Gently, she reached forward, released Anna from her grandfather’s grip. It was broken, now, but that small moment of connection between them—conscious or unconscious—was enough for Cass. She would carry the image of it in her mind for years, long after Francis was gone, and such images—together with his books, his papers, and a small, inadequate cache of photographs—were all that she had left of him.
Susan Tait also sent a card, and an extravagant gift she had delivered to Rothermere from Hamleys: a rocking horse, pale grey, with a long white mane and a soft leather saddle.
Ivor unpacked the rocking horse in the hallway. He stood looking at it for a moment, Cass standing beside him, Anna asleep in her arms.
That evening, over dinner (one of Kim’s lasagnes: she had filled the fridge with foil-wrapped dishes in anticipation of Cass’s tiredness), he said, “I think I’ll write to my mother, Cassie. Invite her to meet the baby. I think perhaps it’s time.”
Susan Tait came to Rothermere one afternoon in May: a petite, slender woman in a yellow skirt and white jacket, her hair newly permed and set.
In her mind, Cass had pictured someone mousy, cowed—overweight, perhaps, the prettiness of her youth (she assumed it was Susan who had bequeathed Ivor his good looks) lost. But the Susan Tait who offered her a smile at the door, and then sat at her kitchen table drinking tea, cooing over the baby in her Moses basket, was not such a woman.
There was, perhaps, a shyness about her, a slight diffidence, but nothing else that might fit with the role that Cass had assigned Susan in her imagination. Helpless, weak. A shadowy, indeterminate figure, straining to read the shifting patterns of her husband’s moods.
Ivor was restless in his mother’s presence: he got up several times, left the room, and then returned not to sit with them at the table but to stand a few feet away. His anger with Susan had not entirely disappeared; but it seemed, at least, to have dwindled to a low heat. One that was tolerable; one that might allow their daughter, Anna, to know at least one of her grandparents first-hand.
Her own mother; Ivor’s mother; Cass now a mother herself. How complicated it all was, and yet how simple it seemed now that Anna had come into the world: how sure Cass was that the mistakes their parents had made would never be repeated.
Impossible, now, not to see herself as absurdly naive: still a child, really, for all her outward-facing confidence and success. So sure, then, that she was in charge of her future, as she was of the music she could bend to her will.
Anna was just over a year old—full-fleshed and strong-limbed; tall for her age, and given to emitting babbling streams of noise that Alan said reminded him of the music of John Cage—when Cass became aware that Ivor was making plans for a solo album.
Hugh had been coming to Rothermere for some time, sequestering himself away in the studio with Ivor and a motley group of musicians whom Cass privately dismissed as bootlickers: hangers-on, more interested in mainlining Ivor’s steady supply of malt whisky than in writing anything approaching proper music.
She had been expecting that all this would stop with Anna’s birth. And it did, for a time: those first weeks after Anna was born Cass recalls as being fully inhabited by all three of them. The baby cradled to her chest, Ivor staring at her, wide-eyed, lost in admiration (or so it seemed to Cass then) as their daughter locked her toothless, suckling mouth to each breast in turn.
And then, gradually, there came a falling away—the slow erasure of Ivor’s presence from their little band of three. Cass climbing from their bed, roused by Anna, as Ivor turned over, drew the pillow over his head, and dived back into a resentful sleep. Ivor disappearing to the studio for long afternoons that turned into evenings, and then into nights. And then, one day, Hugh’s return, without a present for the baby, followed, day by day, week by week, by the other men.
They were all men, at first, and the presence of them—standing smoking on the terrace outside the studio, moving to the living-room at three A.M. to eat cheese on toast and drink, drink, drink—was at first only dimly visible to Cass, absorbed as she was in the wondrous, tedious, all-encompassing minutiae of motherhood.
But soon, she was being woken in the small hours not by Anna, who had begun (thank goodness) to sleep soundly through the night, but by Bruce Springsteen or Blondie playing at full volume on the living-room hi-fi. And in the mornings, she would come down from the nursery to find the cleaner, Lorraine, methodically putting to rights a house that looked as if a hurricane had blown through it, scattering all their possessions in its wake.
