And so, as the men set off down the path to the landing stage, the women remained together on the broad veranda, with a fresh pot of coffee, and blankets wrapped around their laps to ward off the morning’s slight chill.
“It’s a far cry from Savernake Road, isn’t it?” Kate said, and Cass agreed. And it was then, quite suddenly, that Kate began to cry—quietly at first, and then with greater intensity, until her shoulders were shaking, and the tears were running in quick succession down her carefully made-up face.
Cass said nothing for a while—just held her friend’s hand, then moved from her chair and wrapped Kate in her arms. Bloody Lucian, she thought. Aloud, she said, “What is it, darling? Have you had a row?”
Kate shook her head. As her breathing steadied, Cass returned to her chair.
“He’s not having an affair, if that’s what you think. No—it’s my fault, really. Well, in a way. You see, I’ve had two miscarriages.”
Cass reached for Kate’s hand again across the table. “God, Kate, I’m so sorry. When?”
“The first was a year ago . . .” Seeing Cass’s expression, she nodded. “And yes, I know I should have told you, but we haven’t seen much of each other, have we? And it’s not exactly the kind of thing you put in a letter.”
“You could have called . . .”
“Yes, I could have. But who knows where you are, these days? And to be honest, I just wanted to forget about it and try again. So we did, and then it happened again, Cass. Seven weeks in. That was a month ago.”
“God. Kate. You poor thing.” Cass moved her thumb across the soft pulse-point of her friend’s wrist: a small, rhythmic gesture of reassurance. “And how are you feeling now?”
Kate wiped her face with her other hand. “All right. Pretty washed out. That’s why Lucian wanted us to come here for the month—for me to rest. Where better to recuperate than Switzerland?”
“Well, that’s true. It’s very peaceful. All this clean mountain air.”
They were silent for a while, watching the lake. The boat was a fair distance from the shore now, Lucian and Ivor two crouching figures in yellow rain-slickers. Beyond them, grey clouds were massing against the white peak of Mont Blanc.
Kate let go of Cass’s hand. “I’m all right, Cass. Physically, anyway. It’s just that I can’t seem to shift the feeling that Lucian’s somehow relieved about it. He hasn’t said so, of course, but he has his two kids with Marian—he hardly ever sees them as it is—and I don’t think he really wants another. So what I can’t decide is where that leaves me. Where it leaves us.”
“Because you definitely want children?”
Kate looked at Cass then, her brown eyes still damp with tears. “Of course. Don’t you?”
Cass swallowed. Out on the lake, the boat was growing smaller and smaller, drawing a widening vector in its wake. “I don’t know. I think Ivor does. He’s suggested I come off the pill. He’s . . . straightened himself out, I suppose, and I guess he’s ready. I think he wants the chance to do things over again. To undo the mistakes his parents made, if that makes any sense. I think I understand how he feels.”
“And you? Are you ready?”
“No. I . . .” She hesitated, aware that it might not be tactful to say more. “Well, I don’t know. Not yet, anyway. I just can’t see how we would make it work.”
“Well,” Kate said. “It will either happen, Cass, or it won’t. There’s no more comfort than that for any of us, is there?”
“No,” Cass said. “I don’t suppose there is.”
The women sat together in the wicker chairs, talking of other things—the latest film role Kate had been offered, and was unsure whether to accept (the script insisted on her being nude throughout several scenes, while her male co-star would remain fully clothed); Cass’s incipient ideas for her next record. The men returned exuberant, hungry, their hair sculpted into boyish tufts by the spray. Lucian suggested they go out for lunch, and as he was not the sort of man accustomed to being disobeyed, that was what they did.
He chose a smart restaurant—stiff white tablecloths and heavy glassware and elaborate plaster cornicing—for which they were all, in their jeans and jumpers, underdressed. But the maître d’ didn’t seem to mind.
“Mr. Hillier,” he breathed at Lucian as he showed them to a table by the window, with its inevitable view of the lake. “Please. Your usual table.”
