategic in his own way but doesn’t like to admit it openly. It’s easier for him to step almost casually into things, to hold the responsibility for his decisions at arm’s length. They are well-matched. 

When they meet her father and brother, she feels strange. On the one hand, her heart is warmed that she is finally impressing her father. Since her mother died, he has seemed even more disappointed in her than before. Disappointed in her flightiness, her divorcing Mel, her love of rock ‘n’ roll, her lack of academic ability, in her being a single mother. She has long given up trying to impress him but the hole left by his disapproval hurts her in an obscure and buried way. The way his eyes light with interest when she tells him about her relationship with Paul and his openness to speaking with her new boyfriend about his business troubles is gratifying but painful. She has presented her father with an interesting jewel, and for that he has briefly descended from the mountain and put a hand of blessing on her. 

Lee is slightly contemptuous of Paul at first, looking down his nose at the latter’s modern clothes and long hair. But Paul is more than Lee’s match in intellect and before too long the old man is leaning across the restaurant table to talk about publishing rights and management percentages and purchase of public shares. Her brother joins their tight masculine circle and all three ignore her. She doesn’t mind, it’s not her role to talk. She is there to hold Paul’s hand, which she does all the way through dinner. 

Afterwards Paul doesn’t say much but she sees his mind working. In the brief time they have been together she has come to recognise the many faces he wears. This face, closed off and quiet, is the one he wears when he is ruminating. He makes all his major decisions in the privacy of his own mind, and lets her know afterwards what they will be doing.

At a later dinner, her father returns to his usual habit of lightly mocking her. The things he says are always said with a laugh and a look around the table seeking confirmation, which he usually gets. 

“Linda thinks money grows on trees,” he laughs.

“Poor Linda, reading was never her forte. She had to go to Arizona just to graduate college. If you could call that a college.”

“Apparently she’s a photographer, she tells me? I don’t think Cartier-Bresson needs to quake in his boots just yet!” 

Laughter. Her brother chuckles too. Paul vaguely smiles but even his reflexive politeness wavers. He makes excuses for both of them and they leave early. He is annoyed as they walk down the Upper West Side.

“He shouldn’t talk about you like that!”

“Oh I’m used to it. He doesn’t really mean it. It’s just a family joke because I was so unacademic compared to John.”

“It really doesn’t bother you?”

“Well..sometimes. But I don’t get hung up on it. It’s his trip.”

He hugs her warmly “Well I think you’re a fantastic photographer”

To be praised by him, he whose opinion matters so much to the world! She has never felt more loved. She will do anything to keep him in her arms.

If I make you happy I don't need to do more

1969 - 1970

In those early days, Linda holds on to Paul because she fears if she doesn’t he will wander off, but after a while she realises that he needs her to hold on to him so that he doesn’t float away. 

The vulnerability at the heart of him is almost shocking to behold when she finally sees it. It’s there after sex, when he lays on her chest like a child and says nothing, just breathes. It’s there when John says something cruel and he is shiny-eyed and shaky-voiced for hours, wrapping arms around himself and retreating to music, always with her holding an arm around him. It’s there when he follows her around a room, subtly grabbing a hand or an arm and pulling her to his side when she talks to someone else too long. It’s there when he obsessively reads every word in the press about himself and the Beatles, and takes every bit of it to heart, talking endlessly about this or that critic and his opinions. That’s the side that astonishes her most. She cannot imagine being him, having his godlike talent, and caring for one solitary second what someone in the newspaper says. It’s the part of him she finds hardest to empathise with. All she can tell him is “Don’t listen to those fools! Who cares what they think?” He almost looks surprised that she genuinely doesn’t understand why he cares.

When he pulls himself together after these moments, he becomes hard and commanding, instructing her on what she should do and how they should organise their life. She doesn’t mind: she can’t bear too much of a weak man.

When he asks (tells) her to come to England and stay with him, she quickly rearranges Heather’s upcoming start in school so she will be free to travel as soon as he wants her to. A friend asks her if he will be willing to have Heather with them too and she doesn’t know. She doesn’t think too much about the future; she will go now because he wants her and see if it works out. A part of her still thinks he will get bored of her and move on; no point disrupting Heather now while things are still uncertain. She knows that he will not ask her to give up her daughter; he loves Heather too and seems to like that she is already a mother. But a tiny part of her wonders what she would do if he said that he didn’t want Heather to be part of their life. This barely-formed idea is the first of her treasonous thoughts. She is briefly, terrifyingly willing to do all he asks even to the point of giving up her daughter. The thought doesn’t last long and she would never do that, never give up her girl. But it frightens her that it even crosses her mind.

In the years that follow, some people will accuse her of being a bad mother to Heather. Of being flighty and selfish and bringing home a parade of men to their apartment in New York. The criticisms hurt her deeply, far more than any criticisms of her musical ability do. It would have been so easy for her to farm Heather off on the family upstate like so many of her female relatives have done, even those that are still married. Linda kept her girl with her because she loved her and did not want to be without her even as she followed her love of music and built a life in the city. Those critics know nothing of all she has done for Heather, all the work that went into maintaining their little life together. Sometimes she misses those few years when it was just the two of them.

She comes to London and moves into the chaotic house on Cavendish Avenue, which she cleans up from the squalor it fell into after Jane left. She falls in love with the dogs instantly - Martha with her shaggy sad face, Eddie’s yappy bark. There are cats too, having kittens all over the place, and she tends to them. In her deepest heart of hearts, Linda has always preferred animals to people.

There is constantly a parade of people coming in and out of the house, and she has to work hard to remember who they all are and how they are connected to the Beatles or Apple. Everyone seems to want a piece of Paul at all times and she recognises that her role now is to be something of a buffer between him and the world. So she remains constantly at his side, half listening to conversations she doesn’t really understand while holding on to him. He seems to feel safer and stronger now that he has her by his side. She sets to organising his life for him, amazed at his inability to do it himself.

Sometimes the phone rings and a woman is on the other line, wishing to talk to Paul. He speaks quietly; she tries not to eavesdrop but is troubled by the tone in his voice. It doesn’t usually sound like he is saying goodbye. Her biggest threat, she believes, is Jane. They are in her territory and even though he says he has not seen her in months, her brother still works at Apple and their mutual friends still come in and out of the house. Looking back years later, she recognises that the conversations she has with Paul about getting a fresh start and pushing away people who were always trying to get something out of him was her way of excising the people connected to Jane out of his life. She doesn’t recognise that for what it is at the time but in hindsight it is quite obvious. 

But he doesn’t object, and is happy to go along with her suggestions, especially once Heather comes over and they have formed a family. 

She can’t really object too much either when he does the same to her. Both Paul and her father, seemingly independently of each other, advise her to put distance between herself and her New York friends. Her father is concerned they will talk to the press about the burgeoning business relationship. Paul doesn’t really give a reason, just makes it clear that he wants her to be dedicated to him and Heather only. She doesn’t mind. She hasn’t spoken to any of her friends since she left New York anyway, and doesn’t think twice about cutting them out. Paul’s world is too huge and consuming and it’s the only place she wants to be. The only things she has on her mind are: Beatles drama, separating Paul from the Jane friends and getting Heather settled in England. 

She doesn’t think about any of her friends except Lillian. Linda knows Lillian will be angry and upset at being dropped, and she is particularly afraid to hear her reaction. Lillian has an acute mind and has always been able to see right through people. Her perceptiveness is both addictive and terrifying. Linda can’t think of a way to tell Lillian that it’s over between them so she decides not to say anything at all. It’s a decision she pays hard for down the line.

Linda is always aware that the London house was bought with Jane, who helped decorate it and lived there for many years. The Scotland farm was also Jane’s idea, but she only spent a few weeks there in total. This farm, Linda decides, will be her creation. 

She takes to the remote location instantly. Skies as huge as Arizona’s, sea views as lovely as the Hamptons. She wastes no time on getting horses and as soon as they each have one she feels calm and settled. There are sheep and chickens and the ubiquitous dogs. Every day is a discovery as they learn how to live in this place. She flings herself into homemaking with vigour. 

When she was a girl she often sank into lassitude. There were always staff at home to look after practical things and she never had to work. It was a dream life for many but it made her depressed. Sometimes she felt smothered by the house in Scarsdale and longed to be in Cape Cod or East Hampton, on her family’s other properties, riding horses and swimming in the sea. In Scotland, she regains the joy of living purely in a body. They often walk around nude, letting the soles of their feet become scaled with dirt and grime. She sits on the back steps and feels the sun on her face. She smokes joint after joint and watches the sky swimming above her. They lay down in the grass with the children and dogs, she and Paul passing the camera back and forth to take photos.  Every day she jumps on a horse’s back and rides through the property, thinking about nothing except the sweet smell of the animal’s warm coat rubbing her bare legs. Too much time in the city made her skin pale and rubbery, but in the first summer in Scotland she is outside so much she browns again even in the intermittent sun, her arm hair bleaching, just like during her childhood summers on the coast. 

Those early days in Scotland are full of animals, children and music. She sings with Paul, easy and unaffected, learning the words and melodies of his endless songs without much effort. He is always composing, lost in his own world at the piano while Mary cries and Heather races around chasing Martha and Linda cooks. All of his songs are familiar to her, like a radio playing in the background of their life. Apart from periodic holidays abroad, she keeps him up there on the farm, dissuades him from travelling back to London too often, only visiting Liverpool when he insists. They are safe there in their golden, pot-clouded bubble.

She takes hundreds of photographs - of the fields, the horses, the children and of Paul, her favourite subject. Right from the start she has gotten a little erotic thrill every time she looks in the viewfinder and catches his face in there. For those few moments he is the object of her view rather than the subject who controls and creates everything. The tiny jolt of power she feels at framing him is different to the power she feels at his needing her so utterly. The photographic power is complete, unconnected to how she looks or what she can do for him. She is the agent, the eye that sees without speaking or judging. 

He senses this too and often wants to take the camera off her when she has photographed him just so he can photograph her back, to even out the minuscule power imbalance.

Linda spends hours cooking and hardly any time cleaning. The house is full of junk and chaos - half finished bowls of cereal, cat and dog droppings, doodles and sketches by Paul, bits of wooden toys. He is as easy going as she is in those days - no fussy comments about how his mother kept their childhood home neat as a pin. He is languorous and sexy, wrapping his arms around her all the time, sitting up in bed to eat the eggs she makes him, afterwards pulling her in on top of the empty plates to make love. He digs holes to plant dozens of trees, and is always, always playing music. 

She remembers washing up in the kitchen and seeing him sitting in the yard with his guitar, pulling a beautiful melody from thin air, the evening light catching his soft profile and his delicate hands moving over the instrument. She is astounded at her luck in catching this unrepeatable butterfly of a man. He is never, ever boring. 

Every time they want to bathe the children they have to carry buckets of hot water to the outhouse, remove a great metal cover from the steel bath, fill it and all climb in together to wash. Stoned and giggling, she remembers how Paul’s face looks in the dim light, how warm his smile is and how loudly and happily Heather screeches as they all splash around together. Soon they are joined by lovely little Mary and Linda wonders how it is possible to be so happy. It’s all so different from her New York life, its bustle and speed, photographing gigs, meeting rock stars and talking late into the night with Lillian. Linda feels like a real woman at last.

When she married first, it couldn’t have been more different. Her mother had died and she needed to get away from her father. Lee's grief was parlayed into anger at Linda, his teasing taking on an extra edge of contempt. There was an expectation that she would come home to look after her younger sisters. Linda will take a lot, but she is no doormat. She was failing at Vermont College anyway so she dropped out, moved to Arizona to study there and met Mel. He was interesting at first but she outgrew him in months. But by that time she was pregnant and marrying him was the only option. She wasn’t sure about marrying him but getting out from under her father’s influence was a welcome spur. 

Mel was handsome, rather swashbuckling, passionate about his anthropological work. He was kind but held a thread of darkness within him, a tendency to blame her for his dark moods. She couldn't get him to talk to her openly, and though he did love her and Heather, it was in a rather abstract way. If she insisted on it, he would pay her attention, touch her, allow their minds to communicate, but he quickly fell into darkness and blame again, and eventually his favoured relationship status was remote coexistence. His research was the thing he cared about most and there was no room for Linda in that. He lived a life of the mind while she lived in the world and in her body. 

She played her part for a while, appearing in Ladies Home Journal as Mrs Joseph Melvin See cooking a pie, dressing artfully artlessly, but eventually she became so choked by boredom and anxiety that she barely gave him warning before she took Heather and left for New York while he was on a research trip. He seemed more baffled than hurt by her decision. He put no impediment in her way to a quick divorce. Paul often marvelled at how he could have let her go so easily, but Paul was a man of heart and soul while Mel was, despite his love of nature and the physical life, a brain in a jar. 

One of her treasonous thoughts - that she doesn’t have till many years later - is that she sometimes misses that Mel left her alone, didn’t usually bother himself too much with what she was doing or thinking. At the time, she could never have imagined that she would ever miss that. But years of being consumed by Paul leaves space for such crazy thoughts.

Notes

Chapter and heading titles from the following songs:

Dead in the Morning by I Draw Slow

Nowhere to Run by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas

(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman by Carole King

Story playlist.

Chapter Text

Proud to be playing that part

1969-1970
That first year is so eventful it might as well be seven. One moment they are in the London studios every day with the band, absorbing strange dynamics that they dissect together at length in the evenings. The next, she is pregnant and they marry, walking out on the registry office steps to a cacophony of weeping, she and Heather clutching the new kittens they both love so much. Then they are in Scotland where, as far as Linda is concerned, their life truly begins. 

Paul alternates between peace and agitation, some days ignoring everything outside the farm, others racing to the Campbelltown post office for telegrams or poring over newspaper articles, his face angry and anguished. Linda cooks, smokes weed, feeds Mary, lets Heather run free, rides horses, pins up Heather and Paul’s drawings on the walls, wears the same pinafore days in a row, plays records and dances. 

She encourages Paul to manual labour, believing it will calm his agitated, ever-working mind, and it does, sometimes. He builds a wall and fills it with pieces of broken glass embedded in the cement and she marvels at his creativity. But other days he does nothing. He leaves projects half-finished and she has to ask the farm workers to tidy them up. She doesn’t care too much - the house is full of her own half-knitted sweaters and ramshackle, mismatched furniture. But she does care when it becomes apparent that his abandoning projects is not always because his restless mind is moving on to something more interesting.

The ice in the seam

1985
Sometimes it feels like the only sound in the world is Paul’s voice. From the moment he wakes up and observes what she is cooking, adding a running commentary, Linda will spend the day hearing him talking, talking, talking. 

Here he is, chatting animatedly to Stella about some drama she is having with one of her teachers. There he is, talking to James about zebras. Here he is talking to a gardener about some plant he remembers from the Caribbean. There he is, talking to her about some modification he wants to do to one of the cottages. 

Now he is talking to her about making elderflower cordial, saying that she must get out and clip the blossoms before the summer solstice. She is busy with James’ lunch, picking raisins out of a scone because the child won’t eat them. She doesn’t want to make elderflower cordial but Paul won’t shut up about it. She gets annoyed, snaps.

“I don’t have time for that, Paul! Can’t one of the girls do it?”

His face becomes icy. That’s worse than him answering back. Then, the hammer drops.

