Cass’s breath stilled in her throat. Ivor was out; at Hugh’s, she supposed. As she reached for the blue folded paper, she was acutely aware of each small sound in the empty flat. The sudden disembodied burble of Mr. Dennis’s television downstairs, the hiss and gargle of a pipe.
The letter, unlike the card, was addressed only to her. The handwriting was neat, rounded, the spaces between each word measured and even.
Dear Cassandra Wheeler, it began. You will, doubtless, be very surprised to hear from me. You may not even know that I exist. Well, you will know, of course, that Ivor has a mother and a father; but how much—or how little—he has told you about us, I can only imagine. In any case, I suspect it is very little.
Susan Tait’s voice—as Cass heard it through her writing—was warm, diffident; she had worked hard, Cass sensed, to keep any excess of emotion at bay. Plainly, deftly, she constructed the framework of Ivor’s childhood, of his father’s drinking, of the effect it had had on all of them. (Much of this Cass had guessed at, but Ivor had still never offered her more than the barest of facts.)
Goodness knows, Susan wrote, he saw more than any young boy should, and I should have worked harder to protect him. It took me a long time to learn to respect Ivor’s decision to cut us both off so cleanly—to distance himself from me, as well as Owain. But I do respect it, Cassandra.
That’s why I am writing to you, rather than to Ivor; in the hope that you, as the woman who loves him (I can see that you love him: I have watched every one of your performances on television), will be able to decide what is best for the man he is now, not the boy I used to know.
There isn’t much time left—a few months, perhaps. But that’s time enough if Ivor feels that he would like to say goodbye to his father. You are, I am sure, a thoughtful, sensitive person—I can hear that in your music. I have bought your albums, and I play them often, as a way to feel closer to you both. I am sure that you will know what to do.
In the meantime, I wish you both a very merry Christmas. With love,
Susan Tait
After reading the letter, Cass sat motionless for a long time.
Then, resolved, she flung off the blanket, stepped out into the hallway, slipped on her coat, and placed the letter in her pocket. Downstairs on the street, the wintry air turned her breath to swirling clouds, and by the time she reached Hugh’s flat, she was numb with cold.
Hugh answered the door.
“Lady Cassandra,” he said. “The Queen of Sheba herself.”
She pushed past him. “Where is he?”
She found Ivor on the living-room sofa, among scrabbly drifts of detritus: blankets, clothes, plates carrying brownish tidemarks of congealed food. A woman Cass didn’t know—long red hair, brown polo neck, blue jeans—was propped on the floor beside him, her head lolling a few inches from his bare feet. Cass ignored her. To Ivor, who wore the same glassy-eyed expression as Hugh, she said, “I need to talk to you.”
The red-haired woman giggled. “Ivor, seems like your mum’s arrived.”
“Fuck off,” Cass said, and the woman rolled her eyes.
“Touchy.”
Ivor barely lifted his head. “What is it?”
“Just come with me.”
He followed her out to the yard: grimy brick, rickety furniture, a couple of half-frozen geraniums making a valiant bid for survival. He wore no coat and he was shivering, hopping from foot to foot. “What is it, Cassie? Do you have to follow me everywhere? Can’t I even have one fucking afternoon to myself?”
Wordlessly, she handed him the letter. He saw the handwriting, and pushed it back at her, his voice deepening to a snarl. “No. Whatever she’s saying, I don’t want to know.”
“You do, Ivor. Read it. She says he’s dying.”
“No.” He was loud now, almost shouting. “I don’t fucking care, all right? He’s nothing to me. Neither of them are.”
“Ivor . . .”
He caught her arms with his hands, then; held her a little too tightly. “Don’t, Cassie. This is mine, all right, not yours. This is one bloody part of my life where I get to decide, not you.”
They stood still for a moment. His breathing was shallow, laboured. He couldn’t hold her gaze.
“All right,” she said. “All right.” And then, gently, she removed his hands from her arms, and walked back into the filthy living-room, where Hugh was curling up next to the red-headed woman, his head leaning against her bony shoulder.
