Greatest Hits

by Laura Barnett

  Margaret arrived at Rothermere the evening before the wedding, with Len Steadman and their daughter, Josephine—now a tall, rather awkward thirteen-year-old, still a little bloated with puppy fat.

  This was the first time Cass had seen her mother and half-sister in four years. Not long after their meeting in Buffalo, Margaret had written Cass a letter. She had listened to The State She’s In—to “Common Ground,” in particular—for the first time. She said she found it difficult to believe that Cass could take something so personal—Margaret’s own letter to Francis; a letter that had never even been meant for Cass’s eyes—and air her feelings about it so publicly. She couldn’t see, Margaret concluded, how they might begin to rebuild their relationship if Cass continued to hold such resentment towards her.

  Cass can remember quite clearly where she was when she read her mother’s letter—in the back of a bus with Ivor and the band, on their way to the Great Western Express Festival.

  “What is it?” Ivor had said, seeing her face. “What does she say?”

  Wordlessly, she’d handed him the letter. After he’d read it, he’d taken another swig from his can of beer and said, “Fuck her, Cassie. What do you need her for, anyway? She’s never done a bloody thing for you.”

  Much later that night, after their set, they had performed a drunken ritual amid the wet grass: taken a lighter to the letter, and watched it shrivel, burn, then disappear. And that, Cass had decided, was enough: she would not write back.

  But over time—during the long hours she spent in buses, taxis, planes—she had found herself thinking more and more about her half-sister, Josephine. The girl with the hand-knitted jumper, and Cass’s own oval brown eyes. And she had started to send her postcards from Hamburg, Rome, Sydney, Tokyo. Josephine had replied with breathless excitement—I can’t believe how amazing it is that you’re FAMOUS, Cass! Everyone at school thinks it’s just the COOLEST THING EVER!!! And gradually, Margaret had begun to include her own letters with Josephine’s. A truce, it seemed, had been called. And so, despite her misgivings, Cass had found herself asking Kim to issue them with an invitation to the wedding.

  Len Steadman, of course, she had never met. What struck Cass most about him, as she opened the door, ushered them into the living-room with its enormous white marble fireplace, the new Steinway piano occupying its allocated space in the bay window, was his absolute ordinariness. He was a mild, colourless man in a cheap-looking navy pinstripe suit, looking around him with an awe he didn’t bother to disguise.

  “Goodness, this is some place,” he said to Ivor. “Must have set you back a fair bit.”

  It was impossible, Cass thought as she handed Len a glass of champagne, to imagine such a man tearing a jagged rip in the weft of her young life; bringing about such a stirring of romantic feeling in Margaret that she’d decided she had no choice but to leave her daughter, and her husband, and start a new life five thousand miles away.

  They did not talk of Francis, who could not attend the wedding—he was too frail, now, to leave the home other than for brief, blanket-wrapped excursions along the seafront in his wheelchair. Ivor’s mother, Susan, would not be coming either. Ivor had still not responded to her letters, even the one that had arrived, a few weeks after the first, letting them both know that Owain Tait had died the previous Tuesday in Warwick Hospital.

  Cass had asked Kim to send flowers to the funeral (Ivor had been reluctant to do even that), and had written to tell Susan that she and Ivor were engaged, and that she hoped, in time, that they might have the opportunity to meet.

  She wondered, afterwards, if it had been wrong to offer Ivor’s mother false hope—it certainly didn’t seem that Ivor was prepared to go back on the decision he had made when he’d left home. But she did not, in truth, think often of Susan Tait; not when there was My Loving Heart to promote, and the wedding to prepare for, and another American tour that would begin, with relentless efficiency, two days after their return from honeymoon.

  Their wedding day. Ivor in his dark blue velvet suit, a button-hole of blush-pink roses and lily of the valley pinned to his broad lapel. Kim and Kate in pink silk, lilies glowing white against their dark, gathered hair. Hugh McMaster as best man (Cass had not been happy about that, but Ivor had insisted): clean now, but putting away the booze with an enthusiasm that implied to all that he had simply swapped one addiction for another.