“We had it when we were kids, Mike and I…”

Here it comes…

“My aunties used to make it…”

Curse those bloody aunties, Linda thinks. Did they have nothing else to be doing but dancing constant attendance on the McCartney children? But she says nothing. 

He looks angrily at her, expecting an apology. She refuses, shakes her hair out. She’s fed up and won’t put up with him any more today. She looks out the window at two of the dogs and is soothed by their gentle shapes, snoozing in the sun.

“I would have thought you’d care enough to do this for me.” His voice has reached an unappealing whine.

“All I ever do is do things for you!” 

She lets the sentence out, unwisely, but she couldn’t care less. She looks briefly at him, and hates the expression on his face. His mouth is pursed, his eyes raging, a bitchy sulk sweeping over his features. The face of a man who’s hardly ever been told No since he was twenty years of age. She hates that face, hate what an unpleasant spoiled brat it makes him look.

James comes into the room and his presence short circuits the screaming match that was sure to begin. Paul scoops up his son and stalks out into the yard. They play in the garden and don’t snip any elderflower blossoms, even though it’s blooming right over their heads.

Linda puts on music, lights a joint, rests on the patio. She has more work to do later, but she is going to relax now. The joint takes the edge off her anger and she smiles at Paul and James when they return. But Paul remains cold, turns away from her outstretched hand and hides in the studio for the rest of the afternoon.

He doesn’t speak to her for two days until she finally apologises. She smokes two joints in a row first.

After they make up, she pulls him out into the woods behind the farmhouse for weed and sex. They lay under the summer moon, laughing quietly and thinking about nothing at all. 

Talk to me, I'll do what you choose

1969-1970

Late in the summer of the first year Paul begins to periodically withdraw. It always coincides with something the other Beatles have done or said, especially John. In these times it helps him to talk on the phone with Linda’s father and brother. The three strategise as to how they will protect him, protect them as a family. But John is so unpredictable and every time there is a meeting, he seems to find a way to throw a spanner in Paul’s works. Like when he accuses Paul of buying song shares on the sly, and becomes so angry they both fear he will become violent. Paul is impassive at that time, but she first sees him cry in September, after the meeting where John announces he is done with the band and wants a "divorce". Paul tries to hide his tears from her when they finally go to bed in Cavendish, but she dissuades him. She takes him in her arms and tells him she’ll always love him. He weeps and weeps and she is momentarily frightened of the weight of his sorrow and unsure of her own ability to withstand it. But she shakes off that doubt as quickly as it comes and returns to the mode he needs her in - his loving mother. She will happily be his mother as well as his lover in that moment, and that night, she is both.

Most of his sorrow is not that simple or overt, though. As the year comes to an end, and the second year begins, the times he spends on the farm often feel more like he is there in body but not spirit. 

All is not lost with the Beatles - Abbey Road is released and a thing of wonder, and other music is being planned even after the divorce statement, but the sense of impending loss seems to grind down on Paul. He spends a lot of time talking to his own father and brother. Accompanying them, Linda is welcomed but always kept slightly at a distance from their intricate conversations. She is too preoccupied by the children and their other projects to be concerned, but things deteriorate when they are back on the farm. Paul is not always in bed, and he has good days, but the days where he lays there, unwashed and uncommunicative, often passed out with drink and more, become more frequent. 

Many mornings she rises to feed Mary and wake Heather, feed and walk the dogs, take the horses out, organise farmwork and make breakfast - meanwhile Paul, usually so insistently present, is invisible. His silence is the hardest thing of all to bear. For him not to be making music is like the sea freezing mid-wave. She tiptoes to their room to look at him and barely recognises the shambled creature laying on his side, his pale face almost smothered by black beard, his usually shiny hair matting into strips. 

She brings him food, tries to talk to him but he either says nothing or snaps at her to leave him alone, that he is useless. Sometimes he eats, sometimes he only drinks. She doesn’t know where he is keeping all the bottles; a search of the outhouses is fruitless. She smokes joints from the minute she wakes up to stave off the horrible feeling of dread that rises in her gorge. 

Her heart almost breaks when she sees him trying to be kind to Heather when the child runs up to him, pulling him by the arm to try and get him to come out and see the new puppies. Eventually Linda keeps Heather away from him, seeing that even she can perceive that something is very wrong. 

These cycles last just a few days at a time, after which he will suddenly emerge, sober if not yet washed, and start hammering fence posts or helping with shearing. But news from London comes, or some obscure cruelty occurs that she can only guess at, and he is gone again.

One day Linda finds herself wishing she could talk to Lillian. Her friend’s rough manner and unpretentious kindness always helped her in the past. Yet aside from her promise to cut out her old friends, she knows that Lillian would tell her that this is what she should expect from marriage. She knows this because once in conversation, Lillian said to her:

“I’m convinced most marriages only last because people get amnesia.”

“What do you mean?” Linda laughed. “They lose their memory and forget who they are?”

“Not literally,” replied Lillian. “But when I think of the amount of dinner parties I’ve been at where a man calls his wife stupid in front of her, or a woman calls her husband a bumbling fool, and they look at each other with real hate - and then the next time you see them it’s all smiles? Or the men that knock their wives around and they keep going back for more? I’m just thinking of all the times I’ve heard someone say something so unbelievably poisonous to their wife or husband and yet if you bring it up later they’ve completely forgotten? It must be the only reason. Amnesia.”

“They could have apologised in private, you know.”

Lillian frowned. “I very much doubt that. Families in general - people talk about their idyllic childhoods and then you find out the mother was a drunk and the father had a second family. Either children are really damn stupid or everyone is playing a part.”

Linda laughed again, trying to get Lillian off the subject. She was hard to deal with when she got intense and heavy like that. Plus, she would think like that, wouldn’t she? It wasn’t like she was going to get a chance at having a normal family life, being some kind of lesbian and all. 

If Linda spoke to Lillian now and unburdened herself of her troubles, Lillian would remember all that she told her and remind her of it when things were good again. Linda can’t risk that, especially now that she is married to Paul and her path is decided. She must be strong, she must manage.

So with that in mind, Linda consciously changes from Kind Mother to Tough Mother. She storms into the room, rips off the covers and shouts at him to pull himself together. He is so shocked at first he cannot speak, then he is full of rage at her defiance. For the first time, she is afraid of his anger as he shouts at her to mind her own business, but she stands firm. Linda will tolerate a lot, but she is no pushover. Their fight is as bitter as the one they had before the wedding, when she was left in a furiously weeping heap, burying her face in the tabby kitten’s fur. But her instincts are correct, as they usually are. The fight brings him back to life, and they end up having sex that she needs to hold her nose for. Afterwards he is calmer, even a little apologetic and she reactivates Kind Mother. She tells him he must start making music again, and must finish his own album. 

“I’ll help you” she promises.

It doesn’t happen right away, and that is not the last time he descends into that severe a depression, but a line has been crossed. She has shown him that she is here to stay. She has seen him at his worst and not left him or betrayed him, even when she was tempted. She has shown that when he falls apart, she will always stay upright. She is on her path, and soon enough it is both their path. 

Back in the London house, he sets up a homemade studio and gets to work.

Small world just got bigger

1984

The movie is a disaster, but Linda will never say that to anyone. She will tell journalists, friends and family that it’s a great script, a great concept, great music, Paul’s acting is wonderful - all obvious lies. But the project is not about artistic merit. She knows on some buried, nonverbal level that Paul cannot be left alone with his thoughts these days. Richie, Mike and George Martin silently agree. 

So she goes with him every day to the movie studios, James accompanying them, and listens to him woodenly run through line after line. Paul has never been able to accept that there are some things he isn’t good at. For his sake, she’ll pretend that the self-conscious performance he puts on every day when he plays his role is good acting. For his sake she’ll tell journalists that the film is just great and should win awards. For his sake, she’ll do take after take of her background role, tamping down her irritation at the interminable process of film-making. 

Everything about their responses to John’s death has been delayed. For the first few months, they hardly said a word about it when they were alone together, only speaking about it when journalists asked. She would flinch a little when he got defensive in interviews: breaking down he and John’s respective contributions to songs, talking endlessly about this or that studio dispute that only he and a handful of rock music dorks care about. 

She can’t understand why he reads every single stupid book published about the band, fretting endlessly about the cruel and dismissive things said about him within. Those writers didn’t know any of them, who were they to say that Paul and John were never friends? But he takes it all in and even seems to start believing it himself, asking out loud “Did he ever even like me?” 

No amount of reassurance seems to bring him back to earth and she is torn between sympathy and extreme frustration that he will listen to these asshole writers over his own wife.

But she rarely lets it show: always staying on her path, holding his hand, resting her arm over his body, letting him follow her around as she works in the house and gardens.

In the last couple of years, he has taken to talking about John as though he is still alive. He refers to him in the present tense, asking her what she thinks he would say about this or that new album or piece of current affairs. She wakes sometimes in the middle of the night to find him wide awake, and he tells her John just appeared to him in a dream, was about to tell him something, and then he woke up. She remembers her own dreams after Lillian died and feels sick inside.

Once she catches him talking out loud to John in an empty room in the studio when she goes out to ask him something. He doesn’t hear her come in and at first she thinks that one of the engineers has stayed late. But as she stops at the door, she sees that Paul is alone, sitting in the centre of the room holding an acoustic guitar which he occasionally strums. 

She stands stock still and hears him speaking with a quiet, gentle voice, so different to the confident timbre of his daily running commentary on their household.

“John, I’m thinking C7 for this part…would that work?”

He plays some notes.

“It sounds a bit like….Would you do it this way, John?”

More notes, echoing in the silence of the large room. An owl suddenly screeches outside. Paul smiles.

“Thank you John…I knew you’d like it…”

She walks in loudly, pretending she has just arrived and didn’t hear anything he just said. She has a sudden impulse to interrupt because she isn’t sure she can handle whatever he might say next.

Before he has the movie to distract him, his endless fussing about the house is unbearable. He is more demanding of her time and attention than seven-year old James. It also seems as though the quality of her attention doesn’t really matter. It’s simply important that her attention is turned on him, like sunlight. He asks her questions and doesn’t listen to her answers, seemingly just happy that she has turned away from whatever she was doing to listen to him. 

It’s at this time that he becomes more insistent that his own parent’s marriage was like that of young lovers, and encourages her to say the same about hers. His secrecy and obfuscation about their money, always an issue, becomes more and more apparent. Linda has no interest in the complicated ins and outs of where their money comes from or where it lives, but he begins to scare her with stories about how the government could take it all away, making her even more frugal than she already is. 

When they toured, money was usually just there, to be used for whatever they might need it for and not thought about too much. They rarely carried cash, simply signing for whatever they needed or getting a manager to do the same. But now he talks about how they must live like the decent working-class people he grew up amongst, with the wife getting her weekly allowance and using it sensibly. A part of her rebels, hears Lillian’s voice in her ear: “You’re no 1940s Liverpudlian housewife!” 

But she silences the voice, listens to Paul and economises. It’s not like they don’t use money when it’s necessary. It’s more that he needs to see her scrimp and save like his mother and aunties did. She could ask for money to buy James new clothes from Harrods, but she knows Paul prefers when she finds something in a charity shop, and she enjoys the imposed thrill of making do. Linda has never really needed much in the way of material possessions, and if managing money this way makes Paul feel secure, what harm? They never scrimp on weed, that’s the main thing.

Aside from the money, his household scrutiny becomes too much and when he gets the idea for the movie she encourages him robustly. She worries so much about him; worries over the white, pinched face he has worn since the end of 1980, the way he seems to have aged ten years in just three. If this silly movie will keep him occupied - keep that look from his eyes, even for a little while - it’s worth the bother and expense.

At the movie premiere they both drink too much and sway in front of the cameras. She effusively praises the film but senses his disappointment in the finished product. They have a terrible row that evening when they get home, neither able to remember the next day what it was about

Notes

Chapter title and headings from the following songs:

The Red Shoes by Kate Bush (2011 Director's Cut re-record)
Rest in the Bed by Laura Marling
Living Proof by Cat Power
Tell Mama by Etta James
Valentine by I Draw Slow

Story playlist

Chapter Text

Pray God you can cope

1971-1972

About a year after Mary joins them, Linda is pregnant again. It’s more difficult the third time around; she is sicker and needs to visit the hospital more. They do a lot of travelling: between Scotland and London, Jamaica for holidays, to America for the new album recording and to visit her family. While she loves the excitement her body rebels at it, worn down with tiredness from schlepping the whole family everywhere they go. Mary takes most of Linda’s attention and Heather gets troublesome and mutinous. But Paul is right: it is so much better to always be together as a family, no matter where they are. Linda is happy to sit in the recording studios in New York and Los Angeles, organising the days' sessions, listening to the tracks being laid down and giving her opinions, singing her harmony lines under Paul's direction, taking photographs, feeding Mary, smoking joints and playing with the sound engineer’s dog. She is happy to pretend to be Paul’s secretary to telephone people they need to get on board for musical contributions. Some of the musicians resent her and the children being there but she couldn’t care less. It’s a new decade and she has witnessed too many chilly, distant marriages among her relatives and parents’ friends to want to repeat that in her generation. 

Paul puts her name on the new album but it is mainly so that they can access the songs’ royalties, those under his own name alone being tied up in the escrow account created after the lawsuit he initiated against the other Beatles. Linda’s brother is quick to explain all this to her but she knows that it’s not the full story. She never claimed to be a songwriter but Paul shows her all his music and values her opinion. As time goes on, she contributes more to songs - later on, she fondly remembers them both coming up with the lyrics for 'Helen Wheels' on a long drive to Scotland to London. And she is singing on most of the songs, a little self-conscious about her voice but encouraged by Paul. She loves the sounds of their voices together, enjoys how hers is harsher and almost more masculine sounding than his. Heather even joins them for a couple of backing tracks. Making music together as a family - how beautiful.

Since the lawsuit he has been troubled, but not depressed. Many people are furious with him but he feels better when he is doing something rather than passively accepting his fate. Her father and brother supported him and all of them know that they are doing the right thing. 

Shortly before the lawsuit, he came close to breaking down again when he read the Rolling Stone interview. She read it too and found it ludicrous - clearly John is out of his mind, it’s insane to take him seriously. But Paul pores over it and keeps rambling on about this or that point, alternating between enumerating the ways that John is wrong and obsessing over points where he fears he may be right. She loses patience and is sharp with Paul - she cannot respect him when he gets weak and reactive like this. She does what works best - keeps the home, makes jokes, is loving but firm with him, and encourages him to get stoned with her every day. 

Every day she is learning more about how to manage him and strengthen their bond. More than anything else, he needs her to be steady and grounding when he is anxious and spiraling. It isn’t always easy; sometimes he brushes off her attempts, is brusque and contemptuous, and she reacts in anger. They have bright and blazing rows, but these don’t last long. And in public they are always united. When he needs her to defend him to a newspaper, to write a public letter in response to John and Yoko, she does it without delay. Part of her is slightly sickened at having to get involved with such pettiness but she will do it for him and for their family. And when she defends him, he becomes stronger and more powerful, and she loves him more.

Linda barely remembers Stella’s birth, clouded in anaesthesia. She remembers going to the hospital, sick and feverish, Paul close by but seeming far in her pain-addled eyes. When she awakes they tell her that she and Stella nearly died. They hand her the baby and for a terrible few moments she feels nothing at all. She is floating and detached, looking down from the ceiling at the tableau of a pale, wracked woman holding a baby in her arms. It’s only when she sees Paul holding Mary that she remembers who she is and starts to cry. He cries too and tells her he prayed for the first time in years. Later they tell the press that the band name Wings came from Paul’s prayer that she and Stella would be carried to safety on the wings of an angel.

