The night she’d left Rothermere, Johnny had made hot chocolate for Anna in his basement kitchen at two A.M. Cass had put her daughter to bed in the room they would share—drawn the coverlet up over her sleeping body, under the watchful eyes of the Manhattan drag queens. And then, back downstairs, Johnny had poured her a whisky, looked frankly at the cut, the split lip, the purplish bruise, and said, “Well, this will be the last of it, then.”
It was a statement, not a question. Cass had sipped her drink, looked across the table at him, and said, “Yes.”
They’d stayed for two months, in the end: two months during which the album launch had had to be postponed, and the tour dates rebooked, and Anna had woken most nights crying, calling for Cass in a way she hadn’t done since she was tiny. Asking when they were going home.
“What do I tell her?” Cass asked Johnny, desperate, and he stared at her with his shrewd, brown-black eyes and said, “Well, the truth, of course. Or as much of it as you think she can stand to hear.”
And so, in the night, Cass had held her daughter close, and stroked her hair, and said, “We’re not going back to Rothermere, darling. I’m going to find us a new place to live.”
A few months after that, she had. Home Farm; that frizzy-haired estate agent; that hideous brown carpet; those cracked tiles and the flaking paintwork; all of it speaking to her of free- dom, of a place that would be theirs, and theirs alone.
Such a kind friend, Johnny. It had been to him, again, that Anna had gone when she’d set her heart on London, on art school: he’d offered her the top floor of the Spitalfields house, promised to let her come and go as she pleased.
Anna had been well, then—healthy, productive, upbeat.
“Talented, too,” Johnny said, and both Cass and Anna had thrilled to the sound of his praise.
But it had also been at Johnny’s that Anna had begun to fail, and that her light had begun to dim once more.
“I think it’s back, lovey,” he’d told Cass on the telephone. “She’s terribly thin. And she hardly ever leaves her room.”
The next day, Cass had driven up to London and taken Anna out to dinner at an Indian restaurant on Brick Lane. It was true that she was thin—very thin—but she’d emphatically denied that the illness had returned.
“I’m fine, Mum,” she’d said. “I’m just busy. There’s so much to do.”
And as if to prove a point, she’d eaten a great deal that night—cleared the metal tureens of prawn dhansak and aloo gobi and brinjal bhaji, all washed down with several glasses of white wine.
“See?” That face, that unique composite of Cass’s and Ivor’s, and yet utterly, entirely, Anna’s own. “I’m eating now, aren’t I, Mum? Honestly, Uncle Johnny’s such a worrier.”
How, when, had Anna developed such an ability to lie? Cass had not believed her capable of it, until she’d been forced to confront the fact that it was so. And then, when it had already been far too late, she’d realised that she herself had given her daughter the tools.
All those days when Cass had woken early, spent half an hour concealing her bruises with the special heavy-coverage foundation Sue, the make-up artist, had procured for her. The tours on which she’d always worn long-sleeved blouses and dresses, even when it was a hundred degrees and more under the unremitting glare of the stage lights. The interviews in which she’d spoken so convincingly of her partnership with Ivor, of how fully he supported her, of how easy, how intuitive their relationship—both musical and personal—had always been. The times she had been held up as the epitome of a strong, independent woman, succeeding on her own terms . . . All of that had been a lie, a fallacy, a construction; a shimmering mirage concealing the ugly truth. In music, she had always been honest; but the rest of her life, it seemed to Cass then, had become an exercise in mendacity, in papering over the cracks. So why would Anna not have believed that she must do the same?
Johnny, dear Johnny, had not seen things in these terms.
“How, darling Cass, can you possibly believe you are to blame?” he’d said to her, over and over again, when he came to visit her in the hospital that first time.
She’d looked at him, sitting there beside her bed in his battered leather jacket, and felt nothing other than a distant, remote awareness that her old friend was speaking to her; that he was saying something important, and that she would like to listen to him if only she weren’t so very, very tired.
