There was Kim, in miniature, sun-warmed and smiling. (She was using a photograph Bill had taken on their last holiday to Nassau.) There—Kim had scrolled slowly down her Facebook page—were the messages from the fans. Hundreds of them. Dear Kim, I know that great art takes time, but could you please tell Cass to hurry up already? Kim, I’ve heard that Cass might be back with new material, is this true?? Kim, I am in Tokyo, I LOVE Cass Wheeler, please tell me, is she OK??! Kim had shown her another profile, too—not her own, but one called “Cass Wheeler Fan Club—Unofficial.” There was a photograph of Cass, long-haired, impossibly young, her mouth open at the microphone. Cass had squinted at it, trying to place it, but could not.
“Look.” Kim had pointed out a figure in bold type. “Seven thousand members, all wondering where you are. All wanting you to come back.”
Simon had confirmed that this was so. “You’re the one that got away, Cass,” he’d said. “Everyone wants to know what you’re doing next—and why you’ve been away so long.” And then Cass had felt a fresh rush of fear: for how, she thought, would she explain it to them, when she could hardly begin to explain it to herself?
Now, pushing open the kitchen door, she thinks, I believed in it all once, didn’t I? That hunger. That energy. That faith. Surely I can find a way to believe in it again.
TRACK TWO
“Architect”
By Cass Wheeler
From the album Snapshots
I was an architect
I changed my name
With just a pencil and line
I’m going to knock it down
Build it back up from the ground
Oh, a pencil and a line
So beautiful and fine
Just a pencil, a pencil and a line
My windows open like a smile
I paint my walls teeth bright white
And then I rest a while
Rest a while I rest a while
Like a pencil and a line
A pencil, a pencil
Oh, a pencil and a line
So beautiful and fine
Just a pencil, a pencil and a line
Just a pencil, pencil
A blank page
A flag on a ship
A sail full of wind and
A blueprint print print print
Oh, a pencil and a line
So beautiful and fine
Just a pencil, a pencil and a line
Oh, a pencil and a line
So beautiful and fine
Just a pencil, a pencil and a line
* * *
RELEASED October 1988
RECORDED August 1988 at Hightop Studios, New York City
GENRE Folk rock / synthpop / soft rock
LABEL Lieberman
WRITER(S) Cass Wheeler
PRODUCER(S) David Reiss
ENGINEER(S) Todd Wallis / Leon Brown
The first time Cass saw Atterley, it was almost dark.
She had slept most of the way. They’d left the vicarage after lunch, Sam Cooper helping Aunt Lily carry the bags out to the boot of her car. Her father had not come down to wave them off, but Cass had gone in to him that morning in his study and kissed his cheek. He had held her hand for a long time and said, “It’s only for a few weeks, Cassandra. I’ll be right as rain in a few weeks.”
As the car had swung out onto the road, she’d looked up at the house, and fancied that she saw a shadow moving at the window of what had once been her parents’ room. But the curtains had not been tugged back, and nobody had waved.
It was three months, now, since her mother had left; three months since everything had changed. Cass had believed, for the first few days, that what Irene’s mother had told her couldn’t possibly be true: that Margaret would return, that she would come home from school one afternoon to find her there, making tea, or stretched out silently on her bed. But her mother did not return, and though her father returned to work—gave his sermons, conducted his church business—Cass could see that he was not fully recovered. A light seemed to have gone out in him: he was dimmed, shadowy, and would not speak of what had happened, or of why Margaret had left no note for her daughter, and had still not been in touch. No letter, no postcard, no telephone call.
It’s true, Cass thought for the hundredth time, there in the car beside her aunt, I really do mean that little to her. And I always did. Aunt Lily reached across the space between them, squeezed her hand. “You must be tired, lovey. Why don’t you close your eyes for a bit?”
Cass was asleep almost at once. The next thing she heard her aunt say was, “Maria. We’re here.”
