Greatest Hits

by Laura Barnett

  They had been sitting side by side on the living-room sofa, after dinner, sharing a bottle of pinot noir. It was October, late evening, and they had not yet turned on the lamps: the colours were leaching minute by minute from the room, the grey shadows thickening around them, but neither of them, each intent on the other’s face, had noticed.

  She had told Larry that she had in mind one single day—an ordinary day, a day like any other—in which to listen to her music and make her choices. There was a simplicity, a crisp efficiency, about the plan that appealed to her. No fuss, no ceremony, just a portion of time allocated to the act of listening. At the end of the day, a party. Old friends, musicians, journalists, comrades-in-arms. She would play the new songs to them for the first time: make her new music known, as she must again make herself known to them, after so many years of isolation.

  She had told Larry that she wanted this, wanted all of it, but she was afraid. Afraid of what she might hear in her past: in those songs with whose sound and structure she had so confidently framed her comprehension of everything that had not, in the end, proved comprehensible. Afraid of following the trail that must surely lead to what had happened. To all that she had won, and all that she had lost.

  And Larry, throughout, had said nothing, sat listening, intent, expressionless. When he saw that she had said all she needed to say, he’d drained his glass, leant forward, and wrapped her in his arms. They had held each other, two lonely old fools embracing tightly in the darkness; and that, Cass had realised then, was the only answer she’d been looking for.

  Now, alone in her studio in the clear-skied freshness of an April morning, Cass sets Larry’s card down on the coffee table, in front of the stack of LPs. She takes a record from the top of the pile, slides it onto the turntable, and sits down to listen.

  TRACK ONE

  “Common Ground”

  By Cass Wheeler

  From the album The State She’s In

  It was early morning when she left

  And the city, under a grey sky was still sleeping

  A note left on the table lying flat

  Held the secrets she’d been keeping

  We have no common ground, my love

  We have no common ground

  So I am leaving with the dawn, my love

  And I never will be found

  Ooooooooooooooooooooooo

  Crossing that dirty green London common

  As the sky turned from grey to blue

  A suitcase, a long-distance airfare

  And a life to start living new

  We have no common ground, my love

  We have no common ground

  So I am leaving with the dawn, my love

  And I never will be found

  Ooooooooooooooooooooooo

  * * *

  RELEASED 13 September 1971

  RECORDED June 1971 at Union Studios, London NW10

  GENRE Folk rock

  LABEL Phoenix Records

  WRITER(S) Cass Wheeler

  PRODUCER(S) Martin Hartford

  ENGINEER(S) Sean O’Malley

  She was born Maria Cassandra Wheeler, in the back bedroom of the vicarage that faced the common, and the tall white cupola of the church it had been built to serve.

  It was April 1950. Through the three hard days of her labour, the baby’s mother, Margaret, watched the blossom bowing the branches of the apple tree outside the window, and prayed for release. But when it came at last, it was at a price: a small, damp-headed creature, ugly and mottled, screwing up its face against the light.

  “Your daughter,” the midwife said, placing the warm bundle in Margaret’s arms.

  “She’s beautiful,” Margaret said, though she did not think so.

  All that, she thought, for this, and closed her eyes.

  Francis, the vicar, took the newborn girl from his wife’s slackening grip.

  “Cassandra,” he said under his breath: it had been his mother’s name, and he’d have liked to pass it to his daughter, but a Christian baptismal name had seemed more fitting. Expected, surely, by the congregation, several of whom were downstairs now, making tea, occupying themselves with whatever it is women do at such a time; brisk, busy wives and mothers, who had arrived, a whole chattering, hatted flock of them, three days ago, when Margaret’s torture had begun, insisting he remove himself to his study.

  “You mustn’t worry about a thing, Reverend,” they had said as one, and yet how could he not worry, confined to those four walls, pacing up and down while his wife’s cries travelled through the thickly carpeted floor?

