Guilt rose again in Cass’s throat. She put out a hand to Ivor, to tell him to stop the car, to retrace the route to Atterley. But then he looked at her, and smiled, and she knew that she would not turn back. And so she said nothing, and closed her eyes, and let the steady forward motion of the car carry her away.
1 P.M.
Lunch. A bowl of thick homemade vegetable soup; a slice of bread sawn from a loaf of wholemeal sourdough, layered with Fred Hill’s good, salty butter.
It is only in recent years that Cass has begun to take a real interest in food: in its quality, its preparation, its capacity to invigorate and console. She certainly hadn’t cared much about it as a child. Of the meals her mother had prepared at the vicarage, she can remember only two, served on rotation. Roast chicken, dry and tasteless and accompanied by potatoes that were either soggy and undercooked or charred to tooth-cracking cinders; and liver and onion, a slippery, blubbery confection that turned Cass’s stomach, and which she had usually refused to eat, going to bed hungry and with an ear full of Margaret’s complaints.
Lily, of course, had been a good cook. Those tagines she had served, and the fragrant curries she’d produced at a moment’s notice for tablefuls of people: how exotic they had seemed to Cass then. Now, of course, such fare is quite normal, even ordinary. The Royal Oak on the High Street—once a bastion of “traditional English home-cooking”—has started to serve a Thai menu in place of those heavy earthenware dishes of shepherd’s pie and toad-in-the-hole.
Anna used to love the Royal Oak: they’d gone there often for lunch, after they’d first moved to the village. The publican, Roy, was of the old school: a towering, bulky man, with fists that had seen their fair share of action (he and his wife, Sheila, had moved out from Tooting in the late sixties, trailing rumours of some sort of altercation with the Richardson gang), and he had no tolerance whatsoever for what he termed “funny business.”
The first time Cass had taken Anna in for lunch—it was a Sunday, and early; the pub had only just opened, and Roy was polishing glasses behind the bar—he had looked up, performed only the most discreet of double-takes, and then swiftly poured a glass of white wine for Cass, and an orange juice for Anna.
“On the house,” he’d said, pushing the glasses across the bar towards them.
After that, they’d been welcome in the pub anytime. And if anyone attempted to approach Cass—to disturb their quiet little circle of two, at their usual table beside the fireplace—Roy would be close behind, his fists opening and closing by his side, to suggest, quietly but firmly, that whoever it was might be more comfortable elsewhere.
Cass loved him for that, and she loved Sheila, who was fat and permed and good-natured, and always gave Anna an especially large helping of apple pie. And she loved their daughter, Angela, who was almost as tall as her father, and was saving to go to college to be a nurse. As an act of kindness, Cass sometimes asked Angela to come and clean Home Farm, though the girl was easily distracted, and spent most of her allotted time exclaiming over the furniture, and Cass’s dresses and jewellery, and the framed photographs on the walls: Cass backstage at the Albert Hall, among flowers; Anna as a baby, waddling unsteadily across the Rothermere lawn; Lily and John on the terrace at Atterley, shading their faces from the sun, the ivy-covered house rising tall and solid behind them.
Yes, they had been good to her, Roy and Sheila. He’d died of a heart attack five years ago. Sheila had followed two years later, and the pub, with its Thai food and its freshly painted walls, is now run by people Cass doesn’t know. Indeed, it strikes her now that the whole village is peopled by strangers, or almost-strangers. All of them living in such close proximity, and she barricaded away behind these high stone walls. Is it fame, its inevitable distancing, its sheen of unreality, that has done this to her, or something else, something deeper? Her own desire to retreat from the world, to cut herself off from a network of relationships, of simple, daily interactions that seem to come so easily to others, and that once, surely, came easily to her, too.
She remembers a warm September Saturday in the Royal Oak. Anna bending over her drawing. The pub collie, Timmy, curled up on his cushion in the empty grate. And then, without warning, Ivor pushing open the barroom door and walking in.
