Greatest Hits

by Laura Barnett

  Cass’s heart was beating fast. “I thought you were meant to be on my side, Lily.”

  Lily reached across the table for her hand. “I am . . .”

  “No.” Cass snatched her hand away. “Not when you say those things about Ivor. Not when you start bringing Stephen into this. I didn’t promise him anything. I didn’t know any of this would happen.”

  “But how would you feel,” Lily said in that same small voice, “if he was doing the same thing to you?”

  “How would I feel?” Cass got to her feet; she was shouting. “Why don’t we go and ask John’s ex-wife how she feels about what he did with you? You’re a hypocrite, Lily. And you’re not my mother. You can’t tell me what to do.”

  She couldn’t stand to look at her aunt a moment longer; she set down her glass and ran from the garden, up to her room, the room that seemed so empty, now, without him: without Ivor’s slim, cool body stretching out beside hers on the narrow bed; without his warm breath on her neck as she fell into a fitful, overheated sleep.

  And though, by the next morning, Cass was flushed with shame for what she had said to Lily—came down to breakfast meek and remorseful, and was forgiven—she had already, carefully and deliberately, put her aunt’s advice from her mind. It was only years later that she would remember what Lily had said that night, and understand.

  Weekdays, that summer, were a torment: Cass wandered listlessly from room to room, interested in nobody, in nothing, other than the spectral presence of Ivor Tait. Even in his absence, she could still see him sitting on the terrace, drawing his long, elegant fingers across the strings of his guitar.

  “What’s it really like, Cass?” Linda asked. She had a boyfriend now—a blond rugby-player in James’s class at the boys’ school—but they had not gone any further, yet, than kissing on the back seat of his father’s car.

  It was a Wednesday afternoon, and Lily was home early from a shoot; Cass and Linda were stretched out together on the living-room sofa, playing records, drinking tea. Cass thought for a moment, looked around to check that her aunt wasn’t within earshot. In a low voice, she replied, “Amazing, Lin. So much more than I’d thought it would be, somehow. With him, it’s just . . . natural. Easy.” And then, though she hadn’t yet said this out loud to anyone, she added, “I just love him so much. I really do.”

  Linda stared at her. “Bloody hell. You haven’t told him that, have you?”

  Cass shook her head.

  “Well, make sure you don’t, all right?” Linda was firm. “If there’s one thing I do know, it’s that you’ll make him run a mile.”

  So Cass didn’t tell him—though she voiced the words, silently, each time she caught sight of Ivor’s Morris Minor spluttering up the drive; each time they sat together in John’s office, and their music floated up to the ceiling and seemed to hang there, suspended and shimmering. And if she was disappointed that Ivor didn’t reach for those words first, to offer them to her like a gift—and she was disappointed; she couldn’t deny that, even to herself—then she put that disappointment from her mind, and made sure it didn’t have the air to breathe, and root itself, and grow.

  And then, one day in August, he said, “I think we’re ready, Cass. Do you?”

  She looked at him, and loved him, and said, “Yes.”

  He booked them a slot at a pub in Lewes for the following weekend. She knew the place: she’d been there with Linda and Stephen and James for pints of shandy. (The landlord turned a blind eye to the small matter of their being underage.) Sometimes, there’d been a musician on the tiny stage—a shifting lineup of men with long hair and pale, anaemic-looking skin, playing Dylan and Donovan and Simon and Garfunkel.

  She had, it was true, dared to picture herself sitting up there with her guitar, playing her own songs—offering them to an indifferent crowd: flat-capped locals at the bar, staring into pint-glasses; other kids from school, yawning, fiddling with sticky beer-mats—and she had felt fear unfurling at the pit of her stomach, and creeping upwards towards her mouth.

  But then, that night just a year or so later, there she was: standing beside the bar, guitar in hand, Ivor by her side. Lily and John were there; and Linda and her rugby-player, Tim. Jonah had come up from London for the night, and even Stephen was standing alone at the back, clutching a pint of cider. She had finished with him a few weeks ago, over the telephone. “It’s because of him, isn’t it?” he had said bitterly, and because she felt that the least she owed him was honesty, she’d replied, “Yes. I’m so sorry, Stephen. I really am. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” After a silence, he’d said, “Perhaps you didn’t. But you have.”

