A man who had walked off up the road to the train station at two o’clock on a Friday afternoon, with two suitcases and the Martin D-28 Dreadnought he’d worked evenings and weekends in the White Hart for eighteen months to buy. His mother, Susan, had written to him once a week for a year, on her blue-lined Basildon Bond, and had come up to see him at his hall of residence, wearing her best Sunday dress. Ivor had asked a friend to tell her that he wasn’t there, and had sat at his window and watched her walk away. And then, after a while, he had moved on himself, and instructed the university not to pass on his address.
A man who had first heard The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in his room in that Bloomsbury house, on a grey, damp, windless Wednesday when he was meant to be reading Chaucer, and was instead transported to the streets of Greenwich Village with that skinny slip of a musician. Just four years his senior—an older brother, really, and that tough, ugly, boot-leather voice ringing loud as a siren call.
What can Cass remember, now, of that night in May, almost fifty years ago?
The dress she wore—stiff white cotton, with a paisley print, and a hemline so short she’d had Linda come into the changing-room to check whether anyone would be able to see her underwear. (They would, Linda decided, if Cass bent, knelt, sat, or crossed her legs, so she would pretty much need to remain standing at all times.)
The way she wore her hair—loose, brushed straight and smooth across her back—and the thick strokes of kohl she painted around her eyes.
The bonfire John and Jonah built at the bottom of the garden, where the lawn stretched away to meet the stream. Its flames rising, red and gold and blue, into the sky as the dusk gathered its shadows around them.
The two joints she shared beside the bonfire with Stephen, Linda, and James. The way she grew sleepy and sad, and her thoughts turned to her father in that little flat in Worthing: to how wrong it was, surely, that she was here, surrounded by people, while he was alone, with nothing to look forward to, and nobody but God to comfort him.
The sudden silencing of the record-player. A man stepping out onto the terrace with a guitar in his hand, and a crowd gathering to watch him. Moving to join them, hand in hand with Stephen, as Jonah appeared beside her and whispered in her ear, “That, missy, is Ivor Tait.”
The way she listened—the way all of them listened—as the man on the terrace said, in a low voice they had to strain to catch, “This is a song called ‘Living Free.’”
And then he began to play, and Cass watched the quickstep of his fingers across string and fret, absorbed the deep, roiling warmth of his voice, and felt, for one crazy, intoxicating moment, that he had somehow reached inside her own mind, and brought out of it a song that had been hanging there all along, formless and inchoate, just waiting for the moment to be born.
The second in which Ivor looked up, still singing, and met her gaze, and she saw something there that she had never seen before—some kind of recognition; some unspoken knowledge of her that she herself had not yet fully acquired. And then she let go of Stephen’s hand, and moved alone across the grass towards the terrace.
When Ivor had finished playing, he looked up at her again, and bridged the small distance between them. She watched the slow, graceful movements of his body as he approached. “I hear you play.”
It was dark now in the garden. His face, outlined against the kitchen window, was steeped in shadow.
“I do,” she said.
His gaze was frank and level; she had the unsettling feeling that he was sizing her up. She stared back at him, unblinking. After a moment, he said, “So why don’t you get up there and show us?”
Perhaps it was the grass she’d smoked, or the firelight, or the fact that, there in the garden, she couldn’t offer him a satis- factory response. Or perhaps she had sensed, in this stranger, a challenge, to which she was determined to prove herself fit: later, she wouldn’t quite be able to decide what had made her go upstairs to her room, pick up her guitar, and bring it back down to the terrace.
The crowd that had gathered to watch Ivor had drifted back. Some were standing, others sitting cross-legged on cushions—she saw Linda, Stephen, and James among them, passing a freshly rolled joint from hand to hand—as Jonah’s fingers moved over those tight steel strings, and his voice sent its rough Southern blues shimmering into the Sussex air.
At the song’s end, Jonah stood for a moment with his eyes closed. Opening them, he saw Cass, and her guitar. “And now, would you all please welcome to the stage our very own Miss Cassandra Wheeler!”
