“At least,” Johnny had remarked drily to Cass as they’d watched the men’s antics from the terrace, “they can’t get a car back here and launch that into the pool. There’s a bloody great château in the way.”
Cass had been so happy to see Johnny: he’d arrived three days before, with his friend Sue, a make-up artist, in a car packed with lights, costumes, and props. Now that the sessions were finished, they were to make use of the château for the cover shoot: Sue and Johnny were transforming the master bedroom into a dressing-room. Here, in the photograph she and Johnny had discussed at length, a man (Ivor) was to be seen in reflection, applying make-up, while Cass, dressed as an Edwardian dandy, looked on.
The picture had been Cass’s idea, arriving simultaneously with a name for her second album: Songs From the Music Hall.
She’d been at home in Muswell Hill one idle Sunday evening, watching The Good Old Days on television, when the image had slipped into her mind: a man powdering his face before a mirror, watched by a woman in a suit and tie, in homage to Vesta Tilley and her like—the female singers who had once caused such a sensation in the London theatres. (Faintly, she recalled plain old Mrs. Souter singing “Jolly Good Luck to the Girl Who Loves a Soldier” as she cleaned. “What’s that song?” the eleven-year-old Cass had asked, and Mrs. Souter, seeming suddenly playful, girlish even, had said, “What, you mean you don’t know Vesta Tilley?”)
But Cass had not, initially, imagined Ivor in the role of the man at the mirror; that idea had come from Johnny.
“He’ll hate it,” she’d warned him, and it had been true.
“That bloody poof,” Ivor had hissed, “is determined to humiliate me.” But eventually, he was won over, perhaps by vanity—Johnny had cannily insisted that the young man in the photograph had to be extremely handsome—and by Alan’s more prosaic considerations. (Both he and Martin were convinced that Ivor’s presence in the photograph, as both Cass’s guitarist and her boyfriend, would boost sales.)
“All right,” he’d said the night before they’d left for France. “I’ll do it. After all, who am I to refuse the great Cass Wheeler anything?”
“Don’t be like that,” she’d said, and reached up to kiss him, but he’d pushed her away.
“Why not? That’s how it is, isn’t it? You calling the shots, and me your bloody puppet on a string.”
And so the shoot would go ahead as planned. Johnny and Sue were up in the master bedroom now, putting the finishing touches to the room—they wanted to begin that evening, after dusk. (Johnny wanted tenebrous darkness, the “sexy chiaroscuro of candlelight.”)
“What time is it, Kim?” Cass said. “I forgot to put on my watch.”
Kim lifted a languid arm, opened her eyes just wide enough to examine her wrist. “Almost five. God, it’s still so hot.”
“I’d better go up. Sue wants us to try the costumes.” Cass swung reluctantly upright, wincing as her bare feet met the baked terracotta tiles. “You’ll come and keep me company, won’t you? Tell me I don’t look too ridiculous?”
“Of course. Might just have one last swim before I come up. Unless you want me now?”
“No, it’s fine. We’ll be a while, anyway.” Cass reached for her silk kimono, slipped it on over her bikini. A quick blur of movement drew her eye to the château’s second floor: a shutter thrown open, an arm resting on a windowsill. In the dim maw of the windowpane, Ivor’s face was framed, ghostlike, as he looked down and met her gaze.
“Afternoon, darling!” she called up, her voice sounding falsely bright, over-loud. “Ready for the shoot? I’m coming up now.”
Ivor shrugged. And then, after a moment, he stepped away, drawn back into the unseen shadows of their room.
So this, it seemed, was success.
Mornings waking in a featureless succession of hotel rooms, unsure of where she was, drawing gradually back into the present. The next city; the next town; the day’s ever-changing schedule of commitments replacing the free, formless landscapes of her dreams.
