“Well,” the man said. “I guess I must have mislaid my invitation.”
He extended his hand. Cass could feel Kim watching them from across the hall. “Larry Alderson.”
The name was faintly familiar. His handshake was firm, even vigorous, and this, for some reason, pleased her.
“Cass Wheeler,” she said.
“Of course,” Larry said. “Who else could you possibly be?”
Now—damp-faced, exhausted; pausing to catch her breath at the mouth of the narrow turning that leads to Home Farm, the sign almost obscured by overgrown ivy—Cass thinks of Larry as he had been two weeks ago, before he left.
Stiff-backed, distant, his lovely mouth set in a grim line, his bright blue eyes—the precise colour, she had decided, of faded denim—looking everywhere but at her.
“I guess,” he’d said finally, as the taxi waited out on the gravel drive, “I had a different idea of where things were going, Cass. I might be an old man, but I can’t say it doesn’t hurt.”
She’d wanted to run to him, throw her arms around him—tell him she was sorry, that she would set it all aside and try again, try harder than she had ever tried for anything. But her fear had been too great, too welcoming, too familiar.
She’d sat on the sofa, waited for the dull slam of the front door. And then, only then, had she allowed herself to cry.
TRACK THREE
“Living Free”
By Cass Wheeler
From the album Songs From the Music Hall
I met a man who said he was living free
Nothing before him but the open road
He said, “Why don’t you just leave it all
And come with me?
Who only knows, who only knows
Where it will lead?
Just leave it all behind
Give me this sad old world, I’ll set it free
“You know it looks different when you’re living free
The sun rises higher in the deep wide sky
The wind it gets stronger, and the air so sweet
Oh, who only knows, who only knows
Where it will lead?
Just leave it all behind
Give me the sad old world, I’ll set it free”
And so I followed him and I tried living free
Who could believe that open road was mine?
The wind it grew stronger and yes, the air was sweet
Who only knows, who only knows
Who we can be?
Let’s leave it all behind
Give me the sad old world, I’ll set it free
Living free
* * *
RELEASED 10 September 1973
RECORDED July 1973 at Château d’Anjou Studios, France
GENRE Folk rock / soft rock / pop
LABEL Phoenix Records
WRITER(S) Ivor Tait / Cass Wheeler
PRODUCER(S) Martin Hartford
ENGINEER(S) Luc Giraud
It would seem to Cass, later, that her life only really began once she came to live at Atterley.
Of course, she missed her father: he visited when he could, and she returned to London to visit him just before term started, and about one weekend a month after that. But, disloyal as it was, she began to dread those weekends in London. She was not allowed out to meet friends, and Francis was usually busy with preparations for the Sunday Eucharist. The hours dragged terribly, and the evidence of her father’s loneliness—the lone eggcup left to dry on the draining-board; the disarray into which the vicarage was falling, despite the best efforts of Mrs. Souter and the church ladies—was almost more than she could bear. She began to invent reasons not to go: she was too busy with homework; she felt it would be better if she could settle fully into life at Atterley.
There, time was skittish, fleet-footed. All was busyness and action: John’s new building project; Lily’s latest assignment for a newspaper or magazine. Both of them woke early, and seemed to exist in a state of perpetual animation. It was only after dinner, sitting together with a brandy before the wide brick fireplace, playing records, chewing over the matters of the day—a friend in hard times; a tricky client; the civil rights protests unfolding on the television—that Lily and John would fall still, his arm resting loosely around her shoulders, her head lolling gently back against his chest.
Cass would sit with them most evenings, too, Louis asleep on her lap, nursing her own small dose of brandy, made almost palatable with a few drops of water. (It seemed babyish to admit that she’d have preferred a cup of tea.)
She liked to watch her aunt and uncle, coiled together on the sofa; so easy in each other’s company, so utterly assured of the other’s affection. She had never, it occurred to her, seen her own mother and father exchange more than the driest and most peremptory of kisses. And she was grateful for the fact that Lily and John didn’t treat her as a child: they always included her in their conversations, sought her opinion on politics, art, culture, encouraged her as she stammered out her tentative replies.
It was there, in the living-room at Atterley, that she began to have an intimation of another kind of life: one in which she might escape the long shadow of her mother’s flight, and her father’s reticence. She kept this feeling to herself—treasured it—as she listened to the lovely, meandering plainsong of their voices, rising and falling over the urgent, staccato undertow of her uncle’s jazz.
Lily’s taste in music ran in a different direction to John’s. One Saturday afternoon not long after Cass’s arrival, her aunt took her aside and showed her a stack of her own records. Joan Baez, Shirley Collins, Ewan MacColl, and Peggy Seeger.
The cover photographs showed intense-looking young women holding guitars and banjos, and a man with a full Father Christmas beard cupping a hand to his ear. Cass wasn’t quite able to stifle the desire to laugh, and Lily, laughing with her, said, “Just listen, Cass. Just listen.”
And so they had listened, sitting before the brick fireplace with a pot of mint tea. The women’s voices were high and breathy and unpolished, and sang of maidens and shipwrecks and cruel lords. Cass closed her eyes and experienced the curious sensation that she was drifting back through time, watching lives as they had once been lived.