Lucian ordered the food, to be shared between them on heavy white china plates: escargots, prawns swimming in garlic, an enormous platter of côte de boeuf, exuding a sticky trail of blood. The sommelier kept their glasses brimming with pinot noir, and soon they were all pleasantly drunk. Cass’s earlier conversation with Kate—her friend’s tears, the soft pressure of her hand—acquired the murky quality of a dream. She looked from Kate—restored, now, to equanimity—to Lucian, whose arm was thrown proprietorially around the back of her chair. She thought, not for the first time, of how utterly impossible it was to understand the inner workings of another’s relationship; of how every couple must carry its hidden places, its secrets, its taboos.
Under the table, she reached for Ivor’s hand.
She would never, in the years after leaving it so abruptly, miss Rothermere.
The house would remain, in Cass’s memory, a dark and shadowed place—unfairly, no doubt, as they did have their measure of ease and contentment there. (It was, after all, the house in which Anna was born, and lived out her early years.)
But the gardens she would miss. The lake, with its reeds and lily pads and sudden, mysterious stirrings; as a Valentine’s gift to her two years into their marriage, Ivor had it filled with a shoal of koi carp. The walled rose garden, with its sundial, and the bench where, on sunny days, she liked to sit with her old Martin guitar. It was there that she had composed the lyrics for “In This Garden,” scribbling them in her notebook; and where, for as long as she performed the song, she would always picture herself and Ivor, sitting side by side into old age, like a pair of film actors ageing in rapid, cross-cut montage.
It was there, too, in the summer of 1979, that Cass first learnt that Jonah had died.
Kim delivered the news, having learnt it via a circuitous route: Jonah’s sister, Mary (Cass and Ivor hadn’t even known he had a sister), had telephoned Lily and John at Atterley, after finding their telephone number in one of Jonah’s notebooks.
The story was a terrible one—almost unbelievable at first. Jonah had been sleeping rough in Detroit. (Even his sister didn’t know what had drawn him there from Albuquerque: she, like all of them, hadn’t heard from him in years.) He’d been using again: this, thinking back to his strange, unsettled mood the night Jonah had come to see them play in Denver, had not come as a surprise to Cass. The family was choosing to believe that he’d taken a dubious hit, rather than deliberately misjudged his limits. He had, in any case, been found dead in the street one morning by a young nurse named Kayla Dwight, who was on her way to an early shift at the Henry Ford Hospital. The funeral was in three days’ time, at the family’s Baptist church in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
“My God,” Cass said. Kim held her hand tightly. “Where’s Ivor?”
“In the studio,” Kim said. “He was there when I took the call.”
Cass let go of Kim’s hand, ran across the garden to the studio. Inside, she found Ivor sitting blank-eyed on the sofa, holding an empty whisky glass.
“Pour me one,” she said. “We’ll raise a toast to Jonah.”
And they did. And then, after their glasses were drained, they held each other, and remembered the friend they had loved and lost, and who had never offered them, or anyone else, a chance to save him; who had perhaps, in the end, simply not wanted to be saved.
They flew over for the funeral: first-class tickets from Heathrow to Chicago, bought at the last minute for an astronomical sum, and then a driver charting the miles down th
rough the deserted flatlands of the Mississippi Delta.
The crowd at the church was large: family, local worshippers, musicians from all over America and Europe. At the wake, an ancient bluesman in a three-piece suit took to the stage. He had been something of a mentor to the boy he recalled as all skinny legs and arms, trying desperately to fit his tiny hand-span to the strings of the old man’s guitar.
“Jonah Hills was born with the music in him,” the musician said, his voice cracking a little as he settled that same guitar on his knee. “I knew it from the moment he started to play.”
Cass listened, and remembered the man she had first seen walking up the driveway at Atterley, and assumed was homeless: the very thing he would eventually become.