“Leaving so soon, Lady C?” Hugh said. “Why don’t you stay? I’ve got some good stuff here. Might loosen you up a bit . . .” But she wasn’t listening: she was striding past, away from their cackling laughter; away from the man who wasn’t Ivor but a stranger; a man, it seemed to her then, that she barely knew, even after all this time.
She supposes, now, that this could quite easily have been the moment when it ended between them. Ivor might have quit the band—quit her life—and moved in with Hugh; dived down deeper towards the ocean floor, even stayed there. Or found his own way to resurface, and made it all somebody else’s problem. No doubt it would have been better, in some ways, if that was what had happened—but Cass can’t bring herself to regret the path they took. Not when it would lead them to their daughter. To Anna. To that bright, smiling child.
She remembers, then, that she and Ivor spent that Christmas apart: Cass at Atterley, with Lily and John; Ivor who knew where. At Hugh’s, probably.
He hadn’t come home since the day she’d shown him his mother’s letter. She’d written back to Susan: a couple of brief paragraphs, letting her know that she’d told Ivor the truth.
I don’t think he will come, Mrs. Tait, Cass wrote. But at least we’ve given him the chance.
On Christmas Day, she drove down to Worthing with Lily and John, to visit her father in the home.
She’d offered to give a concert for the residents: an acoustic guitar, the old carols and a few songs of her own. “The Holly and the Ivy,” “The Coventry Carol,” “Brightest Star,” a song she’d begun on the flight back from Los Angeles, sketching the arc of it in her notepad: the sky beyond the first-class cabin window black and empty, lit only by the tiny lighthouse flash at the tip of the plane’s wing.
Her father sat propped in his chair, blank-faced: a tiny, shrunken, white-haired man, grown old before his time. His eyes half closed as she played, his expression betraying no emotion—but yes, Cass was still sure of it, he was listening.
She drove back to London from Atterley on New Year’s Eve, in the racing-green MG she had bought herself the previous year (along with driving lessons). Alan and Rachel were giving a party at their new house in Primrose Hill. She would go alone, or she would go with Ivor: she didn’t care either way, she told herself as the car broached the empty, white-skied miles between Sussex and London. And yet, as she drew up outside the flat in Muswell Hill, she knew that she was lying to herself. She did care, of course she did.
If Ivor isn’t home, she said to herself, if he still keeps pushing me away, it’s over between us. It really is.
But she found him sitting in the kitchen, nursing a half-drunk mug of coffee. He was just out of the bath, wearing the Victorian gentleman’s robe she’d bought him. His hair was still damp, unkempt, giving him a childish, vulnerable look that threatened to break her heart.
“I’m sorry, Cassie,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
He stood up, came to her. He began to cry, silently, his shoulders shuddering in sudden, violent spasms. When he was calm, his breath coming steadily, his body still, she made them a pot of mint tea, and they sat at the table, and he began to talk.
The story Ivor told that night did not shock her, or even come as much of a surprise: she had guessed at most of it, in the gaps left by his silence, and in the few details offered in his mother’s letter. Not a story of horror, of neglect beyond one’s worst imagining, bu
t of a frustrated, unhappy, uneducated man, expressing his anger with his fists. A man who understood nothing of the lives lived beyond the narrow limits of his own experience, who was afraid of such lives, who didn’t know what to make of a son not made in his own image. A woman who lacked the courage—or the means—to stand up to him, and whose weakness her adult son could not find it in himself to forgive. A grandmother who had, in the worst times, offered the boy a place of refuge, a single bed in a small, tidy house where silence was just that—the absence of sound, of fear, rather than the noisy, pregnant pause that preceded each new skirmish.
“I loved my grandmother, Cassie,” Ivor said. “She was the only person who could make me feel safe.”
His face was wet with tears again, and Cass reached up to stroke his cheek, loving him, feeling the knot of anxiety she had carried for him for so long in the pit of her stomach loosen itself, and slip away.
She held Ivor in her arms and whispered, into his hair, “You’re safe with me, baby. You’ll always be safe with me.”