At that moment, her courage almost failed her. She shook her head, prepared to run, but Lily placed a hand on the small of her back, and across the terrace she saw Stephen nudging Linda, and beaming his encouragement.
“Go on, darling,” Lily said, and she went.
Yet it was not Lily, Stephen, or Linda Cass saw as she stepped into the centre of the circle, slipped the strap of her guitar over her neck, and settled its weight across her shoulders, but that tall, long-haired man who had played so beautifully, and who was watching her, now, with that same assessing stare. Her opening chord was an affirmative answer to that stare, but as the song grew and swelled, she forgot him, forgot everyone around her. She was alone, with her guitar, and the music that had come to her, up in her room—and that now, for the first time, she understood would only ever really exist in the act of sharing: in a moment such as this, with the upturned faces of the people she knew—and many she didn’t—watching her, and listening, drinking her music in.
She played four songs straight through, without pausing for breath. At the last chord, applause rose from the crowd. Stephen got up from the floor, kissed her on the mouth, and reclaimed her hand. But Ivor kept his distance, and through the rest of the night, she made no effort to approach him, though she was constantly aware of his presence, as if of a radio frequency to which she had only just become attuned. And then, hours later—it was three A.M. and the party was winding down—Ivor was suddenly there, in the hallway beside her, placing a hand on her arm.
“You’re good, you know,” he said. “Really good.”
“Thank you.” She looked down at his hand.
“I’ve been on the circuit a few years. Heard a lot of singers. You’ve got something, Cass.”
Her name sounded different on his lips: that of a woman, not a girl. His face had seemed hard-angled before, out there in the garden—stern, even; certainly not friendly—but his ex- pression seemed to have softened. His hair was dishevelled, as if he had only just woken up, and she saw that there was a tiny scar, barely wider and longer than a penny turned on its side, running from the corner of his right eye. He was, she noted, a little stooped—he carried himself like a man not entirely at ease with his height—and his skin, in the dim light of the hallway, had a rather sickly pallor. And yet it occurred to her, suddenly and clearly, that she had never seen anyone so beautiful.
“So do you,” she said.
“What are you—sixteen?”
She was indignant. “Seventeen.”
Ivor nodded, removed his hand from her arm, then placed it, quite gently, on her face, as if mapping the curve of her cheek. And then, just as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone.
He returned the following weekend, with Jonah. It was Sunday, late morning: Cass was in the kitchen with Lily, peeling potatoes for lunch, when a white Morris Minor came lurching up the drive. The car was even older and grimier than Stephen’s Vauxhall, its bodywork pockmarked with rust and dirt.
“Whose is that, now?” Lily said, and went to find out.
Cass watched the two men as they clambered out of the car. When she recognised the driver, unfurling his legs in their blue jeans, she took off her apron, smoothed a hand over her hair, and checked her reflection in the windowpane.
They stayed to lunch, of course: Atterley so often played host to unexpected guests that Lily almost
always over-catered. John talked about the house he was designing for a businessman in Middlesbrough—an ugly pile, faux-classical, with a pillared entranceway and a five-car garage.
“I’ve tried to push him towards something a bit more modern,” John said, “or, at least, tasteful, but he won’t budge.”
Jonah described the house he had grown up in, over in Mis- sissippi: a two-storey colonial, with a wide wooden porch where the family would sit out on summer evenings drinking iced tea. “And a fair bit of bourbon, too,” he said.
Cass thought of the cards her mother still sent her from Toronto at Christmas, and on her birthdays, with photographs tucked inside. That high, broad house with the white veranda and the twin dormer windows tucked into the grey sweep of the roof. Her mother and Len Steadman smiling, always smiling, and her half-sister, Josephine, growing taller—once a waddling figure in a padded snowsuit, now a blonde, gap-toothed child in a yellow dress who looked just as Cass herself once had. She could not disagree with Margaret there—the resemblance between them was striking—and she had studied each photograph for some time, filled with a strange, uncomfortable blend of envy and fascination.