From the start, Stella is the child who has Paul’s whole heart. Not that he loves the others any less, but something about this vibrant, headstrong girl, whose very existence was in doubt for a time, seizes him in a profound and unbreakable way. She is the only child he writes and records a full song about. Linda finds Mary easier to raise while Stella keeps her on her toes from day one. She truly can lift up a mountain while singing like a skylark.

I don’t want to doubt you, know everything about you

1986

Linda is going to collect Stella from a football match. Paul is coming with her but he is, as always, very slow to get ready.

Linda stands in front of the farmhouse door, waiting impatiently. She has been ready for forty minutes. Paul is still fiddling with the back of a speaker that he took a notion to fix about half an hour ago.

“Can’t it wait, Paul?” she calls, trying to keep frustration out of her voice. “We’ll be late if we don’t leave soon.”

He doesn’t answer, too absorbed in his work. She walks into the living room, two of the dogs at her heels. 

“Will I just go? It looks like you’re on a roll there.”

Paul sticks his head out from behind the speaker. “No, no, I’m nearly done here. Hold on a minute.”

She turns away so he doesn’t see her irritated sigh. He never seems to take into account other people’s schedules. How many times have they piled into the car frantically, already fifteen minutes late for something, because he took so long in the bath or picking mushrooms in the field or simply got caught up in the music he was playing? She used to find it endearing but over the years it just strikes her as pure selfishness.

She pets the dogs in the hallway, taken down from her agitation by their warm smell and wiry fur. Paul appears after a couple of minutes and she gets up from her crouched position, ready to open the door and leave.

“Ready?” she asks.

“Yep!” he responds brightly. Followed by…

“I’ll just brush my teeth”

The thread of rage that runs through her almost knocks her out with its ferocity. It feels like violent spikes cascading through her entire body, choking her throat and tangling her insides in flames. He’s up the stairs and in the bathroom before she can react. 

She crouches down again, pulling one the dogs closer to her, muffling her open-mouthed, silent scream in its ruff. There’s no point expressing her anger - Paul will just fight back, list off the ways in which he is perfectly entitled to take a few minutes to clean up before leaving the house, relentlessly overwhelm her with his voice until they end up in a screaming match which will make them even later than they already are. He would only tell her that she’s being irrational to get so riled up about him only wanting to brush his bloody teeth, for god’s sake . 

But Linda knows that brushing his teeth, or looking for a jacket, or feeding the cats, or setting the burglar alarm are, like everything Paul does, not just activities that can be finished in moments. Who’s to say he won’t get distracted by a book on the bathroom shelf, or start playing a harmonica over the sink, or identify a problem with the radiator, or any number of other things that will stretch a thirty-second task to three minutes or more? When they have a twenty-minute drive to the sports pitch and Stella hates it when they are late to collect her? When somehow she, Linda, will get the blame for them being late?

In that moment of delay, Linda feels angrier than she ever has in her entire life. She tells herself she is being idiotic to get so enraged over something so trivial. But the boiling heat inside her refuses to listen to her rational mind. She rests her entire face on the dog’s neck and works hard to get her breathing back to normal.

Honey, I want it my way

1971-1972

In the press, there are two versions as to why Linda joins the band. The more popular one is that she muscles her way in, desperate for some reflected Beatle glory despite her pathetic lack of talent. The other version is that Paul practically bullies her into it because he cannot bear to be on stage alone without his mother-wife. The truth is somewhere in between. 

Anyone who knows Paul knows he would not allow her anywhere near his band if he didn’t want her there. Anyone who knows Linda knows she would not meekly submit to something so immense if she didn’t also want it. She’s always loved music though never saw herself as a performer. But then, she never saw herself as a photographer either, and she became quite good at that, didn’t she? Plus, she sometimes misses her old life. In New York she was at Max’s Kansas City every night, meeting exciting people, flying about with her camera, dissecting it all the next day over coffee and eggs with Danny and Lillian. She was ready to leave that life behind when she married Paul, but that doesn’t mean she was willing to leave music and excitement behind altogether. 

The idea of being on stage is both thrilling and terrifying, but the initial idea of just touring small universities and small venues around Europe takes some of the edge off. It sounds wonderfully liberating: playing almost by accident to little crowds in humble halls, doing it just for the love of the music, not worrying if it’s perfect. Paul talks a lot about his Hamburg days and how playing night after night in crappy little bars helped the band get good. She likes the idea of it, of helping him get over his perfectionism and enjoying music for its own sake. 

But when he proposes she learn keyboards she is a bit more nervous. A bit of singing is all right, but she’s never really played an instrument. It doesn’t help that Paul is a terrible, impatient teacher. Like someone teaching driving by saying “Just drive!” he seems to think that anyone can “just play” if they try hard enough. They have a few lessons but quarrel so bitterly that she temporarily abandons the idea, much to his anger. Eventually he persuades her back, and she takes a couple of proper lessons. She improves, but he wants to start the tour long before she feels ready. Still, she’s never been one to let anxiety stop her doing things, so she casts off her worries as best as she can, packs up the children and joins the tour bus. It’s both immense fun and immense stress at the same time. Trying to tend to a new baby, a toddler, Heather and Paul all at the same time, in the back of a small bus, with these new band members that she is still figuring out if she can trust, stretches her patience very thin some days. But other days they have a wonderful time barrelling through the English countryside, trees full of May blossom and curious animals watching them from the fields, getting through industrial quantities of weed and singing all the way. 

The first Wings album is also being recorded at this time, so she is getting a baptism of fire when it comes to learning music. She does her best to kill her anxiety, but stage fright almost gets the better of her many times. She can still remember crying almost hysterically on Denny's shoulders before a gig in France, and the horrible moment when she forgot the chords to Wild Life on stage in Leeds. Even as she improves, she still sometimes announces "I'm not going on!" before a gig. But then, Paul does that too.

She knows her early performances aren’t up to much, but the low profile of the university concerts mean they don’t get too much scrutiny. It's during the first European tour and when the first couple of band albums are released that the vitriol really starts coming in. Music critics hate Linda - hate her voice, hate her playing, believe she is a nobody riding on the coattails of a genius and bringing him down. It’s the male version of the deranged fans who swarmed her and Heather when they first moved to London, shouting and spitting at her, graffiting the walls with “Go Home American Cunt”, mocking her appearance in those weird home-made newspapers they created for each other. 

In those days, it aggrieved her somewhat that Paul would still stop and talk kindly with the fans, instead of telling them to fuck off like she would have done. And again, with the reviews and commentary, he is unhappy with it but he says nothing much to the world. The treasonous thought crosses her mind: He won’t defend me like I do him.

Part of her wants to drop out of the band, but she is on her path now and cannot step off it. Plus, when a proper world tour begins, she knows she must be there as well. Women still flock to Paul and Linda is extra careful never to leave his side, never to take her hands off his person, especially when there is another woman around. Even if it’s someone else’s wife or a recording studio secretary or just a passer-by, she keeps herself on alert. It’s not that she doesn’t trust him, but she doesn’t trust any woman with him. A small, frightened part of her, deep inside, still fears that her luck might run out. That part of her is not dominant - Linda knows her own worth - but it is not extinct either. And Paul enjoys feeling claimed. He likes that she lets the world know: He’s mine, he belongs to me and our family and no one else. 

So she goes on tour with him, and brings the children too, even though it’s fiendishly difficult, because she knows what happens to the women left behind.

Things go briefly nuclear with John and Yoko in the third year, and just as quickly subside. They meet in New York at Christmas and it’s more normal than it’s been in years. Publicly, Yoko is a huge pain in the ass, but privately she is all right. Linda would never say they are friends, exactly, but she rather likes her all the same. Like Lillian, she is certainly never boring. When they are all together Paul and John only ever want to talk to each other anyway, so she might as well talk to Yoko. More than anything, Linda would like for her life with Paul to not be so affected by whatever those two are doing. He says in interviews that he is unconcerned by them and not really aware of what they are doing, but that is not so.

Linda and Paul agree on the start, without having to say it, on democratic centralism in their relationship. They can quarrel all day behind closed doors, but once they have reached an agreement (usually what Paul wants) they will speak with one voice in public. Linda has become very distrustful of journalists and is more than happy to stick to the party line in interviews, especially as it is rarely an actual lie, just a simplified version of the truth. She and Paul share this trait with his family - his father, brother and other relatives. While staying with Jim and Angie and Angie’s daughter, Linda witnesses plenty of family fights, but not a word of these gets out into the wider world. And why should they? It’s no one else’s business. 

Jim is a thoughtful and sensitive man, quite strong-willed in his way, though rather in thrall to his much-younger wife. He is like Paul, but less emotional. One night when they are visiting, he tells Linda about long-dead mother Mary. He speaks for a while but Linda gets the same feeling she gets when Paul talks about her, as though she was not quite a real person. They both talk about Mary’s hardworking nature, her love for her children, her warmth, but nothing more specific than that. All the stories about her are the same: cycling off to deliver babies, returning to cook enormous dinners while cleaning the house to the nth degree. 

Linda wonders if Mary would approve of her, with her ragtag children, sloppy housekeeping, comfortable clothes and relaxed attitude to grooming. She barely knew Mel’s parents and supposes she should be a little glad to be spared the dreaded mother-in-law. Still, she wonders sometimes who Mary was, and if anyone who knew her would actually be able to tell anything specific about her. There are no photographs of Mary in Jim’s house, but Paul has a couple framed in London. Linda sometimes looks at the photos but can’t recognise anything in the dark woman with an old-fashioned hairstyle looking back at her. She doesn’t look like Paul, or Michael, or their own children. She looks like Anywoman.

There's too much of ironing goes to a shirt

1987

Something strange happens to Paul after John dies. After years of relaxed homemaking, he suddenly becomes obsessed with cleanliness. After working so hard to get Linda to join the band and be on tour with him, he is now just as committed to her staying home and adding housecleaning to her long list of domestic obligations.

He goes on bizarre rhapsodies about the beauty of laundry day in his childhood home, with the ubiquitous aunts handwashing piles of sheets, putting them through wringers and scrubbing shirts with carbolic soap. He tells her the story about how Mother Mary refused Jim’s offer to buy her a washing machine because she thought it immoral. Linda finds it funny at first, informs him that he will prise her washing machine out of her cold dead hands. 

But as time goes on, it becomes apparent how deadly serious he is about all this. He starts to fulminate about dust in corners, grime on the side of the kettle, cat hair on the couch cushions, dishes not promptly washed. She gets a cold feeling when she realises that having a pin-neat house has become an obsession for him, and there is only so long she will be able to resist his will.

She reframes it to herself, tries to see the positives. He’s right that she missed out on valuable life lessons by having maids and other staff growing up, and she does feel self-conscious about having such an upper-class background. He’s also right that it is far better not to have domestic staff - these people can rarely be trusted not to run to the papers with every little piece of gossip. And it will probably be better for the children to live in a tidier atmosphere. 

Linda can wrangle Mary and Heather into helping her a bit, but has no luck with Stella. However, the bulk of this new work still falls on Linda herself and she watches her hands get even more rough and lined from being endlessly immersed in soapy water. 

For a blissful week on holiday, they have a rented house complete with staff, and Linda marvels at how much she unwinds, how much of her insides were coiled up with low-level stress from trudging around all day. But Paul is quick to remind her that it's much nicer to have the whole family together in the kitchen. She does agree - the girls are able to cook now, and cook well, and Paul is no slouch in the kitchen either. But they all enjoy cooking. It's the other tasks - the washing up, the laundry, the hoovering, cleaning the bathrooms, washing the windows, endless dusting - these are tasks that no one enjoys, but Linda still has to do them.

It’s not that he tyrannically orders her to do these new domestic tasks. She knows that if she talked to anyone about it, it would sound like she was some kind of woman in purdah, but it’s not like that. It’s more that she can see that he needs this. It’s necessary for him to feel like he is in some facsimile of his childhood - especially his childhood before his mother died - in order to feel safe in a world that year on year makes him more and more bewildered. 

She cannot explain to anyone that even though she appears to be dancing to his will, it’s actually Paul who is weak and helpless in these times, and she is the one who must be strong for him.

My beating heart, the anchor to a ship so warm

1971-1973  

Paul wants another child not long after Stella, but Linda puts her foot down. As well as the dangers of the last pregnancy, she is at her limit with taking care of the three she already has while also travelling on tour. Touring is exciting but exhausting. She enjoys performing but doesn’t get essential sustenance from it the way Paul does. Whenever they return to yet another anonymous house they are staying at, it grinds on her mind that in just a few hours she will be up making breakfast after only a few hours’ sleep. He will sleep on but she doesn’t mind that. Most of the time, it wouldn’t even occur to her to mind that she makes breakfast alone. Weed helps, both with getting her to sleep and with making the raw mornings softer and gentler, the sound of the children squabbling less harsh. 

They can’t usually bring the animals when touring and she misses Cinnamon and Martha and the cats and chickens so much it aches. When she has finished making breakfast and setting up the children with their much-resented tutors for the morning, she will smoke and think of Cinnamon’s long brown face, her lustrous eyes and gentle whickers, the smell of her rough coat, and count the days till she can ride her again. 

They make more albums, she takes photographs for the covers, and Paul writes so many songs he forgets many of them. Critical reception is mixed but since when can any of those bastards write a song, or do anything creative?

The idea to go to Nigeria to record is a confused blur; it was probably Paul’s but she can’t be sure. She is unfazed - years of managing the family on the road has rubbed away any caution she might have felt before. Being around Paul is like being on the edge of the universe - he makes anything seem possible and doable, and she is not afraid of uncertainty, even with half the band quitting before they leave. They have their home with them wherever they go. 

But when they get to Nigeria it’s a challenge even for Linda. The children get sick in the heat, the facilities are basic even in the gated community they rent a house in, and she finds herself handwashing clothes, towels and sheets in a tepid basin for hours on end. Nothing seems to work the way it’s supposed to and people are not easily swayed by celebrity. Linda and Paul have gotten used to wandering around without much preparation for the day ahead, confident that taxi drivers and shop owners will take their orders on verbal credit, but everyone here wants to see the cash before they do anything. Paul grumbles and she echoes him. 

It’s not all bad - in fact, one night they spend listening to Fela Kuti play is a treasured memory for both of them for years after, even if she almost misses the great man because she keeps nearly falling asleep. But it’s hard to feel good about the place when they are robbed at knifepoint and Paul collapses in the studio with what later turns out to be a bronchial spasm but which looks at the time very much like a heart attack. She tries not to remember how his face looks - white, sweating and puffy - as he lies on the ground, gasping for breath and his eyes looking past her while she screams helplessly. The children have to witness that too and even after they are reassured that Daddy is fine, they still walk around with large haunted eyes for the next few days. 

The cold, hard panic that wrapped around Linda’s heart when she thought Paul was dying is a feeling she will never forget. She had another treasonous thought: If he dies, all this will have been for nothing!

So after all that, Linda keeps on touring, bringing up the children on buses and planes and in rented homes, but she does not have another baby. Paul doesn’t push her too hard about it and she is glad, because she is not sure if she would be able to keep up her resistance if he really insisted. She thinks that he is probably hoping for a son.