There is something about Larry, Cass thinks now, alone in the listening-room, that reminds her of Johnny.
They had the same strong physical presence; the same playfulness, belying the plain, almost monastic purity of their artistic intention. The same commitment to the bright, uncompromising clarity of a visual composition. A photograph, each element arranged perfectly within the frame. A sculpture, hewn doggedly from stone, its lines clean, emphatic, unapologetically occupying the space in which it stands.
The men had known of each other, but had never met.
“Ah, the great Larry Alderson,” Johnny had said with a smile that day last year, not long before the end.
And Larry, before Johnny’s funeral, when she had told him of their long friendship. “I saw his retrospective at the Institute. Amazing work, Cass. A true original.”
She wonders, now, how it would have been if they had met. Would Johnny have flirted gently, playfully, with Larry? Would he have taken her aside, and said in that wise undertone of his, “Be good to this one, Cass. Don’t mess things up. Don’t be afraid to let him in”?
If only, that night two weeks ago, when Larry had put his question to her—when he had turned to her and offered her all that he had—she’d had such advice ringing in her ears. Perhaps, then, she’d have looked back up at Larry, taken his hand in hers, and said, unwavering, “Yes, Larry. Stay with me always. Yes.”
The sheer, utter uselessness of regret. She looks back at the card on the table: the clean, sweeping lines of the Henry Moore; inside, the elegant loop and curl of Larry’s handwriting. Today, Cass, find a way to forgive her. And then—please—find a way to forgive yourself.
Such a thing, in that moment, seems beyond her, and she doubts herself—wonders whether there can really be answers to be found here, in the music she has made. These frozen moments; these still-frames, seeking to capture a place, a person, a feeling, before they disappeared, and were lost to time.
Johnny had never understood why she had decided to retire, to pack up her music and close down that part of herself—the best part, really; the part that she had understood, from the moment she’d first laid her hands on Irene’s mother’s piano, as her simplest, clearest, truest self. And so it had continued to seem to Cass, really, until her daughter had withdrawn into herself, moment by moment, hour by hour, day by passing day. Then Cass had seen the world change, its sounds becoming cacophonous, each note jarring, out of place.
She could not bear to listen back to the soundtrack she had once so easily set to a life that had revealed itself as nothing but a long, featureless road, along which she was condemned to walk, alone, at the whim of some cruel, merciless deity. To think that people built churches, mosques, synagogues, temples to such a god. To think that her own father had once believed that He was benign, loving, placatable with prayer. How could Francis have subscribed to such a fairy tale? How could Cass go on making music, hymning an essential symmetry, a harmony, a truth that had revealed itself to be nothing but a mirage?
That, perhaps, had been the worst of it: this new knowledge that at the core of things, under all the bustle and fuss, there was no sense to be made of anything. Just chaos, and mess, and impenetrable silence.
Right to the very end, however, Johnny had seen things differently.
“You can’t live without music,” he’d said. “You can’t turn your back on your art, on the very thing that defines you.”
She could still see her friend’s p
ale, hollowed face, asserting the vigour and beauty of life even in the knowledge of its imminent withdrawal. “Imagine if I’d just decided, on a whim, never to pick up a camera again. It’s unthinkable, Cass. Impossible. What, I ask you, would have been left for me then?”
TRACK EIGHT
“She Wears a Dress”
By Cass Wheeler
From the album Huntress
She wears a dress
Of silk and feathers
That was her mother’s
They sewed it together
Needle in the lamplight
Dancing in the gaslight
That hand she held so tight
She’ll wear her mother’s dress tonight
She’ll wear her mother’s dress tonight
She’ll wear her mother’s dress tonight
She wears a dress
Of lace and linen
The girl who was chosen
What was she given?