“Your grandfather used to play the banjo, you know,” Lily told her. “He taught your dad, too. He was pretty nifty.”
Cass couldn’t imagine this: even before her mother had left, she had only known her father to listen to hymns, or classical music. Vivaldi. Mozart. Beethoven, when he was feeling particularly exuberant. She couldn’t imagine he played much Beethoven now.
“Why did he stop?” she said, and Lily replied, “I don’t think your mother ever cared much for music.”
Margaret: pink-rimmed eyes and downturned mouth, reflected in triplicate; the flowery afterglow of her perfume. Already, her mother’s image was losing clarity in Cass’s mind, and yet she was always present, a faint outline hovering at the limit of conscious thought. And there, too, hung the questions to which Cass still did not dare give voice. How long had she been planning to leave? Why didn’t she take me with her? Why wasn’t I worth staying for?
In London, she had felt that she might choke on the effort of swallowing these questions; had channelled her curiosity, instead, into anger, alternating with cool remoteness, that sense that nothing that was happening to her was quite real. It was, she was coming to understand, a dizzying seesaw; but then, she was her mother’s daughter, and the thought left a bitter taste on her tongue.
Aloud, Cass said, “I don’t think my mother cares for anyone but herself.”
Lily, standing by the turntable, drew the needle down onto a fresh disc. The hiss and crackle of static, subsumed by a fast-swimming shoal of notes plucked from the strings of a guitar.
“Of course you’re angry, Cass,” Lily said, turning to fac
e her, “and you have every right to be. I’m pretty furious with Margaret myself. But nothing is as simple as it seems, especially when it comes to marriage. One day, you’ll understand that for yourself.” Cass felt brittle suddenly, taut; she closed her eyes, and listened to the singer’s voice. That high, urgent soprano, singing of a mother, a silver dagger, a bride.
“Joan Baez,” said Lily. “Isn’t she something?”
“Yes,” Cass said. “She is.”
Upstairs in her room that night, Cass took up her new guitar, settled it on her knee, fitted her left hand to the neck, and let her fingers dance across the fretboard in silent imitation of the music she had heard.
They had listened to the Baez album, in its entirety, twice through, while Cass studied the album sleeve as if searching for clues. The blood-red lettering, and the bleached, grainy photograph of the exotic Baez. Her features lost in monochrome, her mouth half open, her guitar strapped high across her chest.
The song titles, with their hints of violence and foreign lands: “Silver Dagger”; “Mary Hamilton”; “Donna Donna.” Cass had read them over and over, drunk them in; had allowed herself to believe that if she only willed it hard enough, the songs would somehow pass in one easy movement from her memory to the fluid motion of her hands. But Cass’s fingers were clumsy, useless as claw-hammers, and the sound that came up from the instrument’s belly was a deep and tuneless jumble.
She thought of Irene’s mother’s piano, of the discordant smudge of noise she had made all those years ago, back when the keys were still just nameless slivers of ebony and ivory. And she felt, for all her anger and disappointment, sitting there with the instrument she couldn’t yet play, a sense of essential rightness: an as yet inexplicable feeling that to sit, holding this guitar, with all its mysteries and secrets, was to see the blur of the world shift, and come, quite suddenly, into focus.
The postcard was a cartoon. Two women—one blonde, one dark—leaning, unclothed, over a hole in a garden fence; the blonde brandishing an oversized pair of scissors, and the brunette a butterfly net. Above the brunette’s right shoulder loomed a wooden sign—“Nudist club”—while the caption read, “If that smart Alec tries it again . . .”
In black biro, Julia Adams had scrawled a name next to each of the figures—Cass above the blonde; Julia over the dark-haired woman. On the reverse, she had written, in her looped, uneven scrawl, London’s dull, dull, dull without you, Cass. Still can’t believe they’ve sent you off to the sticks. Went to Margate yesterday on Stan’s Lambretta. Wore my new navy bikini. Kevin sends his love. Next to the word “love,” Julia had drawn a fat, bulbous heart, pierced by an arrow.
She had not expected to hear from Julia. Even as their new alliance had begun to form, Cass had not thought of it as a lasting one; she had, as the months wore on, begun to find Julia hard work, and her card seemed to be addressed to another person entirely—one Cass had left back home in London, with Kevin and his scooter and his purple hearts melting on her tongue.
Kevin, on the other hand, she had expected to write to her—even, in the wilder regions of her imagination, to ride up to Atterley from London on his scooter. His silence, at first, rang loud and reproachful. But Cass did not write to him, either, and made no attempt to flee the vicarage to meet him during those weekend visits to her father. And as the weeks wore on, and those visits dwindled, she realised that Kevin did not mean much to her, now, but the faint remembered pressure of his lips on hers, of his hands on her skin. The fading pleasure of the memory was undercut, anyway, by her acute embarrassment in recalling the moment in which Mrs. Harrison had discovered them, and Cass had found herself unable to explain what on earth they had thought they were doing.
And so Cass preferred to put Kevin from her mind. And she did, together with Julia Adams, and, more painfully, Irene, whom she truly missed, but to whom she simply couldn’t conceive of a way to reach out, to spool back through the months to the time before Cass had, so casually and thoughtlessly, cast her old friend aside.