White wine in the morning sun

1988

Paul is away for the night. Contrary to what they tell the press, they do not actually spend every night together. They did in the first decade, when she still feared other women. But since John died, a small but fundamental part of her has realised that any real threat to her position never emanated from other women. 

She rarely consciously thinks this; it only rises in her mind when she is very stoned and even then she can barely put words to it. But it means that she is subconsciously not gripped with fear any more when Paul goes to London for a night. She would rather stay in Sussex and ride, enjoy the peace. 

Things have been difficult with Heather - she has just come out of a psychiatric hospital and is now on a trip with Mel. Linda worries about her, wonders if she has failed her first daughter in some way. No one could have been a better adoptive father than Paul. But it’s true that he has always related better to young children - once their children became teenagers he became impatient, frustrated that they want to actually talk to and argue with him rather than just playing and rough-housing. He can be hard on Heather - criticising her dreaminess, her seeming inability to get her shit together. Linda has never minded Heather’s relative lack of ambition but Paul seems to take it personally. They do love each other but it’s probably a good idea for them both to have some distance, even though Paul is not keen on the idea. But Heather is in her twenties now, neither he nor Linda can prevent her doing what she wants. 

Stella is the only one who can really go toe-to-toe with Paul. Sometimes she is so cheeky that Linda is speechless, amazed at the girl’s chutzpah. But she secretly admires Stella’s fearlessness. She is as stubborn and ambitious as her father, and will not be walked on by him or anyone. Linda hopes that Stella still has respect for her as her mother. At least they are the best of friends, as Linda is with all her children.

James, as the golden son, might be expected to be the one to truly be his father’s equal, but Linda can see already that he is such a gentle, self-effacing soul that it will take everything in her power to keep him from being subsumed. She sees in James the lonely little girl she once was, before rock ‘n’ roll gave meaning to her life, and feels a kind of intense protectiveness towards him that her daughters never needed. 

Linda gets high and puts on music. She will listen to anything as long as it’s not Beatles, Wings or Paul’s solo stuff. She settles on Toots and the Maytals and dances around the kitchen, holding one of the dogs up by the paws and singing languorously to him.

I'm going from East to West (East to West)
I'm going from North to South (North to South, yeah)

She does dance and she does feel better. Very high by now, she wanders into the sitting room, dusted to within an inch of its life earlier that day, and stares at the photograph of Mother Mary on the mantelpiece with bleary eyes. She suddenly realises that she is speaking out loud.

“How did you do it, Mary?”

The addressee’s face, slightly blurred and turned in three-quarters view while she holds toddler Paul, does not answer.

“Did you really never have a day where you said ‘Fuck Jim, fuck these kids, fuck this job?’ Did you never want to get on your bike and cycle away? Or did you really never think of yourself?”

Linda twirls around the room, a little dizzy and reckless. She spins to face the photograph again.

“Did you really hand over your pay every week? Or is he lying, did Jim hand over his pay to you? I bet he did. I bet you knew about every penny going in and out of that house. Why can’t I figure this stuff out?”

Mary, restrained and neatly dressed, seems to move the dark blurs of her eyes and look directly at Linda. Linda feels the judgement. Apart from Lillian and a couple of others, she has only really been friends with men. If Mary was around when Linda met Paul, would she like her new daughter-in-law? Angie had certainly needed some convincing.

Mary’s neat clothes and demure expression vaguely remind Linda of Jane. Every now and then, she sees her former rival’s face appearing on magazine covers and newspaper supplements, promoting her bakery empire. Jane looks more beautiful at forty than she did at twenty-two, when she quietly told the world that she and Paul were no more. Linda is not and has never been a glamour girl, but it is only when looking at Jane’s fine-boned, elegant face, dainty small limbs and impeccable clothes that she feels insecure about that. 

Another time when she was home alone, Brideshead Revisited was repeated on the telly, and Linda stayed up to watch the whole thing through, telling herself that it was to admire Jeremy Irons, but in fact it was just to see Jane in her small role. Whenever Jane’s oval, almost childish face appeared as Celia Ryder, Linda found herself perched on the edge of her armchair, staring intently at the screen, joint forgotten in the freestanding ashtray beside her. 

When Linda is feeling worn out and out of step with the world, she keenly feels the presence of Jane, as though the woman was living in the bushes on their property. Linda probably thinks about Jane more than Paul does. Staring at Mother Mary’s half-occluded face, Linda gets the same uncomfortable, unnameable feeling.

“He wants our lives to be exactly what you and Jim created,” Linda accuses the photograph. “I don’t know how to do it. Can you come back to him in a dream and tell him to give me a break?”

Or would Mary appear in Paul’s dreams and tell him to go harder on Linda, tell him that he shouldn’t have married this spoiled American with her sloppy housekeeping and wacky ideas about vegetarianism in the first place? Would she give him a plate of her bangers and mash, the only meat dish Paul says he misses, and tell him not to bother with such nonsense?

Linda takes another hit of her joint and on impulse sweeps everything off the mantelpiece. The photo goes crashing to the carpet, along with two candles, a Nigerian sculpture, some pieces of James’ Lego and a bundle of dried acorns.

She doesn’t go back to clean up the mess for three hours.

You’re making it clear when I don’t want to think

1973-1974 

Linda eventually makes contact again with Danny and a couple other old New York friends, bringing Paul with her for every meeting, of course. She doesn’t contact Lillian, could never do so after what Lillian wrote about her and Paul in the New York Sunday Times review of the James Paul McCartney TV Special. Lillian’s attack is savage and reminds Linda of John’s worst moments in its ferocity. 

I can tell you right now, she didn't marry a millionaire Beatle to end up in a Liverpool saloon singing 'Pack up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag' with middle-aged women called Mildred…..'You are my sunshine', sang the people who gave the Beatles their original vitality, and Linda sat, her teeth relentlessly clamped in a Scarsdale lockjaw: I could have wept. . . Linda comes across as an incredibly cold and arrogant figure coming to life only when the TV cameras are focused right on her. She is a great beauty and someone should forget about Paul, and make a movie with her. She is obviously dying to become a star, you can tell. . . 

Linda can’t make heads nor tails of Lillian’s attack. Is she saying Linda is too good for the McCartneys, or that the McCartneys are too good for Linda? She has never been much of a reader and years away from Lillian’s sharp Australian humour have blunted Linda’s ability to make sense of her old friend. She puts the details of the review aside, only retaining the feeling of hurt, betrayal and, deep down, a sense of guilt that she brought this on herself by abandoning Lillian. 

Paul, as is his way, pores over the review in detail, but only really gets bothered by his description as Sweaty, pudgy, slack-mouthed Paul McCartney trying to get across what essentially turned out to be little more than bland easy-listening. He asks Linda to put less butter in her cooking. 

She wonders to Paul if she should try and make amends with Lillian, but he dissuades her, telling her that if someone reveals themselves in that way, it’s safer never to have anything to do with them again.

But then Lillian dies, struck down by the asthma that had strangled her lungs for years. Linda says little about it in front of Paul, but night after night she has terrible dreams where she is surrounded by the sound of laboured breathing in multi-tracked stereo, culminating in an image of Lillian’s face, pale and sweating, her mouth opening to say something before Linda abruptly wakes up. She needs a joint early in the morning after these dreams to chase away the feelings they bring up.

Linda talks herself out of her unhappy feelings by reminding herself that her New York life is in the past, and Lillian dying is a symbol of that. She is on her path and will keep moving forward. And she and Paul are so busy, the path is no trouble to follow.

Linda remembers little about the jam session with John in LA. She doesn’t usually take cocaine but on nights like this, when she’ll be out till all hours and still have to get up with the kids the next morning, it’s the only thing that’ll keep her going and she doesn’t want to miss the excitement. All she can remember clearly is John telling Paul to get her off the keyboards so Stevie Wonder can play. Fair enough, she concludes. 

The next day is calmer, sitting by the pool in that bizarre villa John lives in with poor, sweet, sodden Harry Nilsson and the other rock stars. Linda is distracted from Paul and John’s tentative reunion by May, whose niceness she can’t help but distrust. May is very pretty and Linda is sure she sees her looking at Paul. Normally Linda would drape her arms over her husband to make her claim clear, but speaking with John is one of the few times that Paul prefers to be untouched by her. So she allows May to play with Mary and Stella and asks her many questions, trying to figure out if she can be trusted. 

There seems to be two versions of events as to why John and Yoko are living separately, one from Yoko, delivered with sad gravitas, and one from John via May and others, delivered with brio. Paul talks about it endlessly and changes his position day to day. The dissections and speculations remind Linda of 1969 and she alternates between obsessive curiosity and boredom. May was John and Yoko’s assistant, is she really an independent entity in all this? She seems very young and rather helpless around John. Her greatest asset seems to be her ability to manage his life, but she doesn’t seem to be able to manage to get him to pay her a great deal of attention. It reminds Linda of how people described his marriage to Cynthia.

She tries to talk to John about the upcoming legal dissolution of the Beatles, telling him to contact her brother. He listens vaguely but doesn’t seem to take it in. He alternates between defensiveness and helplessness, and she is struck again by his insecurity. 

When Linda first came to London, John was the Beatle she wanted most to meet, but when she finally did, she was vaguely repulsed by his weakness. If Paul needed a mother, John needed an entire matriarchy. Their personalities were the complete opposite of what she expected and falling for Paul was a no-brainer. By the time she discovered, in that first year in Scotland, that Paul could be just as weak, she was fixed on her path.

While they are all walking on the beach, Linda briefly looks away from May and the children  and sees Paul and John walking ahead, two twin-like silhouettes against the glaring sand. She feels strangely unmoored. For a moment, she feels as though the two could just keep walking into the distance, away from her and the children and May and Harry and Richie, and simply disappear over the horizon.

They visit the couple again a few times in their place in New York, and while Linda can’t quite bring herself to warm to May, she enjoys the relaxed red wine-and-weed evenings they have together, the men reminiscing about Liverpool and Hamburg. After these visits Paul is quiet for hours, his face taking on that closed quality it does when he is shuffling ideas in his brain. 

There are hints at possible collaboration, but John is like a scared cat, any sudden movements will send him fleeing. He tentatively agrees to join them in New Orleans for the Venus and Mars recordings and Paul is energised by the news. It’s only years later that Linda realises how strongly the idea impacts him, how he has a buzz and fire about him in those weeks that, if she is being honest with herself, he hasn’t had in years. 

She doesn’t recognise this at the time, however. Much of her mind is preoccupied with what it will be like having May with them in New Orleans, if Linda will have to keep a close eye on her. It all comes to nothing anyway - John doesn’t show and they are all too busy in New Orleans to really think that much about it. Shortly after the album is recorded, they hear that he has returned to Yoko and they are having a baby.

Becoming a vegetarian is not difficult for Linda. The day Martha’s puppies killed a couple of the chickens in Scotland she wept, uncharacteristically. As time goes on, her passionate love of animals has only increased. It’s like a layer of denial has been ripped away and all she can hear in her mind’s ear is the frantic screaming of pigs before a bolt is blasted through their heads, of cattle being crushed and minced, of dogs in China ending up in a chow mein. The idea of anyone killing an animal upsets her as much as the idea of someone killing her children. She looks in Cinnamon’s eyes and sees the universe. Paul tells her a quote “All the treasures of the earth lie between the eyes of a horse”. It’s the beauty of the horses that convinces him to join her in giving up meat too. Riding together across the Sussex fields remains one of their greatest pleasures. 

Becoming a vegetarian and encouraging others to do the same fires up an immense sense of purpose in her. It helps that Paul is just as enthusiastic, to the point that he sometimes implies to people that it was his idea first.

Pick up your tiny burden

1987

Linda has been bouncing with enthusiasm since she got the idea to write the vegetarian cookbook. Planning the book helps her quiet the mental images she keeps getting of animals being murdered over and over again to fill the bellies of humans. She thinks If this book stops even one animal from being killed, it’ll be worth it.

Paul finds reasons to be present a lot when she is meeting with her co-writer. He seems distrustful, even though the man is much younger than her and clearly not remotely interested. She wishes Paul would go away. It’s not that he’s impeding them exactly, but his habit of running commentary is distracting and seems to bog the project down in theories before they can get started on the actual writing. Linda does not like to overthink things - once she has something in mind she likes to get stuck in right away. But Paul has all sorts of ideas - some of them good, she’ll allow - that he wants to discuss before they can start working properly. She wishes she could just tell him to bugger off but he’s in the kind of mood that she knows he wouldn’t take it light-heartedly.

“This is Linda’s little project, but it belongs to the whole family as well. Being vegetarian is really important to all of us.”

The co-writer nods, not really knowing what to say. Linda swallows her irritation at the use of the word ‘little’.

More than once, Paul has some kind of mild emergency that requires Linda’s presence right away, forcing her to cancel a meeting with the co-writer at the last minute. Once, when she has to drop the man off at the side of the road, he ruefully says:

“My grandmother had bad health and my bachelor uncle took care of her. Whenever he’d go away for a night she always got worse and he had to come back.”

At the time, hurried and flustered, she assumes that he is just commiserating, telling her about a similar situation where someone had to abandon their obligations to tend to a loved one. It’s only several days later that she half-realises the bite behind the words. She immediately smokes a joint to get the significance out of her mind.

Notes

Chapter and heading titles from the following songs:

Gold Dust Woman by Fleetwood Mac
This Woman’s Work by Kate Bush (2011 Director’s Cut re-record)
Love You Madly by Cake
The Backseat of My Car by Paul & Linda McCartney
The Housewife’s Lament by Anne Hills & Cindy Mangsen
Living Proof by Cat Power
Red Wine at Noon by Joy of Cooking
There's No Other Way by Blur
There Is A War by Leonard Cohen

Story playlist

Chapter Text

Rolling over like a great big cloud

1985

Linda’s dream landscape is starting to become more vivid than reality. It is always the landscape in Scotland, sometimes crossed with the beaches of Westchester County.

A flower that grew in the Sussex garden last week is abstract, without size or smell, but the roadsides of the Kintyre peninsula in summer are in the centre of her amygdala - messy rows of quaking grass, queen anne’s lace, loosestrife and ragwort. The central drama of existence is crowning the hill and seeing the Irish Sea suddenly, a blunt blue stripe across the whitened horizon broken by the tip of Torr Head in Northern Ireland, the sea enclosed by cliffs of old red sandstone that have existed long before there was even a channel for St George to claim. A section of old stone wall emerging from roadside grasses is the fulcrum of the universe, weighted down with toadflax and bramble, blocks of grey flint hiding behind dropping dandelions. The dream landscape is always in full sun. The young brain imprints and collects every sunny day and embanks it into its supply store, even though the same brain still clearly remembers the many drained afternoons of endless mist and humidity. But these afternoons are peremptorily dismissed by the mapper of dreamscapes. Only drowsy crossroads heavy with flies, bees and fumitory, soaked in gentle sunlight, make their way into her nightly adventures.

One by one, the children are growing up. Heather is already an adult, and Mary and Stella are teenagers. Only lovely James is still a child, innocent as milk. 

Linda’s children are her dearest friends, and she is happy to see them growing up, making their first, brave steps towards adulthood. Still, she carries an obscure feeling of loss. The change from childhood to adolescence is like the change from spring to summer: slowly building up in the gradual emergence of buds and blossoms, before it all erupts in aggressive, frightening greenery and the innocent frozen earth is swept away. Too much at once.