It was not long before Cass learnt that Ivor and the musicians—he was already calling them “my band”—were working on a set of new songs that he was intending to release under his own name.
“What’s the problem?” he demanded, late one blustery Sunday afternoon after Lily and John had come to lunch, and Ivor had informed them of his plans—easily, casually, as if it were a decision they had taken together, after a sensible, mature discussion, like any sensible, mature married couple.
His face was hard, closed. Across the room, in her playpen, Anna sent a stack of building-blocks tumbling, and gurgled in delight as they fell.
“For God’s sake, Ivor,” Cass said, her attention caught between her daughter and her husband, and not, she knew, fully attuned to either. “Why didn’t you talk to me first? It will mean releasing you from your contract, won’t it, at least for a while? And what happens when we’re ready to make the next record?”
“When you’re ready, you mean.” His tone was crisp, each word clipped. Anna was stacking the blocks again, her lips taut with concentration; she looked up every so often to ensure that her mother was watching. And so, in watching her, Cass missed the expression that passed across Ivor’s face as he said, “God forbid that you should have to release your husband from his fucking contract.”
That, Cass would decide, had been the stray note, sending a shiver through the harmonic progression of the song.
She had always instinctively recognised the power of a misplaced sound: flattened or sharpened, anti-chromatic, an interloper in the smooth, sequential pattern of the scale. She was, after all, famous for her idiosyncratic tunings.
Perhaps, then, it had always been there between them—that sharpened note, that jarring semi-quaver—and Cass had simply not wanted to hear it. She had trusted in—what? In the rare, astringent beauty of it; in the crack in everything; in the small sliver of a scar marring an otherwise symmetrical face. Perfection was impossible, its pursuit banal: in art, in life, in love, it was the flaws, the mistakes, the disharmonies, that spoke the loudest, that drew us closest to the stuff of real experience.
But what, she asks herself now, is to be done when that small, hairline fissure begins to undermine the whole? No sudden shift and crack, no crash and fall, but a slow and gradual process of subsidence, of beauty turning to ugliness, and the light slipping finally into the dark.
As it happened, Alan foresaw no problem with Ivor going solo.
In the last month of Cass’s pregnancy, Alan had arranged for Graham, Kit, and Frank to have nine months off on full pay, in the expectation that Cass would not immediately wish to return to the studio. And Kim, then four months pregnant herself (her own daughter, Tasha, would be born on a blazingly colourful day in September), was happy to reduce her working hours. Her husband, Bill, a Californian sound engineer whom she had met on the My Loving Heart sessions in Los Angeles, was already being offered more work than he could handle.
Even now, a year after Anna’s birth, Cass was still determined not to employ a nanny; she couldn’t bear to think of her daughter’s cries being answered by anyone other than herself.
And although an idea for a new album was beginning to take shape—she had in mind a series of contemporary reworkings of Kate’s fairy stories—it was still not much more than that. She couldn’t expect her band to wait for ever: Frank had already had an
offer of session work, and Graham was thinking about taking a year off, and moving to Nashville with his new American wife.
“Ivor needs to get this out of his system,” Alan said. “And if he is ever going to do that, now is probably the right time, while you’re busy with Anna. While you’re not in the studio yourself. And besides”—he shifted his gaze—“there’s an appetite for it, Cass. Ivor’s record could sell very well.”
She didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all.
“Alan doesn’t understand,” Cass said to Kim. “Jerome’s fifteen months old, and Rachel’s pregnant again. It doesn’t make any difference to Alan—Rachel will always be the one at home, doing everything. But what am I meant to do, Kim, if Ivor goes off and does his own thing? How am I meant to manage?”
Cass could sense her friend weighing her words carefully. “Well, you could think about getting someone in to help with Anna, so you can spend some time writing. Maybe even get back into the studio?”