In those early months at Atterley, then, Cass was quite alone, and there were moments when the knowledge of this made her head spin. Waking in the morning, not quite yet remembering where she was; returning from her weekends in London, when her anger (with her mother, for leaving; with her father, for not doing enough to make her stay; with both of them, for being the sorry, broken, flawed people she now knew them to be) resurfaced with such violence that she often found herself, on the car journey home, lashing out at Lily, turning her fury outwards. Her aunt, at first, did not retaliate—she kept her eyes on the unspooling road before them, her lips drawn into a firm line, waiting patiently for Cass’s mood to turn. But Lily’s silence served only to stoke the fire: Cass grew shrill, vicious, hardly knowing what she was saying, seeking only to provoke. Why do you want me here with you anyway? Why do you even bother? You didn’t bother with me for years, did you? You’re only doing this because you feel guilty. You’re only doing this because you don’t have any children of your own. Well, you can’t just walk in and start behaving like my mother. You’re not my mother. My mother’s on the other side of the world. My mother’s mad. She’s always hated me, and I hate her, and I hate Dad, too.
Finally, then, a reaction: Lily shouting, drawing the car to a sudden halt by the side of the road. “That’s enough.”
Cass opened the passenger door, stepped out. “Fine. I’ll walk home, then. Not that I’ve got a home to go to.”
A few moments of stunned silence: the throbbing of the car engine as it cooled, the raucous cawing of crows circling above the fields.
Cass turned from the car, leant against the hedgerow, breathed in its musty scents of grass and warm earth. Then she began to cry, her shoulders heaving. Lily wound her arms around her, and said into her neck, “No, Cass. Not like this. This isn’t the way.”
Gradually, as the months passed, Cass began to understand that this was true: that she could choose, if she wished, to release the grip of her parents’ unhappiness, and her own.
She was not alone. She had her aunt and uncle, the parties they threw, the friends that came to Atterley for one night or two, or even, in one case, a fortnight: that was Harriet, a university friend of Lily’s, now working for a publishing house in London, where her fiancé—Lily explained to Cass in whispers the night Harriet arrived—had just broken off their engagement. She had her drawing—Cass would often sit on the terrace in the late afternoon, as she had that first summer, sketching whatever was before her: a jug of water, a slice of lemon hanging suspended like a sliver of sun; Louis, curled on a cushion; Harriet, stretched out on a wooden chair, her eyes hidden by her white-framed sunglasses.
And, above all, Cass had her guitar. She played for hours up in her room, the strings raising welts on her fingers that turned, gradually, into calluses, and then softened, until they seemed to have become one with the wood and steel of the guitar.
Now, of those months, that is the memory she has most clearly retained. The brightness of her white-walled room; Lily’s photograph staring down at her from above the fireplace, fierce-eyed, resolute; her first guitar settled on her knee. The intensity with which she willed her fingers to shake off their clumsiness, to acquire the ease, the fluency, that was becoming her sole focus, the thing that drew Cass from her bed in the morning, and that she was still thinking of last thing at night, when she closed her eyes for sleep, her fingers throbbing, marking out against the counterpane the strange new chord-shapes into which she was forcing them.
In the last week of August, John and Lily took a trip to Brussels—there was a new housing development that John particularly wanted to see—and Cass went with them.
They stayed in a small, dark, cobwebby hotel on a narrow street not far from the Grand Place; drank beer in the evenings (Cass was permitted a raspberry shandy), accompanied, inexplicably, by plates of cubed cheese doused in a delicious spicy salt; and toured the housin
g development, which was built of wood and white-painted brick, with roofs swooping off at sharp angles, and concrete canopies connecting one building to another.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” John said, while Lily’s camera clicked and whirred. Days later, in her darkroom, she would show Cass the photographs, with their textures and contrasts and slices of shadow, and Cass would see the beauty, and understand. But there, under the fierce midday sun, she only smiled, and nodded, and thought, for the twentieth time that day, of how she longed to get back to Atterley, to her room, and to the guitar waiting for her there.
And then, in September—quite suddenly, for in this new quick-march version of time, the summer seemed to have spun past almost without her noticing—there was school.
Cass had seen the place once already, in June, when the headmistress—a kindly woman, youthful and rather chic in a powder-blue seersucker suit—had smiled at her beneath her cat’s-eye glasses and said, “Well, young lady, you’ll be welcome here next term. Your reports, until very recently, were exemplary. I’m sure you’ll give us no trouble, now, will you?”
Unlike her old school in London, with its high Victorian turrets and dim, shadowy corners—just right for hiding in with packets of stolen cigarettes—this place was newly built, the buildings square and boxy and studded with wide panes of glass that, on the first day of term, were freshly cleaned and shining as the girls gathered for morning assembly.
Cass found herself standing next to a tall girl with a friendly, freckled face.
“Linda Saunders,” the girl whispered as they opened their hymn books. “Do you like the Beatles?”
Cass nodded. “Yes,” she whispered back. “But I like the Stones, too. I can play ‘Carol’ on the guitar.”
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