Hours in Alan’s office (he had rented premises on Berwick Street, recruited two members of staff); or in an upstairs room at the American label’s Sixth Avenue HQ, talking to journalists, trying to give an account of herself. It was not, she was learning quickly, acceptable to say that she worked simply by instinct, drawn by a creeping sense of how a song might sound, by her need to snare that quiver of notes before they disappeared. They needed more. They wanted her to explain her intentions. They wanted to know where she fitted in.
These writers were almost always men. Eva Taylor was a rare exception, and a loyal one: in a second, larger interview for the Courier, just after Songs From the Music Hall went to number one, she wrote that “no self-respecting feminist should be without a copy of this outstanding record, in which the hopes and dreams of the modern woman—our fascinations and obsessions—are writ large.”
If the men were American, they were obsequious, even flirtatious; if they were British, they were usually chippy, even rude—especially to Ivor, whom some of them (Don Collins, especially) seemed to like to goad.
“Ivor Tait, once a promising singer and guitarist in his own right, is now playing second fiddle—or guitar—to his famous girlfriend, and doesn’t seem at all happy about it,” Collins wrote after one particularly bruising encounter with Ivor, backstage at the Marquee. (Collins had gone up to Ivor to congratulate him, in a voice dripping with sarcasm, on showing such solidarity with the feminist movement; Ivor, in response, had swung a punch at him.)
Afternoons on the bus, caught between ennui and encroaching nerves; evenings at the venue, each hour neatly apportioned to the unchanging sequence of tasks—sound-check, dinner, hair and make-up, show, party, sleep. The new buses were large and well appointed, almost inconceivably luxurious compared with Vertical Heights’s old Transit, or Tyson’s Dodge; but they were still, after all, buses, with the same stuffy, recycled air, the same lingering odours of air-freshener and tobacco, the same white-noise of the engine lulling her to a broken, insubstantial sleep.
She and Ivor travelled alone, now, while Graham, Kit, and the crew piled into a second bus. Alan, when he joined them on tour—he was gradually taking on a handful of other clients, to whom he had to devote a reasonable portion of his time—preferred to travel separately: he didn’t like to intrude on Cass’s privacy, and disliked the druggy, locker-room atmosphere of the men’s vehicle.
Cass had a rule now, too, enforced by Alan: no more than two consecutive nights were to be spent on the road. She still found it difficult to sleep in her bunk, even when Ivor went off to join the men’s card game. (Adrian, the new tour manager, was a demon at poker.) Even then, alone under clean white cotton, she would spend most of the night awake, watching the unspooling road (interstate, motorway, autobahn, autostrada: each one different, each one exactly the same), and scribbling scraps of lyrics in her notebook, or painting.
She bought herself a set of oils, with which she began to fashion thickly layered, abstract images, each one no larger than a postcard. (It was difficult to manage a larger sheet of paper amid the unpredictable rolling and shuddering of the bus.) She had no idea if her miniature paintings were any good; indeed, she didn’t care at all whether they were or not. They were simply reactions to the mood of the moment, ways to fill the long, fractious, moonlit hours. For her music, when they were travelling, seemed to desert her: even in quiet moments, no sounds found their way into her mind but the low, tinnitus after-buzz of the amplifiers; and the shotgun scatter of applause; and fragments of her setlist, tuning in and out like the radio broadcasts she had once treasured, under her sprigged counterpane at the vicarage, all those years ago.
Already, so quickly, she was falling out of love with touring. Often, on those endless afternoons and sleepless nights, she thought of their little flat in Muswell Hill (and soon, it really was theirs—Vince suggested she invest in property, and
Harriet, happily settled in Ireland, agreed to sell). Then, Cass’s longing for home—for that lovely, light-filled music room, with the veranda on which her plants, uncared for, were surely withering was so strong it was almost painful.
There was no option, of course, but to tour. And those moments on stage were still what she lived for—those heady, perfect, transcendent moments when there was no past and no future, but only the five of them (Frank, the session keys player, was now a more or less permanent presence in the band), locked together in a groove. It was still there, on stage—gowned, sweat-sheened, exhausted; letting the great urgent sound of her voice swell up from her body and roll out over the heads of the crowd—that she felt most truly alive.
