Greatest Hits

by Laura Barnett

  Another long pause. A sigh, and then, “He’s gone off on his own somewhere. Well, not on his own. I don’t know her name, I’m afraid . . .” A cough, another sigh. “Look, Cass, you don’t need me to tell you what it’s like on tour. Bitches on heat, throwing themselves at the guys everywhere they go. I’m sure it’s just one of those groupie flings, you know? Nothing serious.”

  “Right.” On the beach, Kim and the girls were turning from the sea, high-stepping over the pebbles in their jelly shoes. Watching her daughter—the tiny, plump-armed shape of her in her white sunhat, her blue striped OshKosh pinafore—Cass felt nausea rise up from her stomach, and settle in her throat. “Thanks, Zoë.”

  “I really am sorry, Cass. And about your father, too.”

  It was Thursday morning when Ivor finally reached her. He sounded breathless, cross, as if he were the one who’d been trying to find her.

  “I had no idea where you were,” he said. “The staff here are fucking useless. Now Zoë tells me you’ve checked into some bloody hotel in Worthing.”

  “Well, we did need somewhere to stay for the funeral, Ivor.” Cass hated how bitter she sounded, how easily she had slipped into the role of shrewish wife. She thought of the voices—low and tender, or urgent, hot, fast-flowing—in which they had once spoken to each other as they made love. She thought of Ivor’s hands running across another woman’s body, through another woman’s hair.

  “So where have you been?”

  “I went off by myself for a bit. I just needed some space, you know?” She heard him swallow, draw breath. “I’m sorry about your dad, Cassie. About Francis. I really am.”

  She closed her eyes. She hadn’t cried, yet, but she knew that the time would come.

  “Not sorry enough,” she said, “to give your tart a kiss goodbye and fly home.”

  He issued no denial, no retort. He was silent for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was calm and cool. “How can I fly back? We’ve got a show tomorrow. I can’t cancel now. We’d have to issue refunds.”

  “But you could have cancelled two days ago.”

  A silence. Then, “Would you have done that for me, Cass? Would you, really?”

  “I can tell you right now, you bastard,” she said, her anger rising, “that I have never done what you’re doing to me. And how could I, Ivor, when I’m so busy changing our daughter’s fucking nappies?”

  And then she slammed the receiver down.

  Ivor flew home two weeks later. It was eight o’clock when his car drew onto the drive: Cass was in the kitchen with Anna, spooning cornflakes into her reluctant mouth.

  “Daddy?” Anna said, as she had over and over again since her father’s departure, each time she’d heard the growl of an approaching car.

  “Daddy,” Cass confirmed.

  He was red-eyed, the hard angles of his face seeming bloated, softened by booze and whatever else they’d all had far too much of on the tour. He didn’t meet Cass’s eye, offered her only a peremptory hello as he drew Anna up into his arms, kissed her, lifted her top and blew raspberries on her bare stomach as she giggled and writhed.

  Cass stood on the other side of the room, drinking her coffee, finishing her toast.

  “I’m going for a bath,” he said after a while, handing Anna back to Cass, ignoring his daughter’s indignant screams as he closed the door behind him.

  At twelve, after she’d put Anna down for her nap, Cass pushed open the door to their bedroom and found Ivor dozing, wrapped in his damp towel.

  She watched him, took in the pale skin of his chest, with its scattering of dark hair. She loved him, and she hated him, and she didn’t know where one feeling ended and the other began.

  “What’s her name, Ivor?” she said.

  He didn’t open his eyes. “Whose name?”

  “You know whose name.”

  He opened his eyes now. He lifted his gaze to meet hers, and the moment stretched out between them, taut and resonant.

  “Cassie,” he said. “Please. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t matter. I’m not going to tell you her name.”

  Inside her, the spring snapped, and unfurled: she rushed over to the bed, climbed astride him, pounded his chest with her fists. Her words were empty, banal, even to her own ears. How could you? What’s wrong with you? Off with some woman on the day I find out my father’s dead, for fuck’s sake. After everything I’ve done for us, looking after our house, our daughter. I’ve given it all up for you, haven’t I? Every single thing I had. Every single thing that made me happy. And I hate you for it, Ivor. I really do.