All of this can be broken

1975-1976

This tour is enormous, an impeccable success. Linda is growing tired of living away from nature. Stadiums, hotels, press conferences and private jets, even with their friendly family junk scattered around them, feel oppressive and artificial compared with the rejuvenating green of home. She doesn’t mind the British weather, in fact she embraces the rain for the greenness it gifts the landscape. She tries to find natural spaces wherever they travel, but frequently doesn’t have the time. 

Many times, while waiting through soundchecks and the other bits of requisite foofaraw before a show, she mentally takes herself to a spot on the banks of the River Ouse, not far from the Sussex farm. An archway of holly trees: a polished dark cavern fringed with new luminous beech leaves, still slightly crumpled from their buds. Blackcaps, blackbirds, robins, chaffinches and wrens all compete for sound, while she stands knee-deep in the green of nettles, cow parsley and red-branched meadowsweet. Or she remembers a wild meadow in Scotland: two song thrushes volleying their paired melodies back and forth, a pigeon cooing, blackbirds whistling in the background, recently returned swallows sweeping over the grass full of dandelion seed heads and hidden cuckoo flowers.

She mentions this to Paul one night after a show, and they talk for a while about their favourite natural places. Paul frequently speaks of Oglet Shore on the outskirts of Speke where he birdwatched as a boy. On a good day, if you looked in the right direction, you could see the Isle of Man on the sea beyond the river. He brought Linda to visit the shore once, but she found the visible presence of factories across the wide, brown Mersey off-putting. She prefers the Dam woods, full of rhododendrons, where the wind isn’t as fierce and she can hear the birds. She finds herself wishing she could have been a childhood friend of Paul’s, joining him on his cycles out to Hale Head lighthouse, watching and cataloguing lapwings, curlews and gulls.

Paul talks more about his childhood that year because Jim is dying. Both of them try to pretend it isn’t happening, but the old man’s long face is more sunken every time they visit, his arthritis more crippling, to the extent that he can barely move. Despite their frequent contretemps with Angie, Linda has to concede that she takes good care of her husband. The last time the family visits Jim’s home, Paul spends some time alone with his father before Linda comes in with the children, carefully, one by one. Heather is old enough to be aware of what is going on, though even Mary, at seven, seems to understand the import of the occasion, if her solemn dark eyes are anything to go by. Stella is too young really, but she sits quietly in imitation of her sisters.

Linda wants to look away from Jim’s skull-like face, drained by pain, and internally chastises herself for her squeamishness. She forces herself to take the old man’s hand and speak softly to him even as her body, secure in rude health, longs to leap away and run from this room of death. Paul sits at the other side of the bed, and seeing her take Jim’s hand, he does the same, though tentatively, as if he fears his father will snatch it away and berate him. Jim looks at Linda for a long time with clouded eyes, but it seems as though he doesn’t recognise her. He turns to Paul and speaks, so quietly and strongly-accented that Linda can hardly understand a word. All she can pick out is a reference to Mike, and to “your mother”. 

They are at a glitzy launch party for the new album when Paul gets the news. He returns from a phone call looking exactly the same, smiling and bantering with the guests, but Linda can immediately see in his eyes what has happened. She doesn’t say anything about it until later when he brings it up, but while they are still at the party she makes sure to hold him closely every way she can.

Linda is secretly relieved when Paul says he can’t possibly go to the funeral. Angie has given him permission not to attend, saying that it will just be a media circus. Paul himself says that they simply can’t cancel the Europe tour dates, but Linda knows that the real reason - or at least one of the real reasons - is that he couldn’t bear to be photographed crying. 

Paul pours himself into work, trying to make the tour shows as good as they possibly can be. Even after record ticket sales and stratospheric chart positions, he still frets and worries that the audience will not enjoy the concerts. Linda puts aside any irritation she feels at his fussing and does her damndest every night to bring up the energy of each performance. She dances, whoops, leads the audience in clap-alongs, seizes Denny in thrilled hugs, and sings like her life depends on it. The audience reaction, night after night, is marvellous and she can see Paul practically levitating with delight at every wall of cheers. 

The first show in America is the one he worries about most, so Linda and the band put everything they’ve got into it. It’s a triumph, with three encores and screams so deafening Linda gets a taste of what it must have been like to live through Beatlemania. After the final encore, the band piles into the dressing room, scattering energy like glitter as they towel off, drink water and high-five each other. She looks over and sees Paul wearing a strangely vacant expression, before he suddenly collapses in weeping.

Now I’ve lost that good ol’ man, I’m miles away from home

1980

Linda hates Japan.

She has been in a luxury hotel with the children for four days now, but without Paul. He is still sitting in a jail cell while these awful people decide what they’re going to do with him. Her brother and the British consulate assure her that it will all be OK, that they’ll get him out, but they said that on the first day when he was arrested and he’s still in there.

She told the maid that came to clean their room to leave. She’d rather clean herself than have another one of these people touch her belongings. The woman didn’t understand English but got the message, walking backwards out of the room, bowing. Linda can’t stand the bowing. It’s so fake, so phony, trying to act all submissive when she knows these people only want to destroy her and her husband. She remembers the choice comments her father made about the Japanese and their conduct during the war and gets even angrier. She hates the food, those dreadful water soups full of meat. She hates the elderly men she sees polishing cars and sweeping the sidewalk from the window of the hotel. She hates those ridiculous blocky traditional sandals they wear, and the bizarre toe-glove socks that go with them. She has no interest in visiting a shrine, or an onsen, or a geisha bar, and will snap the head off the next dignitary that suggests it. 

The rest of the band have all scarpered, and if not for the company of the children, she would go mad. Though only ten and eight, Mary and Stella are mature enough to help with looking after James and keeping him occupied. She tries not to go on too many long rants in front of the girls, but their almost adult-like sympathy helps. Linda is vague with them about the exact reason Paul is in jail - although she thinks they are probably old enough to hear about pot, she’s not sure Paul would agree. Not that it would be any great surprise - while not making a habit of it, she and Paul have smoked in front of the children a number of times, and they have been arrested for possession before. Either way, the girls don’t really ask and take Linda’s assertion that the Japanese are out to get them at face value.

Hovering behind Linda’s rage is a terrible feeling of guilt. Most of that bag of weed was for her. She’d scored it in New York just before they left and was so excited about it, hearing great stories about its smoothness and potency. One good thing about travelling to the States is getting high-quality marijuana. Of course, Paul would have partaken too and they would have rolled joints together, but she has always been a heavier smoker than him. If things were fully just, it should be Linda in that jail cell. But there was no way Paul would even consider letting that happen. 

She remembers the horrible moment when she realised he was being taken aside. Wrangling the children as usual, she was distracted as they all trooped through airport customs, not even noticing that an official had opened one of their suitcases. Suddenly she felt the air in the room change, and she looked up from where she was untangling James’ bib, to see Paul’s face suddenly looking white and drawn. An official wearing white gloves ( why do they all wear white gloves in this country? ) placed a hand on his lower back and guided him to a nearby door. He looked back before he was drawn in and said in a too-loud voice “Don’t worry Lin, they just want to ask me something.” She hasn’t seen him since.

They have been cautioned and arrested many times while on tour, but it never seemed serious or important before. The previous times, they were never separated, were always together while talking to policemen or customs officers in LA, Barbados, Sweden. This is different.

Now she is stuck in this stupid hotel room with its stupid bamboo mats that you can’t wear shoes on, its stupid, ridiculously low bed and stupid, ridiculously small teacups, waiting to hear something, anything about when Paul will be released. They have told her that she can visit him tomorrow and she doesn’t know how she is going to make it till then. Of course the Japanese would be a nightmare to deal with; it’s the same nation that produced Yoko, that impossible woman who has caused Paul nothing but trouble for the past decade. 

Not only does Linda have no Paul, but she has no weed. It’s the longest she’s gone in years without smoking a joint and she feels sick and irritable. She gazes out of the window at the unbearable concrete jungle of Tokyo and curses the country, again. Newspaper reports have indicated that Paul could face a seven-year jail sentence for drug smuggling. Though her brother reassures her that that definitely won’t happen , her mind keeps wandering to but what if it does ? She has a treasonous thought: What will become of me ?

Love’s labour’s never lost

1976-1977

Linda tells Paul she is ready to have another baby while cutting his hair one evening. She likes to cut their hair in matching styles; long at the back, short and fringed at the front, twin black and blonde. It's a style Paul cut hers in first, in Morocco some years ago. He said he was going for a Bowie look. She wasn't sure about it at first but grew to like it, especially when he had his cut to match.

“I’d like to have another baby,” she says softly, snipping a strand above his ear.

He turns around so quickly he nearly pokes himself in the face with the scissors.

“Really?”

“Careful!” she laughs. “Do you want to have an eye out?”

He turns his head back, smiling at her in the mirror.

“This is great news. Are you…?”

“No Paul, I’m not pregnant.” she chuckles, brushing some stray hairs from the back of his neck. “But I’d like to be. Again.”

It’s been six years since Stella and Linda finally feels ready to embark on the voyage again. Enough time has passed that the horrible feeling of fear and sterility that swept over her whenever she thought about that pregnancy has faded. Part of her wants a non-negotiable reason to slow down their touring schedule a bit. And since Jim’s passing, she has felt a longing to bring forth new life, to counteract the misery in the old man’s deathbed face that still sometimes arises in her dreams. 

Paul kisses her rough-skinned hand, a look of gratitude in his eyes.

“Well, if you’re not yet, we’d better get to work, hadn’t we?”

She doesn’t finish the haircut.

Medics scold Linda for being pregnant at the “geriatric” age of thirty-five, but she ignores them. She knows her own body and what it can handle. The girls are incandescent with excitement, talking endlessly about the names they want to bestow on their new sibling. Even the dogs seem to sense the impending new arrival, laying their heads protectively across her stomach long before she starts to show.

The night James is born, Linda tracks the progress of the day by the sound of birdsong outside the Avenue Clinic in London. Before evening, she hears the bustling wren and the chaffinch; at sunset she hears clattering rooks and gentle shimmering swallows; dusk falls with the sound of frantic blackbirds, begging the darkness not to come.

In the immoderate happiness that follows the arrival of the golden baby boy, Linda thinks more and more about vegetarianism. She almost feels guilty for bringing another human into the world, even one as beautiful and perfect as James, and resolves to find more ways to persuade people to stop eating meat.

A creature void of form

1980

Looking back, Linda is never really sure if that day in December 1980 actually happened at all. The memories are vivid, but disjointed - a sequence of images and feelings with little connective tissue between them. The only visual that remains horribly consistent is Paul’s face: a hollow, emptied expression, white and blasted as nuclear winter.

She remembers driving back from dropping the children to school and wondering why he is standing at the doorway to the farmhouse, unusually still. As the car gets closer she sees his face and has an impulse to look away, so terrible is the sight. She knows, before he says anything, exactly what has happened. She doesn’t even remember what words he uses to tell her. Her eyes are blinded with tears and she clings to him as desperately as she did in the early days. He doesn’t move, doesn’t raise his arms around her, doesn’t drop his head to her neck. He remains stock still, a heavy block in her arms.

Paul goes to the studio, as arranged. She doesn’t try to stop him. Work is always what he turns to when his feelings are too much to handle. He stays the full day and is ambushed by sleazy journalists when he exits that evening. Linda is choked with rage at the press response to his reaction. Even those people, who don’t know him like she does, can hardly miss the obvious signs of shock in his face, the dreadful emptiness in his eyes. She thinks that his comment, inappropriate as it may be deemed by the press, is more honest and real than the carefully plotted tributes spooling out of the mouths of every two-bit hack that once brushed against John’s elbow. 

He doesn’t shed a single tear until they are all together as a family that evening, watching TV coverage. Even then, he barely makes a sound, just stares ahead with tears running in thin waterfalls down his face, only breaking his silence to loudly curse the name of the suspected murderer. Linda sits leaning against him, holding James in her lap with one arm, Mary to her right holding her hand and Stella and Heather sitting at her feet. The girls cry too, but out of them only Stella dares to take her father’s hand, which he grips gratefully. 

Linda feels unreal, as though all this is happening outside her body. The TV broadcasts platitude after platitude, weaving a pretty little tale of the twentieth century’s greatest warrior for peace which is so far from reality that Linda feels like throwing her shoes at the screen. John was a beautiful soul, but he was not Christ. This rubbish is all Yoko’s doing , she thinks. Always quick with the media narrative, that one . She immediately feels guilty for her churlishness. After all, poor Yoko has just lost her husband, whatever state their marriage may have been in at the time. And little Sean has lost the only father he’ll ever have.

Eventually she persuades Paul to take a sleeping pill. It’s one-thirty in the morning and the children have all gone to bed but he is still fixed in his armchair, his eyes starting to close but unable to stop looking at the TV. 

“Go up to bed first, then take it.” she says softly, holding the pill and a small glass of water.

He looks past her.

“Please, Paul.”

He looks back at her. Her heart burns painfully to see his beautiful face stripped to such utter desolation.

“Can’t I take it here?” His voice is tiny, like a child’s.

“You could, but then you’d end up falling asleep down here and that’ll screw up your back. I’m pretty strong, but not strong enough to carry you upstairs.” She smiles a little, softly, kindly.

His eyes drift again. “Hey. I can still fit into my Hard Day’s Night suit, you know,” he grumbles, but with no heat in his voice.

She takes his arm. “Come on. You need to sleep. There’s nothing else you can do.”

The words sound brutal, but she says them with infinite softness. He rises, almost automatically, and lets her lead him upstairs.

Half an hour later he is asleep. Even unconscious, his face still wears that dreadful wasteland expression, like a landscape exploded and devastated after a war.

Linda slips out of the house and goes to the stables. She needs to be near the horses. She walks into Cinnamon's stall and leans against the mare’s long, solid neck. All day she has been trying not to think about Lillian, but she cannot hold it back any more. She sees her friend’s face in better times: smiling warmly at her across a table, running to meet her at a neighbourhood cafe to tell the gossip from last night, sitting up late in Linda’s apartment, playing with Heather and talking about music. All that warmth and happiness, torpedoed by fate and vengeance and cowardice, and put beyond repair by death.

Linda wraps her arms around Cinnamon’s neck. The horse turns her head slightly, touching Linda’s hair with the velvet-soft skin of her lips. Linda weeps and weeps, her whole body shaking with lost breath and the suppressed sadness of a lifetime. She weeps for Lillian, for John, for Paul, for her mother, for Sean and Yoko, for Julian and Cynthia and Mimi, for George and Richie, for Jim, for mother Mary, for Mal and Keith and Jimmy, for everyone in the world falling apart at this moment. Nothing will ever be the same again.

Is this the midway

1978 - 1979

After James is born, Linda loses interest in sex. She is just too tired.

Paul is patient. She had a similar phase after Stella’s birth. But that only lasted a couple of months. Now it’s been six and Linda feels like she could possibly never do it again. Such an idea would have been unthinkable even three years ago. Paul has always had a vibrant appetite and Linda has always been happy to satisfy it - when she had the energy. But nowadays her lifeforce is diluted, stretched thin across multiple things. Between looking after the children, the farm, the household, touring, performing, planning and organising trips, her research into promoting vegetarianism - every day is starting to feel longer and longer. And all of these days are spent with Paul by her side. By the time she gets to bed she wouldn’t mind a bit of Paul-free time. 