With the exception of that first card, Cass had kept all the letters and photographs in a box under her bed, but she still could not bring herself to compose a reply.
“And what about you, Ivor?” Lily said. The meal was over, and they were sitting in front of the fireplace with mugs of coffee. “Where did you grow up?”
Ivor stared down into his mug. He was sitting on the floor; Cass was a few feet away, on the sofa beside her uncle, and was acutely aware of the precise distance between her leg and his. All through lunch, she had done her best not to look at him, and he had not looked at her; but she knew he was here for her, and the knowledge was like a wonderful secret that only the two of them shared (though of course, she would acknowledge later, it must have been perfectly obvious to everyone else why he had come).
“Nowhere worth talking about,” Ivor said, and Lily shifted a little on her seat, and said, “I see.”
Later, they took out their guitars, and began to play: first the three of them together—Jonah, Ivor, and Cass. After a while, Jonah slipped away, as he had surely intended to do all along, and Lily and John followed him out into the garden. And then they were alone in the living-room, each reading the movement of the other’s hands, tracking the rise and fall of the other’s voice; absorbing his strange tunings (she was fascinated); her picking style (he had never heard anything quite like it); his angular figure bent low over his guitar (she couldn’t lift her eyes away); the pale fabric of her hair falling across one eye as she sang (he wanted to take a bolt of it in his hands, and draw her face to his).
“Hey,” John said when they finally fell silent, and Cass gave a start: she hadn’t realised that the others had come back into the room. “You sound incredible together.”
“Yes,” Lily echoed. “Incredible.”
Cass looked up at her aunt, then, and saw her watching Ivor with an expression that wasn’t quite a frown but certainly wasn’t a smile.
They fell into a routine, that summer. Ivor would drive down from London on Saturday morning, and stay until Sunday night. John gave up his study to them for the weekend, and that high-raftered attic, with its wide skylights and angled draughtsman’s desk and books on William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Le Corbusier, became their music room.
They worked on Ivor’s songs first. He had dozens of them, some no more than fragments—a lone melody, a lyric to which he hadn’t yet fitted chords. Others, like “Living Free,” were almost finished—she contributed a chorus, harmonies, and a chord pattern she’d been working on for some time, transposed to a new tuning.
Ivor scribbled all his ideas and lyrics in a battered black spiral-bound notebook that he carried with him everywhere. One Sunday morning, while he was in the bathroom, Cass reached into his jacket pocket for the book and thumbed through its pages, with their smudges and pencil scores. She saw doodles and crossings-out and, on one page, a drawing of a woman, long-haired and full-lipped, frozen in the act of turning away. Ursula, Ivor had written underneath.
The name rattled around in Cass’s head, long-vowelled and sibilant, through the rest of the morning (she had quickly slipped the notebook back into his jacket when she heard his tread on the stairs), until she could bear it no longer.
“Who is Ursula?” she said.
Ivor looked up at her; he was tuning his guitar, and his eyes, resting on hers, were distracted, remote. “A woman I used to know.” He didn’t ask how Cass had come across the name. He turned his attention back to the neck of his guitar. “You have a guy, don’t you?”
Stephen, with his ambitions and his pale poet’s looks and his declaration of love: he had told Cass he loved her, a few days after the Atterley party, and she had not known how to respond; she had thought of Ivor, remembered the heat of his skin on hers as he’d placed a hand to her cheek, and felt a shiver of guilt. She hadn’t wanted to lie to Stephen, but neither had she wanted to be cruel; she’d told him she cared about him, deeply, but it had not been enough. Stephen’s hurt still lay between them like an unexploded mine. She was avoiding seeing him, making excuses when he telephoned, or drove over to see her. She was busy with her music, she said to him, and it was true—she was busy with her music, and busy thinking about Ivor, and already it was becoming difficult for her to separate the one from the other.
