“I think my mother’s gone away,” Maria whispered into the dark, when she and Irene were tucked into their bunks.
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you going too?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh.” Irene was quiet for a moment. “Well, if not, maybe you could come and live with us instead. But I suppose your father would be lonely.”
In the morning, Maria woke early, and dressed while Irene was still sleeping, expecting that Irene’s mother would take her home in time to change for Sunday school. But when she went downstairs, nobody else was up. She sat quietly for a time in the kitchen, watching the clock inch towards half-past seven.
At a quarter to eight, Irene’s mother pushed open the door, her long hair hanging loose over her cotton robe. “You’re up early, love,” she said. “No church today, all right? Let me make you some breakfast, and then we’ll have a little chat.”
While the rest of the family slept on, Irene’s mother made Maria toast with strawberry jam, and told her that Margaret had decided to go and live somewhere else.
Maria stared at the wall. She had the incommunicable sense of an emptiness opening in some deep part of herself: a void, a fissure, on whose edge she might so easily lose her footing and fall. She swallowed. Her voice was unsteady as she said, “What do you mean? Are Daddy and I going to go and live there too?”
“No, Maria love.” Irene’s mother’s voice was low and gentle.
Her face, in the grey morning light, looked very young—as young as the woman in the photograph on Margaret’s dressing-table. She reached across the table for Maria’s hand; her own was warm, soft, with two faint whitish circles on the fourth finger, where she had removed her rings.
“For now, at least,” she said, “I think you and your father will be staying here in London.”
Months later, just before she went to Atterley for the first time, Cass—then still Maria—found a note on her father’s desk.
She shouldn’t really have gone in—she wasn’t allowed to enter her father’s study alone—but Mrs. Souter, the new charlady, had been dusting and sweeping, and left the door ajar while she stepped out into the garden for a smoke.
Dear Francis, the note said. Len Steadman and I are in love. My happiness has come as a surprise. I feel, with him, that I really might be able to live a different kind of life.
We are moving to Canada, the note said. Toronto, we think. Len has a sister there.
There is no common ground between us any more, Francis, the note said. I did try my best to love you—both of you—but I have never felt that either of you really loved me. You’re as thick as thieves, the two of you. So close. So full of secrets. And Maria will be better off without me, I think. I know I have not been a good mother to her, though I have tried. Please believe that I have tried.
I have written to Lily, the note said. You must know how difficult that was for me, and I hope that you will accept the help she is offering.
I will try, in time, the note said, to earn God’s forgiveness, but I will not dare to ask for yours.
Maria hadn’t quite finished reading when she heard Mrs. Souter coming through into the hallway. She put the note back where she found it, and never saw it again.
9.45 A.M.
In the listening-room, the record has eased its spin; the needle returned to its cradle.
“Common Ground.” It was not the first song Cass wrote—there had been screeds of them before that, begun in a burst of enthusiasm, and then fading, for the most part, to a pale imitation of the sounds she could hear in her head. But it was the first song that had really made sense to her.
She can remember exactly where she was when she wrote it: in her bedroom in Atterley, under the watchful postered eyes of Joan Baez and the Animals, and looking up, from time to time, at the large framed photograph that hung above the fireplace.
The photograph was one of her aunt Lily’s. A woman—Lily had told Cass her name, but it had quickly slipped from her memory, and so, silently, Cass had awarded the woman her own special, private name, “Cassandra”—standing beside a brick wall, steadying herself against it, her face cast in extravagant blocks of shadow, like an actress from a black-and-white film. Marlene Dietrich, perhaps: Lily and John had taken her to see The Blue Angel in Brighton earlier that year, and the chiaroscuro planes of Dietrich’s face—the pencilled eyebrows; the shadowed cheekbones; the thin, painted lips that seemed to brook no argument—were still present in Cass’s mind, long after the film had flickered to a close.
