He spent the night on the sofa in the living-room, under one of Serena’s crocheted blankets. In the morning, Cass observed him sleeping there from the open doorway, and then went through to the kitchen to make herself a mug of Nescafé. Ivor came through a few minutes later, bleary-eyed, his long hair greasy and unbrushed.
“Cassie,” he said. “What the hell was all that about?” She regarded him coolly over the rim of her mug.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t you ever treat me like I don’t matter. I don’t care what your other girls were like. I’m not a toy you can just pick up when you feel like it and then put down again. We’re either together in this, the two of us, or we’re nothing at all.”
He looked back at her, and she saw him wrestle with his response. After a few moments, he put a hand to his face, rubbed his eyes. “Of course we’re in this together, silly girl. Crazy, silly girl. There’s nobody else. How could I ever want anybody else but you?”
And then he came over to her, and held her face between his hands, and she allowed herself to be kissed.
One morning towards the middle of July, Cass received a note from Lily.
It was brief, pointed, and written in navy-blue ink on a plain white card. Will be in north London for a magazine job on Friday. Perhaps you could find time to meet? I should be done by five o’clock. I’ll come to you. I’d have called, but you didn’t leave a number. Lily. This was the first communication Cass had received from her aunt and uncle since leaving Atterley. She had wondered, that first evening at Savernake Road, whether they might come after her: she had slept poorly that night, alive not only to the strangeness of Ivor’s room, the room that was now hers—the musty, unwashed scent of his sheets; the warmth of his slumbering body—but also to every sound from the street below. Around one A.M., she had heard a car splutter to a halt, and had rushed to the window, pushed the curtains aside. But below, she had seen only a taxi cab, its engine running, its amber light aglow, and a smart couple in evening wear stepping out onto the kerb. No Lily. No John. Unable to decide whether she was disappointed or relieved, Cass had pulled the curtains into place, and slunk back to bed.
When the next day had passed without their arrival or acknowledgement—and the next day, and the day after that—Cass had come to understand that she had been wrong to expect them. Lily and John had given her freedom—a freedom she had exercised, in leaving them. For a moment, she had felt abandoned once again (her mother, turning her back on the vicarage, sloping off into the grey morning with her suitcase). John and Lily were not going to fight for her; they were going to let her go. But this, after all, was what she had wanted. And so Cass tried not to think of the pain she had caused them, telling herself she would have to learn to live with it; and over time, the burden of her guilt did seem to ease. She wondered if this was how it had been for Margaret, over there in Canada, settling into her new life with Len Steadman, while the scars slowly knitted over the wounds she had left behind.
Lily arrived closer to six o’clock than five. She wore a loose blue shift, her usual red lipstick and brown leather sandals; her toes were painted to match her lips, and the sight of them—the vulnerability of her aunt’s bare skin—moved something deep inside Cass, so that for a moment, she was unable to speak. And as Lily said nothing either—stood before her on the doorstep, watching her from behind her round tortoiseshell sunglasses—there was nothing between them but silence, and the heavy weight of things unsaid.
“You’re still alive, then.” Lily pushed her sunglasses back onto her head, above the darkly shining canopy of her fringe. “Well, that’s something, isn’t it?”
Cass met her gaze. Lily wasn’t smiling—not yet—and her eyes were stern, but Cass thought she could detect a faint softening.
“I’m sorry.” She could not raise her voice above a whisper.
Lily nodded. “Yes. Well. So you should be, you wretch of a girl. I won’t come in. There’s a pub on the corner, isn’t there? Let’s get a bloody drink.”
There were few other women in the pub, and nobody at all in the garden, which was more of a scrubby yard, furnished with two wooden benches and a miserable rose bush straggling up an ancient trellis.
“London,” Lily said as she brought out their gin and tonics. “I don’t miss it. But I expect you can’t imagine wanting to live anywhere else.”