Tom Arnold’s tour had been the breakthrough. Those two six-week support stints in America in November 1972—one on each coast, with a couple of brief forays into the Midwest—had propelled The State She’s In (much to the surprise of her own American label) to a respectable position on the Billboard chart.
“Deserves to go higher,” Tom had said, and he had done his best to make that happen: lobbied her label; introduced her to other musicians, publicists, critics; talked her up tirelessly in his own interviews. She was grateful to him, of course, and was also aware of how serendipitous their meeting had been in the first place: had Graham not got sick in LA (Graham reminded her of this fact as often as he could), they would probably never have met Jake, and therefore probably never have met Tom, and therefore could conceivably have stayed rattling around the backroads with Tyson for the foreseeable future.
Tom had come to see her in her dressing-room after their first concert together at the Boston Music Hall. Three thousand people in the crowd: a seething mass that, from the stage, her nerves digging their sharp claws into her throat, Cass had only been able to suppress by imagining that she was singing to one face, one person. In fact, she had found herself picturing her mother; had seen her at her tenth birthday party, all those years ago: Mrs. Raynsford’s piano, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Margaret leaning down to smile at her, her face uncommonly soft, even loving. Very good, Maria. Very good.
“You did great,” Tom had said in the dressing-room, unconsciously echoing Margaret’s words. “Really great. You’re electric out there. Just don’t take any of it for granted, Cass. Remember not to let it go to your head.”
She’d smiled. “I’ll remember.”
He’d squeezed her shoulder, and stepped back out into the corridor. “See you back at the Sheraton. Martinis on me.”
She had not remembered his advice, of course—not for a long while. She had stared back at her reflection in the dressing-room mirror, and seen herself through others’ eyes: the even symmetry of the face that so many now admired; the soulful dark eyes; the long blonde hair. She was twenty-two years old, set on an inviolable course towards achievement. Her ambition was without limit, and she saw no reason why any such limit should be set.
How difficult it was, all these years later, to shift back into the body of the girl she had once been. So young, so single-minded, so sure. To see with that girl’s eyes, think with her mind, and wish, against all odds, that there were some way to make her understand how easily it could all just slip away.
In the spring of 1975, Alan suggested they find her an assistant. There was too much for Alan to do for her alone, and certainly too much for her to do for herself. They should look for a woman, perhaps. Someone easygoing but organised. Someone who might become a friend.
Cass was unsure. “I do have Ivor.”
“Yes.” Alan’s voice was dry. “You do.”
It occurred to Cass, as she held Alan’s idea in her mind over the next few weeks, that he was already coming to know her better than she knew herself: he’d understood that she was lonely, before she’d even acknowledged this possibility. And yet even as the thought struck her, it seemed absurd. She was surrounded by people—she was rarely alone, even when she wasn’t on tour; every moment of every day was accounted for, cut to fit the pattern set by the label. Rehearsal, recording, press, radio, gigs.
She wasn’t writing so much these days—not with the ease and speed she’d always taken for granted, and rarely, now, with Ivor. The closeness they had reaffirmed on that first American tour was disappearing: a gulf had opened up between them that she didn’t know how to bridge. On stage, their affinity was easy, instinctive, but off stage, it had disappeared, lost itself in absences, awkwardness, half-finished sentences. She knew that he disliked Tom—believed, with some reason, that he was making a play for Cass. But his disaffection went further than that: Ivor seemed to simmer with a resentment whose existence, when questioned, he flatly denied.
On tour, he kept more and more to the men’s bus, leaving Cass to travel alone; and at home, he was increasingly absent from the flat. He’d taken up with Hugh again, and was spending long stretches of time at Hugh’s place in Crouch End. Hugh threw parties there: noisy, rough, scratchy affairs that lasted several days, and were peopled by a crowd Cass didn’t know, or care to know: a rackety, ever-changing flock of squatters and bikers and gaunt-faced old hippies, thin and raw-boned and reeking of desperation (or so it seemed to Cass). Powder and pills and brown sugar: she hated all of it, hated the expression she saw on Ivor’s face when, eventually, he came home: exhausted, emotionless, numb, wanting only to sleep.
