Greatest Hits

by Laura Barnett

  One day, she took down the copy of Great Expectations that Francis had given her on her thirteenth birthday, with its green leather binding, and showed it to Ivor. She realised, with a stab of shame, that it was almost six months since she had last been to visit her father.

  “Will you come with me?” she asked Ivor, and after a moment’s silence, he nodded, and said, “Yes, I suppose so. If you’re sure you want me to.”

  They drove down to Worthing on a Wednesday afternoon—early closing day at the bridal shop, and a rare day when Ivor and Hugh had no house-painting to attend to.

  It was a fine, crisp autumn day. The roads were clear, and they reached her father’s building just before five. Parking on the drive, Cass saw that the oak tree on the front lawn was ablaze with colour; and it pleased her, in some small way, to know that he woke every morning to such a view.

  “Does Reverend Wheeler know you’re coming?” the warden said when they announced themselves.

  Cass hadn’t seen him before: he was a small, narrow-faced man who looked them up and down, in their matching jeans and beads and cheesecloth shirts, with a disapproval he didn’t bother to disguise.

  She stood a little straighter. “No. But I hardly think he’s going to object to his only daughter and her fiancé coming to tea, is he?”

  “Fiancé?” Ivor whispered when the warden had disappeared upstairs.

  “Don’t you dare say a thing.”

  The warden was gone for so long that Cass began to fear that her father had, indeed, gone out, and that she ought to have telephoned ahead. But eventually they were permitted to climb the dim stairwell to her father’s door, and there Francis was, in the hallway. Smaller than she remembered—surely he shrank a little more each time she came?—and so much older, too: gaunt, grey-haired, wearing a white shirt and brown knitted tank top and an expression she couldn’t quite decipher.

  “This is Ivor, Dad,” she said, and Francis looked at Ivor, and nodded, but didn’t extend his hand.

  She made a pot of tea in the kitchen—so tiny and old-fashioned, but clean, like the rest of the flat; everything tidied and put away. There were labels on the cupboard doors, written in her father’s neat, careful hand. Tea and coffee. Canned goods. Pots and pans. Over the stove, another note read, Switch off the gas. What Lily had told her must be true—her father’s confusion was worsening, and these handwritten notes, these small attempts to anchor himself, moved her almost more than she could bear. She leant back against a cupboard, closed her eyes, waiting for the kettle’s whistle. Then she poured hot water into the teapot, and carried it through to the living-room on a tray with a plate of Bourbon creams.

  The room was uncomfortably silent. Ivor was sitting in the armchair by the window, seeming too large for the small, dark space, his long legs stretched out in front of him. Francis, on the sofa, was staring straight ahead, his expression still blank, inscrutable.

  Her father looked up when she offered him a cup of tea, and as he took the cup, he said, as mildly as if he were thanking her, “So this is your fancy-man, then.”

  She stood still, stared. “Dad . . .”

  Francis’s gaze was cool now, unyielding. “Don’t think I don’t know, Maria.” It was years since he’d used her Christian name. “Don’t think I don’t know what sort of woman you are. You and your mother both.”

  Around her, the room seemed to buckle and spin. She replaced the teapot on the tray, afraid that it might fall, scattering its hot contents across the carpet in a wide, seeping stain. “Dad, I—”

  “Leaving your aunt and uncle like that, without so much as a by-your-leave, after everything they’ve done for you. Not even bothering to sit your exams. And all for him?” Francis waved a dismissive hand in Ivor’s direction. “For him, and some pipe-dream of being a singer. Well, I’ll tell you something, Maria—that’s all it’s ever going to be. A pipe-dream. You’re just like your mother—head in the clouds, always dreaming of something else, something better. Well, I don’t want to have anything to do with it. Anything at all.”

  Cass put a hand to the sideboard, steadying herself. Across the room, Ivor got to his feet. “Come on, Cassie. Let’s go.”

  “No.” Cass gathered herself, stood tall. “Dad. How can you talk like this? This isn’t you.”

