Chapter Five
History is constantly teaching, but it does not find many pupils.
(Austrian proverb)
By the time Arnie Garth’s black cab finally – and I can only imagine triumphantly – enters the sleepy little Cumbrian village where this Noreen-Two-Souls is meant to hang out, I am nowhere to be seen (or to be not-seen), and Arnie’s lower back is giving him hell.
So, he is quite relieved when they pull up at the old marketplace in the very heart of Rough Fell.
And even more heartened to find, right there on a corner, the Wordsworth Arms, a local pub which advertises rooms to rent.
The evening is, not unexpectedly, dark and drizzly, so the newcomer has scant opportunity to appreciate the beauty and grandeur of the landscape in which he has surprisingly found himself.
He can see only the vaguest outlines of the hills, or maybe even mountains, which surround him.
He can, of course, still admire, by the light of the quasi-Victorian street lamps, the dusty grey stonework of the picturesque village itself and the rustic Cumbrian charm of this historic market square, with its tiny shops and cafés and replica gibbet.
But, naturally, he does no such thing, because Arnie Garth, late of LA, doesn’t give a shit about scenery.
The bucolic makes him nauseous, and he just wants his bed.
When he eventually manages to extricate himself, in some considerable pain, from the steamy rear of the cab, Arnie notices that a few of the locals, who are loitering outside the pub, have chosen to stare fixedly, if slightly blearily, at him.
They look as if they could have been here for centuries, in their drab rustic garb, holding dusty pint glasses and being dour and drizzled upon.
He wonders for a senseless moment if they actually recognise him – he has been known to do an Alfred Hitchcock in some of his movies (if Hitch ever did a cameo stark naked).
Then he realises that he is still dressed for southern California, in skimpy Hawaiian shirt, linen pants and shades. He starts to shiver.
“Right, guv,” says the cabbie, hefting Arnie’s Louis Vuitton suitcase from the trunk of his cab and dumping it on the damp and cobbled street. “Arse end of nowhere. That’ll be set rate of five hundred and eighty-seven quid.”
“You are fucking kidding me!” says Arnie Garth, which causes the locals to laugh in gentle derision.
“Call it a round six hundred,” says the cabbie, as Arnie begins peeling off nearly all the notes from the serious wad in his pocket.
The cab driver grabs the money swiftly and leaps back into his vehicle, glad to see the back of his weird passenger and, indeed, of the equally mystifying North. But before he leaves, he hurls one final thought into the chill Lakeland air.
“Anyone going to Heathrow?”
Always worth a try, but sadly no takers. Yet the Cockney-eyed optimist still switches on his ‘for hire’ light, as he roars off around the square and back to southern normality.
Arnie lifts his suitcase out of a convenient puddle and trudges towards the pub, nodding to the curious customers, who simply stare in vaguely threatening silence, like assorted townsfolk in a Dracula movie.
The heavy door opens with a creak. Of course it does.
The pub interior, decked out with everything from ancient wooden ploughshares on the ceiling to cracked old pharmaceutical bottles on practically every shelf, is itself like a tired film set.
Indeed, some years ago, when he naively thought that his audiences gave a damn about storylines, or at least would appreciate his doing so, Arnie had constructed something not dissimilar that was meant to be set in the Highlands of Scotland.
Despite the novelty of pop-up kilts and the tossing of human cabers, Throb Roy had not been a success, and he had reverted to less atmospheric LA-style dross.
Determined not to be intimidated by the scrutiny of yet more beery villagers, Arnie drags his now sopping suitcase to the well-stocked and brightly lit bar.
Local ales vie with national favourites, whilst above them, lined up like soldiers preparing for battle and imminent vanquishment, is a formidable array of spirits, some of which Arnie has actually heard of and several of which he wouldn’t touch unless his mouth was forced open.
To his relief, the landlord, a huge man with a red face and equally fiery foliage, offers him a warm smile from behind his beard and bar, accompanied by something in an almost impenetrable accent.
“And a good evening to you, sir. What can I get you?”
“Huh?”
The larger man repeats his words, only slower and far louder, which usually works with foreigners. And idiots. Looking at his visitor’s attire, he senses that he might have struck the double here.