Cass’s response was swift and strong. “It’s Ivor who should be helping. He’s her bloody father.”
Kim turned her attention back to her paperwork. “In my experience,” she said quietly, “the more you tell a guy he can’t do something, the more he digs in his heels.”
She was right, of course. Ivor was set on making the album, and he was damned if Cass, or anyone else, was going to dissuade him.
“We’ll get a nanny,” he said. “We can afford one, for God’s sake. It’s just stubbornness that makes you think you have to do everything yourself. Stubbornness and your need to be in control. Well, I’ve had enough of it, Cassie. I’m going to make this record, and there’s fuck all you can do about it.”
She stared at him, his eyes narrowed in the half-light: they were standing on the attic landing, outside the nursery. It was after midnight—Anna had woken, crying, and Cass had only just managed to get her back to sleep. She didn’t want to wake her, and yet she couldn’t stop herself from shouting: she hardly knew what she was saying until the words emerged, ugly and blunt-edged, impossible to withdraw.
“You wouldn’t have any of this, Ivor, if it wasn’t for me. Who bought this house? Me. Who pays for your fucking whisky? Me. So fine—go off and do your vanity project, if you have to. But don’t forget who’s made it possible.”
It came so quickly, then—the hard, sharp sting of his hand, drawn lightning-fast across her cheek.
She staggered back, closed her eyes. She couldn’t see Ivor as he said, his voice sounding nothing like the voice she knew (the voice that, on stage, in the studio, wove so sweetly around her own), “You will not control me, Cassie. You will not.”
She said nothing, didn’t trust herself to speak. She kept her eyes closed, heard his footsteps move off across the landing, and down the stairs. Her cheek felt raw, exposed; she moved her hand across it, feeling its heat beneath her palm, as behind the door to the nursery, Anna began to cry.
It wasn’t long before Ivor’s plans were set in place.
He was insisting on a fresh sound, something that would be entirely his own. A producer was found; the musicians contracted; a gap in the schedule allocated for the release on Lieberman’s new electronic division, Apex.
At the behest of the producer, a twenty-eight-year-old synthesiser obsessive named James Lyons, Ivor bought a dizzyingly expensive machine called a Fairlight CMI, whose dark-faced monitor presided over the live room in a way Cass found vaguely sinister. But she couldn’t deny that it was capable of magic: the machine could reproduce a sound—any sound at all—and transfer that sound to its keyboard.
“Here,” Ivor whispered to her, late one night, when Anna, miserable with a cold, was struggling again to sleep. “Come with me.”
She looked up at him from her nursing chair. That night a month before—the sudden whip-crack of his palm across her face—already seemed surreal, nightmarish. She had lain sleepless in their empty room—she didn’t know where Ivor had gone, and she didn’t care—her sore cheek pressed against the pillow. In the morning, she’d told herself, she would call Kim, ask her to help her pack her things. She and Anna would go to stay with Kim and Bill, or with Johnny (she couldn’t quite bear the idea of going to Lily and John: her aunt’s words, her warning, now echoed in her ears), until she had found them a place of their own. The marriage was over: it had to be. She could see no other way.
All this Cass had said to herself, and then she had dropped gratefully into sleep, and woken to the bright, transformative light of a summer’s morning.
Ivor was curled against her, his arms around her waist, and his voice—his own voice again, now, the voice she knew—was saying softly in her ear, “I’m sorry, my love. I’m so sorry. Forgive me.”
She had allowed him to hold her, allowed the previous night to slip off into the distance—an aberration, a misstep. She had got up, dressed, and seen to Anna. She had not called Kim, and she had not packed her case.
Now, in the nursery, Ivor took Cass’s hand, and led her, still carrying Anna, downstairs, through the living-room, and across the damp, cool garden. In the studio—which was quiet, for once, Hugh and the men disbanded—Ivor switched on the Fairlight machine.
Smiling, still holding Cass’s gaze, he said, “Listen to this.”
