Greatest Hits

by Laura Barnett

  On the day the Courier article was published, Cass wrote Eva a note. I can’t tell you what it means to me, she wrote, to read a piece like yours—to feel properly understood.

  A few days later, a postcard came back, care of Phoenix Records—Monica Vitti in a strapless black gown, spotlit, shading her face with an outstretched arm. It struck me after we met that you look a little like her, Eva’s message ran. Or perhaps I should say that she looks a little like you. I wish you the greatest success with your music, Cass—and may that success always be on your own terms.

  An impromptu party in the Phoenix offices, to celebrate The State She’s In entering the charts. Crisps and celery sticks and Martin’s secretary, Rachel, pouring champagne. The men in suits—Cass was still struggling to remember their names—beamed at her, as if she were a precocious child whose cosseting was beginning to pay dividends. Journalists flirted with her, and grew steadily, determinedly, drunk.

  One of them—Don, Cass thought his name was; he had a round, unremarkable face and a thin, downturned mouth—accosted her on the fire-escape, where she had stepped out for a smoke, and a moment alone in the cool London air.

  “So,” he said, reaching into his jacket pocket for his cigarettes. “Ivor Tait—you’re together, aren’t you? A couple, I mean, just to be clear.”

  Cass said nothing. He offered her the packet—she’d just extinguished her own cigarette—and she shook her head. The journalist shrugged, and continued as if she’d answered his question in the affirmative.

  “How does he feel about all this, then? He was on the folk scene for a while, wasn’t he—touring the clubs, looking for a break that never came? And then forming Vertical Heights, which was his band, really. Can’t be easy for him, now—you stealing the limelight, as it were.”

  “I haven’t stolen anything.” She spoke sharply, and Don looked pointedly at her, the corners of his mouth dragging upwards into a mirthless smile. She saw, then, that he wanted this, was trying to rile her. She looked back into the office with its silent typewriters and telephones, to where Ivor was standing beside Graham and Martin, sipping champagne, his eyes wide, animated. (He’d taken a pill earlier, at home, and another when they arrived.)

  She thought of Ivor as he’d been on the day he’d signed his contract, had seen that he would not be receiving a joint writing credit on every song. His face had changed, stiffened, and then he had got up and stalked from the room, just as he had that morning months before, when Martin had telephoned for the first time.

  “Well,” Alan had said, “you’ll need to give him some time. But there’s nothing else for it, Cass. I don’t think the Lennon-McCartney model is going to work here—you write too many songs on your own. And it isn’t as if Ivor’s not coming out of the deal pretty well, too.”

  She’d nodded, and felt reassured. But later, in the flat, they had shouted at one another for hours, their words blunt, brutal, irretrievable. Towards five A.M., Ivor had thrown a few things into a bag, picked up his guitar, and left; and she had pushed open the doors to the veranda, curled up on a wicker chair, and watched his hunched, angry figure march off up the street.

  Now, keeping her voice light, steady, she said, “That’s really not how we see it, Ivor and I. He’s proud of me. And I am of him.”

  “I see.” The journalist was still wearing his ugly little smirk. “How very touching.”

  Kate appeared in the doorway, then—elegant in a floor-length dress, her bare shoulders glistening under the bright office lights.

  “Cass, darling,” she said, “whatever are you doing out here?” And Cass, relieved, reached for her friend’s hand, and strode back into the room, without offering the journalist another word.

  One day in late November—they were just back from touring France, and had a few days off in London before setting off on a three-week trip to Holland and Belgium—Cass took a train to Worthing. (She had still, much to the amusement of Alan, the band, and the roadies, not learnt to drive.)

  In a cotton carrier bag, she carried a copy of The State She’s In, along with a framed photograph, taken by Johnny, of herself on stage, and a handsome edition of Great Expectations that she had picked up a few months before in a second-hand bookshop in Manchester.