If she could somehow separate his body and touch from his mind and voice, perhaps she could do it again. It’s not that he annoys her during the day, at least not usually. It’s just that he’s so insistently there , always thinking, talking, planning, buzzing around like a hummingbird. She has to manage him as much as she does the children - more so in some cases - and it’s getting harder to switch back to thinking of him as a man - as her man - when they retire to bed, either in their own home or in a rented place on tour. It’s usually easier to peacefully smoke joints while watching TV or reading, then gradually drift off to sleep on their own sides of the bed. She is aware that she should probably do something about it - the webs of women’s advice are full of cautionary tales about the fate of the women who ‘let the passion die’. They’re too young to already be giving up on their physical relationship. It’s something she would have worried herself sick over if it happened a few years ago. But now she is just too tired to care. When she has to get up during the night anyway to feed and tend to James, after a full and exhausting day, how can she be blamed for wanting to prioritise sleep?

The longer it goes on, the harder it gets to Do Something about it. Linda feels a little resentful that apparently the responsibility for getting their sex life back falls on her shoulders, along with every other bloody thing in this house. She supposes she should be grateful that Paul doesn’t pester her like a thoughtless teen. But it starts to weigh on her, laying by his side in the dark, knowing that he is feeling abandoned but not having the will or energy to do anything about it. All she wants to do is sleep.

They see John and Yoko a little bit more than they let on to the press, but not that much more. One weekend in New York, a weekend where they leave the children with Linda’s family and spend some time alone for the first time in years, they have dinner with the other couple. Afterwards, Paul keeps them both up late in the hotel, sitting in bed, smoking and talking about John.

“He’s so thin. Did you see Yoko ordering for him? I hate that.”

“I know,” replies Linda, wishing she could go to sleep. “But at least they’re not eating meat, not much anyway.”

“I don’t know if they’re eating anything at all,” he grumbles, flicking the channel of the muted TV. “It’s fine to be healthy, but it can’t be healthy to be as thin as they are. He was always a strong guy, when we were kids. Big shoulders, broad chest. He’s not built to have so little meat on him.”

“Hasn’t affected her knockers, anyway,” Linda grins, reaching for the joint.

Paul laughs, putting an arm around her shoulders. “Surely hasn’t. That was a pretty transparent jumper or whatever she had on. Not that I was looking!”

Linda chuckles. “I wouldn’t blame you, to be honest. They were a bit hard to avoid!”

“Like a bullet,” he agrees.

The levity only lasts a moment, before he is back on the subject of John’s health, like a concerned father.

“I’m just worried…” He nibbles at his thumbnail, his face showing his thoughts shuffling.

She nudges his leg. “What?”

He removes his thumb. “I’m worried he’s using again. You know. Heroin.”

She turns to look at him, incredulous. He answers her disbelieving expression.

“It just reminds me a lot of ‘69, you know. You were there - remember how thin he was, how out of it? Her, too. His face looks so… I don’t know the right word - Sunken? Something’s wrong. It’s either junk, or too much coke, or he’s sick.”

Linda does remember ‘69. But she can’t believe it this time.

“He couldn’t be on H! They have a baby in the house.”

Paul looks back at the TV. “Maybe… They do have like six apartments though. Plenty of space to shoot up far away from the nursery.”

Linda shakes her head, refuses to believe it. “They couldn’t be. Sean is everything to them. Well, to John anyway.”

Paul takes back the joint, takes a deep inhale. Watching the smoke trail out of his mouth and nostrils, he says: “I hope so. I really hope so. I just have a bad feeling.”

It’s not the only time Paul fusses and worries about John. When he tries to call him, it’s a crapshoot as to whether he'll actually get to talk to the man himself or get put off by Yoko or one of her minions. Sometimes they have good conversations, sometimes very bad ones that leave Paul white-faced and silent for hours, retreating to the home studio. Linda is frustrated by so many aspects of this whole situation. Why does Paul always have to call John, why can’t John lift up the damn phone once in a while? Paul excuses it with John’s always been like that, you always have to call him, to which Linda can only answer Why do you always have to call him? Why does it always have to be like that? Paul has no answer.

Why, when they do call each other, they never talk about the one thing that they really want to, (if Paul’s opinion is anything to go by) namely, working together again? Why, when it is so obvious that Paul will never be satisfied by any other collaborator, and when John’s ‘retirement’ is obviously bunk and a cover-up for his own loss of creativity? Why are they both making this so hard?

If Linda was less tired, if she didn’t have so much to do with James, if thinking about promoting vegetarianism didn’t take up so much space in her brain, she might be more forceful in getting Paul to actually communicate with John, helping them both to get over themselves, to ignore Yoko and just talk to one another, properly. But she did all this before, at the start. All the listening and hand-holding and support as Paul wavered between anger and heartbreak over John’s unpredictability. She doesn’t have it in her to do it again. Not unless one or both of them takes the leap and does something to make it easier.

Notes

Chapter and heading titles from the following songs:

Kingdom of Rain by The The ft. Sinéad O’Connor
The Big Sky by Kate Bush
Devil’s Spoke by Laura Marling
The Captain by I Draw Slow
Made by Maid by Laura Marling
Shelter from the Storm by Bob Dylan
Don’t Wake the Children by I Draw Slow

Story playlist

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Chapter Text

Some moments that I've had

1987

A gentle spring day in the garden at Peasmarsh. Linda looks at the budding oak tree through a cloud of smoke. Innervisions is playing on the stereo, the speakers pushed up against the open sliding door and the music spilling out on the patio. James is at a friend’s house and she misses him. It feels a bit silly to admit that her best friend is her nine-year old son. But it’s true. He is a pure soul, still unembarrassed to snuggle up to her and tell her what’s on his mind. He is as sensitive as Paul but much simpler with it - he doesn’t yet put up walls and masks, or bury himself in activity to prevent himself feeling upsetting things. She wants him to come back so they can embark on their annual ritual of going up to the woods to listen out for the woodpeckers, the sound of their drumming like tree trunks creaking. 

Linda takes pride that they have raised the children to be open-hearted, that they have avoided the smothering emotional restrictions she and Paul were raised to expect as normal. It hasn’t made life easy, especially when Stella has made her will known, but it’s been worth it.

How they all grew up so fast is beyond her. It feels like just a few days ago that she was slotting tiny Stella into a makeshift playpen on the open-top tour bus they used for the first European tour. It doesn’t even feel that long since she and Paul were taking countless photographs of Mary’s squished baby face in Scotland, both of them speechless and amazed at what they had made. And James, he might as well have been born an hour ago for how quickly the time has passed. Soon he will be a teenager too, growing a foot overnight, his body struggling to accommodate the unspeakably speedy acquisition of an adult skeleton.

The years have disappeared in a rushed cloud of activity. What have they been doing with themselves all this time? What haven’t they been doing? Endless nights in studios and on stage, creating music with different faces - the Dennys, Henry, Jimmy, Geoff, Joe, Laurence, countless other session players. The many faces drift by. Travel - on buses, jets, cars, yachts - heading to America, Europe, Australia, Jamaica, Morocco, Nigeria, even rotten, terrible Japan. Travel for recording, for touring, for holidays, travel created via countless phone calls and letters and conversations. Projects - films, artworks, her photography book, Paul’s endless extracurriculars, musicals, other people’s albums, idea after idea tumbling through the years, many realised, many not, many half-realised and sitting on a shelf somewhere. Parties, dinners, launches, galas, award ceremonies, films, plays, gigs - event after event, a sequence of glittery, glamorous nights full of exciting people and she and Paul always side by side, she always holding his arm. 

Linda loved the buzz and excitement of this life, even with the small children, for the first eight or so years, but since they stopped touring and she has had a chance to catch her breath, to stay put in Sussex and Scotland and take holidays only when they want to, she has become less interested in the high life. She doesn’t even really want to go to London that often, unless it’s absolutely necessary. She’s certainly no less busy here on the farm, with all the housework that needs doing, not to mention the many administrative tasks that fall on her shoulders, but she prefers to be busy in one place now, rather than dashing all over the world. Part of her wishes she could have had a life like this when the girls were younger. But she was younger then too, she still had the energy to try and get everything out of life, and she wouldn’t have missed the studio and concert nights for the world. At least she has had many quality years with James as a toddler, steady and secure on the farm.

Though she would never admit it aloud, one upside of John’s death and the Japan bust is that it put paid to Paul touring for many years, and thus freed her up from the stage. Now that she has had some time away from it, she finds that she rarely misses it. In her heart of hearts Linda never really wanted to be a superstar. It was magical being on stage, and she can admit that she enjoyed the attention and adulation of a crowd, but it was also too much - too loud, too intense, too overwhelming. Her nerves never really left her and the endless sniping of the critics was a nightmare. Not so much for her - Linda let most of it roll off her back - but for Paul. He sees Linda as an extension of himself so when critics maligned her playing or her voice or even her facial expressions, they might as well have been saying those things directly about Paul himself.

But Paul is suffering for not being able to tour, to play for an audience. He bravely carries on, immersing himself in project after project, be it an album or a film or something else, but Linda can see that an essential part of him is withering for the lack of an audience. He gets moody and has occasional bursts of temper that she mostly ignores. She can also tell that in the last couple of years he’s been drinking more than he should, although not nearly to the extent as he did after the Beatles breakup. She sympathises with him but also secretly slightly despises him for missing performing so much. It’s like a part of him has never grown up, never evolved past the show-off little boy banging the piano for his relatives. It’s a treasonous thought and she tries not to indulge it. 

Things are different to how they were in 1971, though. Sympathetic as she is to Paul, Linda is not willing to embark on live concerts just for the sake of it, just for him. The thought of trying to assemble yet another band, after the countless betrayals over the years, is intolerable. Paul is wounded by the way in which, one-by-one, the men he considered his friends dropped off and away, some selling stories to tabloids on their way out. Linda has no sympathy for their points of view. They should all consider themselves lucky to have had a chance to work with Paul, no matter the circumstances. But that doesn’t stop her missing them, Denny especially. The three of them had been best friends for a while, a tight and loyal unit, at least when Jo Jo wasn’t around to drip poison in Denny’s ear. Some of Linda’s happiest tour memories are of singing with Denny, the two of them sharing a microphone and warm smiles and sometimes even an unexpected kiss in the corner of the stage, something which Linda didn’t consider romantic and which they never talked about but which increased the sense of intimacy between them.

It’s painful and hard to think about the people to whom she was once close that have betrayed them and are now out of their lives. Linda is not lonely - she has the children, and despite what Paul says to journalists, they do have friends outside of the family. But since Lillian she has never had a friend that she could really talk to. It was the price of marrying a famous person, she supposes, and it doesn’t trouble her most of the time. 

The brief period before they married, before they became PaulandLinda, often comes to her mind these days. She fondly remembers walking around New York in late 1968, she the tour guide, still with her own life to potentially return to. Bringing Paul, anonymous in a beard, to all her favourite venues and cafés and galleries. Laughing as she went to collect some negatives and instructed Heather to tell Paul what subway stop to get off at for their apartment. At the time she thought she wanted nothing more than to get out of that life, full of one-night stands and uncertainty. But now, even acknowledging its unsettled quality, she remembers that time chiefly for it being when she last felt fully herself. Part of her wants to still be that girl in a brown raincoat, standing on the corner of West 67th street in a sweeping cold wind, one hand holding her boyfriend’s, the other her daughter’s. Nostalgia makes everything about those days seem innocent.

Linda stretches, shakes off the memories. She dislikes thinking too much and is grateful for the distraction when a small bee lands on her finger. The moment coincides with a growly bassline in Living for the City that she particularly likes. Smiling, she watches the insect with fascination, its small black body flanked with tiny yellow pouches of pollen, its slightly hairy legs warily stepping over her skin. She turns her hand slightly and the bee flicks its wing, a universe contained in the tiny web of creases in the translucent surface. Mikey the cat looks up from his snoozing in the grass and inspects the bee with his golden eyes. When it flies off, the movement coincides with a ring of the doorbell inside - the friend’s mother has brought James home. Linda goes inside to greet them, gathering up her golden-hazed son in a bear hug.

The things you think are precious I can’t understand

1974

Linda is tough, but there are times when criticism gets to her. Especially when it’s to her face. 

They are in Nashville, trying to get a follow-up to Band on the Run off the ground, but the new band members are already proving to be difficult. Jimmy is completely unpredictable - the epitome of professionalism one day, a raving drunk the next. He and Denny gang up together and tease poor straight Geoff, who will insist on wearing his karate outfit to the studio and doesn’t touch drink or drugs. Sometimes Linda feels a pull of maternal care towards Jimmy - he is so young, after all - but most of the time she is just annoyed and frustrated by his antics. He’s already been arrested for crashing a car while drunk, which will affect his future US visa chances.

On this sultry Tennessee afternoon however, Jimmy has turned his violent tongue on her. The complaints echo Henry’s earlier ones almost word-for-word, delivered with the same drunkenness. Linda has just fluffed some harmony vocals - not her worst studio snafu by any measure, but it is enough to set Jimmy off.

“I’ve had enough of being stuck in this b-band with such an, an un-un-professional!” Jimmy slurs, his eyes unfocused and angry.

Linda looks over at Paul, but he doesn’t immediately react. It was the same with Henry. He always starts by letting the complainer say their piece, before intervening.

Jimmy pulls off his guitar, nearly dropping it out of his uncoordinated hands.

“You c-can’t sing, you can’t play, you slow us all down, and we all know why you’re still–”

Denny interrupts. “Jimmy, cool it. She’s not that bad.”

Not ‘good.’ she notices. Just ‘not that bad’ .

Geoff stays sitting completely still and silent, as if he believes that if he doesn’t move, everyone will forget he’s there.

She stands up for herself. She’s always been able to do that, and all the more so in the years since marrying Paul.

“I know I’m still kind of a beginner but I’ve come a long way and I’m trying my best! Denny has said it plenty of times,” - she looks over at him - “I’m a part of the sound of the band!”

Paul is looking down at his bass, seemingly lost in thought. She can’t get him to look at her.

“It was just one mess-up, I did it OK in rehearsals, let’s just try ag–”

“No!” yells Jimmy, leaping to his unsteady feet. His smooth, babyish face is twisted with the ravages of drink, yet to make their permanent mark. “It was the s-same last week, and last m-month, and the whole fucking time I’ve been playing with you! I’ve been on stage since I was sixteen, it’s an insult to expect me to play backup to some talentless sl–”

Denny, usually an incorrigible egger-on of Jimmy’s bad behaviour, instead intervenes to calm him down. He stands up abruptly and grabs the younger man’s arm, whispering something urgent in his ear. Jimmy stops speaking but doesn’t stop glaring at Linda. He places the guitar carefully on the ground - the most precise movement he has made since all this began - and looks over at Paul, like a child seeking validation from their father. But Paul is still miles away, rocking his head slightly, as though he is listening to music only he can hear.

Jimmy tosses his head away and stares back at Linda. His voice is a semi-coherent growl as he sways in place.

“It’s not just this part. You can’t play a note on that” - he indicates Linda’s Minimoog - “unless HE points the whole fucking thing out to you first.” He jerks his head towards Paul. “That’s fine if you’re in the fucking kiddie school play, but this is supposed to be a BAND!” He is screaming now, and the volume of his voice, if not the content of his words, finally seems to get Paul’s attention.

