But Francis was not angry now. He got up from behind his desk, came round to stand beside her, encircled her with his arms. Into her hair, he said, “I’m so sorry, Cassandra. My darling. My girl. It’s all my fault, of course. All of it. But you’ll be better off with Lily and John. I know you will.”
“I’ll miss you, Dad,” Cass said, so quietly that in the long silence that followed, she began to think he hadn’t heard.
But then he said, “I’ll miss you too. More than you can ever know.”
When she stepped away from him, she saw that his face was wet with tears. She reached up, brushed her father’s cheek with her hand, and said, “It’ll be all right, Dad. You’ll see.”
Once they were on the road, Lily lit a cigarette and passed it to Cass.
“If you’re going to smoke,” she said, “you might as well do it properly. Watch and learn.”
She drew another from the packet, lit it, and took a deep drag. From her aunt’s lips, Lily watched a series of smoke rings emerge, hang for a moment in the air, and then rise up to break against the roof of the car.
At Atterley, they found John in the kitchen, surrounded by a jumble of pans, herb-jars, packets of flour and butter. Louis was coiled on the windowsill, licking his paws.
“Dinner’s almost ready,” John said, and he came forward to kiss Cass on each cheek. “I’m sure we ought to be telling you off, but I suspect you’ve had quite enough of that. Anyway, I hope this can be something of a new start for you.”
Cass smiled. “That smells good. What are you making?”
After dinner, John heaved the trunks out from the boot of the car and up the stairs to Cass’s room. The door was closed; as she went to open it, he said, “Let me.”
Lily came up behind him. Cass saw them exchange a glance.
“Actually, darling,” Lily said, “why don’t we let Cass go in first?”
Cass pushed open the door. Inside, she saw the same room she had already begun to think of as hers: the white walls, the green gingham curtains, the bare floorboards covered with a thick white rug. There was something new above the fireplace: a large black-and-white photograph of a woman, standing beside an easel, her chin tilted towards the lens.
“Oh,” she said. “Did you take that, Lily?”
“I did. She’s an artist. Dinah Frith. She reminded me of you, somehow. You as you might be one day, anyway. But keep looking, Cass. What else can you see?”
And so Cass kept looking, and there, laid out on the bed, she saw it. Long-necked, round-bellied, its polished wood treacly and shining under the electric light.
“We know how much you’ll miss playing the piano,” John said. “We thought this might be the next best thing.”
Cass walked over to the bed. The guitar was heavier than she had expected. She held it to her, ran a hand over its thick steel strings, and heard a low, responsive hum.
“It was John’s idea,” Lily said. “He thought it might give you something new to focus on. Something”—she smiled, her tone softening—“dare I say it, more constructive than a mod with a scooter, however handsome I’m sure he must be.”
Cass adjusted her position so that her left hand was holding the guitar’s neck and her right was cradling its body. In her mind, she heard the same melody that had appeared in her bedroom in the vicarage: or the echo of it, like some half-remembered tune.
“You don’t have to play it, of course,” John said, clearing his throat, “if you don’t want to.”
She looked up at him then, at both of them, her aunt and uncle, watching her carefully, offering her this gift that was surely so much more than she deserved.
“Of course I want to,” she said.
11 A.M.
At the record’s end, Cass sits for a moment in silence, her eyes closed.
She can hear Larry speaking, as he had in the living-room two weeks ago, just before he’d left—his face stiff, his voice stern, raised, rendered unfamiliar by anger. Of course I know you, Cass. Of course I know what you’ve been through. But do you think you’re the only fucking person who’s ever suffered, who’s ever made a bloody mistake?
Her solipsism, her accursed tendency to look inside herself, rather than outwards, to the world: it had brought her everything, and it had taken everything away.
There had been an interview, sometime in the early years. A pub room somewhere: wood-panelled, dimly lit. The journalist young—barely older than she was—with a suede donkey jacket and a round, boyish face. His name was Don Collins; he’d been flirting with her, making Ivor glower and scowl.