  Lily met her at the station, in the same old car. And she seemed just the same, too, in a smart navy coat and her trademark red lipstick, the fine grey threads in her hair the only indication that almost a decade had passed since her aunt had appeared at the vicarage on that painful, distant afternoon.

  She eyed Cass’s carrier bag, with its carefully chosen selection of gifts. “You mustn’t expect too much, you know, Cass darling. Your father hasn’t been doing well at all.”

  Cass nodded. “I know.”

  But she didn’t know, not really. Lily had informed her of Francis’s deterioration, of the necessity of moving him from the neat little flat to a residential home where he would have proper access to nursing care. But still, the change in him was a shock. It was like expecting to meet one man and finding another in his place—carrying his name, but bearing only a faint resemblance to the father she had known.

  The home was a good one (Lily had reassured her of this): a tall, white stucco building on the promenade, with generous windows admitting the grey glimmer of the sea. Francis’s room was on the first floor, at the front, and that view was the first thing Cass saw when she walked in: the jumble of shingle; the green flashes of seaweed clinging to the groynes; and beyond, above acres of wet sand, the slate-coloured layers of water, cloud, sky.

  The room was large, and fussily decorated: swagged curtains, swirling patterned carpet, two chintz armchairs placed in front of the window, a low table between them. Her father was installed in one of these chairs, slippered feet just poking out from under a tartan blanket. He wore pyjamas, purple with a thin grey stripe. The two top buttons of his pyjama shirt had been left undone, exposing several inches of pale, crêpe-paper skin, and a small, wiry coil of white hair.

  Francis had always been a fastidious dresser—those cassocks hanging in the vestry, perfectly pressed; the clerical collars held just so between the starched edging of his white shirts—and his dishevelment was, to Cass, jarring and faintly obscene. She leant forward to fasten the buttons, saying softly as she did so, “Hi, Dad. It’s me.”

  His hands shot up to defend himself, pushed her violently away.

  “No, Margaret,” he said fiercely: an echo of the voice that had once boomed out from the pulpit, so confident of being listened to. “Leave it alone.”

  Cass looked up, over the back of the chair, meeting Lily’s eye. I did warn you, her aunt’s expression said, though aloud, Lily said brightly, “Come on, Francis, you know that’s not Margaret. It’s your daughter, Cass.”

  “I had a daughter,” Francis said. He was quiet now, his tone conversational, but he stared warily at Cass with his watery brown eyes. “Her name was Maria Cassandra. Where is she? What have you done with her?”

  “I am Maria Cassandra,” Cass said, and she reached for his hand. “Dad. It’s me.”

  She sat with him for a while, in the armchair next to his, holding his hand. They said little at first—she commented on the loveliness of the view; he told her that he hadn’t liked the oxtail soup Margaret had served for lunch. And then, after a while (Lily had discreetly left the room), she began to talk more easily, to sketch out the details of her life. Ivor; the flat in Muswell Hill; the gigs, the album, the reviews.

  Francis said nothing—just kept staring out to sea, his head lolling gently to one side—but Cass was sure that he was listening. Time seemed to hold its breath. When Cass became aware of her aunt stepping back into the room, together with a white-uniformed nurse pushing a trolley, she couldn’t have said how long she had been sitting there, in front of the window, talking to her father, watching the dark smudge of the sea blur into the horizon.

 
“Here’s the turntable,” Lily said. “Nurse Brenda’s brought it up from the lounge. Isn’t that kind?”

  The nurse—efficient in her uniform, her grey hair gathered under a starched white cap—was busying herself with wires and cables, arranging the record-player and its twin speakers on the trolley.

  “Yes, very kind,” Cass said. “Thank you.”

  Francis twisted round in his chair, snatching his hand from hers. “What’s that? What are you doing over there?”

  “Nothing for you to worry about, Reverend Wheeler,” Nurse Brenda said, without looking round. “Your daughter’s going to play you some music. Now, won’t that be nice?”

  From the canvas bag, Cass drew out the record, handed it to her father. There she was in the café on the Old Kent Road, caught by Johnny in the stark early-morning light.