  There were no speeches, but each member of the wedding party had been asked, after sunset, to take to the stage and perform a song. Ivor sang “Just Us Two”; Cass “In This Garden,” which she had written for the occasion on the new Steinway. Kate and Kim duetted (rather presciently, it would occur to Cass later) on a version of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”; and Hugh stumbled his way through an exuberant, drunken rendition of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Then the band—Graham, Kit, Frank, and various friends guesting on guitar and vocals—played on until the early hours as the house watched with benign interest, a dowager duchess observing primly from the sidelines.

  Sometime towards dawn, Cass found herself standing on the lawn with Serena and Kate, arms woozily entwined. (Serena, since putting her daughter, Sarah, to bed in a spare room, had been dedicating herself to the consumption of champagne.)

  “You know, Cassie,” Serena said. “I was wrong. I’ll admit it. I didn’t think you and Ivor would go the distance. I didn’t think he could ever be tied down.”

  Cass’s eyes travelled to her new husband, dancing unsteadily under the lightening sky. His eyes were closed, and he was smiling, waving his arms above his head. It had been a long time, she thought then, since she had seen Ivor so childishly, unquestioningly happy, and she felt a rush of love for him; of optimism for the future that would be theirs. She thought of the moment he had stood before her, in the hallway at Atterley, placed his hand to the curve of her chin; of the times—so many times—that she had stood beside him on stage, the warm chords of her guitar merging with his, their voices blending and soaring.

  “I don’t want to tie him down,” she said, and led her friends off by the hand to dance.

  “What are you doing?” Ivor said.

  She lifted her hand to her mouth, placed the small white tablet on her tongue. Took a sip of water, let it slip coolly down her throat. “Taking my pill, of course.”

  They had been on honeymoon for almost a week. Ibiza: a white-walled finca, tucked into the gently angled slope of a hillside. The interiors decorated in the latest style—mint-green paintwork; giddying op-art wallpaper; deep-pile rugs softening the polished wooden floors. But they were spending little time indoors (except in the bedroom): the gardens were heady with lavender and scrub-rose, and the pool terrace, shaded by palms, overlooked the glistening dark blue expanse of the sea.

  A housekeeper, Inés, came up twice a day from a neighbouring farm to prepare breakfast and lunch, clean the rooms, and ask, in halting English, if they would be dining at home or in a restaurant. On the second day, Ivor had tried to explain, as tactfully as he could, that they would far rather be left alone, but she had stared at him, uncomprehending, and had returned as usual at eight the following morning.

  Inés was there now, as Cass followed Ivor out onto the terrace: she was serving breakfast under the vine-covered pergola. Plates of melon and Serrano ham; sweet sponge cakes that Inés called magdalenas; bowls of milky coffee. Ivor and Cass were silent until the housekeeper had retired to the kitchen. Then Ivor said, “Are you sure you want to keep taking the pill? Couldn’t we let it go, and see what happens?”

  Cass looked at him, tanned and relaxed in his swim-shorts, his loose white shirt unbuttoned. “You know what would happen, Ivor.”

  He speared a slice of melon with his fork. “So you don’t want kids.”

  Cass was silenced for a moment. She took a sip of coffee, buying time. It wasn’t that she didn’t want children; well, she had no idea whether she did or not—the subject had n
ever come up between them. They had always been so busy with the music, the recording, the touring. She had been so busy, and Ivor not much less so, though it was true that, even since giving up the dope, he still hadn’t returned to writing with the intensity the act had once demanded of him.

  “What’s the point, Cassie?” he’d said when questioned; without resentment, but with a clear-sighted honesty that she couldn’t find it in herself to dispute. “You’ll end up putting your songs on the next album, anyway. I might as well just play my parts and leave the songwriting to you.”

  Still, they were busy, both of them: where on earth did he think a child would come into that? What would she do—place a screaming baby in a Moses basket and leave her in a corner of the tour bus? Give her to Kim to hold while she went out on stage? No: it was absurd; there was no way for her to tour, record, and be a mother to a child. Not the kind of mother she would like to be, anyway. A mother who was there for her daughter, her son. A mother who did not, unquestioningly, always put her own needs first, and hang the consequences out to dry.