He fiddled with the machine, and then Cass heard Anna’s voice, played back with pin-sharp clarity. Sing. Sing. Sing. It was the first comprehensible word they had ever heard her say: she’d uttered it clearly and brightly a few weeks before, imperious as a miniature duchess. Ivor must have brought Anna out to the studio one day, persuaded her to speak into the machine.
Anna, drawn by the light and noise, opened her eyes, and smiled for the first time in hours. Across her, Ivor and Cass looked at each other, hardly daring to breathe.
Ivor would start Inside the Machine with this sample of his daughter’s voice, repeated ten times, blurring gradually into the drum-machine intro of the opening track.
And, twenty-four years later, alone in Home Farm, Cass would find herself playing those ten bars, over and over again, until she could no longer bear the sound, and the memory of that moment of pure, unadulterated happiness: so intense, so deeply felt, and so impossible, it would seem, to hold on to.
The Reverend Francis Wheeler died on a Tuesday morning in July 1982, after a brief struggle with a chest infection.
England was in the clammy, relentless grip of a heatwave, Anna was only just over a nasty outbreak of measles, and two IRA bombs had exploded in London’s parks. Driving down to Worthing from Rothermere with Kim, Anna and Tasha engrossed in each other in their twin car seats, Cass turned off the radio, unable to bear any more gloom.
Ivor was in Bangkok, on the south-east Asian leg of his Inside the Machine tour: the album had charted high in almost every territory, and its lead single, “I Need Your Love,” was on radio playlists in both the UK and the US. He had been touring, more or less continuously, for three months. The rare week or two he had at home at Rothermere he spent in the studio with James and Hugh, laying down demos for a second album.
“Come and hang out with us,” he’d say to Cass. “Let Anna see her daddy making music.”
So Cass took Anna out there most afternoons—sat with her in the control room, beside James; held her daughter’s fascinated face up to the glass to watch her father at work. But Anna would soon begin to tire and fret, and Cass would have to leave them, trudge back up to the house with Anna crying in her arms. And yes, as she did so, she hated Ivor a little; as she hated him, too, on the nights when he was on the other side of the world, standing on stage, losing himself in his music, while she was at home, lost in motherhood’s relentless tedium and unfathomable joys.
On the day her father died, then—that hot, humid, terrible day—she telephoned Ivor’s hotel in Bangkok from her own hotel in Worthing.
There was no answer from his room.
“Would madam like to leave a message?” the Thai concierge asked.
Cass put a hand to her forehead, wiped away a fine layer of sweat. Outside, the grey-green sea was shimmering under a haze of heat, and Kim was drawing Anna and Tasha, one toddler dangling from each hand, down from the promenade onto the beach.
“Please tell him that my father has passed away,” she said. “His funeral is on Friday at St. Saviour’s Church in Worthing. I’m staying at the Chatsworth Hotel. Could you please ask him to call me here as soon as possible?”
“Of course, madam,” the concierge replied. “I’ll make sure Mr. Tait gets the message.”
She tried the Apex press officer, Zoë, next, and managed to reach her. The musicians and crew had a week’s break between gigs, Zoë said. A group of them had made off for the beaches at Phuket, but Ivor was not among them. Nobody—not Zoë; not the tour manager, Andy; not Alec, Alan’s assistant, who had been sent out on the tour—knew where he was.
Cass liked Zoë: she was clever, funny, unflappable, with platinum-blonde hair and a filthy northern laugh. She was also, Cass observed, a terrible liar.
“Zoë,” she said, “my father has just died, and I’m really not in the mood for any crap. I think you know exactly where Ivor is. Am I right?”
There was a long pause at the other end of the line. “I’m sorry, Cass, I really am, but I can’t say. I work for Ivor, after all. Please understand.”
Cass took a breath. “You work for Apex, and Apex is owned by Lieberman Records. And I, as you may be aware, am the biggest-selling British female artist on Lieberman’s roster. So if you know where Ivor is, Zoë, I believe it might be in your interest to tell me.”
Greatest Hits Page 29