  Her father’s voice was cold. “Because someone has to tell you the truth, don’t they? Someone has to tell you what a fool you’re being. Your mother’s not here to do it, and my sister’s almost as foolish as you are, so who else is there? I might be stuck out here, forgotten, forgetting, but I’m still your father.”

  She could feel the tears coming. “Please, Dad. Please . . .”

  Francis shook his head. He wouldn’t look at her. Ivor was beside her now, placing a hand on her arm. “Cassie. Come on.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Francis said. “Run along with your fancy-man now, just like Margaret did. Run along and leave me here alone.”

  Cass took Ivor’s hand, and he led her out across the landing, held open the front door. She held her nerve until they had passed the warden’s desk—“Leaving already, are you?”—and crossed the lawn, under the oak tree with its brightly burning canopy of leaves, to the car.

  There, on the front seat, gathering the soft fur of her Afghan coat against her face, she began to cry. Ivor was silent, and held her, and when she was quiet again, he started the car, and drew it out onto the road that would take them home.

  As the last scattered outskirts of the town turned into hedgerows, she said, “It’s just us, now, Ivor, isn’t it? It really is just us.”

  “That’s enough, Cassie,” he said, and reached across for her hand. “Really. That’s all we’ll ever need.”

  TRACK SIX

  “Road of Shadows”

  By Cass Wheeler, Ivor Tait, Hugh McMaster,

  and Danny Ingleby

  Previously unreleased

  In the dark

  Sodium glows

  The white lines come and the white lines go

  Under quiet chimney ghosts

  We’re knocking down miles like dominoes

  The old world music is the scenery

  The backdrop, back line, you don’t see me

  Engine hums as the feeling grows

  We’re knocking down miles like dominoes

  Knocking down miles like dominoes

  Rolling past this town on this road of shadows

  Knocking down miles like dominoes

  Rolling past this town on this road of shadows

  Well listen here, listen there’s nothing I need

  When I’m on the road just you and me

  To feed the song inside that grows

  Knocking down miles like dominoes

  Above us the moon’s so round tonight

  Wheels like wings as we take flight

  And as the grass beneath, beneath us grows

  Knocking down miles like dominoes

  Knocking down miles like dominoes

  Rolling past this town on this road of shadows

  Knocking down miles like dominoes

  Rolling past this town on this road of shadows

  Knocking down miles

  Dominoes

  Knocking down miles

  Stop. Go. Dominoes

  Knocking down miles

  Stop. Go. Dominoes

  Knocking down miles

  Stop. Go. Dominoes

  Knocking down miles

  Stop

  * * *

  WRITTEN June 1969

  RECORDED September 1970, at 45 Savernake Road, London NW3 (previously available only on the bootleg Cass Wheeler and Vertical Heights: The Demo Sessions)

  “It’s a good crowd,” Angus said. “Boisterous, but good.”

  Cass nodded. She was standing beside the van, smoking a cigarette. It was dark in the car-park now, and
the streetlight lent Angus’s face a yellow, ghoulish glow. “Think they’ll quieten down?”

  Angus shrugged, and offered her one of his enigmatic smiles. His eyes were wide, black-pupilled: she had watched him earlier, on the motorway, taking a pill from Hugh’s outstretched palm. Each of the men had accepted one in turn, lifting it to his mouth in one swift, choreographed movement. A religious offering: she had thought of her father at communion, leaning down to place the sacrament on Mrs. Harrison’s pinkly lolling tongue.

  Hugh had extended his hand to her, too, but she’d shaken her head and turned away. The nerves were coming on already, circling and snapping, and they did not respond well to amphetamines; she’d try to banish them later, in the dressing-room, with a large glass of red wine.

  “Well, you’ll just have to make them, Cass,” Angus said.

  She took a last drag on her cigarette, crushed the stub under her foot. “Where’s Ivor?”

  “In the dressing-room. It’s a cupboard with a mirror, really. But we’ve got the drinks in.”

  “My wine?”

  Angus rolled his eyes. “As if I’d forget.”