  And now here she was: his daughter. Alive and well, though surely her colour was a little alarming. The baby stirred, opened her eyes, and he saw that they were a deep shining brown, just like his own.

  Hello, little one, he said silently, and he felt something for which he had not been quite prepared: love, of course—sharper, more visceral, than his love for Margaret, though that had its own particular piquancy; clearer, more focused, than his love for God—but also fear. The terror that he, alone, would not be strong enough to protect her.

  “I’ll put her down now, Reverend,” the midwife said, and Francis looked up at her in surprise: he had, for a moment, quite forgotten she was in the room. “Your wife needs to rest.”

  “Of course.” He handed his daughter over, and his arms, without the small weight of the child, seemed suddenly redundant. “I’ll be downstairs. There are women . . .” He trailed off, unable to quite define their purpose. “If Margaret needs anything.”

  “Yes, Reverend.” The midwife was already turning away. “We’ll be just fine, won’t we, little Maria?”

  Cassandra, he thought disloyally as he closed the bedroom door behind him. Her name is Cassandra. And then Francis went back downstairs to his study, where his unfinished sermon was waiting.

  Maria grew quickly. At six months, she was crawling; at ten, lifting herself unsteadily onto her feet.

  She hated sleep—resisted bedtimes, and found, once her motor skills permitted, increasingly ingenious ways to vacate her cot, and draw her mother from her bed. Margaret—delirious with exhaustion and her own inchoate, private pain—began to lose patience with her daughter: she had a lock installed on the door of the child’s room, and drew the bolt across after laying her down to sleep.

  “Leave her, Francis,” Margaret said when they woke in the night to the sound of the child’s distress, the beating of her tiny fists on the locked door. “She’ll grow out of it.”

  Most nights, Francis buried his head deeper in the pillow, and obeyed. But there were times, in the early hours, when he simply couldn’t bear it any longer, and then he would creep from the room and cross the landing, open the door to find his daughter hoarse, exhausted, her cheeks wet with tears. He held her, then, as he had held her that first April morning, and walked up and down before the curtained window, telling her the stories he dimly remembered from his own childhood. Mowgli in the jungle, the panther Bagheera; Tom, the chimney sweep, who fell into the river and lived there, among the otters and the reeds.

  Maria would grow calm, then, and watch him. Those moments in the night—his own soft whisper; his daughter’s staring eyes and tiny hands, opening and closing like the buds of some strange, exotic flower—became so precious to Francis that sometimes he went to her even when she hadn’t begun to cry.

  By day, too, Maria could not sit still. New outfits were ruined within hours, marred by grass-stains (she loved to slip from her mother’s hand and roll across the churchyard turf), or the masticated remnants of food. In church, if left to her own devices, she would run up and down the nave, scattering the embroidered hassocks, offering the loud, inarticulate, wordless tune that, at eleven months, she had begun to carry with her everywhere.

  “She’s running wild, Francis,” Margaret said. “I’m at my wits’ end.�
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  And she was: the church ladies began to voice concerns, to mount delegations that would arrive at the vicarage most mornings, insisting they take charge of Maria for a few hours “to give poor Margaret time to rest.”

  Under the ladies’ care—mothers, most of them, and proud, capable housewives; certainly nothing like Margaret, whose long-held fear that she lacked some essential aspect of the maternal instinct was, she felt, being confirmed with each passing day—Maria was transformed. With them, she sat quietly, absorbed in her game: an abacus; a doll; a set of building-blocks. Sometimes, the ladies brought their children with them, and then they played together, Maria and whichever toddler was placed before her that day.

  “See,” the ladies said. “There’s nothing wrong with her—she just needs the company of other children. Perhaps if she had a brother or sister . . .”