  He held her arms, pushed her away: gently at first, then employing his full strength. She lay beside him, her breath coming in short, fast gasps.

  “I don’t want this, Ivor,” she said. “I don’t want it to be like this.”

  He reached for her hand. “I’m sorry, Cassie. I really am. I’m a stupid bastard. I’m weak and I’m foolish. But I love you, Cassie. I love you both. And I didn’t know about Francis then, did I? How could I have known?”

  She moved their joined hands to his chest, released her palm from his grip. His skin was warm, still clammy from his bath. She drew her fingers gently across his stomach, to the hem of his towel; his lips met hers, and the love they made was angry, and tender, and forgiving, and filled with grief. And afterwards, they lay together, Ivor’s breath deepening as he fell asleep, and Cass lying with her eyes open, watching the ceiling, waiting for their daughter to wake up.

  Anna was two and a half when Cass and Ivor finally employed a nanny. Her name was Alberte; she was a small, blonde, strong-limbed woman from Copenhagen whose fiancé, Mark, was a pilot for British Airways.

  Cass liked Alberte, and enjoyed her company; she often found herself, on the many nights when both Ivor and Mark were away, sitting up with her in the living-room, playing records, drinking red wine.

  “I know Mark sleeps with other women when he’s away,” Alberte said one night, when they’d had one glass too many. “But I don’t care. I know he loves me.”

  “Aren’t you jealous?” Cass said.

  Alberte shrugged. “A bit. Not so much. It means I can have my freedom, too.”

  Freedom. Cass had thought about the word a lot while recording Fairy Tale at Rothermere in November 1982: her fifth album, and her first in six years. Ten songs; ten modern fables. Her favourite, and the lead single, would be “Queen of the Snow”: the Snow Queen recast as a single mother in wintry New York, wondering how many of her own mistakes would eventually be repeated by her baby daughter.

  She heard the song, the whole album, as cool, stripped back, standing in opposition to the prevailing fashion for electronic sounds: just Cass, her guitar, and her Steinway alongside a cello, or perhaps a violin.

  “The trouble,” Alan said, “is that the label doesn’t agree, Cass. They hear you with a bigger sound. Poppier. More contemporary.”

  “Then please tell them,” she said, “that’s not what I hear.”

  It had been a couple of years now since Martin had been tempted out to Los Angeles by a rival company: in his absence, Phoenix had been disbanded, unseated by the rising gods of post-punk and new wave. Many of its artists had been let go, but Cass had been absorbed onto the mainstream Lieberman list, under the personal supervision of the managing director, Roger O’Brien—who telephoned a few days after Alan had conveyed her message about the new record.

  “I hear you’re not too happy about the musical direction we’d like you to take,” Roger said. He was an old Etonian—no longer, in Thatcher’s brash, money-driven age, something to be ashamed of, it seemed—with a loud, nasal voice and a florid drinker’s complexion.

  “No,” Cass said.

  “Cass, you know how much we value and respect you as an artist. You’re unique. There’s nobody like you, and your fans are desperate to hear from you. But . . .” He
lowered his voice, softened it. She didn’t like him, and she didn’t believe a word he said. “We’ve waited a very long time for this album, and this is the way we’d like you to go. So I’d be very grateful indeed if you would at least give Ed Riccione a try. He’s very bright, very fresh. He’s been working with Culture Club. We think he’s just what you need.”

  She gave in: she simply didn’t have the fight left in her. Not when she was having to acknowledge just what a fool she had been; what an absurd cavalcade her marriage was becoming. To think that she’d allowed herself to dismiss Ivor’s dalliance in Bangkok as just that: a momentary lapse, an insignificant fling. To think that, two nights before, she’d been woken at one A.M. by music from downstairs—“Computer Love” by Kraftwerk, those disembodied voices and unearthly blips climbing the stairs to her bedroom. She’d gone down and found Ivor and Hugh in the living-room, incoherent with drink and who knew what else, and two women in short skirts and thigh-high boots.

  As Cass came in, one of the women had looked up from the line of coke she was cutting on the coffee table and said, “Hey! Want to try some of this?”