She looked around her, and realised that even music hadn’t given Jonah enough to live for—or any of these people who, here and now, spoke only of what a wonderful musician he had been. It was true—he’d been the real thing, with no interest in chasing money or fame. But now his music had died with him, however sincerely that kind old man claimed it would live on.
They stayed a few nights in New Orleans—would have stayed longer, were it not for the series of London live dates scheduled for the following week, which Alan had been unable to postpone.
Kim had booked them into the Hotel Monteleone. From there, Cass and Ivor walked the streets of the French Quarter, looking for the seedier, darker alleys where the real music was played. Warm tropical air and brass bands on every corner. Sweat pouring from the faces of the jazz musicians in the Preservation Hall.
Was there something truer, Cass asked herself as they sat in that tiny, tumbledown room with its bare wooden floors and roughly plastered walls, in the efforts of these men—and the occasional woman—playing for little more than tips and beer, than in the cavalcade her own career was becoming?
The pomp and pageantry, the peacock-strutting and the preening. The driving force of her ambition, her desire to be . . . what? Listened to? Recognised. Acclaimed. Cass Wheeler—a name to be shouted, whispered, caught in newsprint, each new utterance erasing the last traces of the girl she had once been. The girl lifting a hand to her cheek, still feeling the sharp sting of her mother’s blow. The girl lying awake in the dark, wondering where her mother had gone, and if she would ever be coming back.
And yet, Cass thought, as the New Orleans jazz band played on, what did her success really mean? What did any of it mean if a life could end, without ceremony, on a side street in downtown Detroit? A mother, a father, and a sister, crying in the church where Jonah had been baptised. A group of so-called friends who hadn’t heard from him in years. A child that Jonah had, for a short time, believed was his, and whose loss, perhaps, had proved impossible to bear.
A child. She closed her eyes, and there, on her lap, Cass felt her imaginary weight. A girl. A daughter. Their love made flesh: the answer to their mistakes, and to the mistakes of the parents who had borne them.
She knew the child: she recognised her as clearly and certainly as she would an old, old friend. Irene. Linda. Kate. Serena. Alan. Johnny. Kim. None of her friends’ faces was as sharply defined, in that moment, as that of the daughter Cass was holding in her arms.
Hello, little one, she said to the child silently, as the trumpeter lifted the gleaming bell of the instrument high into the solid, stifling air.
TRACK TWELVE
“Queen of the Snow”
By Cass Wheeler
From the album Fairy Tale
(Demo version)
New York was silent
With fresh fallen snow
The glass and the concrete
The hard neon glow
On the fifty-fifth floor
On the Lower East Side
A woman stood and watched
Her newborn child
Oh daughter, my daughter
Your mother is here
The queen of the snow
The empress of tears
The mirror, it shattered
The shard’s in my eyes
Ice and shadows
In this great kingdom of mine
One day, it will be yours
This freezing cold land
My face in your mirror
My hand in your hand
Oh daughter, my daughter
Your mother is here
The queen of the snow
The empress of tears
May you grow taller
Than I ever was
May you bring sunlight
To this nation of ice
Oh daughter, my daughter
Your mother is here
The queen of the snow
The empress of tears
O daughter, my daughter
Your mother is here
The queen of the snow
The empress of tears
* * *
RELEASED Album released 7 January 1983;
this demo version previously unreleased
RECORDED November 1982 at Rothermere, Surrey
GENRE Folk rock / pop
LABEL Lieberman Records
WRITER(S) Cass Wheeler
A sunny child. A daughter. Brown eyes too large for her face, and a luxuriant cap of sandy-blonde hair: so much of it, arriving slick and reddish in the fierce, exhausting, long-anticipated moment she was born.
A mouth that sought to smile even when the nurses insisted that she didn’t yet know how. A small, hot baby body, bird-boned, fragile, yet also strong, determined, firm: gripping, grasping, reaching. Warm night-breath, odours of cotton and talcum and sour milk, and that piercing, rasping, expertly modulated cry, cutting through sleep and dream and the cotton-wadded delirium that was neither sleep nor dream, but a waiting-room between one desperate summons and the next.