As Cass had played through “Common Ground” for a second time, she had looked up at Cassandra, that anonymous woman in the photograph: not Dietrich, but like her, with the same stern-faced, uncompromising gaze. Here I am, the woman seemed to be saying, and you will take me exactly as you find me.
Cass had thought, then, of her mother, in Canada; had wondered how it was that Margaret had found the strength, so suddenly, to remove herself from the frame of her life, like an article torn from the pages of a magazine. And in that moment—she recalls it so clearly now—she had found herself admiring her mother, almost, for the force of that determination, and the courage it must have taken to begin her life again.
Otis is pawing at the door; his small, fine-boned face is a picture of supplication, and he has risen up on his hind legs to scissor his front paws against the glass.
She can’t help smiling. “All right. I’m coming.”
When Cass lets him in, the cat stands motionless for a moment in the doorway, as if unsure, now that his aim has been achieved, whether it was really what he wanted. She kneels down, rubs his head almost roughly, in the way he likes, and he arches his back, his eyes narrowing to slits.
How tiny he was when she found him, he and his four brothers and sisters, out in the garage on a pile of old carpet offcuts, blind and water-slicked and emitting their piteous high-pitched cries. The mother—she was a farm cat from somewhere round about; Cass had seen her prowling around the garden many times—was exhausted. She had barely found the strength to look up and offer Cass an unemphatic croak of protest before diving back into sleep.
Cass had brought the whole brood indoors, lined a box with a blanket, given the mother water, brought in cat food from the village shop. She’d asked Sally Jarvis whom the cat belonged to—the shopkeeper seemed to know everybody in a ten-mile radius—and she’d said, “Oh, she’s Fred Hill’s cat, from up at Dearlove Farm. But he won’t thank you for taking that lot up to him. Drown them, most likely.”
It was possible that Sally had been joking, but Cass had taken her at her word. After a month or so, when the kittens were starting to lose their scrawny, alien look, she’d written out a card for the shop window. Kittens: free to good homes.
“Are you sure you want people coming to the house?” Alan had said. “I’ll call the RSPCA for you, if you like.”
But Cass had refused: she’d grown attached to the litter of kittens, with their tiny mewling mouths and unsteady legs, and she wanted to see to their rehoming herself.
The people who came looking for a kitten were, for the most part, friendly, punctual, sincere. If Cass had seen recognition slowly creep across their faces—and she had, on some of the older ones—then they’d been far too polite to make any mention of who she was, or, more pertinently, who she had once been.
Otis had been the last animal left. He was not the runt of the litter—that tiny, wriggling scrap of fur had been one of the first to be chosen; out of sympathy, she’d supposed, and the thought had cheered her. But he was certainly the least attractive, with an oversized head and strange, uneven markings: he was black all over but for patches of ginger on his face and belly, like puddles of spilt paint. Cass had looked down at him, alone in the blanket box—the mother cat had unceremoniously departed a few days before, her weaning duties done—and reali
sed, though she had not been planning to keep any of the kittens for herself, that she didn’t want to let him go.
The kitten had looked back up at her, his expression weary, resigned. In her mind, she’d heard a familiar refrain, a voice cracked by sunlight and hard living. Not a song of hers, or the incipient budding of a melody, demanding to be heard. But still, it was something.
“Otis,” she’d said aloud. “I’ll call you Otis.” And the little cat, unmoved, had yawned, and stretched, and settled his head back on his paws.
Now, he is stepping away from her touch, streaking out onto the terrace, where the morning sun is rising over the wrought-iron table and chairs; the wooden bench; the pots of bay and thyme and rosemary. Cass steps out after the cat, out of the cool shadow, into a strip of sun, and closes her eyes.
Silence, or something like it. An arpeggio of birdsong. The low rumble of a car. The distant diminuendo of a plane. Such are the sounds that have, over so many years, formed, for Cass, their own kind of music. The only kind that sounded right inside her head; that didn’t thud and clash there, ugly, discordant, deafening.
