There, in the garden, Irene and Cass sat in the sunshine on their plastic chairs, watching the children splashing in the paddling-pool. Harry, a lithe, narrow-chested twelve-year-old; Sam, who was ten, and had a crop of deep auburn curls that Cass assumed he’d inherited from his father; and seven-year-old Katherine, a brisk, motherly little girl who had taken Anna under her wing, and was carefully helping the smaller child step in and out of the water.
It was easier between them, perhaps, than Cass could have imagined. Each woman sketched in the spare outline of the last decade. Mike’s promotion to partner in his GP surgery. Alice’s breast cancer scare. Sam’s struggles at school, which Irene and Mike were working to have diagnosed as dyslexia. Cass’s music, and her tours. Francis’s slow decline. Her decision to become a mother.
“And Ivor?” Irene said. It was mid-afternoon now, and still warm; her chest was pink from the sun, and she was shielding her eyes with her hand. “You haven’t said much about him. Goodness, he is handsome, isn’t he? Mike and I actually saw him on Top of the Pops the other night. I called the kids to come and watch. They haven’t been able to stop going on about ‘Mummy’s famous pop-star friend and her famous pop-star husband.’ They’re not usually so shy. I think they’re a bit in awe of you.”
Cass looked down at the table. “Less of the star, I think. In my case, anyway. Not now. Not after they crucified my last record. And God, they were right to. It was dreadful. The label was . . .” She ran her finger up and down the curve of her glass. “No. I can’t blame anyone else. It was my own fault.”
“There’ll be other albums, Cass.” Irene spoke quietly, and Cass was reminded of their last meeting, in the changing-room in Cornelia’s shop. Irene’s embarrassment; her admission of how deeply and carelessly Cass had once wounded her. It seemed to her, then, that she couldn’t lie to Irene, not to the woman who had known the girl Cass had once been. Maria Wheeler, bare-kneed, her hair in plaits, her mother lost to her, her father fading day by day.
And so she began to talk, as she had talked to no one else. Not to Alan, or Kim, or Lily, or Kate or Johnny or Serena. She told the truth, and understood it as that only in the moment it was uttered. Ivor’s infidelity. His violence, and her own. Her anger with her mother, and her grief over her father’s death. Her ambivalence about motherhood. Her suspicion—no, her fear—that it might have cost her her career: that all the urgency she had once channelled into her music had rerouted itself into her daughter. That the songs she had once heard in her mind were still there, but almost inaudible, and she was afraid that, even if she turned to listen to them, they would turn out to be no good at all.
Irene listened—distracted only, from time to time, by the arrival of one of the children asking for juice, or ice cream, or her adjudication in some minor dispute.
“It’s not easy, is it,” Irene said when Cass, at last, fell quiet. “The path you’ve chosen. If I’m honest, I’ve always envied you—I just saw the glamour, the money, the excitement. I didn’t understand that it would all come at such a cost. Most people don’t realise that, I suppose.”
Cass shook her head. Irene reached across the table for her hand.
“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” she said. “I don’t know you well enough for that any more, do I? And even if I did, I know you’d still make up your own mind. So if I can say anything, it’s just that I know you will come through this, Cass. You’ll be all right. You’re strong. You’ve always been strong.”
Cass’s voice, when she spoke, was halting, threatening to break. “I don’t feel strong any more.”
From the bottom of the garden, then, Anna called out to her. “Mummy! Mummy!”
Cass squeezed Irene’s hand, and then let go, and went to find out what her daughter needed.
Was it weakness, then, that had made her stay?
Weakness, she would decide, and love (for yes, she did love Ivor then, even as the feeling slowly ebbed away) and stubbornness; and her determination that her daughter would not grow up wondering why one of her parents had abandoned her.
Anna. Four years old, then six, seven, eight: home-educated, with Kim’s daughter Tasha and Alan’s children Jerome and Katie, by a Steiner-trained tutor who believed in self-expression, creativity, unguided play.
She was still, was she not, a sweet-natured, enthusiastic, happy child? And yet there were moments—how could there not be?—when the high wattage of Anna’s expression dimmed, like the sun slipping behind a stretch of cloud. Too many nights when she wet the bed, or went looking for Alberte, or asked her why Mummy and Daddy were so angry with each other; whether it was something she had done. Cass could see that Anna was becoming more serious, more withdrawn, more comfortable in her own company, or with Alberte, than with her parents. Cass knew it, because she had once known it in herself.
There were rumours of what was happening, beyond the restricted confines of her loyal circle. Ivor spotted entering and leaving Annabel’s nightclub in the company of a string of “attractive blondes.” A large bruise on Cass’s arm, revealed unwittingly by a long sleeve as she gripped the microphone, caught by photographers at a gig in Bristol. Speculation in the papers that these two observations were connected.
Lily arrived at Rothermere the day after the first rumours appeared in the press.
“Cass,” she said, “if even one word of this is true, you’re to pack your things right away and come with me.”