  All this Cass said to herself, sitting there beneath the pergola, sheltered by the vines from the fierce Spanish sun; but she knew, even in the moment it arrived, that her anxiety was also rooted in something far deeper than mere logistics. The fear that she, like Margaret, might lack some key element of the maternal instinct. The fear that in creating new life, she would destroy the one she had built for herself. And what of her music? What if those sounds inside her head—those pure, shimmering, otherworldly sounds, for which the music she actually produced could only ever stand as poor, flawed facsimiles—were drowned out by the deafening, prosaic, earth-dwelling noises of a child? What if, in short, she found herself unable to write ever again?

  She drew a breath, took another gulp of coffee. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe someday. Not at the moment, Ivor. Not when everything’s going so well.”

  He laid down his fork. “For you, you mean.”

  “No.” She reached across the table for his hand. “For us. What’s brought this on, anyway? You’ve never even mentioned children before.”

  He let go of her hand, drew his sunglasses down from his forehead. The mirrored lenses reflected Cass back at herself, her face distorted, fractured. “I don’t know, Cassie. It’s the wedding, I suppose. It’s got me thinking. Even when things were terrible at home—when my dad was on the warpath—I’d always thought I’d have kids. Do it better than he did, maybe. Than them both.”

  She closed her eyes; saw, behind her lids, the small, frightened boy, drawing his pillow over his head to muffle the sounds rising up from below. She knew the provenance of his scar, now: his father, Owain, had swung a punch at him, and Ivor’s face, in falling, had collided with the sharp corner of a skirting-board. He was ten years old; he had needed stitches. The doctor, examining him, had said, “How did you get this nasty cut, then, lad?” And Susan, sitting beside her son, had said, “Oh, he fell over, would you believe? He’s ever so clumsy.”

  “We’ll talk about it, all right?” Cass said now. “Someday, we’ll talk about it. But not here, Ivor. Not today.”

  He nodded, and they ate, drained their coffee mugs, left the dishes for Inés to clear. The pool water was cool, inviting, dappled with shade from the tall palms. They swam, floated, embraced in the shallows; and that moment slid off into the distance, and was, for a time, forgotten.

  She would say, in interviews at the time, and subsequently, that Huntress was the album she was proudest of, if not her favourite.

  “It’s impossible to choose a favourite,” she always said. “It’s like asking a mother to say which child she loves the most.”

  The cover artwork, famously, she painted herself: a self-portrait in thickly layered oils, wild-eyed, staring, open-mouthed. She looked less beautiful than unhinged, and that, frankly, was the point: a woman’s wild inner self, freed from its shackles.

  Few knew—or still know—that the model for the portrait was a photograph taken by Johnny in the grounds of Rothermere, for which he asked Cass to perform a primal scream that drew the security guard recently posted at the front gate running to find her, and confronting Johnny with a brandished truncheon. Johnny, once his terror had subsided, would dine out on this story for months, if not years.

  The US label hated the picture. The record would always, in America, carry a different cover: a photograph—by Johnny again—of Cass dressed as Diana, preparing to launch an arrow from her drawn bow. For the more observant fans, the photograph was imbued with a degree of knowing irony: Cass’s prey, a murky portion of its face just visible between the massed trunks of the trees, was Cass herself, added by Johnny by combining the two negatives in his darkroom.

  They recorded the album in the new studio she and Ivor had installed at Rothermere, with Eli Glass, the young American producer who had masterminded Tom Arnold’s last record. Cass never quite took to Eli—there was an arrogance about him that she instinctively disliked, and they would not work together again. But she could see, from the very first day of recording, that he knew what he was doing: transforming her songs—twelve of them, with “Brightest Star” as the first single, and “Follow Me” as the second—into something truly arresting.