It ought to have terrified her, the loss of music: that gaping hole, that place where once there had been joy, sadness, anger, fear, made manifest, transmuted into sound, now empty, purged. How she had hated silence, before. She had flooded each room with music—her own, and that of others; she had felt, in the sudden shock of quiet that followed the last note of each song, a voiceless fear wash over her, and gone at once to turn over the record, to replace the disc, to switch stations on the radio.
When Anna had been small, Cass had surrounded her with music: placed a mobile above her cot that chimed with the breeze; strummed her Martin guitar for her; settled her on the belly of the Steinway, her little legs tapping out a stuttering rhythm as Cass’s hands moved over the keys. No wonder her daughter had woken so often in the night, her cries drawing Cass—never Ivor—from her bed. The child was unaccustomed to silence; her tiny ears had held in them, shell-like, the echo of music, the shimmer of guitar strings and the pulse of drums, and her mother’s high, lilting melodies.
Yes, the loss of music had come upon Cass so suddenly, and almost without her noticing. They had been in the early stages of preparing an album, her first in two years. A producer had been found: a Nashville man named Hunter Forbes, who had worked with Mark Knopfler and Black Francis, and had agreed to decamp to England for the sessions. Musicians had been secured, her own band having long since scattered to the winds. All that work had had to be abandoned. The label had been beside themselves; and even Kim had been worried—really worried.
“Are you sure about this, Cass?” she’d asked. “Are you really sure this is what you want?”
Cass had been sure.
She had told Alan to make everything good with Hunter and the musicians, and then lock up her studio. She had asked Kim to take all her records away: her own; Ivor’s; the hundreds she had acquired over so many years.
And then she had been left alone with that silence, and she had understood, for the first time, that it wasn’t really silence, but its own creeping, layered symphony of sound. And that this—for now; for ever, maybe—was all that she could stand to hear.
The telephone rings at ten o’clock: Callum, calling about the masters. The new songs, polished and smoothed, ready for their long-anticipated launch into the world.
She takes the call in the green room. “Callum?”
“What are you—psychic?” He sounds amused; she pictures him smiling that slow, lopsided smile of his. He’ll be sitting at his desk in his studio—larger than hers, and so it should be, given how much more use it has had. He’d suggested they run the sessions there, but Alan had quickly, discreetly, intervened. “Cass would really like to record the new songs at home,” he’d said. “For reasons I’m sure you can understand. She’s comfortable here.”
Now, holding the receiver, she laughs. “Some have said so. But no, Callum, I’m not psychic. Kim left a note.”
“Good old Kim.” Funny how much stronger his Scottish accent sounds on the phone. A trilling, island lilt: he was born in Tobermory, on the Isle of Mull. Perhaps that, too, was why she had warmed to Callum so quickly: the soft echoes of that voice, that place; that house before the shingled beach where she and Anna had spent so many weeks; the rocks and the peat and the sea eagles slow-dancing against strips of cloud. “You took your time answering. I thought maybe you’d given up already.”
“No. I’m not one for giving up, Callum.”
“That I know.” A pause. “So I’ve got the masters back.”
“How are they?” That strange trepidation, knotting in her throat, even after all this time. Is this any good? Do these songs we have made bear any resemblance at all to the music I can hear in my head?
“Great. Really great.” The knot loosens. She sits down on the nearest sofa: battered brown leather, picked up by Kim from a junk shop in Canterbury.
“Fantastic on the studio monitors,” Callum goes on, “and pretty damn good on the MacBook, too. I’ll give them a try in the car later, and then on the mobile. That’s how the kids’ll hear them, after all.”
“Kids.” Cass smiles. “Can’t imagine many of them wanting this record.”
“Well, you’d be surprised. The Twittersphere, as they say, is abuzz.”
“God. Simon’s got an agency dealing with all that.”