  She followed him across the car-park, and inside. As they pushed open the door, she felt the weight of the beery, smokeladen air settle on her skin. The club was a long, wide, breeze-blocked room, awash with noise: from the band on the stage (a local rock group called the Heavy Elements, whose fans were out in force); and from the shouting of the crowd, the young men muscled and sleek in their shirtsleeves, the women creamy-skinned and full-bosomed, spilling out of their low-cut tops.

  One woman caught Cass’s eye as she crossed the floor; she had a head of dark, bottle-black curls, and a red plastic handbag slung across her chest. She looked Cass up and down—took in her long dress with its tiny mirrors (a gift from Serena, and almost identical to Serena’s own), and her loose-flowing blonde hair. The woman turned to her boyfriend, nudged him in the ribs.

  “Who does she think she is?” Cass heard her say, just audible over the racket of the band. “Bloody Marianne Faithfull?”

  In the dim corridor backstage, the noise from the bar only just dampened by the double doors, Cass turned to Angus. “Why the hell did you book us in here? They’re going to eat us alive.”

  He shook his head. “Never. You’ll win them round. You always do.”

  Cass still couldn’t quite make up her mind about Angus.

  He had approached them at Joe’s bar one night, when they’d only just stepped down from the stage: the intense-looking man she’d noticed at their gigs for some time, staring up at them from a lonely table in the front row.

  He’d said that he was managing a few bands, and asked if they’d ever thought of expanding their line-up: he loved the songs, but felt they’d suit a bigger sound. Drums, bass, electric guitars. “Really broaden things out, you know?”

  Watching Cass, he’d added, “Or you could stick with the acoustics, mike them up. I’m not saying you need to go the whole nine yards. But have a think about it, won’t you?”

  Ivor had been enthusiastic: he’d written Angus’s number down on the back of a beer-mat, slipped it into the pocket of his jeans. Back at Savernake Road, as they were getting ready for bed, he’d said, “We should try this out, Cassie. Hugh on drums . . .”

  He’d seen her face change. “I really don’t know what your problem is with Hugh. At least give him a try. Jonah knows a guy, Danny, who plays bass, and has just quit his band. He says Danny likes our stuff. I think this could really work.”

  She’d held fast for a while, convinced that the music she could hear in her head was exactly as they played it, and should remain so. Two unamplified guitars, two voices—plain and unadorned as the old oak table that stood in Lily’s kitchen at Atterley. The folk sound her aunt had taught her to love, and under whose tutelage she had strummed out her first, faltering chords.

  That was not the only music that spoke to her, of course. Her record collection was growing steadily, her long-adored Beatles and Stones records filed alongside carefully chosen albums by the Kinks, the Byrds, the Small Faces, the Who. She now had her own copies, too, of the folk discs Lily had introduced her to, to which she had added others by Simon and Garfunkel, Tom Arnold, Judy Collins, Pentangle, Dave Van Ronk. She liked best the singers who told stories, for whom the words were as important as the music, each element indivisible from the other.

  At Savernake Road, where Bob ruled the record-player, they all sat up late into the night listening to Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, and the Incredible String Band. Jonah had introduced her to the rough, bluesy acts he knew and depped for, on occasion: the Yardbirds, the Bluesbreakers, and Fleetwood Mac, whom she, Jonah, and Ivor had been to see one night at the Marquee. They’d been unable to take their eyes from the singer, Peter Green, intense and messianic in his long white robe: he played an electric, Ivor was at pains to point out.

  “It’s not enough, Cass,” he said, “just you and me sitting on stage like that, unamplified. It’s been four years since Newport now. It’s time to move on.”

  Somewhere, deep down, she had begun to sense that Ivor was right—but she would not let him know that just yet. “You said it was just you and me. You said that would always be enough.”

  He nodded. “It is you and me. You, me, and the others.”

  Still, for weeks, Cass had withstood Ivor’s pressure, ignored his pleas to at least let him call Angus back.

