Danny told Luis that it would be better for him to visit Bude alone, to try to bridge these rifts before bringing him to visit. His parents were professional hosts, polite around strangers which was an awful way to describe his fiancé. But Luis had never met them. Sitting on the bed Luis watched him pack and asked why he didn’t tell them on the phone.
‘I want to see their faces. When I tell them. I want to know if they can be happy for me. For real. Rather than just for show.’
Luis observed, ‘Is this an invitation? Or a test?’
Danny replied, ‘It’s like you said. When we look at our wedding guests all we should see is affection. I don’t want anyone attending who secretly – deep inside – thinks we’re gross. For once in our lives, we get to pick the people looking at us. That’s not going to be true at any other time. Not when we’re walking down the street together or enjoying a meal. There will always be someone who rolls their eyes or makes a comment. But it can be true for one day.’
Danny thought on the fact that they never walked downthe street holding hands. Luis knotted his fingers together, troubled.
‘Danny, this wedding is not separate from the world. It won’t take place in a better world.’
Danny refused to cede ground.
‘We can make our wedding separate. We can dig a moat around it. And only lower the drawbridge for the people who truly love us. So, yes, it is a test. If just twenty people and no parents pass, that’s okay. That’s who’ll attend. For the rest of our lives, Luis, we’ll live in their world. Our wedding will be ours.’
Danny had swung from welcoming strangers off the street for their engagement party to a purity test for their wedding. After a long silence, Luis asked, ‘Does that test include me?’
Stunned at the question, Danny sat on the bed, taking Luis’s hands, about to deny the idea that Luis was being tested, only to find the lie wouldn’t come.
‘Is that how you feel?’
Luis looked at Danny, aware that his question hadn’t been answered.
‘I feel like I’m coming up short.’
Danny was quick to say, ‘I felt that way too. But we’ve found the farm. We’ve sent the cards. It was never going to be easy.’
Luis asked, ‘And your parents? What do they want from your visit?’
It was typical of Luis to reverse a line of thought and to try to see a situation from the other side, a mental discipline he had developed during his professional life. Danny was often impressed by his partner’s way of thinking but now his even-handedness bothered him.
‘My parents don’t want anything. They didn’t ask to meet me. They didn’t ask to meet you.’
Luis reacted to the sharpness in Danny’s tone.
‘There’s no point going to see them angry.’
Danny disagreed.
‘That’s the only point. They never understood my anger.’
Chapter Twenty-ThreeA Guest or a Son
Leaving the flat the next morning, Danny experienced an anxiety he hadn’t felt since they first started dating when everything was fragile and new – that he had said or done the wrong thing, that there would be no next time and that he would never see Luis again.
Danny caught the morning train to Exeter where he changed onto a regional bus. There were some seventy stops to the northern edge of Cornwall, a slow journey through the granite moors where Danny would roam as a teenager, much to the consternation of his parents who wondered why he couldn’t make friends like ordinary children, concerned that he spent too much time on his own, feral in the hills or by the sea. Passing through Dartmoor National Park, sixhours after departing London, Danny finally saw his childhood town of Bude.
His parents were waiting at the bus stop, both in good health from daily coastal walks and a diet of fish broths. His mum, sixty-nine years old, was wearing a brown jacket buttoned up to the neck with black trousers and sturdy leather boots. His father, seventy-three, wore a waxed waterproof jacket, grey combat trousers and modern hi-tech hiking shoes. At some point his mother had stopped dyeing her hair and it was now a magnificent grey. His father’s silver hair was cropped short. For a handsome man, he had never shown any interest in style or fashion, not as the absence of vanity but as vanity of another sort, disdain for frivolous concerns. No one hugged. Perhaps they weren’t sure how.
Danny’s parents owned and managed a guest house overlooking the dunes. Shortly after they married which, for point of comparison, was two years after their first date, with a wedding at their village church blessed by a priest, they went into business together. They bought a rundown townhouse and converted it into a guest lodge with nine bedrooms. The rooms ranged from cosy nooks for solo travellers to a grand attic suite with sweeping sea views and a small balcony. There had been many renovations over the decades with the most recent opting for uncluttered simplicity, pine bedframes and pine cabinets, accompanied with English hospitality necessities such as mini-kettles, tea bagsand home-baked Cornish fairings made with ginger, golden syrup and cinnamon. According to tradition the biscuits were given by a man to his sweetheart during courtship. Whenever Danny’s mother baked a batch she would give Danny two, one for him and one for any girl he might have his eye on. Alone, he had always eaten both.
Over the years the guest house terrace had become a popular spot for visitors to enjoy homemade ice creams, celebrated for their unusual flavours such as ‘Cornish Tea’ with Earl Grey, chunks of scone, raisins and ripples of strawberry jam. The bar served eclectic local ales brewed with Styrian Golding hops. The restaurant made their own pasties and parsley pies. However, during the rise of cheap package holidays, the business teetered close to bankruptcy. Danny’s parents had been weeks away from a forced sale with no choice but to re-mortgage their home – an end of terrace, two-bedroom house on a cul-de-sac ten minutes’ walk from the guest house. Throughout his childhood the family home had remained neglected with faulty electrics, draughty windows, damp walls and a concrete backyard sprouting weeds while his parents diverted their resources into the business.
Growing up Danny would compare the condition of his bedroom to the bedrooms in the hotel, dreaming of one day sleeping in the attic suite, a room he would often clean. He would watch his parents fret over the happinessof their guests, oblivious to his sadness. He never told them how, on the daily walk to school, he was called a faggot so frequently that he had started taking a circuitous route to avoid the confrontations, entering his school over a back wall at the last possible moment before classes began. While his parents wrote handwritten notes to each of their guests wishing them a pleasant stay, Danny returned home with a note stuffed into his schoolbag from fellow students describing the various ways he should kill himself. Over dinner his parents would discuss which beach toys to buy for the summer while Danny would sit at the table, believing that it would have been better to be their guest than their son.
Arriving at the cul-de-sac Danny took a moment to admire the improvements to their home. The house was painted pale blue, the colour of diluted sky. The aluminium windows had been replaced by timber. The concrete patio was now a coastal garden with pheasant grasses, red valerian and gorse. He had followed the changes from his mother’s Christmas card updates, a typed summary of the year’s events, but this was the first time he had seen the transformation. He said, ‘Your garden is beautiful.’
They seemed pleased.