  “Cassandra,” Francis said. “Isn’t that my Cassandra?”

  Cass reached across, removed the sleeve, gently, from his clasping fingers.

  “Yes, Dad. That’s your Cassandra. That’s me.”

  She took the disc from its sleeve and handed it to the nurse. As the first plucked notes flooded the room—the notes she knew so well, but which here, in her father’s room, seemed transformed, as if played by someone else—the nurse retreated, closing the door behind her. Francis whipped round again to face the source of the sound, his eyes wide, staring.

  Cass looked at Lily, unsure whether to lift the stylus and usher the room back into silence; but Lily mouthed at her to wait, and indeed, after a minute or two, as the song built and swelled, Francis’s anxiety seemed to dissipate. He sat back in his chair, his eyes tugging shut. He maintained that same position, eyes closed, as the record spun on from track to track, transmitting that strange, disembodied echo of Cass’s voice—backed by Ivor’s, lifted by the layered swell of bass and drum.

  She was sure, after a time, that he had fallen asleep; but when she got up to turn the record over, Francis opened his eyes, and she saw that they had pooled with tears.

  He met her gaze. One of those tears loosened itself from the others and spilt over, inching down across the gathered skin of his cheek. She reached across, unthinkingly, to absorb it with the wool of her sleeve, and her father did not brush her hand away.

  TRACK NINE

  “Lilies”

  By Cass Wheeler

  From the album Huntress

  Lilies in the bathroom

  Old men in the back room

  Talking in low voices the way old men do

  The young girl and her mother

  Gentle with each other

  Eat their dinner

  In their finest Sunday clothes

  Did you see the flowers, Mama?

  I think they’re called lilies, Mama

  Oh if we could buy some for her

  And put them in my room

  Lilies in the bathroom

  I am in the back room

  With the old broom

  And all things left behind

  The young girl has a mother

  They’re gentle with each other

  While I eat my dinner in this room that was yours

  Yes, I saw the flowers, daughter

  And yes, I also thought of her

  And yes, why don’t we buy some for her

  And put them in your room

  Flowers in the bedroom

  Mother’s in the back room

  You are in the garden and

  Autumn is coming soon

  * * *

  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

  Cass was not expecting to love America.

  Like many Europeans of her generation, her opinion of that colossal, sprawling landmass had been formed at a distance, refracted by newsreels, music, literature, and the overbearing influence of received ideas. It also veered wildly between two poles.

  At one end, there was Richard Nixon, with his soft, treacherous jowls and heavy, uncompromising brows; the tongues of fire licking up into the Alabama night; the Vietnamese children running, shoeless, from clouds of smoke. This was the America her peers had railed against in London and Paris: they had tussled with police at the Sorbonne, carried placards outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

  Cass had not joined the protests—she had still been living at Atterley, pretending to show an interest in school, when the first sparks had ignited—but their aftershocks had reached her, as they had reached them all. Bob, Serena, and Paul had marched on the embassy with a crowd from Bob’s faculty, on the day dozens of students had been injured in the fray. They had scattered to a pub before things turned ugly, but the sign Serena had fashioned out of card and poster-paint requisitioned from the school art cupboard—“US OUT!”—had occupied a corner of the living-room at Savernake Road until someone, at a party, had spilt red wine over it, and it had to be thrown away.

  And then, at the other pole, there was Greenwich Village. Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Dave Van Ronk, hunched over their guitars in dimly lit cafés. Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo, thinjacketed and freezing, as a cool sun rose over black fire-escapes and grey pavements and the voluptuous pale blue curves of a VW camper van. There was California—beaches and bikinis and open-top convertibles sweeping along the oceanfront to the sound of surf guitar and five-part harmony; and John Wayne’s arid, sun-bleached West; and half-naked hippies rolling in the Woodstock fields. There was Joni Mitchell, and Buffalo Springfield, and Neil Young, and the old blues masters on their splintered porches, whose plaintive music Cass had first heard relayed by Jonah’s deft fingers and gravel voice, and to whom they all owed such a debt of gratitude.