Anna had looked up, set aside her drawing, and run across the bar to greet her father. Roy, at the bar, had met Cass’s gaze—seen her desperation, she supposed, and understood its source. He’d offered her a small nod, marched over to the door, and gently prised Anna’s hand from Ivor’s. “You, sir,” he’d said, “are not welcome here.”
She can remember, so clearly, how Anna had looked then—her mouth gaping, her eyes narrowing, preparing for the onset of tears—and how Ivor had stared at Roy, stupefied, his reaction dulled by whisky. (She could see perfectly well that he was drunk.)
“I suggest, sir, that you leave,” Roy had said, his voice calm and even, and Ivor had looked to his daughter, whimpering, reaching for him; and, beyond her, to Cass.
“Bitch,” he’d said to her—quite softly, even tenderly. “Crazy fucking bitch. Don’t think this will be the end of it.” And then he had turned and left.
Anna had begun to wail. The bar was silent but for the sound of her tears, and the low, tinny burble of a Madonna song—“Like a Prayer”: Cass can still hear it in her mind—from the radio.
Roy had looked around at his customers. “Well, then,” he’d said to everyone, and no one. “Looks like the show’s over, doesn’t it?”
He’d placed a hand on Anna’s shoulder. “Come on, love. Your mum’s waiting for you. And Sheila’s done her toad-in-the-hole.”
Back at their table, Anna had let Cass wipe her face with a napkin. And then she had bent her head low over her food, while Cass met Roy’s eyes again over her daughter’s head and mouthed, silently, “Thank you.”
The flowers arrive just as she is finishing her soup.
She has turned on the radio to catch the news: the highpitched chime of the doorbell cuts over the announcer’s low, politely modulated voice, with its tidings of suffering and horror and disaster. See, Larry, she thinks. I’m still listening. I’m not turning my face away.
He had been appalled, on his first visit to Home Farm, to discover how ill-informed she had become, how cut off from the cut and thrust of politics and current affairs—“of life, in short,” was how he’d put it. “You can’t live in a vacuum for ever, Cass,” he’d gone on, fixing her with those pale blue eyes. And so it is for him, now—for Larry, whatever he’s doing, however furious, or disappointed, or hurt he may be—that she still switches on the radio each day.
In the hallway, Cass checks the security camera: a woman in a short-sleeved polo shirt, bearing an enormous bouquet.
“Birthday, is it?” the woman says, with only the faintest flicker of interest, as Cass opens the door, signs the woman’s tablet computer with a blunt-tipped pen. She is young—twenty-five, at most; impervious, clearly, to the significance (such as there still is) to Cass’s name. So much for the Twittersphere being ablaze, Cass thinks, and smiles.
“No,” she says aloud. “It’s not my birthday. Thank you.” She takes the flowers from the woman’s outstretched arms, and closes the door.
White roses, set among the tall, slender stems of orchids, and white freesias just coming into bud. Their scent is heady, glorious: she stands for a moment in the hallway, holding the flowers, breathing them in. Larry, she thinks, and then corrects herself, acknowledging, with a sharp stab of disappointment, that this is not Larry’s style. And sure enough, laying the bouquet on the kitchen counter in its silver box, she finds a card, nestled among the blooms.
To Cass, the card says, in a stranger’s anonymous, rounded hand. Thinking of you today, and sending love and joy for your playback party. Omar and I are so looking forward to seeing you later. Love—then, now, and always—from Kate xxx PS How did we EVER manage to get so ol
d?!
Dear Kate. Cass pictures her friend issuing instructions to the florist (an expensive one on Marylebone High Street, just round the corner from Kate’s mansion flat), carefully dictating each word and flourish. “Capital letters, all right? Three kisses, and an exclamation mark to follow the question.” Kate is undimmed by age, or at least seems so—especially in the company of Omar, her handsome, wild-haired playwright, fifteen years her junior, and the best lover she has ever had. (Kate had whispered this discreetly into Cass’s ear, over the dinner at which they had been introduced.)
Setting aside her disappointment, then, Cass arranges the flowers in a vase. She works carefully, slowly, taking the time to cut an angled length from each stem; separating orchid from freesia, and freesia from rose, with bundles of glossy, full-leaved foliage.