Linda hates herself for it, but tears fill her eyes. The force of rage being bellowed her way is too much for even her thick skin to take.

Paul looks at her, sees her crying. His face doesn’t change, still carries that remote expression, but he finally speaks, interrupting Denny, who had come in with some opinions of his own.

“All right, that’s enough. We’re stopping for now.” Paul’s voice sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of a well. He stands up and starts walking towards the studio door. Linda follows, but he subtly brushes her off. Sometimes he gets like this, where he wants to be alone, to not even have her with him. Linda doesn’t like it, it makes her feel afraid. But she doesn’t push it, just returns to her piano seat and flops down unhappily.

Once Paul has gone, the fire seems to go out of Jimmy. He slumps in a corner, smoking a cigarette, but doesn’t leave the studio. Denny comes over to comfort Linda as she fights to stop the tears rolling down her face. Geoff walks gingerly out from behind his drum kit and sits nearby. 

They have been here many a time. The others don’t bullshit Linda, which she appreciates. They don’t pretend that her lack of innate musicality isn’t a problem sometimes. But she has been really trying, really working hard and felt as though she was getting better and better. Yes, she’s not confident enough to improvise but not all musicians are improvisers. Yes, she sometimes hits a bum note when singing, but so does Denny every now and then. Of course her timing and phrasing and range isn’t going to look like much compared to Paul, but that’s hardly a fair comparison. As amateur musicians go, she really isn’t that bad. And nothing the band says can really compare to Paul criticising her, which he has done. She still winces at the memory of the time he told her he could’ve had a band with Billy Preston instead of her. Even with his later apology, it still hurts. What has made her tearful this time around is Jimmy’s barely concealed implication that she is only being tolerated because she is Paul’s wife - close to the accusations in the press that she is nothing but a brain-dead ugly JAP trollop who has somehow tricked the genius of a generation into wasting his time on her. It’s vindictive rubbish, but it still hurts. 

She cries too because Paul’s disappearance has brought up the anxieties she feels about him that she usually keeps buried. The press and studio staff who only see his jolly public persona would be astonished to know how moody he can be. He usually isn’t excessively snappy, or if he is, she puts him back in his place pretty quickly - but, as she discovered in the first year, he can shut right down, like a television slowly turning off till only a static dot remains. Even the children can’t get through to him when he gets like this, and it’s the only time where he insists, like today, on going off alone. She really can’t bear it when he disappears - she worries he’ll get lost or waylaid by some nutter, or worse, start thinking too much.

Denny rubs her shoulders and speaks soothingly, sitting probably a little closer than he really should be, but she needs the comfort of a warm, familiar person so she lets him. Eventually he gets Jimmy to leave his corner and rejoin them, perhaps hoping for an apology, which isn’t forthcoming. But the rage has gone out of Jimmy for now, and his wide-eyed, slightly scared expression reminds Linda of a child wondering where Daddy has gone.

After some time, they (apart from Geoff) light up joints and the atmosphere relaxes a bit. Jimmy has sobered up somewhat and doesn’t seem inclined to pick on Linda any more.

“Do you know where he’s gone?” he asks her.

She shakes her head, letting herself be frank. “Not a clue. Like the other week when he ‘went for a walk’. He didn’t come back for three hours, I still don’t know where he went.” 

She half-laughs. Pressing a note on the Minimoog, she takes the joint in her left hand and breathes in the comforting smoke.

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know what’s going on in his head half the time.”

Geoff looks surprised at her frankness. It certainly is surprising of her to admit that, considering how close she and Paul appear. And they are close, it’s not phoney. But there are parts of him that she cannot reach and that he doesn’t want her to.

“Well, he probably won’t return at three am in the back of a copper car, so that’s something,” murmurs Jimmy, in a rare moment of self-awareness.

“No,” agrees Linda. "But still, he does drink more than he should, probably. I’d prefer if he just stuck to weed.”

She’s not often this open with the band - with anyone, really. It’s relatively rare to be in conversation with people without Paul around, anyway. But it doesn’t feel like an ordinary afternoon.

In for a penny, in for a pound. She looks around at the group, feeling comforted by their presence. 

“To be honest, I think he’s depressed. Underneath it all.”

“Depressed about what?” Denny looks affronted, as if he resents that there is something Linda knows about Paul that he doesn’t.

“Just generally. Band stuff. Not blaming anyone.” She looks around hastily. “It’s bigger than that. The whole Beatles thing nearly broke him. You can’t imagine how hard he took it. It wasn’t just a band, it was… all of life… or something…” She trails off, unable to get her thoughts into precise words.

The others seem to understand. The remainder of Wings sit in a huddle for the next hour, until they finally decide to wrap up for the day. Linda goes back to the farm they are renting and deals with the children for a while, until Paul finally turns up, having got a lift with one of the sound engineers after he returned to the studio.

‘Where the hell did you go?” she asks.

“Just for a walk,” he says distractedly. He spends the rest of the evening playing piano.

I’d rearrange just a day or two

1981 is not a good year. Neither is 1982.

There are good moments, sure - Linda could never find fault with living on a beautiful yacht anchored near Montserrat, and the children love the Caribbean too. And after worrying that Paul would fall apart entirely after December, he manages to - just about - keep going with work and projects and busyness. But while it’s better than the utter collapse of that first year on the farm, she’s not sure if this method of coping is entirely perfect either. 

She and he do speak about their grief, after a fashion, but he tends to talk in obsessive circles about the meaning of this or that thing John said in private or public, and Yoko doesn’t help with her frequent provocations, calling Paul into the ring for the Widow Wars. Paul fixates on trivial details about song authorship or his role in a particular cultural scene the Beatles were involved with, and while Linda supports his position, she frequently has to tell him to stop fixating and calm down. Sometimes he listens, sometimes not. 

After cutting down a little bit since the Japan arrest, they both don’t deny themselves weed after December. It’s the only way to stay sane, to take the harshness out of the world. People say the most outrageous things. One time Linda is compelled to write to a journalist, asking him to stop publicly wishing that it had been her husband who had been murdered instead of John. The man replies, full of contrition. Linda wonders why so many people seem to need to be reminded that she and Paul are human beings. 

Paul is calmed by weed, but he also drinks, and that makes him moody and difficult. He loses his temper, falls out with George, which Linda can live with, but also with Mike, which she is troubled by. She was wholly supportive of Paul’s decision to cut Angie and her daughter out of their lives after Jim’s death, but she is ambivalent about Paul becoming estranged from his only brother. Mike can be tricky too, she knows that, but she encourages Paul to make it up with him. They do, briefly, before becoming estranged again later. The pattern is similar to George, who likes to pop up in the media every now and then saying cruel things about Paul, before the two reconnect in private, as easy together as the day they met. Linda finds the push and pull disorientating, wondering what loyalties she will need to maintain this time, but lets it unfold naturally. If Paul is in a mood with someone, there’s no point trying to force a reconciliation, same as there is no point trying to get him to see a problem with someone he has decided to like. 

Besides, everyone is suffering. Richie is getting utterly lost in the bottle, and his new wife, nice as she is, is his co-conspirator. George’s religious obsessions appear to be taking over his entire life. Yoko seems to be falling back onto the needle, or on to a medical substitute anyway. Since the murder, everyone who knew John wears a haunted, emptied face that she recognises instantly. She probably wears it herself.

Paul suffers, and keeps himself busy. Of all the projects he works on, the one that seems to bring him the most comfort is the Rupert Bear song and animated movie. 

They sleep together more often now, after the post-James drought was broken by the jail separation of Japan. Especially after John’s death, Linda can’t bring herself to refuse Paul her bodily comfort, even if she is rarely in the mood. He takes what she has to offer with a kind of abstract gratitude, never asking too much of her, and is happy to lie quietly in her arms for a long time afterwards, gazing at the ceiling.

To make it all worse, that year darling Martha dies. The loyal, unkempt mascot of their foundational years, forever a warm and snuffling presence in Cavendish and Sussex and High Park, gives out her last breaths with her eyes glazed in pain. The only sound she makes is a strange and terrible whine Linda never heard from her before. The stiffness that overtakes her shaggy limbs after death is frightening, reducing her from a live, individual creature to a piece of earth, a stone. Paul strokes the rigid mass of fur with an almost resigned expression on his face. The children are inconsolable, even sixteen year old Heather. 

All the tragedy and loss draws Linda to think more and more about animals being treated cruelly and dying all over the world. In the wreckage of that year, some concrete ideas for the promotion of vegetarianism take greater shape in her mind. 

The sea’s the possibility

1990

Linda’s cookery book is out and the annoying round of press interviews is done. She can reflect on what she has achieved and be proud. The recipes are simple and tasty, with no skimping on butter and salt and all the other things that make food taste good. As she told the interviewers, if her book gets through to truckers’ wives, it’ll have served its purpose. 

Paul alternates between pride in her achievement and resentment that it takes her away from him, even briefly. But she is not going to stop here. The next step is more research into promoting or even manufacturing meat substitutes - the first generation of textured vegetable protein left a lot to be desired, but the boffins are improving it every year.

She slots one of her own copies of the cookbook into the large bookshelf in the sitting room in High Park, where she, Paul and James are spending a couple of weeks. James spent the day practising guitar in the yard, with Paul stopping in to join him from time to time, singing along with the boy’s high, still-unbroken voice. It’s funny - none of the girls have gravitated towards music, despite practically growing up in studio sessions. It’s as though they recognised from the start that music is what men do, and even the presence of their own mother on the keyboards did nothing to change that unconscious conviction. Even her children can’t see her as a real musician. The thought would have irritated her a few years ago, but she doesn’t really care now. She tried and did her very best, and ended up not being too bad at all, but at heart she is a listener and appreciator of music rather than a player. From the first time she heard rhythm and blues records as a child, she has enjoyed worshipping the sound of music, without the pressure of trying to create it. 

Linda passes her hand over the cookery book’s spine, and her eye is caught by a thick volume on the shelf below. The bookshelves up here in Scotland often hold books they haven’t looked at in years, a record of their (mostly Paul’s) literary tastes at a particular moment. This book is hers though - she got it delivered to Campbelltown post office in 1969 not long after it was published. It’s Lillian’s huge anthology of rock ‘n’ roll, the all-consuming work of her last few years.

Linda pulls out the hefty book. She hasn’t touched it in a long time, not since the year Lillian tore her to pieces in the press and then promptly died. Linda has been torn apart by other former friends since then, but of all of them Lillian is the one she feels most inclined to forgive.

She opens the acknowledgments page, sees her own name, before it became forever welded to Paul’s. She turns the book over and looks at her photograph of Lillian on the back cover. In her professional days, Linda rarely photographed women. She needed rapport with her subjects in order to truly see them in the viewfinder, and even before Paul she found other women hard to trust, hard to like. Warmth and intimacy with men was easy, but women brought up too many memories of painful Scarsdale small talk and the freezing that happened when an unknown social faux pas was committed. Her mother was the first woman Linda had trouble understanding - beautiful and vivacious, but more at home in a crowd of people than one-on-one. Sometimes it felt like her mother was a valuable oil painting rather than a person. Her father could be harsh and mean, but she could understand him. Her mother remained a mystery till the day her aircraft plunged horribly into Jamaica Bay.

But Lillian wasn’t hard to photograph. Linda knew Lillian, was able to talk to her straight from the moment they met about music, their shared passion. Lillian was direct and no-bullshit, but still warm and friendly. She reminded Linda of a man that way, maybe that was why Linda was always so at ease with her. Until the year that Linda’s soul was overtaken by Paul and Paul only, Lillian was the closest person to her, the one whose mind she could read and whose sentences she could finish. It took her many years - years after Lillian’s death, in fact - for Linda to acknowledge that she missed her.

She recalls an interview with Lillian from 1970 that Danny showed her some years before. It was completely different from the TV special review. Lillian acknowledges losing Linda, but without any of the anger and vengeance she would unleash later. Linda can remember a couple of lines by heart.

We used to gossip a lot. I wonder if she has someone to gossip with these days? I don’t. I miss her.

Linda looks down at the photo now, finally able to look at Lillian’s frank, open face without anger or regret. 

I missed you too, Lil, she says aloud, touching her photograph with her finger. Still do.

I didn't understand, I’m only hearing now

1989

Paul is going back on tour. After trying and failing to get Linda to join him, he is throwing himself into preparations. She is glad for it. These days, she is happy enough for them to do more things separately. After all, they are still each other’s first port of call and sounding board for whatever projects they are doing. 

It’s as though the intense flame of the first seven or eight years, followed by the pain and difficulty of the years just before and after John, have finally settled into something more balanced and manageable. She doesn’t need to be on tour with him and isn’t frantic with worry about other women the way she used to be. The menopause is working its way through her body and taking away sexual jealousy. It’s even taking away much of sex itself, but strangely that doesn’t bother her. She almost pities Paul, unable to be freed from desire like she is. The highly treasonous thought sometimes crosses her mind that she wouldn’t mind too much if she could send him off with an occasional mistress. She knows now that he will never leave her - he needs her too much - so such a dalliance wouldn’t threaten her position.  Maybe Yoko had the right idea all those years ago with May, the wily old thing. Linda doesn’t entertain the idea seriously, but it does cross her mind from time to time.

Things have improved, but he is still a handful: still hyperactive, temperamental, demanding, prone to moodiness. She wonders why it is that years and years with the same person seems to highlight their annoying qualities, rather than make one inured to them. He is also still fascinating, affectionate, funny, a wonderful father and a genius. 

Leaving behind the veil of desire has brought other, sudden, blinding, often unwelcome insights. 

Critics often complained (still do) about the paucity of some of Paul’s lyrics. Linda can’t understand the complaint. For her, lyrics are never the most important part of songs or music. The rhythm, chords, harmonies and feel of a song were what seized her as a teenage R&B fan, and Paul approaches music in the same way, always starting with a piece of melody before scatting words over it. Lyrics didn’t always have to have meaning, sometimes it was just about what sounded good with the music. Of course, she is fond of the lyrics of all Paul’s songs and touched by those which address her directly. As the world’s most prolific songwriter, he frequently dips into the well of song-themes which have nothing to do with his life - love lost, love longed for, love beginning again. It’s just a theme. 

But one day, about three months ago, after Linda had suffered an unpleasant night of hot flashes, she unwound by listening through the whole Wings and solo back catalogue, including demos and unreleased material they have on their home tapes. At first she was listening out for her keyboard parts - wincing at their child-like simplicity in the earlier records, smiling with pride as they improved later on - but listening to song after song in sequential order, with no distractions around, it was as though her mind filtered out the melodies and rhythm, the multiple vocal lines and instrumentation that she remembered being overdubbed in studio again and again, and began to hear, with precise, glasslike clarity, every single word of every single song. Her mind started to put lines together, feeling them run into each other in one unspooling call of longing. 