Cass couldn’t deny that it was true—she could not look her aunt in the face and issue such a denial. And yet, for all Lily’s insistence, she refused to go. Each time Ivor went away, she convinced herself that things would be different on his return; and then, when he did return, they would be exactly the same. The brief, tantalising sweetness of reunion; and then, too quickly, the same old cycle of anger and blame.
“You’re just like your father, you know,” she said to Ivor one night.
He turned then, his face contorted into a snarl, and said, “Then why can’t you be more like your bloody mother and leave?”
And then, finally, she did leave. That night in April 1988, when Anna was eight years old: a night that would imprint itself on each of them for ever.
Cass remembers, above all, the banality of it, like something from a low-rent bedroom farce. Drawing back the covers of her bed—their bed, though Ivor now slept so often in a spare room on the second floor that even Alberte had taken to calling it “Ivor’s room.” Finding the underwear that wasn’t hers. Black lace, cut high on the thigh.
She would struggle to make sense of this later: if Ivor was going to bring a woman home, why take her to their shared bedroom, the room he hardly ever used? It would strike her that he had wanted to be found out: that Ivor had already made the decision to end the marriage but wanted to confer on her the act of parting. It was this, among so many other things, that Cass would find it so difficult to forgive.
And so the inevitable confrontation. The shouting. The whistle and smash of glass (his whisky tumbler, lobbed at Cass’s head. Perhaps he hadn’t meant for it to hit her. Perhaps). Anna drawn whimpering from her bed by the noises downstairs: not unfamiliar, by now, but louder, worse, that night, than they had ever been.
She had found her mother crouching like an animal on the living-room floor, scattered shards of glass at her feet, the cut above her right eye already spouting a livid stream of blood. Her father pacing, silent now, but still wound into a tight coil of fury. Cass had turned, half-blind, at the sound of her daughter’s footstep on the stairs. She would never erase the sight of Anna then: pale, her skin bluish, her long hair hanging, Medusa-like, in matted cords. Her expression was not so much one of fear as of bewilderment, tempered by a perceptible, too-adult shade of disgust.
For a long moment, none of them spoke. And then Cass said, “Darling, please go upstairs and get dressed. We’re going to take a little trip.”
Anna’
s mouth hung open. She looked from her father to her mother. “Now? Where? Is Daddy coming? And Alberte?”
Ivor had stopped pacing; Cass wouldn’t look at him, but she knew that he had stopped beside the Steinway, placed his hand on its lid. A few inches from his fingers, across that black polished wood, the last roses he had bought her—the card he’d asked the florist to write (or, more likely, had had Zoë ask the florist to write)—were silently bowing, preparing to shed their velvety bloom.
“No, darling,” Cass said. “Please go and get dressed.”
She would deal with the where in a moment, upstairs in her study; placing the call to Johnny in his safe, quiet, beautiful warren of a house in Spitalfields. I’m sorry it’s so late, Johnny. Can we come to you, Anna and I? His cautious, careful reply, in the rough-hewn East End accent he had never lost. Of course, darling Cass. Of course you can.
And then, after that, she would deal with the how, and the why. But for now, there was only the necessity of escape, and her resolution never to return.
TRACK THIRTEEN
“Home”
By Cass Wheeler
Released in aid of homelessness charities
Home is a house
Where the windows are open
Music is playing
And soft words are spoken
All these presents
We just keep on opening
Look at what we call a home
Home is a place
Where the kids play outdoors
Trees in the garden
And rugs on the floors
We’ve done all our shopping
We’re out to get more
Look at what we call a home
Home is a flat
On the rough side of town
With a sheet for a curtain
A patch of hard ground
Look at the Christmas tree
That we found
Sometimes you just need a home
Home is a roof
That lets in the rain
Mould on the walls
An ugly black stain
Carols they’re singing
Are always the same
Sometimes you just need a home
Home is a bridge
A tunnel, a yard
A cold rush of air
A mattress of card
Sit round the TV as if it’s a fire
And feed all the need and the greed and desire
(Shoo wap a doo we doo wop wop wop sha doobie do wap)
At Christmas
For home
At Christmas
Home
At Christmas
Home
At Christmas
Home
* * *
RELEASED 6 December 1993
RECORDED August 1993 at Home Farm, Kent
GENRE Rock / pop
LABEL Lieberman Records
WRITER(S) Cass Wheeler
PRODUCER(S) Steve Linetti
ENGINEER(S) Jim Wright
Home Farm.
It was the name, perhaps, that had decided her: that and the warm red brick, with its familiar resonances of Atterley. A gentle, welcoming, easy house, despite its faded decor, its brown carpets, mildewed bathrooms, and thirty-year-old kitchen. Wide, generous rooms; high ceilings; casement windows that might be thrown open to admit the fresh, cleansing Kentish air, with its faint bitter tang of earth and hops.
Four attic rooms, one of which, tucked comfortably under the eaves, Anna had immediately claimed as her own. Eleven acres of land on which a new studio might, eventually, be constructed. A barn she could consider turning into garages, with a self-contained apartment for Alberte. (The nanny was staying in Mark’s flat in Weybridge, but had promised to join them as soon as Cass had secured a house.) A kitchen garden, and a stringy copse of trees the estate agent had called an “arboretum,” with a brittle optimism that seemed to irritate Kim to distraction, but which, despite herself, Cass found rather cheering.