New Year’s Eve 1975. Champagne, Swiss fondue, and fireworks on the roof terrace of Alan and Rachel’s house.
Graham in the kitchen, pouring himself another whisky. Ricky from the Puritan Experience trapping Martin in the corner with a copy of the band’s new LP. “We want a new direction, man. The label’s got us stuck in a box. Can’t you help us get out?”
Kim, luminous in a skintight blue jumpsuit, her hair drawn into taut cornrows, dancing to Steely Dan with Kit’s wife, Alison, while the eyes of all the men in the room followed the figure-eights of their swaying hips.
Ivor and Cass stood close together all evening, as acutely, thrillingly aware of each other’s presence as if they had only just been introduced. He was ignoring the many sorties others were making to the bathroom with their tiny silver vials of cocaine; and the knowing looks of others, their nudges, their whispers. Why don’t you come and try this, man? Come on, it’s New Year’s Eve!
He had given it all up, he said. He hated the way it made him feel: blanked out, empty, numb. Cass wasn’t sure that she believed him, but she wanted to. She was giddy with the relief of having him close to her, of feeling the breach between them closing over, mending its fissure.
Long after midnight, when the guests were starting to disperse, Ivor took her hand, and drew her out onto the terrace. It was freezing, and her shoulders were bare above her floor-length red velvet dress. (Another of Cornelia’s finds: she was saving her best gowns for Cass now as a matter of course, and Cass had come to treasure their regular afternoons together.)
Ivor pulled her to him, placed his jacket over her shoulders. And there, his face just an inch from hers, he said, so quietly that she had to strain to hear him over the music from the living-room (Bowie, now: “The Man Who Sold the World”), “Marry me, Cassie. Marry me.”
He buried his face in her neck. His breath was warm on her skin, and the roof-scape was laid out before them in a jagged, hard-edged silhouette: black windows interspersed with other, brightly lighted rooms in which other parties were going on, other couples were embracing, laughing, arguing.
From somewhere out there in the city’s blackness came a staccato, gunshot patter, followed by the tiny sharp starbursts of fireworks. Cass heard her own song in her head, then: “Brightest Star.” She had written it for Ivor, of course. She had written it for both of them, and the hope—dim, in recent months, but still there—that they would find their way back to what they had once shared both on and off stage. That union. That unthinking, unquestioning intimacy, as easy and natural as a major chord, as the song that shatters the silence, that makes us believe, for a time, that we are not alone.
“Yes,” she said. And because she liked the sound the word made—its bright, clear, affirmative tone, chasing away fear, loneliness, doubt—she said it again, and again, and again.
4.45 P.M.
The caterers are arriving.
In the silence that follows the song, she hears them. The deep, guttural thrum of their vans as they draw up the front drive, scattering gravel, then suddenly falling still. Kim’s soft, barely audible lilt, floating round the side of the house and across the lawn to the studio, and a woman’s unintelligible response. The faint metallic creak of the van doors, and the gravel again crunching and resettling underfoot.
What would she have done, all these years, without Kim? So much more practical than Cass herself; so much more tethered, somehow, to the world as it really is, rather than as she would prefer it to be. But no pushover, either—no martyr. Kim has always had her limits, and not hesitated in letting Cass know when she has crossed them. “It’s too much, Cass,” she had said to her once, not long before she’d gone into the hospital for the first time. “How can I be there for you if you refuse to be there for yourself?”
She can remember that moment clearly: the shock of it, the set of Kim’s face, thin-lipped, resolute. “I can’t take much more of this, Cass,” she’d said. “I really can’t.” And she had not relented: she had turned and left, and in her grief, Cass had allowed herself to believe that Kim, too, was abandoning her, as everyone, eventually, must do.
But that had been false logic, of course; Kim had never abandoned her, even when Cass had given her good reason to do so. She had stood beside her, and held her hand, and continued to direct the smooth running of Cass’s life: all those myriad administrative tasks with which Cass could not, by nature and by circumstance, concern herself. And with far more than that, too: with the decisions that Cass was too afraid, or too weak, to take alone.