It is the type of activity—mindless, quietly absorbing, and yielding a quick, perceptible result—with which she has, in the course of her years without music, her silent years, begun to take a particular, unexpected pleasure.
Cooking: the miraculous alchemy by which a haul of disparate ingredients might be transformed, step by step, into something fragrant, sweet, sour, delicious: something capable of focusing her, if only for the course of one meal, one plate, entirely on the sensory sensations of the moment. Interior decoration: the change of mood, if only transitory, fleeting, that she has begun to experience with the considered selection and purchase of an object—a bowl, a vase, a table—and its positioning in relation to other objects, beside which it might seem to change, to become something greater than itself. Flowers: their colours, their shapes, their scents; their buds gradually expanding, opening, drawing in the light.
She had never cared much for such things before. Flowers were the bouquets that arrived with Alan, or Kim, or some underling dispatched by the label, arranged by unknown hands. Not ignored, exactly—Cass had always taken the time to admire them, to inhale their perfume—but not truly appreciated, either. There were so many of them, and the displays came, over the years, to exist not in and of themselves but as ciphers for the things that were being demanded of her. Hard work (calla lilies, sent by the label to congratulate her on another sell-out tour). Capitulation (orange roses and yellow orchids, to thank her for agreeing, reluctantly, to add another eight European dates). Forgiveness (red roses, bought by Ivor—or, at least, at his request—and placed on the Steinway’s closed lid, beside a card in which the florist had written, For my dearest Cassie, from a husband who is sorrier than words—or songs—can say).
And of course there had been flowers, too, in the hospital. A course on flower-arranging, of all things: she’d seen the sign on the noticeboard, a few weeks after she was admitted for the second time. (In the weeks after her first admission, she’d been unable to leave her room.)
“What is this place?” she’d complained to a passing nurse. “The fucking Women’s Institute? Let’s not kid ourselves, shall we?”
The nurse was young, patient, her hair drawn into a low, sleek ponytail. She had offered Cass a white-toothed smile, and said, “Why don’t you go along, Ms Wheeler? Many of our patients find it therapeutic.”
“Never,” she’d snapped back.
And then, at three o’clock on the following Tuesday, Cass had found herself pushing open the door to the activity room, and being enthusiastically ushered over to a table on which stood a vase, a small bunch of yellow sweetheart roses and gypsophila, and a wedge of oasis floral foam.
Afterwards, she’d been allowed to carry the vase back to her room. She had placed it on her dressing-table—if such a name could dignify the hospital-issue bench on which she kept her creams and lotions, her framed photograph of Anna, and the small stack of library books that she was attempting, with limited success, to read (Dickens; Graham Greene; Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, pressed into her hands by the librarian, with her hennaed hair and her infuriating expression of unwearying optimism). The sight of those yellow roses—each one a tiny sunburst of colour, tightly furled, soon to explode into vivid life—had so cheered her that Cass had, despite herself, returned to the next class, and then to the class after that.
And now, all these years later, here is Kate’s bouquet, with its silky whites and deep chlorophyll greens, filling the vase she is placing on the kitchen table. Flowers, where before there had been none. Colour, where before there had been only dusty, lifeless monochrome.
The kitchen clock is inching towards half-past one.
Seven-thirty in Chicago, Cass thinks. Not too early, surely?
Not for Larry, anyway, who is an early riser. Often she has woken to find her room bathed in a dim, greyish light, and the shadow of him dressing, quietly and deftly, beside the halfopened curtain.
“Go back to sleep,” he would say. “It’s too early for you.”
And he would place a kiss on her lips, and she would close her eyes and fall gratefully back into sleep, because he was right: it was too early for her. She would rise an hour or two later, go upstairs in her dressing-gown and slippers to find him in the art room, a mug of black coffee grown cold beside his right hand. She would try to enter without making a noise, so as not to distract him, but he would always look up (he has extraordinarily sensitive hearing—“like a bat’s,” he joked once) and see her, and his face would crease into a smile.