  But no second pregnancy was announced. Privately, the ladies suspected it never would be; there was talk that the reverend’s marriage was a troubled one, that he and Margaret no longer shared a bed. This was untrue—the spare bedroom was pristine, kept only for guests—but it was clear, even to the infant Maria (though she was not, of course, yet able to give voice to such knowledge) that happiness had eluded them. And Margaret herself was elusive, too: her mother seemed to shrink from her daughter, to have no interest in her at all besides the basic desire that she be clothed and fed. So Maria sought that interest—demanded it, in the only ways she knew how.

  One morning, returning from the vicarage kitchen with a fresh cup of tea, Mrs. Harrison found her son, Daniel, set down to play with Maria just a few moments before, screaming at the top of his voice, a red mark on his cheek that surely must be a bite. That was too much: Mrs. Harrison called the vicar’s wife down from her bedroom. (Margaret wasn’t sleeping, just lying silently, watching the shadows shift across the ceiling, and wondering how much more of such a life she could possibly endure. Surely, she was thinking, there must, somewhere, be more for me than this.)

  Downstairs, Margaret confronted her daughter. “Did you bite Daniel, Maria?”

  The child stood frozen, motionless, staring up at her mother, her dark eyes huge, sorry, full of the questions to which she could not yet place the words. Why won’t you play with me? Why won’t you touch me? What is wrong with me? What am I doing wrong?

  Margaret stepped forward, then, and drew her right hand, quick and hard, across Maria’s left cheek.

  “You’re a vicious little madam,” she said, “and I wish I’d never had you.”

  The room was silent for a long moment—the girl openmouthed, the livid bruise already blooming on her skin; Daniel confused, reaching for his mother, whose own voice had stilled in her throat. Then Maria began to cry, and Daniel did the same, and Margaret turned on her heels and ran back upstairs, slamming the door behind her.

  Later, home from evensong, Francis asked his wife what had happened to their daughter’s face.

  “I slapped her, Francis,” Margaret said. “Do you expect me to pretend otherwise?”

  Things seemed to improve once Maria started school. She liked it there, tripped off uncomplainingly each morning towards the imposing Victorian building with its high, narrow windows and lingering smells of floor-polish and boiled carrots.

  She had a teacher named Miss Meller, who was young and pale and nervous and spoke quietly, in a small, melodic voice that seemed to well up from somewhere deep in her throat. One day, when they were studying world flags, Miss Meller told the class that she had been born not in England but in a country called Poland, far, far away.

  The children considered this.

  “Why did you come here, then?” a boy asked. His name was Stephen Dewes; Maria found him dull and silly, with his neatly ironed blazer and the stick insect he’d brought to school once in a cardboard box. Not much of a pet, Maria had thought. If I could have a pet, I’d keep a tiger.

  “Because of the war,” Miss Meller said, and she looked so miserable that even Stephen Dewes—whose uncle had, like so many, gone off to war and never returned—knew better than to press her further.

  Maria was intrigued by Miss Meller, after that: by her pink-rimmed nose (she seemed always to have a cold); by the fine slivers of thread that trailed from the sleeves of her cardigan. Miss Meller wore her hair in a bun, which would begin the day at the top of her head, and slowly work its way down, pulled inexorably by gravity, until, by afternoon registration, it was sitting right on top of her collar. She liked “Art”—she said the word so, grandly emphasising its initial letter—and gave the children sheets of thick, coarse paper on which to draw their families, their pets, their holidays.

  Maria drew tigers, ferries to France, a smiling phalanx of brothers and sisters.

  “But you don’t have any brothers or sisters,” said Irene. She was six and had three brothers and a hamster called Hammy, and was Maria’s best friend.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Maria said. “It doesn’t have to be true.” “She’s very creative,” Miss Meller told Margaret at parents’ evening. “But tell me—does she have a tendency to make things up?”

  At home that night, Margaret caught Maria by the wrist, held her in front of the hallway mirror.

  “See that face?” she said. “That’s the face of a liar, Maria. A naughty little liar. Don’t ever let me catch you lying again.”