Sitting alone, silent, while across the lawn the house swings into action, Cass thinks of the decision Kim had helped her to take two years before, when a letter had arrived at Home Farm from Cindy Russo, Ivor’s second wife.
Cass already knew more about Cindy than the other woman might have imagined: she’d read about her in a magazine, back when she and Ivor had still not been on speaking terms. A former model (what else?): toned and tanned as an athlete, her skin taut and unblemished, her hair a lioness’s mane streaked with shimmering shades of gold and brown.
Cindy’s letter had been written on thick white paper that smelt, faintly and unmistakably, of violets. (The perfume had reminded Cass, incongruously, of her mother’s, though surely it was impossible to imagine two women less alike.)
I’m coming over to England with Ivor and the kids, Cindy wrote. I would so like to meet you, given all the history you and Ivor have shared. And I think there are things he needs to say to you, too, and that he can only say in person. Perhaps you might join us for a day in London?
Kim, reading the letter over, had put her head on one side in the way she always did when weighing a decision, and said, “Meet them, I think. But meet them here.”
According to the magazine article Cass had read, Ivor Tait and Cindy Russo had met in the California ashram where they had both been spending a period of “calm and reflection.” Cass had thought such things as ashrams had gone out with the seventies, but in California, she supposed, anything was possible. “Ivor is open about the years he lost to drug and alcohol abuse,” the piece had gone on. “‘Really, I’d thought my life was over,’ he says, tears springing to his eyes, his hand gripping that of his new love, the woman he calls his ‘saviour.’ ‘Meeting Cindy has given me a reason to get back on track. She has given me something to live for.’’’
It had hurt so much more than Cass would have thought possible, even after all this time: the knowledge that Ivor was moving on, that he had allowed himself a second chance. And with a woman like that. A fool, no doubt. A vacuous mannequin. She had wanted to tear the letter into shreds, but Kim’s words had stayed with her, as they always did; and so, after a hiatus of a few weeks, Cass had written back to invite them all for lunch. And then, a few weeks later, they had all arrived at the front door of Home Farm: Cindy, the two children, and Ivor, tanned in a white shirt and linen t
rousers, his handsome, familiar face only minimally altered by the passage of time.
How many years had it been since she’d last seen him: Seven? Eight? The terrible week before she’d been admitted to the hospital for the first time, when she had gone to see him in London: he was living, then, in an eighteenth-century pile on Hampstead Grove, Rothermere having long been sold.
All the awful things they had said and done to each other: too many to count, too much to recall. And now there Ivor was in her hallway, leaning down to kiss her on the cheek, saying, in that slow, quiet voice of his, now carrying a distinct mid-Atlantic hue, “Hello, Cassie. It’s good to see you.”
Cindy had turned out to be neither a fool nor a mannequin. She was a brisk, sunny woman who ran two charities and a string of Los Angeles boutiques, and had a Harvard MBA. Cass, against all her expectations, had found that she rather liked her. And the children, India and Travis—then five and four—were a delight: not at all the entitled, overprivileged Californian brats Cass had ungenerously imagined them to be.
Kim had ordered catering—“The last thing you need to worry about, Cass, is cooking”—and laid the table: they’d lunched on poached salmon, beetroot and feta salad, new potatoes in lemon mayonnaise. Cass offered wine, forgetting that Ivor no longer drank; but she and Cindy each had a glass, and the children sipped their lemonade and ate everything on their plates without a word of enquiry or complaint.
As they ate, it was Cindy who stoked the conversation, complimenting Cass on the house (“I was obsessed with England as a kid—dreamt of one day living in a lovely old place like this”), on her clothes (“Green really suits you, doesn’t it?”) and, above all, on her music, with a sincerity that had taken Cass by surprise.
“I always wished I’d done something creative,” Cindy said as they finished their pudding. (A huge Eton mess, crowned with layers of whipped cream; Cindy, to her credit, had consumed every mouthful of the oversized portion Cass had placed in front of her.) “Something I could really own, you know? Something that was mine, and nobody else’s.”
Greatest Hits Page 25