“Bourbon with a twist. And the number of the nearest Sheraton.”
“Ah,” the landlord grins from somewhere inside the hair, “you’re looking for a place to stay. Well, today’s your lucky day, sir.”
Arnie seriously doubts this but keeps his own counsel.
“It just so happens we’ve got a lovely old room available, one of our finest and most historic, with a splendid view of the hills and a spacious bathroom very nearly ensuite. First time in the Lakes, sir?”
“You mean people come back?”
The landlord gives a deep, rumbling laugh. “You’ve been learning irony on the plane coming over.”
He calls to a young woman who, as Arnie now notices with an appreciation both chemical and professional, is bending firmly over a long, low table at the far end of the room in order to collect the empty glasses. “Rosie, kindly escort our new guest to the Windermere Room.”
When the young woman slowly slides herself back over the table and turns to stare at Arnie, the visitor’s first wish is that she could have been named Noreen.
For this is a person with whom Arnie Garth could quite easily imagine falling in love, and of course she with him.
Not that he has ever fallen in love with anyone, if he is being honest, except possibly himself.
Nor, to his knowledge, has anyone actually uttered those simple, somewhat helpless, all too profoundly exposing words in his vicinity.
At least not with any earnestness. Or whilst entirely sober.
This actually doesn’t upset him in the least. He has no need for these crass and humiliating outpourings of affection – well, at least, he hadn’t until this life-or-death week – and he would in fact have been quite embarrassed, indeed nonplussed, should they ever have been aimed in his direction.
When he thinks about it, he does believe that on a couple of occasions Cleo herself might have come pretty close, but he could be mistaking this for something she once said in a movie.
Arnie ponders on this but knows in his heart – if, indeed, he has one and this hasn’t also gone to someone less deserving down the line – that really, he doesn’t much care.
In a curious way, Arnie Garth can now almost justify to himself the relentlessly appalling behaviour, in thought, word and deed, that he is well aware causes so many others to think so very badly of him.
To detest him, in fact. It was simply an accident of birth.
A snafu in the system. Not his fault and nothing he can do about it. Except, of course…
But she’s tomorrow’s problem.
“This way, sir,” says Rosie. “Mind your head,” she adds, just a fraction too late to stop him from banging his baldness really hard on a dimly lit and unnecessarily low Tudor beam.
“Owwww!”
He can hear the unmuffled laughter from the locals as he follows the young woman’s appealingly nimble frame up the narrow staircase. He doesn’t catch the landlord happily chalking another tick onto a slate behind the bar.
“Ayyyy – ooohhh – owwww!” continues Arnie’s Elizabethan serenade.
“You really want to watch out for those beams,” says Rosie, pertly manoeuvring herself around another hairpin stair-bend.
“Ya think?” grumbles Arnie in the darkness, once again knocking his suitcase into the historic structure’s oppressively tight and deceptively curving walls. It’s like being on an antique version of Space Mountain.
“Elizabethan folk, they were smaller than we are,” explains Rosie.
She turns to him with a mischievous grin as they appear to reach their destination.
“Smaller all over, probly.” Before he can fully appreciate this attempt at some form of local hospitality or – dare he think it – flirting, she adds, “So, you in from the coast?”
“Excuse me?” says Arnie in surprise, letting his suitcase drop so that he can rub his dented and bruising head with both sweaty hands.
Rosie opens the door to the aforementioned Windermere Room, whose dominant attribute could indeed be age.
This would seem to apply not simply to the bed and the period furniture but to the linen, the paintwork, the curtains, the crockery, the television and the dust. In addition to what could well be the original oaken beams and stupidly inadequate windows, the room appears to have retained the original cobwebs and quite possibly odour.
There is a large fireplace beside the bed, complete with fully filled brass coal scuttle, neither of which Arnie has the first idea how to use.
Sensing her new guest’s unfettered distaste, intercut with a less anticipated sense of mortal terror, whose origins she has no way of guessing, Rosie immediately opens all the windows and starts to plump up the pillows with enviable vigour.