She opened her eyes. She saw black brick, and dark thickets of ivy, and a grey cat, its eyes glinting yellow at her as it slunk off into the dusk.
“Daddy calls me Cassandra,” she said. It seemed vital, suddenly, that Lily should know this, as if it were the one thing that still bound her to her father.
“Well.” Aunt Lily turned to look at her from the driver’s seat. “Then that’s what John and I shall call you, too, if you like. But on one condition.”
Cass blinked. “What’s that?”
“That you call me Lily. ‘Aunt Lily’ makes me feel ancient. And I’m not that old, am I?”
Cass considered her aunt’s face. She had a long, hooked nose, like Francis’s, and dark brown eyes, like Cass’s own. Her black hair was cut into a fringe that sat high on her forehead, above inches of pale skin, which, in the semi-darkness, seemed almost luminous.
“I don’t know,” Cass said. “You look quite old to me.”
And Lily, then, opened her red-painted mouth, and laughed, and said, “You and I, Cassandra, are going to get along just fine.”
In the morning, Cass saw that Atterley was built of red brick, not black. It was an unusual shape—she spent a while, after breakfast, walking around the garden, exploring. The house was larger than the vicarage—much larger—and made up of several wings that jutted out at odd angles, each one surmounted by a steep slate roof that crept low over the supporting walls, giving the building a rather squat, narrow-eyed look. The windows were odd, too: some of them wide and square and ordinary, and others tall and thin, like arrow-slits, or small and round, like a ship’s portholes.
“What do you think?” Lily said. She had come out from the kitchen, carrying an enamel mug of tea; she wore a loose green dress, and a yellow scarf knotted over her hair, like the one Mrs. Souter put on when she was cleaning. “Do you like it?”
Cass nodded. “It’s like a castle. Or a house in a dream.”
Lily beamed at her. “Exactly, Cass—can I call you that? It seems to trip off the tongue better than ‘Cassandra.’”
Cass nodded again, and Lily took a sip from her mug. “Yes, it’s a funny old place. But we love it here. John, especially. It’s his house, of course. His grandfather built it. Arts and Crafts style. All that faux medievalism and worship of the exalted craftsman. John can’t get enough of it.”
Cass, at ten years old, naturally had no idea what her aunt was talking about, so she said nothing. Uncle John, as yet, was just a name, and a photograph hanging on the landing, outside the bedroom to which Lily had led her the night before: a man shown in profile, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, bending low over an angled desk, a pencil clasped tightly in his right hand.
“That’s one of mine,” Lily had said when she saw Cass looking at it. “I took it soon after we met. Wasn’t he beautiful? He still is, of course. He’ll be back tonight. He’d have come with me to London to get you, but he’s been stuck up in Norwich. Client can’t make up his mind.”
Lily spoke quickly, in fast-flowing bursts, and without pausing to explain or simplify. She seemed not to have noticed that Cass was a child, and that she knew almost nothing about her aunt or her uncle: their jobs, their histories, their strange, exoti
c lives. Cass had met Lily only once before, and years ago, before she had even started school; she could remember little of the visit other than her aunt’s colourful dress, and her heady perfume, and being sent upstairs to play very soon after Aunt Lily had arrived. She couldn’t recall John being there. She thought she remembered the visit ending prematurely, and not being called down to say goodbye—watching the dark circle of her aunt’s unhatted head as she walked quickly off down the front path to her car—but she couldn’t be absolutely sure.
After that, her aunt Lily had rarely been mentioned again—certainly not by Margaret, who would screw up her face on the rare occasions that an incautious visitor alluded to the existence of her sister-in-law. Francis, in their private moments, had sometimes spoken to Cass of his sister—she was a photographer, he said, and Cass had thought of the man who came once a year to her school, lined the children up in regimental rows, and then disappeared under a canopy with his camera. But her aunt had remained a vague, indeterminate figure that Cass seldom thought of—until a fortnight ago, when Mrs. Harrison had informed her, over tea, that she would be spending the summer at her aunt and uncle’s house in Sussex.