Needle in the lamplight
Dancing in the gaslight
That hand she held so tight
She’ll wear her mother’s dress tonight
She’ll wear her mother’s dress tonight
She’ll wear her mother’s dress tonight
Ooooooooooo
Needle in the lamplight
Dancing in the gaslight
That hand she held so tight
She’ll wear her mother’s dress tonight
She’ll wear her mother’s dress tonight
She’ll wear her mother’s dress tonight
* * *
RELEASED 10 January 1977
RECORDED October 1976 at Rothermere, Surrey
GENRE Folk rock / soft rock / pop
LABEL Phoenix Records
WRITER(S) Cass Wheeler
PRODUCER(S) Eli Glass
ENGINEER(S) Mike Edwards / Sean O’Malley
His name was Alan Leddie.
He was stocky, square-faced, with dark eyes and shoulder-length, sand-coloured hair. He’d played rugby at Cambridge, where he’d studied history, and run a popular series of Friday music nights in his college bar—British blues; psychedelia; the odd bearded folkie, passing through.
“Knows his music does Alan—I think you’ll get on,” Martin had said.
She needed a manager, and Angus, they both agreed, was not up to the job. She’d talked through Vertical Heights’s earnings with Vince, Phoenix’s laconic, leather-jacketed accountant, and he was pretty sure that Angus had been quietly siphoning off more than his agreed commission.
But from Martin’s description of Alan, she’d pictured someone older: a Brian Epstein figure, smartly suited, businesslike—not the disconcertingly boyish-looking man who stood up to greet her when they met in a pub close to Parliament Hill Fields.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Alan said, returning to the table with her whisky. “‘What does he know about anything? He looks like my little brother.’ Well, I know enough—and the rest I’ll learn. But the main thing is, I want this, Cass. I want to work with you—for you. Your songs are special. And when you sing . . . well, you’re the real thing. Not a poser, you know? A folk singer’s honesty and a rock singer’s swagger. Martin thinks you could go all the way, and I believe I can help make that happen.”
He placed her glass on the table, slipped back onto his stool, and fixed her with an expression of such exaggerated, wide-eyed sincerity that she couldn’t help laughing. “Steady on, Alan. At least let me get a drink down first.”
His face rearranged itself, embarrassed. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to launch the big sell.”
“It’s all right.” She looked across the table at him, and decided that she liked Alan—that she believed him, and could trust in his belief in her.
They talked of many things that evening. The trip Alan had taken through the southern states of America, Washington to New Orleans, after graduation: juke joints and honky-tonks and white-hooded men still moving ghostlike, after dark, through the deserted streets. His preference for Mississippi blues over Chicago. “You can hear the South in the music, somehow,” he said. “The empty fields, the cotton gins, the huge, heavy skies.” His love of English folk, New York jazz, and good old rock-and-roll.
“Where do I fit into all that, then?” Cass asked. (How quickly, how easily, she had slipped into using “I” over “we.”)
“You?” Alan sipped his pint. “Ah, we’ll have to invent a whole new category for you.”
Ivor joined them just after nine: he’d stayed behind in the studio with Martin, tinkering with the lead line to “Common Ground.” He was stoned (Martin liked his grass, too; said it “favoured the creative process”), and was easy and placid as a sun-warmed cat, though Cass, alert to the nuances of his mood, could sense him weighing Alan up.
“Private school, eh?” he said, interrupting Alan’s description of the house in which he had grown up. (A rambling Victorian villa, close to the river at Barnes; father a solicitor, mother a violinist who had given up her career for her children, but had never made them carry the weight of her sacrifice.) “Cambridge? Had it pretty easy, then, haven’t you, Alan?”
Alan, across the table, stared back at Ivor. He was still smiling, but his eyes were cool. “If you mean I’m grateful to my parents, then yes, I am. They taught me the value of everything I have.” After an emphatic pause, he added, “What about you, anyway, Ivor? Where are you from?”
Ivor looked away. “Here, there, everywhere. A citizen of the world.”
Alan nodded, and the moment passed.