Cass nodded, took her glass, sipped, and saw, as Lily’s face finally admitted the trace of a smile, that she had been forgiven. They talked, for a while, of other things. John’s work on a house in Harrogate. (It was nearing completion, and he was staying up there this weekend.) Francis, whom Lily had been to see in Worthing. Cass’s music, Ivor, their friends.
When their glasses were almost empty, Lily said, “It was me, you know, not John. It was me who didn’t want children. I think he’d have had a brood of them, if I’d been willing.”
Cass said nothing, ran a finger over the rough, splintered surface of the table.
“I’d never wanted them. Just didn’t have the urge. Couldn’t see how it would work, really. I mean, picture editors aren’t exactly sympathetic to the needs of a working mother. And then, when I met John, I suppose I just wanted him to myself. I didn’t want to share him with anyone—even a child.”
Lily withdrew two cigarettes from her leather purse, lit them both, and handed one to Cass. “Don’t suppose you’ve given up? No? Well, be my guest, then.”
Drawing deeply on her cigarette, emitting a small circle of smoke, she went on. “So it was a surprise, really, just how deeply I came to care for you, Cass. To love you. To think of you, in some ways, as my own daughter.”
Lily put her head on one side, watching Cass with an expression that she understood, in that moment, as profoundly, unfathomably sad.
“Silly of me, I suppose. Silly how upset we both were when you just upped and left like that. John, too. I’ve never seen him like that before. Couldn’t settle to anything, for weeks. Neither of us could.”
“Lily . . .”
Her aunt shook her head. “No, Cass. I’m not saying this to upset you, or to make you feel guilty—though of course you should feel guilty. Neither of us wanted you to stay on sufferance. I just wish you’d talked to us about it, that’s all. You’ve given up everything to follow this man. Your schooling, Cass. All your plans. I just wish you’d let us in.”
A sliver of wood had made its way into the soft pad of Cass’s index finger. She could feel it there, just below the surface, and she stared down at it, worried uselessly at it with her teeth, before letting it go.
“It’s not just about Ivor,” she said softly. “It’s what I want, too. Music, I mean. The chance to make something of my songs. I really want it, Lily. It’s all I want. What does school matter, really, in comparison to that?”
Lily took a long, last drag on her cigarette, and then stubbed it out. “You’re still so young, Cass. You could have waited. Just a few months—that was all.” After a silence, she added, “But I know you want it, you stubborn child. By God, I know you do.”
By the end of the summer, Cass and Ivor were out gigging four or five nights a week—at Joe’s bar, and at other venues scattered around London’s compass points: a riverboat docked at Kingston-upon-Thames; a pub in Hampstead; a candlelit coffee house on the Old Brompton Road.
Their audiences were not large, but they listened, and Cass was beginning to recognise some faces—a woman with shoulder-length blonde hair and a slow, stoned smile, who seemed to follow them wherever they went; an intense-looking young man who sat at the same round table at the front each time they took to the stage at Joe’s.
At one gig on the Old Brompton Road in late August, they found themselves, to their great excitement, sharing the bill with Bert Jansch and Sandy Denny. Cass was transfixed by Bert’s agile, darting fingers, by Sandy’s sweet, breathy, muscular voice, singing the old songs Cass had first heard on Li
ly’s records, and others she had never heard before.
Cass watched Sandy as she sang—her tumble of blonde hair; her voice so simple and easy and right—and thought, with sudden, startling clarity, I want what she has.
In later years, she would think of that moment often, each time she was asked—and she was asked this many times—when she had known that she wanted to perform. “When I saw Sandy Denny sing,” she would always say. “When I saw her hold a room with the power of her voice alone.”
But however deeply Cass was coming to love performing—to feel most at home on those small stages, beside Ivor, with her guitar on her knee, despite the terror that still gripped her before she stepped out under the lights—it wasn’t yet paying their way. They were earning no more than a few pounds here, a round of beers there. Why else, Ivor pointed out when Cass first remarked on this, did she think he was having to paint houses to make the rent?