Cass had opened her mouth to say that she would really rather stay here, at the vicarage, with her father; that she and Irene had made all sorts of plans—chief among them, the construction of a wigwam under the apple tree in Irene’s garden, with the old bedsheets Irene’s mother kept in the airing cupboard for the children’s games. And a part of her—though this she would not admit aloud, even to herself—still hoped that something might come for her from her mother: a letter, a call or (yes, she couldn’t deny that she imagined it), Margaret herself, remorseful, returned. The soft, caring mother: the mother who had thrown the party, not the one who had once gripped her tightly by the arm, or left a livid red mark blooming across her face. This mother would put down her suitcase and embrace her. This mother would say, “My darling girl! How could I ever have left you behind?”
But she had barely begun to speak before Mrs. Harrison interrupted. “There’ll be no argument, Maria. You’re to be a good girl and go and stay with your aunty, and have a lovely time.”
Uncle John arrived just in time for dinner. He was a tall, thickset man, with a wild crop of sandy-coloured hair, and cheeks that flushed pink as soon as he saw Lily coming through into the hallway from the kitchen. He looked, Cass thought—she was hanging back in the doorway, suddenly shy, watching them embrace—more like a farmer than an architect, although an architect, she had just about been able to gather over the course of the day, was what he was, and that meant that he drew pictures of buildings, and then asked other people to build them.
When he and Lily finally broke apart, John looked over at his niece, and smiled a smile that seemed to stretch from ear to ear, like the Cheshire Cat in Cass’s illustrated edition of Alice in Wonderland.
“Maria!” he said, quickstepping across the flagstones towards her. “You’re here, little thing.”
“Cass,” Lily said as he bent down to Cass’s height, placed a hand on each of her shoulders. “We’re to call her Cass.”
John’s smile broadened even further. “Well, of course we are. It’s an excellent name. Far more interesting than Maria.”
He looked Cass squarely in the eye. His were blue, pale blue, the colour of the Wedgwood china Cass’s mother had kept in the sideboard in the vicarage dining-room, and rarely taken down to use. It struck Cass, in that moment, that the china must still be there, along with all the hundreds of other things Margaret had left behind.
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Cass,” John said. Looking back at him—at his handsome, open face, his pink cheeks, his easy smile—Cass saw that he really was; and she felt herself relax, in a motion that seemed almost physical, like a breath long held, and then, quite suddenly, let go.
That summer, Cass and Irene exchanged letters—a long series of them, composed in careful, rounded cursive. (Their last teacher, Miss Doyle, had been a stickler for presentable handwriting.) Irene wrote on pink notelets that carried the faint, not unpleasant whiff of Hammy’s unemptied cage; and Cass wrote on sheets of deliciously thick, creamy paper, without lines (she had to rule them in herself with a pencil), under a printed letterhead that read, in fat, bold type, “John Wiseman, Architect, BSc DipArch RIBA.”
Yesterday, we built the wigwam, Irene wrote. Max got one of the sheets stuck on a tree branch and it tore and now there’s a hole in the roof. We tried sleeping out under it last night, but it got cold, so Mum brought us in and made us cocoa. I miss you, Maria.
My aunt Lily takes photographs, Cass wrote. Yesterday, she showed me her darkroom. It’s not really dark, but it has a strange red light in it that makes your skin look blue. It smells funny, too, because of the chemicals. She put the photograph paper in a tray and we watched it change and in a few minutes I could see Lily’s picture there. (She doesn’t like me calling her “Aunt Lily.”) It was like magic, Irene. Or like seeing a ghost. I miss you too.
PS, Cass wrote, Lily and John are calling me Cass now, and I like it. Please can you call me that too?
Well, all right, Irene wrote. But I don’t see why you should get to change your name and not me. So please don’t call me Irene any more. I’ll be George now, like in the Famous Five.
But Irene’s alias didn’t stick: a few days later, she was back to signing her letters under her given name, while Cass remained, resolutely, Cass.