  Now, in the pub, the fear was there again—snakelike, sinuous, threatening to slide into her throat, and swallow sound—but Ivor bent down and whispered to her, “Ready?” and then Cass knew, quite suddenly, that she was. They sat up on their stools on the small, raised platform, beneath the framed sepia photographs of nameless, smiling people standing proudly beside freshly ploughed fields; lifting beer-glasses in the bar; processing, their faces blackened with soot, through the Lewes streets on Bonfire Night. And it was as if the rest of the room, and everyone in it, had receded, and she and Ivor were left alone together, their voices weaving over and under each other in a way she believed was special; not only because she loved him, but because she had never heard anything quite like it before, and neither, she knew, had he.

  They played “Living Free,” and “Common Ground,” and “I Wrote You a Love Song,” which they’d written together the previous Saturday, up in John’s study, in the space of a few heady hours.

  Afterwards, their friends whooped and cheered, and one of the old men at the bar gave a wolf-whistle.

  “Doing all right for yourself there, mate, aren’t you?” he called out.

  Cass blushed, and looked down at her hands, resting on the belly of her guitar; while Ivor looked up, blinked at the man, and said, in that slow, quiet drawl of his, “Well, I can’t disagree with you there.”

  Ivor lived in a house in Gospel Oak: a tall, wide, Victorian building, set over three floors, with stained glass in the windows, the paintwork old and flaking, and a long garden overgrown with weeds and wildflowers.

  “Our wilderness,” Ivor said. “Nature left to do her own thing.” His bedroom was on the first floor, overlooking the road; if you stood on his bed, you could see over the houses on the other side to the heath, reaching green and wooded up to the peak of Parliament Hill. They walked up there, the first time she came to stay—Cass and Ivor and a flock of other people whose names hadn’t yet lodged themselves in her head, and most of whom, it seemed, lived in the house on Savernake Road. One of the women—Cass thought her name was Serena; she had very long, very straight brown hair, and a dress that brushed the ground—had brought a bottle of Mateus rosé. Someone else spread a blanket on the grass, and they sat and drank, passing the bottle between them.

  Ivor settled himself behind her, his arms around her waist, her head finding the space between his collarbone and his chin. The whole of London was displayed before them: the white dome of St. Paul’s; the stacked crates of office buildings; the shining, space-age spire of the new Post Office tower. Somewhere, miles to the south, was the vicarage in which Cass had been born, and the church in which she had disgraced herself, and her father. What, she wondered with a flash of something like nostalgia, was Kevin Dowd doing now? And Julia Adams, and her old friend Irene?

  “I’ve missed it,” she said. “I’ve missed London.”

  Ivor lowered his face down to meet her ear and whispered, so that only she could hear, “I’ve missed you.”

  That night, they played a gig in a subterranean bar near Leicester Square. It was a dive—condensation running in rivulets down the black-painted walls, the floor sticky with spilt beer, and the barmaids haggard in their skimpy tops, eyes ringed with dark make-up and tiredness. But it was also a place wher
e, when the music started, the punters quietened down. They sat at round tables, drinking wine or whisky or pints of ale, and they smoked, and they listened, and they saved their conversations for the breaks in between.

  Cass looked down at them from the stage, and then at Ivor, sitting beside her, and felt her nerves—always that same, forktongued snake, slithering up in the hours and minutes before a gig—recede. She opened her mouth wide and sang, and in no time at all, it was over, and the people at the round tables were clapping and smiling, and Ivor was taking hold of her hand.

  Some of Ivor’s housemates were in the audience—that girl Serena, and a tall, bearded man named Bob who Cass thought must be her boyfriend (they shared the room on the top floor of the house), and two other men and a woman whose names still hadn’t stuck. (The one thing she was sure of was that the woman wasn’t Ursula.)

  Ivor and Cass stepped down from the stage to join their table. Bob was pouring each of them a glass of wine when an immense hulk of a man, grey-bearded, blue eyes shrewd in his fleshy face, stepped out of the shadows and said, “Hey, Ivor, that was bloody great.”