Like a fool I'm far away I'm just a person like you love Since you've gone I never know I go on but I miss you so They go on the lonely nights Come on home and make it right Don’t be long, my heart isn’t strong I wouldn’t make her her wooden table, I wouldn’t care Love is long, when love is wrong, love is long Sunset's painting up the sky There's something in my eye Why am I crying? I’m still screaming out over you The mess I’m in Don’t you know that inside there’s a love you can’t hide so why do you fight that feeling in your heart? I may never tell you there may be a miracle and baby I love you so I'm getting closer, I'm getting closer to your heart I can see the places that we used to go now Happiness in the homeland Love in song Why won’t you call me back again You get me so excited Baby please call me back again I want to tell you and now’s the time I want to tell you that you’re gonna be mine And a little luck we can clear it up We can bring it in for a landing There is no end to what we can do together I'm carrying, can't help it I'm carrying something for you ​​Love awake to the day When we can make our love awake I know that we can get together We can make it, stick with me I know we'll find our way I know we'll reach the end I need ya, I need ya, I need ya Ooh, well, I used to love you baby, when I was your man But maybe loving you is something no one man can do But I can't let go If I do you'll take a tumble And the whole thing is gonna crumble Hear me, my lover I knew you for a minute Oh, it didn't happen only for a minute Your heart just wasn't in it anymore I was the one that told you he loved you Don't wanna go to another war Lord, I can't believe my eyes, I must be dreaming Give me your number I'll give you a ring

She was caught between marvelling at the ingenuity and range of Paul’s work, and observing a strange, hollowed-out, yet still wondering and curious feeling deep in her core. Far more frequently than loving or tribulated words addressed to herself, the theme of missing someone, truly loving someone, longing for someone far away, anger at someone who keeps disappearing ran through song after song, even throwaway ditties demoed in an afternoon and forgotten about. 

She knows he rarely sits down and expressly summons a theme for a song, but the fact that the lyrics rise from his unconscious makes their impact more, not less significant. This theme certainly didn’t feature in every song, but for a man who can find inspiration in a hotel bill, it was startling how often words of longing and separation came up, organically, unforced. Maybe it’s all chance - he would certainly say that - but something about noticing it clearly and mentally cataloguing it made it settle more firmly in her heart. If she had noticed this years ago, she would probably have assumed that the subject of all this longing and anguish was Jane. She knows better now. The only person who was properly obsessed with Jane was Linda herself.

The thought that had danced around the edge of her subconscious for years was darting directly into her brain, made receptive by sleeplessness and the clarity of menopause. He writes love songs for John. Real love songs too, not the occasional friendship-themed ones he tells critics about. She couldn’t, and still can’t, put a shape on that thought that makes sense to her. It’s not like love between a man and a woman. But in the songs, the language is the same. And it has been a preoccupation, a near-obsession that she has been fielding her whole married life, wondering why it can’t be resolved, even after death. He loves and needs her, but he also loves and needs John, and cannot find resolution to their...Affair?  

Phrases turned in her mind, ones she couldn’t have articulated when she was younger. Was John his true love? He was certainly his first love. What does that love mean? What does love mean, at all?

She suddenly remembered chatting with a psychoanalyst friend of her father’s when she was about fifteen. Those men were so serious about the human psyche - to a ridiculous degree, in her opinion. Half the time when she bantered with them, she felt as though she was the one solving their problems. They always made simple things so complicated. Like this man, he said the most extraordinary thing that day, a quote from Freud or somebody. Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.

“What on earth does that mean?” laughed teenage Linda. “That’s the opposite of love! You give the other person what they need because you have it to give and they need it. And hopefully they do the same for you.”

“That’s what you want to do, but I’m afraid the psyche is more complex than that,” said the psychoanalyst. “This is how the unconscious approaches things. In psychoanalysis, the patient is learning how to recognise the lack in himself - the thing you don’t have - and integrate it consciously into his personality. And recognise what compulsions he will follow by virtue of having that lack.”

“What a load of hooey!” Linda cried. Her father looked over his glasses at them, half critical of her dismissiveness, half amused by her boldness.

“You lot have to make everything so complicated. All subconscious this and that. People are not that deep.”

“You may think that now, young lady, but you have no idea about life.” The man was nettled.

Linda laughed again, accustomed to being talked down to by her father’s friends and not bothered by it. She thought for a moment, and spoke again:

“How can love be about a lack? It’s about being complete, isn’t it?”

“Well, that’s the rub. The heart of desire is what is out of reach”

The heart of desire is what is out of reach. The man was annoying and pompous, but Linda feels, at forty-eight, that she is beginning to understand what he was trying to say. 

Instead of trying to explain the realisation to herself with conscious thoughts, her mind summons the sound of Paul and John singing harmonies. Paul’s voice is so distinctive, so beautiful, always stronger than anyone else’s in the room - yet when he sang with John as a young man on Beatles records, it’s the only time she ever heard his voice truly blend and even disappear.

Linda has been happy, but there have been a handful of times where she seriously considered leaving Paul. Right before the wedding was one, when she felt as though everything was moving too fast. Even though she was already pregnant, marrying Paul seemed, bizarrely, like a step too far. A secret part of her soul could see her own life slipping away and rebelled against the larger part of her that never wanted to leave his side. 

There were a few moments in the first year on the farm, struggling with sleep deprivation and horrified to see her beautiful strong man laid out like a corpse, silent and indifferent to anything but news from London. Later, there were moments on tour where she wanted to leave the stage, leave the scrutinising eyes of the critics and her bandmates, and watch everything from the wings instead. More significantly, the years following James’ birth and before John’s death were clarifying for Linda, as she watched Paul remain as obsessed as ever with things she couldn’t understand, and railed against his need to control her. She fantasised about taking her baby and her girls and simply walking out, leaving him alone with the ghosts of his past. In their fights during those years she sometimes threatened to leave, in vague enough terms so as not to risk having her bluff called, but terms nonetheless. Paul varied between shouted agreement that she should, to abject apologies and barely concealed begging. It came up in some of the lyrics at that time too - 

Yeah, I need love every minute of the day
And it wouldn't be the same
If you ever should decide to go away
 
Well, we've been traveling for a long time
And we finally finished here
Though I said some things to hurt you
Well, it was only out of fear
I hope you won’t mind the things I say along the way

Of course, after Japan and John’s death, leaving was, for the moment, out of the question. But the years of recreating down-home Liverpool took their toll. After a while Linda began to think, treasonously, that one of the reasons Paul kept insisting on her doing every domestic task herself was to win an imaginary competition with John in his head, to prove that his wife was loving and devoted and committed to running the household, unlike another wife, notorious for having armies of staff and being a remote mother. Linda accused him of enacting this competition, which he denied with such vehemence that she knew right away she had hit a nerve. From her perspective, it was beyond stupid - she had all those good qualities already, she didn’t need her strengths advertised at the expense of someone else’s weaknesses.

After all the fears of the early days, she grew to realise that she never had to worry about Paul leaving her, even at his angriest or most depressed moments. The choice to leave was up to her. He may not always like her, but he needs her. What man ever stops loving his mother?

So in recent years, before she immersed herself in the cookbook and other animal rights projects, Linda was readier than she had ever been. Only James stayed her hand. And that was the problem, or maybe the solution. When it came down to it, Linda knew that she couldn’t really leave, emotionally. Breaking up her family was a thought she couldn’t bear to dwell on. Even if there were days - weeks - where she couldn’t stand being around Paul, she knew she had to try, so that her beloved children would never know anything other than a mother and father that loved each other.

And a tiny, mercenary part of her wondered who or what she would be if she was not a McCartney. She saw what happened to the first wives, how all the perks and attention just dropped away like a volume button being abruptly turned down. How they were reduced to selling their stories to survive, and seemed to live forever in a haze of reflected glory, the individual people they once were lost forever under the carpet of their erstwhile men.

So she stayed, and was mostly happy, sometimes infuriated, sometimes miserable, always tired. Fights ended when she learned to give in, or more precisely, to appear to give in. 

When she listened to those lyrics in the kitchen after her sleepless sweaty night, and thought about her husband and his strange love, she remembered the line from that Gladys Knight cover of the Bill Withers song:

You’re too much for one girl

Too much indeed. But not enough for two, she thought, or a thousand, or three other men, or one other man in particular.

Before she wrapped up her listening party, she put on one of the older songs again, one from her favourite album. Wincing at ‘when love is wrong’, she drank a glass of water and let random phrases run through her mind. 

You loved him first, did you love him best? But I loved you longest. I loved you last. You loved me last.

She sang the song’s refrain out loud again, switching loosely from her original line to Paul’s contrapuntal refrain.

Love is long, sing your song, love is long
Win or lose it, winter, summer,
Love is long.

In the circle of fire

1957

Linda is lying in the grass in a field not far from their home in Scarsdale. Her and her brother spent the afternoon exploring a nearby ravine, full of dripping ferns and lily of the valley.

She watches the elegant, shimmering navy blue of the swallows' backs as they swoop across the little stream running into the ravine. They twirl in impossible loops, swiping scarce insects, competing with the trout who spasmodically burst to the surface, tiny gulps on the softly rippling flow of the stream’s widening bend. A single swallow rounds its circle again, spots a gnat a metre above it, hockey-sticks up to catch it in an instant, before resuming its flight path within skimming distance of the water's surface. The Douglas firs, beeches and willows on the opposite bank reflect dark, grassy and silver-green colours into half the stream. On this side it palely reflects the sky, a sheen of pearl over a homely brown base.

She wishes it was the summer holidays, so that they could be in Cape Cod or East Hampton. There, she can escape her parents’ social engagements for whole days on the beach or in the woods or out riding or sailing. Back in their suburban home, she is expected to join their parties, as she did the previous night. 

Her beautiful mother, sparkling with jewels and dressed in pastel colours, sailed through the crowd with ease. Louise seems at her most alive when she is hosting, especially when she has Lee by her side. Here she is pointing out a particularly good canapé that someone must try. There she is drawing together a contemporary artist and a playwright into conversation that may lead to collaboration. Here she is bearing down on Linda with gentle force.

“Darling, what are you doing here in the kitchen?”

Linda looks up from where she is sitting with Pepper the dog’s head in her lap. She has been chatting with José and Maria, two of the hired help for the evening.

“Just talking… it’s a bit loud out there.”

“Nonsense!” Louise’s smile is warm, but her tone carries a hint of sharpness. “You really should mingle more. There’s ever so many interesting people here tonight.” She lists the names of some artists and composers, only some of whom Linda has heard of.

“I’ll go back out in a minute,” Linda promises, not wanting to disappoint her mother, but needing more time in the peaceful, warm kitchen. It’s so much easier to talk to people one-on-one than to drift through knots at parties. Her mother and father can do it, charming and impressing every group they join, before expertly extricating themselves and moving on to the next one. Her brother can do it too. Linda watches them all the time but can never seem to imitate the graceful sequences they adopt as second nature.

She wants to stay in the kitchen. The smell of the food cooking and the soft Spanish voices of the staff soothe her, along with the sound of the dog smacking his lips and clacking his claws on the tiled floor. She wouldn’t mind if her mother sat down with her for a while.

But Louise leaves, rolling her eyes slightly at her strange daughter on her way out of the room.

First thing the next morning, Linda saddles up her pony and rides, before spending the afternoon in the ravine. Now, as she lays in the grass with a bunch of lilies of the valleys beside her, she wonders if she will ever feel normal at parties, like her mother does.

Despite all the amputations, you could just dance to the rock ‘n’ roll station

1990

Linda is out riding in the woods on Whitestar, the son of the Appaloosa palomino she got in America in 1976. She still misses Cinnamon, who died of laminitis five years ago. Linda still blames herself, wishing she had kept an eye on the farm staff when they turned the mare out into the field of new grass. She walked Cinnamon up and down for half an hour - it had worked to untwist her stomach before - but it was too late. They got a digger to carve out a big hole and marked her grave with a standing stone.

It's almost too much, the beauty of mid-May. The green is fresh and untouched, like soldiers before war. The bloom of the rowan like a baby's head, round and painfully soft. The whitethorn trees loaded with creamy blossoms, the cuckoo flower precise and pale, the kingfisher a tropical dart over the shimmering river. A blackcap sings, a treacly weep, while the twitters of innumerable young birds clog the air. The chestnut trees are festooned from top to bottom with their candles of flowers, cream-white with sworls of pink and yellow. At their roots are swathes of vigorous nettles and single-stemmed bluebells. The green is a cave, a river-god's breath.

Linda gathers the reins in one hand and nudges Whitestar into a canter.

When she is out riding, Linda’s mind is almost empty. She doesn’t think about Paul, or the phone calls she needs to make, or the home improvement projects she is supervising, or the dinner she needs to cook. She doesn’t even think that much about the children. She looks around her, sees the soft green leaves and the glowing grass, and hums. Her mind runs through the mental jukebox she has been building since she was twelve years old, unspooling doo-wop, R&B, Elvis, the Stones, Hendrix, Stevie, countless obscure reggae tracks, pieces of stadium rock. She can dance in place, sitting on the horse’s back, to the music playing in her head. 

She pats the gelding’s neck as they race through the woods, glad to be out of the glare of the sun. Linda hardly ever wears sunglasses when she’s riding, preferring to get the sun full in her face and eyes. A journalist who interviewed them both the other week commented in his copy about the effect a lifetime outdoors has had on Linda, noting slightly pityingly that while Paul “could still pass for late-thirties” “time has not been kind to Linda”. After all this time, perfect strangers seem to be convinced that Paul is under some kind of spell, clearly blinded to how much “better” he can do. Linda is beyond caring about any of that now. She has leathered hands and sagging thighs and a deeply lined face, but she would not exchange any of it for her life of riding in the sun, staying up late making music, getting up early to raise her children, and getting through her fridges of Thai sticks. She has lived and is not ashamed of it. She sings aloud.

Whitestar comes to the end of the woodland path, where it opens out into a small apple tree-lined meadow. She can see the farmhouse in the distance, and outside it, her family leading their horses out to join her. Everyone is down for the weekend, even Heather. She has known and loved and lost countless people over the decades, but at the heart of everything are these people that she created and this closed world that only they understand. 

She watches them mount and start riding towards her. First comes James, teenage legs almost too long for the chestnut he is sprawled across. Behind him Stella and Heather ride side-by-side, twin fair hair like her own. And next to her father, kind Mary, dark and lovely, her skilled hands calming a skittish filly. Four dogs leap forward in front of the party, with names inherited from their predecessors - Lucky, Poppy, Jet and Cottonball. Linda smiles and waves first at the dogs, then at her family. 

Bringing up the rear, almost incidental to the group, is the man whose universe she stepped into so blithely twenty-two years ago, stepped so quickly that she didn’t stop to check if there would be anything to cushion her fall. The one who, as a man, is her greatest challenge and sometimes ordeal, but as a co-parent is her greatest ally and friend. He is greying a little (no matter what the journalist says), loosening a bit around the edges, his body starting to blur and lose definition, but his mind as acute and alive and exhausting and exasperating as ever. He still never stops talking, but the sound of his voice is more like the chirping of sparrows or the clatter of rooks now. A sound so persistent it becomes invisible. And it is better to have his song than his silence.

She doesn’t think of the music she recorded and performed with Paul when she sees the riders approach. The simple thought that crosses her mind is Look at what we have made. She pulls the reins and prompts Whitestar into a slow walk towards her family. The air is full of the smell of whitethorn and the sky breaks through the apple tree branches, clear and bright.

The woods behind her are full of bluebells.

Notes

Thank you so much for reading! Let me know what you think in the comments or on tumblr, and do please recommend to other readers that might like this story <3

Chapter and heading titles from the following songs:

All My Rage by Laura Marling
Moments of Pleasure by Kate Bush
Reelin' in the Years by Steely Dan
Little Lies by Fleetwood Mac
Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances by Patti Smith
Carolina by I Draw Slow
Lily by Kate Bush
Rock ‘n’ Roll by the Velvet Underground

Story playlist