He denied he had a problem, however—insisted that the problem was hers.
“Don’t be such a bloody old woman, Cassie,” he said. “Dope loosens me up, all right? It helps me relax. And I’m still here, aren’t I? I’m still here whenever you click your fingers.”
It was true: Ivor wasn’t missing sessions, or gigs; he was doing everything that was required of him. And yet something was missing—their old closeness, their sense of a shared life, a shared future. It was her name on the records, the posters, the deeds to the flat; her face in the newspapers and magazines. Ivor was a part of it—essential to it, in fact, and still essential to her. But this was not his dream, not as he’d conceived it, and she couldn’t find a way to atone for this; didn’t feel, in essence, that she should be required to do so. For she still believed that she would never have asked such a thing of him.
So she said nothing, and carried on, and missed him, and tried not to think about what he was doing at Hugh’s, and who he was doing it with; and yes, she admitted to herself as she weighed Alan’s words in her mind, she was lonely.
“All right,” she said to Alan finally. “Let’s find someone.”
A few days later, she received a telephone call from Kim. “Alan says you’re looking for an assistant.”
“He thinks it would be a good idea, yes. Why? Might you know someone?”
“Yes.” Kim hesitated. “Me. I’m tired, you see. Tired of the hustling. I just don’t think I’ve got what it takes—not really. And when Alan told me about this, something clicked in my mind. It just makes sense, don’t you think? I so enjoyed those weeks with you in France, and I’d really like to work with you. Would you think about it?”
Cass found herself smiling. “I don’t need to think about it. It’s a fantastic idea.”
She could feel Kim returning her smile. “Great. Well . . . shall I get Alan to sort it all out, then?”
When she hung up the phone, Cass sat for a moment, coiling the cord round her finger. It was late morning, a Wednesday, and Ivor was out somewhere—he hadn’t come home last night. The music room was absolutely quiet, no sound coming even from Mr. Dennis’s flat downstairs.
She thought about how long it had been since she’d last seen Kate—she was so often away filming now, and their schedules rarely seemed to coincide. It was even longer since she’d last seen Serena and Bob, with their house in Harrow and their teaching jobs and their little girl, Sarah, whom Cass had only managed to see twice since the day she was born.
She thought about Irene: she would have been married now fo
r what, five years? She wondered how many children Irene had by now—a boy and a girl, perhaps, and a house that she imagined to be just like Irene’s mother’s, cosy and comfortable. She thought about how good it would be to have a friend.
The telephone rang again.
“Kim phoned you, then,” Alan said. “What do you think?”
“I think,” she said, “that I should really be paying you more than I do.”
One day in late December 1975, Cass received a card.
She can recall the day quite precisely: they were just back from the My Loving Heart sessions in Los Angeles, and the icy, steel-skied London winter was a shock after all that brash Californian sunshine. It was late morning, and she was sitting in her armchair in the music room, catching up on the correspondence that Alan’s office had passed on. The flat was, as always, chilly: she had curled her legs up under her feet, and drawn a cream lambswool blanket (one of the several luxurious purchases she had allowed herself in recent months) over her lap.
A small white envelope had been slipped into a larger manila one, along with a letter from Alan. This was delivered to the office a few weeks ago, Alan had written. I had Sandra open it, as usual—you’ll see why I’ve passed it on. It’s none of my business, of course. But I’m here, as your friend—and as Ivor’s friend, too—if either of you want to talk.
She opened the white envelope. The card showed a red-cheeked, cartoonish Santa, heavy sack slung over one shoulder, framed by a garland of holly. Inside was a letter—black ink on blue Basildon Bond—folded into a neat square. The message in the card read, To Ivor and Cassandra, Merry Christmas, with love from Susan and Owain Tait (Mum and Dad).
Greatest Hits Page 24