  And then, one day, on her lunch break from Cornelia’s shop, Cass had found herself wandering down Denmark Street, and standing in front of a shop window, staring at a Gibson Les Paul. The guitar was solid-bodied, its long neck studded with mother-of-pearl, its dark wood polished, shining. In her mind, she’d heard it: full-voiced and resonant, weaving under and over the plucked strings of her acoustic, while their voices merged, and the rhythm section kept a steady pulse, like the heart beating deep inside the body of the animal, pumping blood to brain, and lungs, and coiled, twitching muscle.

  The next day, at lunchtime, she’d taken her father’s green-tooled edition of Great Expectations to a second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road and handed it over before she could change her mind. Then she’d quick-marched along to Denmark Street, and exchanged the notes the bookseller had given her—more, in fact, than she’d anticipated—for the Les Paul.

  At home that night, she’d presented the guitar, in its black case, to Ivor. “For you. All right. Let’s give this a go.”

  Things had moved quickly after that. They’d brought in Danny, who was slight and affable, with an impressive handle-bar moustache, and begun rehearsals in Hugh’s bedroom, his wild green eyes staring down at them from the walls.

  She was still wary of Hugh—there was something rather feral and unpredictable about him, and she hated the way he spoke to her as if she were a child, there only to be petted and patronised. But she couldn’t deny that he knew what he was doing: with Hugh and Danny’s input, their songs seemed to open out into something fuller, wider, more layered and intense.

  And there was something exciting—erotic, even, though she did not quite articulate the thought—about having the three men arranged around her, immersed in the music she had written. Sometimes, at a song’s end, they would all stay silent for a few seconds, eyes closed, like lovers unwilling to let the moment go.

  After a month or so, Ivor had called Angus and asked him over to Savernake Road to hear them play.

  They’d set themselves up in the garden (hang the neighbours—they were all squares anyway), surrounded by candles and flowers stuffed haphazardly into jugs, and played five songs straight through—“Common Ground,” “Living Free,” “I Wrote You a Love Song,” and a couple of new ones—while Serena, Kate, Bob, Paul, Jonah, and the rest of their crowd danced barefoot on the grass.

  Angus had smiled his sphinx-like smile and said, “Great stuff. I’m glad you took my advice.”
/>
  The next day, in a pub on South End Road, they’d signed a makeshift contract Angus had scribbled on the back of an envelope. We, the undersigned, agree to the representation of Angus Mackinnon, and only Angus Mackinnon.

  “Now,” Angus had said, pouring each of them a celebratory glass of Blue Nun, “we just need to get you a name.”

  It was Bob who’d come up with it. “Vertical Heights,” he’d pronounced solemnly one night after watching Hitchcock’s Vertigo while tripping. None of them particularly liked the name, or even quite understood its significance, but nobody could think of anything better. And anyway, Angus had already found them a van and booked a string of gigs, so “Vertical Heights” would just have to do for now.

  Wakefield, Northampton, Lowestoft, Bury, Spalding: towns that were, to all of them, no more than words on a map, and which quickly began to seem indistinguishable. A shifting series of car-parks and student unions and working men’s clubs where they played on tiny stages between the comedian and the bingo-caller, and could never be sure if they’d be greeted with whoops and cheers or booing and cat-calls.

  And yet, through it all, Angus remained sanguine, unruffled. He was sanguine the time a crowd of lads in leather jackets turned up and stood at the front, shouting obscenities at Cass until one of the other punters suggested they treat the lady with some respect, and they turned on him, beginning a fight that ended with the tables being overturned, the police being called, and all four members of Vertical Heights running, with Angus, for the safety of the van. He was sanguine the time the student comedian who’d been on before them had got drunk, outstayed his welcome, and walked up and down the front of the stage throughout their set. He was sanguine when people clapped, and called for more; and he was sanguine when people didn’t clap, and sat watching them in stony silence. (This was an increasingly rare occurrence, but there had been a night in Mablethorpe that they all preferred to forget.) He booked their gigs, made sure they arrived on time, checked the footfall on the door, and handed over their earnings in cash (less his twenty per cent, of course) once a week.