“I’m not sure,” she said to Ivor now, in a voice she hoped sounded casual, worldly-wise. “I think it’s over between us.”
Ivor didn’t look up at her, but his hands, fiddling with the machine heads, lay still. And then he said, “Let’s take it again from the top.”
The relaxed attitude Lily had displayed when it came to Cass and Stephen’s sharing a room did not, it seemed, extend to Ivor: the first weekend Ivor came to Atterley without Jonah, Lily made up the spare room for him, and that was that.
Their long days together in the music room were, for Cass at least, charged with an electricity to which she couldn’t believe Ivor was immune. But he hadn’t made any move to touch her since that moment at the party, and she hadn’t dared. And then, one Sunday in July, when the heat in the attic was sweltering—they had thrown open the skylights, and still the air was humid, sticky, their faces slick with sweat—they played “Common Ground” through from start to finish, and then Ivor put down his guitar, came over to her, took her guitar from her arms, and drew her up onto her feet.
He was barely an inch from her now. She could feel the warmth rising from his body.
She reached up, placed a hand on the nape of his neck, and drew his face down to meet hers. There, where there was no space left between them, he said, “I can’t stop thinking about you, Cass. It’s driving me mad.”
She started to say, “Me too,” but her words were swallowed by his kiss.
That night, Ivor didn’t sleep in the spare room. In the morning, they woke early: it was already bright and hot, the gingham curtains throwing a tessellated pattern across the painted wooden floor. They lay together on Cass’s bed, skin on skin, her ear pressed against his chest, tracking the slow, steady rhythm of his heartbeat. It occurred to her that this—their love-making, the easy, quiet proximity of their bodies—was also, in its essence, musical. It was as if they were running through a song they already knew: a tune both familiar and strange, in which their voices melded and soared.
He left at lunchtime: he had a job house-painting with a friend, and a gig the following night in Milton Keynes.
“I wish I could go with you,” she said, and Ivor placed his lips to her ear and whispered, “So do I.”
After dinner that night, John took a brandy up to his study, and Lily made mint tea. It was a beautiful evening: golden and still, the flagstones of the terrace still holding the heat of the day, and a wood pigeon calling somewhere i
n the trees.
“Be careful, Cass,” Lily said after a while.
She did not have to say with whom. Cass stiffened. “You don’t like him?”
Lily put down her cup, and turned to look at her niece. “I’m not sure if I do. But that doesn’t really matter, does it?”
“No.” She could feel the heat of her anger gathering, as it had that other summer, three long years before. Lily’s car shuddering to a halt at the roadside. The smell of warm grass and exhaust, and her tears fresh and briny on her cheeks. “I’m not a child, Lily.”
Her aunt was silent for a moment. Then she said, “You’re not a child, no. And I hope you’ll appreciate that I’ve always done my best not to treat you as one.”
“So what are you doing now?”
Lily sighed, and closed her eyes. “I don’t know, Cass. What am I doing? I’m making a mess of it, whatever it is, I can see that. I suppose I’m just trying to tell you, because I care for you very much, to be careful with him. He’s not . . .”
She trailed off, and Cass seized her aunt’s hesitation. “He’s not what, Lily? What are you saying?”
Another silence, longer this time. Cass watched the side of her aunt’s face—her long nose, the smooth, dark pelmet of her fringe. She loved her, and she hated her, and her anger was bitter on her tongue.
When Lily spoke again, she did so quietly, calmly. “You know, I sound just like your grandmother. She gave me the exact same lecture when I met John. And did I listen to her? No, I did not.” She turned to Cass. “I like Stephen. I like him a lot, and, more importantly, I know you do, too. Ivor . . . well, of course he’s glamorous, he’s handsome. He’s a wonderful musician. I know you don’t see what I see when I look at him—his restlessness, his self-absorption. I understand that, Cass, but I wouldn’t be any sort of friend to you—any sort of aunt—if I didn’t try to warn you.”
Greatest Hits Page 10