“Cass,” Don had said, his tone changing. “Tell me—why are your songs so autobiographical? The world’s in chaos—Vietnam, civil rights, Ireland. Other singers are responding, trying to make sense of it all. And here you are, writing only about your own life. About yourself.”
He’d leant towards her, smiling, almost in apology, as he added, “Isn’t it a little bit, well, short-sighted? Do we really need to hear your nice little middle-class songs, when there’s a much bigger world out there, calling for our attention?”
Ivor had stood up then, leant forward, his fists clenched. “Hey, whoever you are. That’s enough.”
Don Collins had looked from Ivor to Cass, his smile broadening. The intention to offend, of course, was deliberate, a stick poked through the bars of a tiger’s cage. But Cass had simply smiled back at the round-faced man in his suede jacket, and said, sounding calmer than she felt, “It’s all right, Ivor. Let me answer the question.”
With a huff of protest, Ivor had sat back down. Slowly, quietly, Cass had said, “I don’t know whether the world needs my songs or not. That’s not up to me, is it? Maybe I should be writing about politics, or grand ideas. But, you see, I just pick up my guitar, or sit down at my piano, and these songs are what comes out. If people want to listen to them, and it seems they do, then that’s wonderful. But really, I suppose, I write for myself. I write to make sense of my own experiences, my own life.”
The journalist had looked up from his notebook. “And have you?”
“Have I what?”
“Made sense of it.”
She had laughed. “Oh no, not yet. But then I’ve only just got started, haven’t I?”
Cass stands up from the sofa, slides open the doors to the terrace. The cool air is a relief. Otis is nowhere to be seen; crossing the lawn, she looks for him, and sees a flash of black and ginger among the hydrangea bushes, still bare and spindly, only just coming into bud. She calls his name, but the cat is set on his own, private business, and does not respond.
Across the grass, Home Farm looms square and solid, the watery sun throwing pale light across its symmetrical rows of white-framed Georgian windows; its red brick; the wisteria bush climbing across the left-hand side of the façade. When she first saw the house, its colour had reminded Cass of Atterley, though this house was a good deal smaller; smaller, too, than any of the other houses she, Kim, and Anna had been shown so far. It wasn’t as well appointed as those houses, either: the interiors were large, light, and airy, but in dire need of redecoration, and the kitchen hadn’t been touched since the fifties: the carpet, tiles, and cupboards covered a dingy spectrum of brown and beige, and the stovetop was thick with ancient grime.
Kim had been unimpressed: to the agent, a brittle, hard-faced local woman with a mane of blonde hair set in an aggressive perm, she’d said, “Come on. You’ll need to do better than this.” But Cass had followed Anna—only eight, and not fully apprised, as yet, of the fact that her father would not be coming to live with them—out into the garden. She had stood on this lawn and taken in this view—it was rather forlorn back then, the exterior brick chipped and cracked in places, the paint flaking from the windowsills. Yet she had liked what she saw, and had felt—as she had all those years before at Atterley—that this was a place in which the spring that she had beg
un to imagine lying, coiled and tight, at her core, might just begin to loosen.
Much to Kim’s surprise, Cass had told the agent, there and then, that she would take the house. And despite everything that would happen here—everything Home Farm would come to represent—she has never once regretted that decision.
Up in her bedroom, Cass changes into her running clothes: leggings, trainers, a loose sweat-proof top. She wants to feel the wind on her face, the narrowing of focus that comes with the steady deepening of her breathing, the slow drumbeat of her feet on the road.
It was Kim who’d suggested she take up running: nobody called it “jogging” any more, it seemed, though that term seemed better suited to Cass’s ungainly, lurching pace. Kim had been going out in her Lycra gear each morning for years, and had the long, lithe body to prove it—but then, Cass had reminded herself, Kim had always been naturally slim, even when they’d been out on the road for months, living on hamburgers and fried chicken and champagne.