There were many things Cass did and saw that summer that she didn’t write about to Irene—or, when she did try to write about them, they seemed to lose something in the recollection, to turn into hazy facsimiles of the lucid images projected in her mind.
The party her aunt and uncle threw one night: the garden crowded with people, and her uncle’s jazz records drifting up to Cass’s open window. Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, John Coltrane: John had played them to Cass over the previous weeks, one album each evening, as the three of them sat out on the terrace after dinner, Cass’s usual bedtime apparently forgotten. That night, while the moon rose clear and full over Atterley, she had leant out over the sill, and watched the people talking and dancing and drinking below, until she’d finally slipped into bed and fallen asleep to the high, lonesome wail of a solo saxophone.
The day Lily took her to Brighton: the tall, white buildings and the seagulls and the lady they saw striding along the pier in a tight red dress, a white poodle bobbing at her heels. Lily had bought ice creams, and they had sat on a bench and watched men on motorbikes scoot along the seafront in their leather jackets like a flock of noisy black birds. Lily had her camera with her: a Nikon (Lily had shown Cass the letters etched above the lens), with four cogs across the top that whirred and clicked under Lily’s fingers, and a black case that was rough and leathery. So often was this camera lifted to Lily’s face that Cass was beginning to think of it almost as a part of her: a third eye, opening and closing like some strange, fantastical creature.
While they ate their ice creams, Lily put down her camera, and talked to Cass as she always did, as if they were the same age. Cass was coming to love their conversations: the words streaming unchecked from Lily’s scarlet mouth; the way her aunt would lean in close, her eyes fixed on Cass’s face, as if willing her to understand. And when she didn’t understand—which she often didn’t: she was only ten years old, after all—Cass would do her best not to let on. Like then, on the pier, when Lily said, with uncustomary bitterness, “Your mother couldn’t stand me—but you know that already, of course. She couldn’t ever forgive the fact that John was married when we met. Was married—he’s married to me, now, not that we need a piece of paper to prove it to ourselves. But we got it anyway. Bowed to conformity.” She sighed. “So holier-than-thou, Margaret Wheeler. The vicar’s wife. Funny, really, how it turned out.”
Remembering herself, Lily looked across at Cass, who was concentrating on her ice cream. “Well, not funn
y, really, lovey. Not for you. You must miss her a lot. And of course Francis is in pieces.”
Francis is in pieces. Cass pictured her father, then, as a china figurine, lying smashed on the carpet in the front room. She kept on licking her ice cream, which was melting rapidly into its cone.
“I don’t miss my mother,” she lied, between licks. “She didn’t like me. Or Daddy. I’m glad she’s gone.”
Lily reached into the pocket of her skirt for her cigarettes, not lifting her eyes from her niece.
“Of course she liked you, lovey,” she said. “And I’m sure she loved you very much, in her way.”
In the last week of August, Cass wrote to Irene, I’m coming home next week. Not long till school starts now.
The weather was still warm. She spent her last few days at Atterley sitting out on the terrace, under the wide wooden shade, drawing (John, after noticing the sketchbook Cass had brought with her from London, had come home one day with a sheaf of fine draughtsman’s paper), and drinking tall glasses of Lily’s sugary mint tea.
She drew the house, or parts of it—the ribbed framework of the shade above her head; the ivy inching across the brickwork; the round porthole windows that ran across the upstairs landing. She drew the grey cat, whose name was Louis, after Louis Armstrong, and who had taken, in the last few weeks, to curling up at the foot of her bed, and sleeping there until morning; he would often wake her, ever so gently, by nuzzling his soft, ticklish face against her chin. She would miss Louis, she thought. She would miss Lily and John. She would miss this house, where music played, and people said exactly what they thought, and there were no locks on any of the doors; and no lingering images of her mother, whose features, when summoned to Cass’s mind, were beginning to fracture and dissolve.
Greatest Hits Page 5