Not sunny, then: a moon baby, pale mother-of-pearl skin; eyes narrowed, heralding the squall. But calm once more with the daylight: smiling, moving her tiny fists in tandem with the music that surrounded her—that was, in those early months, the natural soundtrack of her days.
They named her Anna Lily Joan Wheeler Tait. Lily for Cass’s aunt, of course; Joan for Jonah; and Anna for Ivor’s grandmother, whom he had loved.
Lily and John came to visit with flowers, and a crib mobile John had fashioned from balsa wood and paint: a flock of seagulls, caught on the rise of the wind.
Alan and Rachel brought white roses (Rothermere was gaudy with bouquets, each room headily perfumed), and their own small son, Jerome. He was just a few months older than Anna, with his father’s eyes and his mother’s halo of curls.
Kim brought expensive French bath oil for Cass; and for Anna, an enormous stuffed polar bear.
Kate came alone, with a tub of chest-firming lotion, and a special-edition set of children’s fairy tales, each book exquisitely hand-bound.
“I know she’s far too young for them yet,” she said, drawing The Snow Queen from its box, “but I couldn’t resist.”
“They’re perfect,” Cass said. She didn’t ask if Kate had any good news of her own; she already knew the answer from her friend’s face—stoical, resigned, her own sadness deliberately overlaid with her happiness for Cass.
Johnny brought his camera. “Only you, darling Cassandra, could possibly turn me into a bloody baby photographer.”
He took a whole film’s worth of portraits of Anna, and had six of them framed. Cass hung them in the attic room they’d had redecorated as a nursery. Sitting alone with her daughter in the blackest hours of the night, watching the baby’s tiny, fierce mouth as it puckered and sucked, she would look across at the photographs and think of Johnny, and smile.
Margaret sent a card. The expense of flying over from Canada, she wrote, was too great, unless Cass wished to make the necessary arrangements? She hoped, in any case, that Cass and Ivor would soon bring Anna to Toronto.
&n
bsp; Reading her mother’s words, and withdrawing from the airmail package a small teddy bear with soft, oversized ears and a crest of bright-white hair, Cass was overcome with long-buried fury: a feeling that perhaps she could only fully articulate now that she was a mother herself.
The fear that had lain coiled inside Cass for so long—the fear that she was her mother’s daughter, that Margaret’s rejection had, inevitably, cut the pattern for her relationship with her own child—had disappeared with Anna’s birth, leaving Cass giddy with relief. The love she felt for her daughter was full, profound, unquestionable. Cass could no more imagine leaving Anna—or even shutting the door on the child’s wretched night-crying—than she could imagine shifting out of her own body, out of all that ripe maternal flesh, and assuming another form.
A few days later, she sent her mother back a brief note that did not, perhaps, betray the full force of her anger (she found, as she began to write, that she was just too tired for that), but certainly offered her no promises.
We have no plans to visit America, or Canada, anytime soon, Cass wrote, not expecting a reply. And, indeed, none came.
Francis, in his room overlooking the sea, held his granddaughter in his arms, looked down at her, and smiled.
Cass had arranged for him to be moved to the top floor of the home—the largest, best-appointed suite, with broad windows that the nurse, that day, had left open, admitting the dry, saline freshness of the morning.
“This is your granddaughter, Dad,” Cass said, and leant down to tickle the baby’s chin. “This is Anna.”
Francis looked up at Cass. His eyes were filmy, their whites yellowing, pink-seamed. She watched his expression change; she could almost see the fog of his illness as it rolled in. He cried out: an inarticulate, voiceless sound that brought back to her that night more than twenty years ago: his closed door, the church ladies in the kitchen, those terrible animal cries. How cruel the elasticity of time, collapsing the distance between that moment and this.
Greatest Hits Page 28