Kim had broached the subject of exercise not long after Cass had come out of hospital for the second time.
“You never know,” she’d said. They were in the kitchen, drinking coffee, eating Kim’s homemade Jamaican ginger cake. “It might feel good to get out in the fresh air.”
Cass had been sceptical—and, frankly, embarrassed. She knew she had put on weight—two stone, the doctor had told her in the hospital, on the morning they had set her free.
“You’ll want to do something about that,” the doctor had said, not unkindly. She was young, as they all were, with flawless mid-brown skin and an ironed sheet of black hair. “Healthy diet, plenty of exercise.”
Easy for you to say, Cass had only just managed to stop herself from snapping back. You don’t have to see hideous photographs of yourself splashed across the tabloids every time you put on a pair of trainers, do you? And there in the kitchen, with Kim, she had imagined herself in three inches of inky newsprint, sweat-stained and grimacing. “Reclusive star in blubbery running shame.”
But gradually, remembering her room in the hospital—those plain magnolia walls; the way she had felt, in the worst moments, as if they were closing in on her, ready to crush the breath from her lungs—Cass had decided to give it a try. Kim had gone out with her, easing her in gently—two minutes’ walking, two minutes’ running. They’d traced a slow circuit around the Home Farm grounds: from the house, across the lawn to the studio; down to the old barn; past the walled garden and the threadbare copse of trees that the frizzy-haired estate agent had, with defiant optimism, called the “arboretum.” Then back past the kitchen garden to the house, where Cass had finally been permitted to collapse, pink-faced and panting, on the living-room carpet.
After a few months, though, it had grown easier; they’d begun to venture out into the village, to the road that led up over the high ridge of the Weald. The photographs had inevitably followed—Sally Jarvis had spread the papers across her shop counter, arranging her features into an expression of concern—but by then, Cass had found that she didn’t care. She was coming to love her running sessions, the way the frenetic chattering of her mind seemed to still, and fall away; the view that unrolled below her as she climbed the ridge. The valley, dipping gently away towards the silver thread of the river. The dark thickets of trees, the ribboning hedgerows, and, above them, the fine white gauze of the sky.
Soon, she was going out alone most days, despite Alan’s concerns for her safety. Cass had, over so many years, grown accustomed to the strange, unpredictable behaviour of her more obsessive fans. The old army man Richard McGregor, who’d kept pitching a tent on the front lawn at Rothermere, over and over again, no matter how many times he was carried away by the police. The threatening letters Alan and the security team had tried to keep from her, but about which she had insisted, as a mother, that she must be kept informed.
All that had more or less petered out since her retirement, but had not altogether disappeared. A few years ago, a woman had broken into Home Farm one morning, made herself a cheese sandwich, and then gone upstairs to Cass’s walk-in wardrobe to take a knife to several of her gowns. Cass, thank God, had been in London with Johnny; Alan had come to the house to pick up some papers and found the woman with the knife in her hand, slicing through a green floor-length dress Cass hadn’t worn since the late seventies. Cass had been upset, of course, but not excessively so: her first reaction, on seeing the mutilated silk, had been to think, My God—did I ever really manage to fit into that?
Alan had renewed the alarm system, brought in a new security detail to guard the house. But after a few months, Cass had insisted that she didn’t want to live like a prisoner, and the guards (though not the alarm system) had been dismissed. On her right to go out running alone, she had been similarly insistent.
“If they’re really so interested,” she had told him, “in a fat old woman puffing along in her smelly trainers, then let them at it. I don’t care any more, Alan. I really don’t care.”
Alan had opened his mouth to protest, and then laughed with her, knowing that it was, in any case, useless to oppose her: that once Cass was set on something, there was nobody, nobody at all, who could persuade her to change her mind.
Cresting the ridge—the black tarmac spooling beneath her feet; keeping to the hard right of the road, beside the grass verge and the tall screen of trees; the Weald spreading its green-gold colours out before her—Cass thinks of Larry.