  Her mother’s grip was tight on Maria’s arm. She began to cry, her crumpled face reflected back at her in the glass: dirty-blonde hair, brown eyes limpid, damp, under her uneven fringe. When her mother let her go, she fled upstairs to bed, where she made a nest under the covers, and sobbed until no more tears would come. Then she took out her pad of paper and drew an aeroplane, aiming its wingtips towards a shelf of sky, a wide, smiling beach ball of a sun.

  After that, Maria preferred to keep her stories to herself.

  Irene lived in a house on the other side of the common. It was smaller than the vicarage, and on just two floors; two of her brothers shared a room, and Irene and the third brother—Max, who was nine, and always muddy—had bunk beds. Her father went to work in an office, and her mother was pretty and friendly; she would sit the girls up on the kitchen counter as she made their tea, and ask them what they had done that day at school.

  “Arithmetic,” they would say, or, “spelling.” Then Irene’s mother would ask them which subject they liked best, and Irene would say, “reading,” and Maria, always, would say, “art.”

  Irene’s mother had a piano. It was in the front room, which was painted yellow, and was never quite tidy. Sometimes, after tea, and before Irene’s father came home from work, Irene’s mother would let the girls sit on the sofa and listen while she played.

  Maria loved that room: loved the colour of the walls, which seemed to her like pure sunlight, trapped and held fast; loved the rough and tumble of it, the toys waiting where the children had left them; the brown rug, soft and thick as a bear’s fur, on which she and Irene were sometimes allowed to lie and roll around, as if on a patch of warm grass.

  But, most of all, she loved listening to Irene’s mother’s piano. It sounded nothing like the dusty, unreliable instrument the church organist, Mr. Raynsford, kept in the vestry, or the ancient baby grand old Mrs. Farley thumped about on during school assembly. Irene’s mother didn’t play hymns—“When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”; “There Is a Green Hill”; “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind”: all the tunes Maria had heard since infancy. Irene’s mother played music with no words. Music that rose and surged and soared, and then fell away to nothing. Music that seemed to pour from Irene’s mother’s fingers as they moved over the keys: forming first one pattern and then another, according to no will, it seemed to Maria, other than their own. Often, as her mother played, Irene would grow restless; she would shift and fidget on the sofa, or lean over and whisper in Maria’s ear, “Let’s go and play with Hammy.”

  Maria
would shake her head. “No. I’m listening.”

  Sometimes, when she had finished, Irene’s mother would sit quietly for a moment, her head bent forward, resting against the cool wooden body of the piano. Then Maria would want to ask her to play again. But Irene would ask for ice cream, or one of Irene’s brothers would appear in the doorway, and Irene’s mother would get up from the piano, close the lid, and Maria would be filled with a strange sense of loss that she was too young to understand.

  One afternoon, while waiting for Irene to retrieve her dolls from her room (she had four, each with a different hairstyle and outfit, and would usually permit Maria to play with the second prettiest, a blue-eyed blonde named Sylvia), Maria stood in the hallway, watching the piano through the open door to the front room.

  Suddenly, she found herself walking in, lifting the lid, and fitting her small hand-span to the cool ivory of the keys.

  She didn’t press down at first, afraid of making a noise—the children weren’t supposed to touch the piano, or to enter the front room alone. But then her fingers seemed to move without her permission, and a fractured blur of noise came up from the belly of the instrument.

  Maria jumped back. Irene, coming in with the dolls, let out a gasp. “What are you doing?”

  Irene’s mother came in then, too. She walked up to the piano; gently, she closed its wooden lid.

  Maria hung back, waiting to be scolded, but Irene’s mother bent down to her, took her hand. “I did ask you not to touch the piano, Maria. But I can see that you’re drawn to it. Would you like me to teach you to play? I tried to teach Irene, and the boys, but they all got bored and gave up.” To Irene, she added, “Didn’t you, love?”