At closing time, as Ivor went off to the gents’, Alan said, “Angus Mackinnon. I hear he’s kicking up a bit of a stink.”
“You could say that.” Angus, banging on the door of Savernake Road in the middle of the night: drunk, high, furious. You signed a contract, Cass. You can’t just fuck off and leave us in the lurch.
The last time, the neighbours had called the police. Angus had slunk off before the squad car arrived, and Cass and Serena had served the officers tea in the kitchen while the others ran around upstairs, ensuring their stashes were out of sight.
The policemen—neither of them older than thirty—had been rather friendly; one of them had flirted with the women quite openly. “No need for us to go upstairs, is there, love?” With a smirk, “Not unless you’d like to . . .”
But as they’d got up to leave, the other officer had turned serious. “Mind we’re not called back again, all right? We’re not as stupid as we look. Next time, we won’t be turning a blind eye.”
“Give me Angus’s details,” Alan said now. “Address, phone number. Leave it with me.” He hesitated. “That is, of course, if you think this could work. If you’d like me to work for you.”
He looked, in that moment, rather sweetly shy. Cass reached out, offered her hand for him to shake.
“I would, Alan,” she said. “I really would.”
The flat was in Muswell Hill, in a broad Edwardian building of a sort Cass had never noticed in London before. It was fronted by an elegant timber portico, white-painted, with a veranda spanning the full width of the first floor.
“I threw some fantastic parties here,” Harriet said.
The flat belonged to her—Lily’s university friend, who worked in publishing, and had once spent a fortnight at Atterley, mourning her errant fiancé. She was newly engaged to an Irish poet; they were to live in Connemara, in a grey stone house with a view of the sea. The poet was almost seventy, Harriet confided, and had been married twice before; she was fifty-six, never married, and as giddy and excitable as a schoolgirl in the first flush of romance.
“Your aunt Lily got so drunk once,” Harriet went on, “she almost fell off the balcony. I’m not joking. John only just caught her in time.”
Cass smiled, picturing Lily, pink-cheeked and laughing in John’s grip. “Thank God.”
There were two bedrooms—one at the front, next to the living-room, with its own door to the veranda; the other at the back, beside the bathroom, overlooking the rectangle of lush green lawn that belonged to the flat downstairs.
“You can’t use the garden, unfortunately,” said Harriet, “but old Mr. Dennis is a sweetie. Deaf as a post. Won’t mind a bit if you play music all day and all night—which I suppose you will?”
Cass nodded. She was already furnishing the front bedroom in her mind. That would be their music room, she thought. They’d hang their guitars from wall-hooks, and place the piano beside the veranda doors. (Lily and John had offered to buy her an upright, by way of congratulations.) The desk from their room at Savernake Road, and an old armchair in one corner, for thinking, writing, waiting out the inevitable crises that came when a song refused to conform to its given shape. Harriet was bequeathing them a comfortably sagging sofa, a bed, a wardrobe, and a dining-table, and they’d scrabble together the rest of the furniture somehow.
It was a shame to leave Gospel Oak, to see the sturdy old house on Savernake Road dismantled piece by piece—the owners were renovating, preparing to sell. Serena, now four months pregnant, was moving to Harrow with Bob, who had, against all their expectations, found a job teaching English at a girls’ grammar school. Paul, his novel still unpublished, was uprooting to Manchester; and Hugh—well, who ever knew what Hugh was doing? And she and Ivor would be here, in this bright, high-ceilinged flat, with its veranda and its white walls and its scrubbed wooden floors.
“It’s wonderful,” she said to Harriet in the living-room, which was flooded with late-spring light. Dust swirling in the golden shafts; the faint adenoidal buzz of a lawnmower floating up through the open doors. “I can’t wait for Ivor to see it.”
Harriet beamed. “You’re doing me a favour, really. Couldn’t bear the idea of renting to a stranger. And to know that I’m contributing, in some small way, to the creation of wonderful music . . .”
Greatest Hits Page 19