She had known Ivor was hard up, of course—he’d cadged enough tobacco and weed from Lily and John, and she hadn’t been ignorant of the fact that he seemed to wear the same three sets of clothes on rotation, and that they were not always clean. But in her eagerness to leave school and Sussex and her childish life behind, she hadn’t quite comprehended that, with Ivor in London, she would be hard up, too.
Hard up, yes, but not penniless, and in that she knew she was lucky. She had a small monthly stipend drawn from her father’s pension—Francis had made the arrangement with John before moving to Worthing—and, as the weeks wore on, small sums of money began to appear, sporadically, in her bank account.
The first instalment arrived a few days after Lily’s visit. Cass went to the bank to withdraw her portion of the rent, and discovered that the balance on her account had, unexpectedly, increased; over the next few months, she found that this happened again and again. The money could only have come from Lily and John, who must have thought carefully about the size of the sums: they were large enough, along with the allowance from Cass’s father, to cover absolute necessities—rent, food, petrol for Ivor’s car—but no more. And as Ivor had even less money than she did, it became clear that there was nothing for it but for her to find another source of income.
She tried waitressing first—there was a café on South End Road with a sign in the window saying, “Waitress required.” The owner—Ali, a scrawny, lugubrious Turkish man with a thick, slug-like moustache—took one look at her and said, “Do you have a black skirt you can wear? Make sure it’s short.”
Ali’s wife, Azime, ran the kitchen. She was lean and hardbodied, and seemed, with her deep-etched crow’s feet and perpetual scowl, much older than Ali: more like his mother than his wife, Cass thought. All day, Azime aimed a stream of invective at Ali, Cass, and the dishwasher, Ali’s pimply sixteen-year-old nephew, Ahmed, in a mixture of Turkish and broken English, without seeming to care whether she was understood.
On her fourth shift, when Cass’s feet were already hurting more than she’d thought possible, and her hair had begun to reek of sunflower oil and stale smoke (Ali sold strong Turkish cigarettes along with the fried breakfasts), Azime lost her temper completely. She stepped across the kitchen to the serving-hatch, where Cass was preparing to pick up two plates of ham and eggs, and slapped her hard across the face.
A moment of stunned silence: the woman’s narrow, snarling face, the colour flaming on Cass’s cheek.
“Right,” Cass said, and tore off her apron. “That’s it. You’re a bloody maniac. And you can find some other fool to be your slave, because I’m damned if it’s going to be me.”
And then she stalked across the linoleum, watched by the silent, wide-eyed customers, forks hovering in mid-air between their plates and their mouths, and slammed the door behind her.
On the walk home, she was filled with righteous rage, but her anger had dissipated, and the red mark on her cheek had already faded, by the time she arrived at the house. When she told the story to Ivor and the others, it was with amusement: Azime, with her wrinkled walnut skin and incomprehensible fury, had already become a figure of fun.
Listening, Kate laughed, and said, “Barbara’s just given in her notice. Why don’t you come and work with me?”
Kate had a job in a bridal shop, set a few streets back from Oxford Street. It was a fussy, old-fashioned place—not at all like the boutiques that had sprung up along Carnaby Street and the King’s Road, with their lurid patterned dresses and record-players turned up loud. But then, as the manager, Cornelia, said to Cass when Kate took her in to meet her, “Most women, when it comes to their big day, still want something traditional, don’t you think, my dear?”
With her cut-glass voice, her tiny, spare figure and her white hair drawn back into a tight bun, Cornelia was like an emissary from another era. A ballet mistress from a Degas painting, issuing stern instructions to her pupils at the barre; or an Edwardian dowager, pouring tea into fine china cups.
“She was a debutante, you know,” Kate said on the bus-ride home. “From what I can gather, some viscount or other jilted her at the altar.”
“Odd place to work, then, isn’t it?” Cass said.
“Yes, I suppose it is,” said Kate, and they both dissolved into laughter.