  “Thanks, Joe.” Ivor nodded, took up his glass. “Been working hard. Lots of new stuff in there.”

  “So I heard.” The man, Joe, fixed his eyes on Cass’s face. “And who’s this lovely young thing here?”

  “Ah, this is Cass,” Ivor said. “My girl.”

  Cass smiled, and Joe said, “That last song, ‘Common Ground’—was that one of yours?”

  Cass nodded, and was about to reply, when Ivor said, “Mine, actually.”

  He looked at her, and she stared back at him, waiting for him to correct the error, but he did not. “Well, Ivor, it’s bloody good,” Joe said. “I want you guys back here a lot. A lot, all right—every week, if you can make it.”

  “All right, Joe.” Ivor threw an arm around Cass’s shoulders. “Of course.”

  They sat down at the table, and Bob handed Cass her wine. Serena leant across and kissed her on the cheek. “That was really good, Cass. You know, you’re a far better singer than Ursula ever was.”

  Ivor shot Serena a warning glance, and then placed a hand on Cass’s knee, and left it there as he talked to the woman on his other side. She sat silently, drinking her wine; but the knowledge of the lie he had told Joe—of how easily Ivor had dismissed her—had settled in her mind like a stone, and would not be dislodged.

  Back at Savernake Road, she sat up with everyone in the living-room until dawn, playing Love and Jimi Hendrix and the Doors, and smoking something called “sputnik,” which Bob said was hash mixed with opium, and which made the walls sway and the ceiling buckle.

  Cass lay on her back on the carpet, running her hands over its rough weave. Above her, bright and shining, she saw the face of her mother, reflected in triplicate: a three-headed Cerberus, each one narrow-eyed and snarling. I wish I’d never had you, the faces told her through pink-frosted lips, and she felt her old anger flare and catch, put out her arms to push the heads away. And as she did so, she saw their features shift, dissolve, into Ivor’s: three sets of green-brown eyes, three mouths denying her, claiming her song as his own.

  “No,” she said aloud. “No.”

  Ivor, stretched out beside her, took her hand in his. “Are you all right, Cassie? This stuff’s pretty strong . . .”

  She turned to him, put her lips to his cheek, and then, sharply and quickly, unsheathed her teeth and sank them into his skin.

  He yelped, drew his face away, put a hand to his cheek, where a small semi-circle of blood was already welling. “What the fuck, Cassie? What was that for?”

  “That,” she said, “was to remind you that I exist. So don’t you ever forget it again, Ivor. Not with Joe. Not with anyone.”

  Mrs. Di Angelis was wearing a pale green sleeveless dress, and silk court shoes of the exact same shade.

  Cass watched those shoes moving, as if in a slow, silent gavotte, under the desk, as the headmistress crossed and recrossed her legs, and said, “I’m afraid, Mrs. Wiseman, that we’re very disappointed in Cassandra.”

  Lily, on the chair next to her, reached into her handbag for a cigarette.

  “If you don’t mind,” Mrs. Di Angelis said, “I’d rather that you didn’t smoke.”

  “Well,” Lily said, and snapped her handbag shut.

  Mrs. Di Angelis uncrossed her legs—another step in her solo dance—and planted them firmly on the floor. Cass looked up at her teacher, at her cat’s-eye glasses with their jaunty, upturned frames; at her red hair, backcombed and pinned into a high beehive style that, Cass felt, did nothing for her face, which was pretty, and slender, and currently wearing an expression of grave disappointment.

  It was a shame: she had liked Mrs. Di Angelis, with her smart clothes and her warm, elocuted voice and her handsome Italian husband. (The couple had met while skiing in the Dolomites, a fact of which the headmistress often liked to remind “her girls,” to demonstrate that they never knew when they might meet the man of their dreams.) And now, immersed as she was in music, and Ivor, and the exotic, sunlit hinterland between the two, Cass no longer felt anything for her at all. Mrs. Di Angelis, and school, and her A-level examinations—only a few months away now—seemed insubstantial in comparison: dull shadows of the London life she was living with Ivor at Savernake Road.