“Probably best,” he says. “You don’t want to be bothered with all that stuff. It’s another world out there now, Cass. Another world.”
She says nothing, pictures Callum leaning forward in his big leather studio chair, reaching for his cigarettes.
“How’s it going, then?” he asks. “The listening.”
“All right. I’ve only just got started, really.”
“Oh, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to disturb you. Kim said it would be OK to call.”
“It was. It is.” Cass puts a hand to her forehead, where she can feel her tiredness pressing. She did not sleep well—kept waking in the night, reaching for Larry, and finding only empty space. “Of course it is. I’m just . . . tired, Callum. And it’s strange, listening back. It’s been so long.”
“I know it has.” There it is: the soft sound of his first puff of smoke. Perhaps that would steady her, too; she thinks longingly of the small stash of tobacco she keeps in her father’s old metal tin in the top drawer of her bedside table. Officially, she gave up smoking years ago, along with so many other things, but there are times when she longs for nothing more than to draw in that first, delicious drag. “I find it hard to listen to my own old recordings, and I didn’t even write the songs. Must be doubly weird for you.”
She takes a breath. “Yes. It’s weird. But good, too, I hope. Like meeting myself again. Or the person I used to be, anyway.”
“You could try writing about it for the sleeve notes.”
“I could.” She can feel herself starting to withdraw. He’s right: she doesn’t really want to be disturbed, not even by him, not even for this. “I’ll go now, Callum. Thanks for calling. Come round early, OK? About five. Let me have a quick listen before everyone arrives.”
“OK, Cass. I’ll see you then. And enjoy today, all right? There’s a lot to be proud of in that music of yours.”
Callum’s voice echoes in her head as she crosses the lawn a moment later, heading back to the house for her tobacco, and to sneak a look at the mobile phone she has left upstairs in her bedroom, in an effort to avoid distraction. It is four-thirty A.M. in Chicago, but still, absurdly, she allows herself to hope that there might be something from Larry, something other than that card. Something to let her know that they might still have a chance.
The Twittersphere, Callum had said, is abuzz. It’s another world.
Another world indeed. It had been Simon’s idea for Cass—or a carefully curated version of her, anyway�
��to join Twitter, the press manager the label had dispatched to Home Farm as soon as the plans for the greatest-hits record had been finalised. Simon was a lean, athletic-looking man in his late forties, with short, brindled hair and a handsomely weather-beaten face; greeting him on the doorstep, Cass had felt a rush of affection for him, and embraced him like the good friend he had once been.
“You’re looking good, Simon. Really good.”
“So are you, Cass. I couldn’t believe it at first, when I heard about the retrospective and the new tracks. It’s bloody brilliant news. We’ve been without you for too long.”
She had offered him a beer, but Simon, it turned out, no longer drank: a fact that, at first, Cass found impossible to reconcile with the lingering images she had of him, blind-drunk, vomiting champagne (and worse) into the gutter outside some industry party. So they had drunk coffee after coffee, and he had outlined the interest that her decision to return to music was, it seemed, already generating.
“Pieces in NME, Rolling Stone, the Guardian,” he’d said, “and all over the blogs, and we haven’t even announced it yet.”
“How did it get out?”
He’d shrugged. “Someone at the label must have shot their mouth off. We’re trying to find out who, but these days, it’s like trying to contain a bushfire: nobody under thirty thinks twice about putting anything and everything out on social media. It’s annoying, but it works in our favour, really. The main thing is, people are excited. Very excited.”
“Social media”: a new concept—one that sounded foreign on Cass’s tongue, but was not entirely unfamiliar to her. Over the last few years—the years during which, very slowly, Cass had seen the colours begin to bleed back into the world, had begun to want to look beyond herself, her house, the small patch of land on which she had so deliberately and carefully barricaded herself away—she’d read articles about it; had asked Kim to show her the profiles she had created on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook.
Greatest Hits Page 4