  Poppier, perhaps, than her first three albums, the rougher, folkier edges of her sound smoothed and planed, in keeping with the changing aesthetic of the era. Huntress would always, given the quirk of timing of its release (her record in January, the other a month later), be spoken of in the same breath as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, and be rather eclipsed by the latter’s success. Not, of course, that Huntress didn’t do very well in its own right; but Cass’s own pride in the record would be less for its critical acclaim and more for the sense she had then, and has retained, that this was the album with which she had really found her creative stride.

  There, caught like prized specimens inside a display case, were the songs she had wished to write, expressed exactly as she had wished them to be, and elevated beyond the limits of her own experience into something universal: not highbrow or impenetrable, but accessible to ordinary women (and men, of course: she would always be admired by men, though often not in the way she might have preferred).

  She had been receiving letters from women for some time—women who’d seen something of their own lives reflected in The State She’s In, Songs From the Music Hall, or My Loving Heart. But with Huntress, the letters increased tenfold; Kim employed a fan-club manager (Pauline, a twenty-six-year-old secretary from Coventry who’d been coming to Cass’s gigs for years) to read, sort, and reply to them, and pass on only the sparest few to Cass herself.

  Cass has kept several of these letters in the drawer of her desk at Home Farm. One of them is from a young woman named Annabel Macdonald, from Aberdeen. I’ve never written to a musician before—I’m not some kind of crazy fan—but I just had to tell you how much I love Huntress. We’re the same age, and yet you seem so much stronger than I am, so sure of who you are and what you want. I wish I had even an ounce of your strength.

  Cass had first read Annabel’s letter in a hotel room in Singapore. It was evening, the island’s skyscrapers gaudily lit against the night sky; Ivor was in the top-floor bar, drinking Singapore slings with Frank and Kit. She never usually wrote back to her fans—where, if she began, might it end? But in this case, she had felt suddenly compelled to offer Annabel Macdonald something more than Pauline’s standard-issue fan-club reply.

  Thanks so much for writing to me, Annabel, Cass wrote. I’m so glad my music means so much to you—it certainly means a lot to me. But I have to tell you that I’m not as strong as you think. No stronger than you are, anyway. Each new day, each concert, each city holds more fears than I can express. And loving, too. Loving is terrifying. But there’s no alternative, I think, than to face it—for what else is there, in the end?

  She’d given the letter to Pauline to post, and forgotten all
about it. But later—years later—the words she had written to Annabel would return to her with sudden clarity, and she would wish, more than anything, that she could find again that young woman, that long-faded replica of herself, who had been strong enough to look fear in the face, and go on living.

  She remembers, somewhere in the chaos of those years, a week of stillness in Switzerland with Kate and her banker, Lucian. They were a more or less established couple by then: he had left his first wife, Marian, and was angling to make Kate his second.

  He had rented a grand, white-pillared mansion on the upper shores of Lake Geneva: an absurdly beautiful place, looking out over the serene, mirrored surface of the lake, and the red-roofed village houses clustering at the water’s edge.

  Lucian—a looming, mutable man, with a dangerous, irresistible charm—had also chartered a boat, which he liked to sail out onto the lake each morning after breakfast. This was an activity for which Ivor turned out to have a surprising natural ability: he had never, he joked the first time they took the boat out on the lake, had much of an opportunity to learn to sail in his parents’ semi in Leamington Spa.

  “No,” Lucian said. (He, being half-American and wholly privileged, had grown up dividing his time between boarding-school winters in Edinburgh and long summers on Cape Cod.) “I can quite imagine not.”

  They had all nodded and laughed, while Cass stared at Ivor across the stern. She had noticed, since his father’s death, that he was talking more openly about his childhood. She had not yet decided whether this filled her with anxiety or relief.

  For the first couple of days of the holiday, Cass and Kate joined the men on the boat, sunning themselves on the deck, enjoying the postcard view of the high white mountains and the freshness of the wind on their skin. But on the third day, they decided to stay behind—“have some girl time,” as Kate put it. (She adopted, in Lucian’s presence, a coquettish, almost babyish manner that Cass found faintly distasteful, although she did not, of course, air her feelings aloud.)