He had taken, in recent months, to coming out with her on her runs: insisting—out of some anachronistic gallantry that, despite herself, Cass had found she rather appreciated—on leading the way, the better to protect her from oncoming cars (or, perhaps, from curious camera lenses).
She had grown used to watching him, bobbing and dipping a few paces in front of her; his long legs, skinny and bare in his running shorts; his arms moving back and forth like the mechanism of some precisely calibrated machine. He ran gracefully, and this had come as a surprise to Cass, for graceful was not the first word that would spring to her mind to describe him. Six foot four in his bare feet, with his mane of white hair, and the large, rough-hewn features that, the first time she saw him, had reminded her, curiously, of Abraham Lincoln: they shared the same thick, emphatic brows, the same direct, expressive gaze.
They had met in May 2014, in Washington, DC. Cass had flown over with Alan and Kim to attend a concert given in her honour at the Library of Congress. Hopes had been expressed that Cass might take to the stage herself, but she had drawn the line at that, and concentrated her energies on surviving the flight.
It was years since she had last flown—this was the first invitation abroad that she had accepted in almost a decade—and the full depth of her hatred of flying (the loss of control, the aircraft’s unpredictable bucking and juddering) had returned as soon as they had stepped into the business-class lounge at Heathrow, and she had seen the plane waiting below them on the tarmac. “Get me a whisky, won’t you, Kim?” she had said. “Dutch courage.” And her old friend had quickly obliged.
She had survived the flight, and as the plane had nosed its way down towards Dulles Airport, Cass had felt a rising sense of elation: there, below her, was dry land; the land that she had travelled so often, for so long. And it had struck her, then, just how much she had missed America. The dusty freeways; the beer-and-sawdust back rooms where they had waited, she and Ivor and the others, to go out and face the unfamiliar crowd. The empty prairies, stretching endlessly beyond the windows of the tour bus on the mornings she had woken early, drawn back the curtain, and wondered where on earth they were heading next.
The Library of Congress concert, however, had been a strain. Cass hadn’t known, until she was sitting in the front row in her evening dress (something navy blue, structured and flattering: Kim’s choice), how strange, how painful, it would be to hear her music sung by other people, rising from other people’s guitars and pianos and mandolins.
Then Cass had felt the old fear draw over her—the tightening of her throat; the odd acoustic tricks that muffled sound, making the music seem muddy, overloud, and setting off that dangerous ringing in her ears. She had stiffened in her seat, gripping the velvet arms of her chair as tightly as she had clasped the metal armrests inside the plane.
Kim, sitting next to her, had taken her hand, leant in close, and whispered, “Are you all right?”
Cass had nodded uncertainly; and then, quite suddenly, the tightness had eased, the sound levels had returned to normal, and she had begun to sense that she might be able, finally, to hear the songs for what they were: a record of her past. A diary. Nothing to fear or hide from—just her life, as she had lived it, day to day, without foreknowledge of the consequences of her choices.
For who, she had thought then, could live with such knowledge? And there, sitting in state in her blue gown, Cass had felt the burden of her guilt begin, if only by a fraction, to ease its heavy weight.
Afterwards, at the drinks reception, she had grown rather drunk on champagne. There, standing away from the crowd, she had seen him.
He was wearing a collarless white shirt and linen trousers, both a little crumpled. Catching her eye, he had smiled, and raised his glass; and she had found herself moving over to him, without quite knowing why.
“Gaudy, isn’t it?” he said. She looked up, followed his gaze to the distant, ornate ceiling, an Italianate riot of creamy marble and gold leaf, studded with six broad panes of blue stained glass. “A grand monument to bad taste.”
“I don’t know. That glass is rather beautiful, really. If you want bad taste, you should see inside Buckingham Palace.”
He renewed his smile. His accent, she noted, was well-educated American, with a Midwestern twang. She was good at guessing accents: it was a game they used to play, she and Ivor, when they were out on the road.
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