That smile of his. How broad and true it is: how it employs each muscle and sinew of his face, and creeps up to his eyes, their colour brightening, the small puckers at their corners lifting and tightening. God, how she misses it. How clearly she recalls the sight of him, smiling at her as she approached him outside the gallery in Washington: a spare, lean, white-haired figure, hands thrust into the pockets of a rumpled black leather jacket.
That was the second time they had met. That bright, washed-clean morning in spring when Cass had stepped out from the hotel lobby and walked along Pennsylvania Avenue to the gallery, drawn by . . . What had it been, exactly? Curiosity; vanity; an unfamiliar sense of anticipation, that intoxicating feeling that something might be about to happen, if she could only be brave enough to admit its possibility.
Over breakfast at the hotel, she had informed Kim and Alan that she was taking the morning for herself. She had, she’d said, made an arrangement to meet the sculptor Larry Alderson for coffee at the National Gallery of Art. She would be sure to be at the restaurant in time for lunch with the label; she had noted down the address, and would find herself a taxi on Constitution Avenue. Or Larry, perhaps, would help her find one: she had not, in any case, Cass assured them, entirely lost the ability to perform such a task for herself.
Cass had, as she’d spoken, sensed Kim and Alan weighing this information, digesting it, each making a supreme effort not to meet the other’s eye.
“Well, that’s wonderful,” Kim had said.
Alan had nodded. “Take your mobile with you, won’t you, in case you need anything?”
Larry had been standing beside the gallery entrance when Cass arrived. She’d remembered his height, of course, but it had struck her again only as she’d come closer: from the other side of the noisy swirl of traffic, he’d appeared tiny, dwarfed by the building’s grand classical portico. Between the central columns hung a banner: “Andrew Wyeth,” announced in white lettering over a twelve-foot-high detail of a painting. A window left open onto a stretch of yellowing grass. “Looking Out, Looking In.”
“Good morning,” he said, when she was near enough to shake his hand, which she did, feeling, as she did so, that perhaps the greeting was too stiff, too formal. His eyes were bright blue, amused. “Glad you came.”
She returned his smile, though she was nervous now: she stood a little awkwardly, not quite facing him, as if she might, at any moment, be taken by the desire to turn and run. “Did you think I might not?”
“Well.” Larry let go of her hand, ran the other through his hair. It occurred to her that he was nervous, to
o. “I wasn’t sure. It’s a short visit, after all. And I’m sure there are plenty of demands on your time.”
“Oh, not so many as there used to be.”
She remembered it then: how easy he had been to talk to, the previous night, at the Library of Congress, under that ornate roofed canopy of blue and gold. They had stood together for a long while, undisturbed, until Kim, with apologies, had interrupted them, saying that there were still a few other guests to whom Cass really ought to be introduced. Larry had nodded, and melted away, leaving Cass with an inexplicable sense of anticlimax. But half an hour or so later, as they were preparing to return to the hotel, he had reappeared, drawn Cass gently to a quiet corner of the room, and asked whether she would consider meeting him the following day. And she, before her courage could fail her, had agreed.
“And anyway,” she said outside the gallery, feeling suddenly emboldened, “it’s my time, isn’t it? And I decide what to do with it.”
Again, that twitch of a smile. “I’d expect nothing less.”
He led her to a café in the belly of the building. White marble-topped tables, black wrought-iron chairs; potted palms, the soft, watery patter of a fountain, everything cool and calm. They refused the buffet; ordered coffee, pastries. He took off his leather jacket, hung it over the back of his chair, and began to sketch out the details of his life, as she imagined he might begin, on paper, to conceive of the design of a new maquette: its shape, its line, seeming at once familiar and strange.
He’d been born, he said, in Chicago, where, since his second divorce, he had recently returned to live, in an enormous loft apartment on the top floor of a building that had, in his childhood, lain derelict: a handsome old Victorian factory, slowly crumbling to ruin. Two children from his first marriage, another from his second: all of them grown up now, living in Paris, Connecticut, Vancouver.
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