Despite all that is going on for him, including his imminent death or worse, Arnie Garth finds that he can’t take his eyes off this alluring little domestic as she busily skitters around the room, straightening and nudging things with solid shoulders, pointy elbows and tiny feet, in an exercise redolent less of Cumbrian welcome than of pure damage limitation.
“You think we’ve never seen an American before?
” she says in a curiously appealing if not wholly decipherable accent, flicking away what could be biscuit crumbs from a previous guest or century.
“You’re all over the bloody place round here – like McDonald’s.
You come up from London, on your way to do Scotland in an afternoon, and you’ll fit in some snapping and pottering and a bit of fell-walking for good luck.
Some of you even have a go at tracing your ancestors, like they’re not all dead and buried. Is that why you’re here?”
Arnie, whose current mission is trying not to be an ancestor just yet, shakes his battered head. But Rosie is clearly on a roll.
“We had a film crew in a while back. Took over the whole sodding village and drank everything going. That movie about Wordsworth and Coleridge – did you see it?”
She points to a framed still on the wall, just above a battered kettle and a jug of milk on the turn.
It shows a very young and fairly solemn Tom Cruise and an equally stern Denzel Washington wearing frilly shirts and long, curly wigs.
Underneath is the logo of the movie, done like two scratchily quilled signatures: WILL & SAM.
“That art-house crap?” sneers Arnie. “It only did $10 million domestic. And that was despite the Oscar nod for best hair.”
Rosie’s wide hazel eyes suddenly flame up like those bonfires the Brits light every year to celebrate their Parliament not being blown to smithereens, although some apparently regret it now. She turns to her guest with renewed interest.
“Are you in the industry?”
Arnie gives a falsely modest shrug. “You just blew my cover. Why do you ask, Rosie?”
“Because I… I’m an actress!”
“Oh, shit. No shit?” He dumps his suitcase on the bed, which appears to sink visibly. “So, you appear in the movie?”
The smile instantly vanishes from the young woman’s winsomely freckled face.
“No! I didn’t even know they were shooting a poxy movie, did I?
I was working in a bar over in Ibiza, wasn’t I?
Just ’cos I was on holiday, I’d missed every sodding thing, hadn’t I?
And it is so unfair, ’cos I am an actress, aren’t I?
The best one in the whole village! I was Annie! ”
“Yeah?” says the weary guest, who is losing interest fast.
To Arnie’s surprise and instant upturn in interest, the pretty barmaid now gets down on her knees directly in front of him.
Before he can fully begin to marvel at the unanticipated but far from unwelcome level of hospitality accorded to people in his industry by young English womanhood – and just as he is wondering if this is in fact a test from heaven – Rosie begins to sing “Maybe” from her musical triumph.
“Unbelievable!” proclaims a somewhat thrown Arnie, attempting to maintain enthusiasm. “And so unexpected.”
“You like it?” she says, continuing to belt out the famous opening song at an even greater volume.
“‘Like’ isn’t the word, kid. Please stop.” He smiles at her in gratitude for the sudden silence. “Hey, maybe I can find a part for you in Will and Sam – Reloaded!”
“They’re making another Will and Sam? But you just said—”
“It did great on DVD. Go figure. Say, did this Wordsmith have a girlfriend?”
“Wordsworth? I don’t know… Ooh, ooh, I think he had a sister.”
“Even better!” Arnie suddenly looks out of the dusty window, as a cloud crosses the moon. He finds himself shivering and knows that it is not just fatigue. “So, Rosie Whatever-Your-Name-Is, star of the future, what can you tell me about a local ‘lassie’ – Noreen Millburn?”
Rosie gawps at the man for a second. Next comes a frown. Then she begins to laugh. In fact, the laugh continues to build, as if she has just heard the funniest joke going. The sort of mirth that expresses itself out of your nose as well as in your smile.
“Ha! I’ve got to get back to work. Ha! Noreen Mill…!” The laughter soars. She snorts again. “Noreen Millburn!”
Arnie can hear her joyous laughter all the way down the stairs. This would have disturbed him, save for the fact he is fast asleep before she has even avoided the final beam.