  “I just don’t understand it, Cassandra,” Mrs. Di Angelis said, looking her firmly in the eye. “You are such a clever girl, and you were doing very well. We had high hopes for you, and I know your heart was set on art school. But at this rate, you’ll be lucky if you scrape passes in any of your subjects. That is, if you even decide to turn up.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cass said, and in that moment, truly was.

  “She’s been distracted,” Lily said. “And of course, it has been hard for her, moving out here from London, coming to live with us, and her parents being . . . well, not being around. Perhaps we haven’t done enough for her. Perhaps we’ve been too lax. We’re not great sticklers for rules, and we’ve preferred to treat Cass as an adult, allowing her to make her own decisions.”

  “Well.” Mrs. Di Angelis’s feet shifted again, the toe of one shoe scraping back against the heel of the other. “Perhaps therein lies the problem, Mrs. Wiseman—for an adult she is not. At least, not one who is taking her responsibilities, and her education, seriously.”

  “But I am eighteen,” Cass said. “Doesn’t that make me an adult?”

  Both Lily and Mrs. Di Angelis looked at her.

  “Yes,” Lily snapped, her patience wearing thin, “it does. Though if you believe you’re behaving like one right now, Cassandra, then you’re nowhere near as clever as you think.”

  A few days later, Cass packed her things into boxes—there wasn’t much, really, other than her books and clothes and records and photographs, and, of course, her beloved guitar.

  Ivor was waiting on the drive, by his Morris Minor, wearing his brown suede jacket and his blue jeans. When she opened the door to him, she felt a burst of happiness so pure and true that it occluded the guilt she had been carrying with her all morning—for the last fortnight, actually, since she had finally made her decision to leave Atterley.

  It was Ivor who’d suggested it, weeks before—early on a Sunday morning under the covers, half dozing in a warm tangle of limbs.

  “Don’t go back tonight, Cassie,” he’d said into her neck. “Who cares about school, and exams, and all that? We’re different, you and me. We don’t need any of that stuff.”

  She’d made a murmur of protest—she didn’t mind school, not any more; and what about her plans to apply to art college? Her father would be furious, and as for Lily and John . . . well, it didn’t bear thinking about. But a seed had been sown, and in the days she was forced to spend apart from Ivor—those long, colourless days of assembly and essays and choir practice—it began to root itself, and grow.
Perhaps Ivor was right: they were different. They had music. They had each other. What did she care, now, for art school, when it was music she wanted to pursue? And not the music they sat dissecting for hours in her A-level class—Haydn and Bach and Holst, with its strictures and conventions, its fusty gentility. The music she and Ivor made was real, true, answerable to no rules other than its own. She didn’t need an examination to prove that. It began to seem very clear to her that she didn’t need an examination to prove anything.

  And so, gradually, she came to a decision—one that her disastrous interview with Mrs. Di Angelis served only to confirm. She told no one other than Ivor what she was planning to do—not Linda, certainly not her father or Lily and John. She carried the secret with her, and hoped that when the day came, she would be brave enough to follow it through.

  And then, on that bright, fresh, cloud-swept morning in May 1968, it seemed that she was. Ivor carried the boxes out to the car, and Cass placed the letter she had written for her aunt and uncle on the table. A letter of thanks, as much as apology; a letter assuring them that there was nothing else she’d rather do, nowhere else she’d rather be, and that she was grateful to them for everything they had done for her. Then she climbed into the car beside Ivor, and began the slow, winding drive back to London.

  It occurred to her, as the miles slipped by, that her mother had done much the same thing—packed her cases when no one was there to stop her, left her coward’s note on the table, and set off towards another life.

  She thought of her father, finding her mother’s note that terrible Saturday, eight years before: Margaret’s words slowly asserting their true meaning, sharp-edged, irrevocable, and that animal sound welling up from the depths of his throat.

  She thought of her aunt opening the letter, running upstairs to find the bedroom she and John had so carefully, so generously, prepared for Cass suddenly lying empty. Dear, kind, exuberant Lily, who had given her so much, without expectation, without once making her feel the weight of that debt.