  She saw reflected, then, in these tired, well-worn images of an America she had never visited, both the very best the world had to offer and the very worst. And when their first trip across the Atlantic was discussed, she could not imagine how her love for the one might come to outweigh the disgust she felt for the other.

  And yet, somehow, it would. In February 1972, they would touch down on the black tarmac at John F. Kennedy Airport, and she would stand at the top of the metal steps, still nauseous from the flight nerves, and breathe it in, the smell of this new country—engine-fuel and hot rubber and the icy savour of winter, and some unfamiliar tug of sweetness that she couldn’t identify. And she would feel it seep into her: the strangeness of it, the novelty, the sense that everything here was known to her, and yet she also knew nothing of this place at all.

  “We’re here,” she said to Ivor—he was behind her, shouldering on his coat. “We’ve arrived.”

  “We have, Cassie.”

  She looked round at him, and saw in the tiny, quickening movements of Ivor’s face, its twitching realignment, that he felt it, too—this sudden sense of possibility. He bent down to kiss her, and together they walked down the steps from the plane, and into America.

  She remembers the hotel they stayed in, that first night: a grim fleapit on the Lower East Side, above an Asian grocery stocked with packets of dry noodles, inky bottles of soy, and boxes of dried foodstuffs labelled with incomprehensible Chinese script.

  The walls of each room were as thin as cardboard, the windows narrow and barred. Alan took a furious look around him as they checked in, taking their keys from an elderly woman with her hair tugged into a tight grey bun, and said, “This is outrageous. I’ll have the label move us tomorrow.”

  And he did: the next day, they upped sticks to a hotel in Greenwich Village. This place was no larger or more luxurious than the first, but there were no bars on the windows, and their room looked out over the linden trees and apartment buildings of Macdoug
al Street. Cass would perch on the windowsill in the early morning, watching the city rising and stretching in the street below: wailing fire-trucks and darting yellow taxis and the gruff, pot-bellied owner of the corner deli drawing a striped awning down over his racks of vegetables and flowers. And of course, in her mind, she could hear Dylan and Collins and Simon and Garfunkel.

  The American arm of Lieberman Records did not, however, seem especially interested in her own incipient career. A few days into the trip, there was a meeting in a dizzyingly tall building on Sixth Avenue. Suits, head-nodding, the issuing of coffee; typed sheets confirming dates, route, transportation.

  “Of course,” one of the suits said, “you’re gorgeous, sweetheart, and we love your record, but it takes time to get a new artist set up over here. Especially . . .” He trailed off, offering Cass a meaningful glance whose significance she immediately understood.

  “A woman?” she supplied, and the man’s eyebrows disappeared behind the wire frames of his glasses.

  “Well,” he said, “you have to admit we do have some pretty top-class female artists of our own. Joni, Carly, Carole, Linda . . . We need to get you out there, see if we can get you sailing in their slipstream.”

  Cass stared back at him, and said, quite calmly and reasonably, “In that case, maybe you should hire us a boat rather than a truck.”

  In truth, however, she hadn’t really minded any of the privations of that first tour: it had seemed only right that she should have to prove herself, to take her time to map the landscape of this new country.

  She remembers the bars and clubs they played, first in New York and then in an unravelling sequence of towns and cities as they traced a zigzagging route from coast to coast. Cass was opening for a psych blues six-piece from Birmingham—much better known than Cass and her band at the time, though it wouldn’t be long before their fame dwindled to a faint, cultish memory—called the Puritan Experience. They were nice guys—solid, decent types, under the long hair and waistcoats and wide-eyed stage posturing, aware that all that separated them from the lives they had expected to be theirs—jobs as plumbers, electricians, butchers; marriage at twenty-one, children by twenty-four, and a thirty-year mortgage—was a hair’s breadth of luck and hard work.