  In the kitchen, behind the closed door, Cass had screamed at Ivor, reached for the closest thing to hand—Anna’s china mug, with its pictures of Jemima Puddleduck and Peter Rabbit—and thrown it at his head. Her aim had been more accurate than she’d expected—the mug had smashed against Ivor’s temple, sent a trickle of blood running down towards the bridge of his nose. The blood was dark red against his skin. So absorbed had she been in the shock of having actually struck him—in watching the viscous ooze of the blood—that he’d been upon her almost before she’d noticed.

  He’d put a hand to her throat, pushed her back against the kitchen counter. She’d realised, then, her breath caught in his grip, that she was actually afraid of him, and that she was also afraid of herself.

  And so she could not find the strength to oppose Roger O’Brien. And so the next month, in the studio, she worked with Ed Riccione to lay down the tracks, let him layer them with brass, strings, electronic beats.

  “It’s going to sound awesome,” Ed assured her. “Just awesome.”

  When, at the sessions’ conclusion, she listened back to Ed’s mixes, she hardly recognised the songs as her own.

  “I hate it,” she told Alan. “It’s awful. It’s some godforsaken disco party. Tell Roger they can’t release it. Tell him I’m not putting my name to that.”

  But her contractual obligations, as Roger reminded her during a tense meeting at the Lieberman offices, implied otherwise.

  “We’ve spent a lot of money on this record, Cass,” he said, as lightly and sociably as if he were offering her a fresh glass of champagne, “and we need a decent return. So this, Cass, is the album we’ll be releasing next January. And I think you’ll find that there’s not much you can do to stop us.”

  It had bombed, of course. The fans were nonplussed, the critics merciless.

  “If we needed any reminder at all of just how completely irrelevant the singer-songwriters of the last decade have become,” ran one review, “it’s all there in Cass Wheeler’s new album, Fairy Tale. It’s a ten-pound Christmas turkey, wrapped in bacon, stuffed with Paxo. It’s your mum putting on a glittery dress and going out on the town. It’s your aunty wearing a low-cut top and bending just a little too low over her fifth pina colada. It’s a wife trying desperately to match her husband’s grasp of today’s new sounds, and failing miserably. Well, Ivor Tait, this is it: your time has come. Time to step out from your wife’s shadow and take the stage.”

  “Don’t read them, Cass,” Alan said. “It’ll pass. They’re baying for blood, but they’ll soon move on. Take some time at home with Anna. Write. Rest up. We’ll tell Roger where he can stick his bloody contract. I’m already setting up meetings.”

  “It’s all right, Alan,” she told him. “It’s my own fault. I let this happen.”

  And it was true, she thought—she had. Everything was slipping from her grasp. Her music, her marriage. Ivor’s affairs, which he was now making no attempt to conceal—as their growing contempt for each other was also unconcealed, leaving its mark in bruises, scratches, the sudden impact of fist on skin. But none of this, it seemed to Cass, was as damaging or destructive as the words they hurled at each other like missiles. Words that Anna overheard, of course; words that fired off in all directions, and couldn’t fail to hit their daughter.

  “She’s started wetting the bed,” Alberte told her one morning. She didn’t meet Cass’s eye as she added, “She wakes up in the night. She comes into my room. She says she’s afraid.”

  Three-year-old Anna: a bundle of warm flesh; strawberry toothpaste and Johnson’s bubble bath; that smile still there, still reaching across her face, but already, it seemed to Cass, becoming rarer, and dissolving quickly into tears.

  Sometimes, holding Anna, Cass still felt a love so strong it was almost physical—the desire to become one, again, with her daughter, to merge their flesh, to carry her inside the protective casing of her own skin. But at other times—so private she could hardly admit them to herself—she held Anna and felt only the weight of all that she had given up. Her music. The freedom to tour, to stand before a crowd of strangers on a stage, and think only of herself, and Ivor, and the sound that stilled the moment, and held it.

  That freedom was only Ivor’s, now, it seemed. For he was writing, shutting himself away in the studio for weeks on end; and when he wasn’t writing, he was touring; and when he wasn’t touring, he was with his women; and when he wasn’t with his women, he was here, hating his wife and loving his daughter—loving Anna, yes, but not allowing that love to swallow him whole.