But Cass, it turned out, rather liked working at the bridal shop. Cornelia could be strict—the dresses were to be presented on their white padded hangers just so; the brides to be treated with the utmost deference, even when they were clearly just shop-girls, whiling away their lunch hours with dreams of white tulle and pintucked satin bodices. But she was also kind. Many of the girls she employed were performers of one sort or another—actresses, dancers, models, musicians—and she allowed them time off to attend auditions and castings, thrilling to their successes and sympathising with their disappointments almost as deeply as they did for each other.
On the day Kate learnt that she’d landed a part in Hair, Cornelia produced a bottle of champagne. (She had a particular affection for Kate.) When the last customer had departed, she shut the door firmly behind her, turned the shop sign from “open” to “closed,” and poured each of them a glass.
“To Kate,” Cornelia said, “and to all you wonderful, talented girls. May all your dreams come true.”
And Cass, lifting her glass to meet the others’, looked from Kate to Cornelia to Daphne, the other assistant, a harpist with a willowy figure and a gentle smile, and saw no reason at all why they would not; for it felt, in that moment, that everything was theirs for the taking, and they need only reach out a hand and pluck it from the tree.
There were parties, and there were dinners, and there was dancing in basement clubs.
There were letters from Lily and John, and the Rolling Stones live in Hyde Park—the crowds, and the scarred grass, and the scent of marijuana hanging heady in the air.
There were the hours Cass spent in Cornelia’s shop, quiet and cool, smoothing lace and satin and silk over strangers’ bare skin.
There was the week when they all piled into Ivor’s Morris Minor and Bob’s Ford Escort, and drove to Kate’s parents’ house in Cornwall, which was even larger than Atterley, and filled with brocade furnishings and flocked wallpaper and oil paintings of stern, anonymous ancestors. Bob had a sheet of acid tabs, and those were lost days, sunlit and magical, pulsing with a strange, intoxicating energy that seemed to them all then, young and stoned as they were, to be something close to the essence of life itself.
But above all, there was music, and there was Ivor, and there was her inability to tell where her love for one spilt over into her love for the other.
She wanted to know everything about him—not only the basic, obvious things, like where he’d grown up, and what his parents’ names were, and whether he had any brothers and sisters; but the view he’d looked out on from his bedroom window as a child, and the perfume his mother had worn, and the first song he could remember hearing.
This h
e could answer—“Sally” by Gracie Fields, which his mother had hummed under her breath while putting the sheets through the mangle on wash-day, keeping him close by, so that the song, for him, still carried the warm fug of the kitchen and the sharp, clean smell of starch. But on most of her other questions, he would simply not be drawn.
She knew only that he’d been born and raised in Leamington Spa, where his parents, Owain and Susan, still lived; that he was an only child; and that he’d left home as soon as he could, and no longer spoke to any of his family, with the occasional exception of his maternal grandmother, Anna. That, of course, was what she longed to know most of all—why he had cut himself off from them, and whether this bore any relation to the scar beside his right eye, the provenance of which was another of his many mysteries. But the first time she had asked him about it, she had watched Ivor’s face harden and close, like a shutter drawn down over a darkened window, and she had comprehended that this would be one subject on which, for now, she would not be able to press him further.
She had to admit, too, that although she believed she wished to share everything with Ivor—for there to be no regions of their minds to which they did not allow each other access—in practice, his reticence was something she could understand. For there were things about her own mother that she had not told him, that she had not even quite told herself; and Margaret’s letters were still lying, unanswered, in the box that Cass had brought with her from Atterley, and which now lay stowed under their bed at Savernake Road.
Cass spoke often of Francis, however. Of how her father had read to her as a child, and how she could still recall the precise timbre of his voice, so much softer, more intimate, than it had sounded from the pulpit. Of how proud she had been of him, striding cassocked and resolute through the church, secure in the attention of his congregation; and of how painful it had been to see him shrink and dwindle away to the man he was now, pale and stooped, measuring out his days in the little flat in Worthing with only his books, his records, and his fading memories.
Greatest Hits Page 14