  One day that July—the July of 1983, when Ivor was on tour in the US—Cass found, in the pocket of an old cardigan, a slip of paper, folded in half.

  A telephone number.

  Irene. Irene’s mother. Their matching camel coats and darkly shining hair.

  Cass looked at the number, written in Irene’s careful handwriting on the sheet she had torn from her notepad all those years ago in Cornelia’s shop. And before she could quite acknowledge the impulse, Cass went downstairs to her office, picked up the phone, and dialled the number.

  “Yes, this is Alice Lewis. Who’s calling?”

  Goodness, Alice said, how lovely it was to hear from Cass. How proud they all were of her success. And married, with a daughter! Well, that was just the icing on the cake, wasn’t it? Oh yes, Irene and Mike were very well. They were living in Kingston-upon-Thames. Three children—two boys and a girl—aged twelve, ten, and seven. Well, she was sure Irene would be very happy to see Cass. Alice would call her right away and let her know.

  A week or so later, then, Cass strapped Anna into her carseat in the MG, and drove the ten short miles that separated her from her oldest friend.

  She still hardly knew what she was doing, or why: she was aware only of an overwhelming desire to see Irene, to roll back the years, somehow, to the time before everything changed. The two of them, six, seven, eight years old, playing in the back garden of the little house on the other side of the common. The yellow-painted living-room, and the thick brown rug, and Alice Lewis’s piano, polished and gleaming and calling Cass’s name.

  The woman who answered the door of the whitewashed cottage was taller than Cass remembered, and her girlish heaviness had settled into fat. She was wearing a loose pale blue dress with a broad white collar. Her dark hair was shorter, her curls permed into a tighter hold; her lipstick was pink, and she had daubed her eyes with a brownish sheen.

  “My daughter, Katherine,” Irene said, kneeling down to greet Anna, “is just dying to show you the paddling-pool. Would you like that?”

  Anna nodded shyly. Cass, on the doorstep beside her, still holding the huge bunch of irises she had brought, said, “I’m afraid we don’t have her costume with us.”

  Irene straighte
ned up, and placed a kiss on each of Cass’s cheeks. “I’m sure I’ve got an old one of Katherine’s somewhere. It really is good to see you, Cass. It’s been so long, hasn’t it?”

  They sat in the back garden to eat, on plastic chairs that had seen better days.

  “The kids have already eaten,” Irene explained. “I thought I’d get them out from under our feet. But will Anna be hungry?”

  Cass shook her head. “I gave her lunch before we left. Well, the nanny did.”

  Irene regarded her, her head on one side. It was strange, Cass thought, returning her gaze. She seemed older than their thirty-three years, every inch the busy stay-at-home mother (for this, she had gleaned from Alice, was what Irene was). But Irene’s face was remarkably youthful—free of the creases and furrows that marred Cass’s own, and that she had begun to examine, obsessively, in the bathroom mirror. Perhaps this is what contentment looks like, Cass thought. Perhaps this is what it looks like to live an ordinary, happy life. And she looked around her—took in the narrow garden, with its comfortable muddle of lawn, flowerbeds, discarded children’s toys—and envied Irene, then. Envied her the fact that she had found a way to make all this be enough.

  “A nanny,” Irene said. “Of course. It just wouldn’t be possible otherwise, would it?”

  They ate baked potatoes with coleslaw and grated cheese, and a salad of lettuce and tomatoes from Mike’s allotment. “He spends most Sunday afternoons over there,” Irene said. “Enjoys the solitude, I think.”

  She poured each of them a glass of Aqua Libra, and apologised for not having bought in wine. “Mike and I don’t tend to drink much. But I can run round the corner for a bottle, Cass. I’m sorry. I should have thought.”

  “No, honestly, it’s fine,” Cass said, sipping her drink, although she was indeed thinking, wistfully, that a cool glass of Chardonnay or two would take the edge off. She knew she was drinking too much—the bottle just seemed to empty itself, most evenings, as she sat in the living-room after dinner, Anna asleep upstairs. Sometimes, Alberte joined her; but on the nights when she was alone, Cass surprised herself by how quickly and suddenly she would find that she had finished the bottle. But she was not drinking as much as Ivor was, and that thought offered her some meagre comfort.