It was years, the agent said, since the house had been attached to a working farm. An aristocratic couple—some scion of a once-grand local family—had owned it, raised five children here, and lived all their lives between its walls. She was too discreet to say whether the couple had died here, too—but if they had, bequeathing in that act some spectral trace of their long occupation, then it was, Cass decided, benign.
Yes, Cass told the agent there and then, the three women standing together in the garden, watching Anna chase a skinny black-and-white cat across the lawn. A farm cat, probably, the agent had observed with a disapproving frown (she was a dog person, herself): there was a big dairy place, Dearlove Farm, just up the road.
Yes, Cass said again, she would take the house.
Beneath her frizzy perm, the woman’s face broke into a smile. “Well, then,” she said. “If you’d like to accompany me back to the office . . .”
“Are you really sure about this?” Kim asked on the drive back to Sussex. (Cass and Anna were staying at Atterley, with Lily, Cass having grown concerned at exhausting Johnny’s reserves of hospitality.) She kept her voice low, so as not to permit Anna, sketching in her notepad on the back seat, to overhear.
“Yes, Kim.” Cass laid a hand on her friend’s arm. “Thank you, but I really am sure.”
Kim and Alan had arranged everything, as always: she’d had only to sign the papers.
Alan was also taking care of the divorce. He had engaged the fiercest solicitor he could find, and was hopeful, given the potential negative impact on Anna, that they might be able to obtain an injunction to prevent reporting by the press.
He had arranged to delay indefinitely the recording sessions for Cass’s sixth album, Snapshots. Cass was not, they all agreed, in any state to return to the studio. (Roger O’Brien had, in the wake of the disaster that Fairy Tale had proved to be, moved on; the new boss, Iain Urquhart, was far more sympathetic.) But the press officer, Simon, couldn’t resist pointing out that if Cass were to return to work sooner rather than later, the media attention could be successfully channelled into album sales.
Hearing this, Alan had been firm. “Think about what you’re saying, Simon, for God’s sake. What Cass needs now is rest. Rest and time.”
He ensured that she would have it, too: rented a place for her on the Isle of Mull, in the Hebrides, while the renovations to Home Farm were taking place.
Alan had taken Rachel and the kids there, last summer, and had fallen in love with the island: it was, he said, impossible to imagine a more peaceful spot. She could take a guitar, rest, write, walk. Anna would have her sketchpad, her books, the boundless freedom of sea and sky.
It was July when they travelled north, the sun high and golden over the west coast, the tall stone buildings set in a graceful arc round Oban Harbour.
They sat on the top deck of the ferry, huddled together against the wind. A lonely lighthouse, marooned on a steep stack of rocks, gave way to the island’s first promontory: a castle, grey-walled and turreted, set on a shaggy outcrop of ancient lava, backed by a wide sweep of pines; and then, opening to greet them, the small landing at Craignure.
A long drive along a pitted strip of single-track road, swerving at intervals to permit the passing of the few cars they met. The sudden shock of open moorland, vast and empty—rock and peat and scrubby thickets of grass presided over by the glowering summit of Ben Mor. Above them, the broad wingspan of what must surely be an eagle, hanging motionless on a pocket of air. A loch; a village, eerily still in the early evening; a series of tight hairpin bends. And then, at the farthest edge of land, a cluster of houses, facing an inlet from which the Atlantic had retreated, revealing a muddy stretch of beach, gaudy with bladderwrack and discarded stones. Gulls circling overhead, and small, long-beaked birds high-stepping in the shallows.
Anna
had fallen asleep: Cass, bringing the rented car to a halt there before the beach, leant across, and gently woke her. Blinking, only half awake, Anna considered the vista stretching out before them.
“Is that the Atlantic?” she said. She had researched the west of Scotland before they set out, poring over her picture atlas.
Cass, beside her, nodded, and felt a loosening inside her, a wave of relief that was physical in its intensity; in the knowledge that here, for six weeks—and then, after that, perhaps for ever, at Home Farm—they would be safe. The two of them, holed up together, battened down against the world, and whatever it might throw at them.
There would be no unravelling: not yet. There was Home Farm to furnish, an album to record, a new school to find for Anna: Cass had resolved to find her a place in the local primary for the new term. She feared that Anna was too isolated, too unused to the company of children beyond their small circle.
Gigs. Small at first—acoustic sets in old Victorian theatres, those forlorn victims of an indifferent age. Then, gradually, growing in size and confidence—a seven-piece band, horns and trumpets swelling her sound. Graham and Kit back from the old crowd. A new young guitarist, Pete Roscoe, occupying the place to stage-right where Ivor had once stood.
If Cass was no longer able, with her music, to reach the heights to which she had once flown, then she was grateful, at least, to be working and to be enjoying that work. Snapshots entered the UK charts at a respectable number thirty, but climbed no higher; her American tour manager arranged concerts on each coast, but did not bother to plot her old route across the Midwest. But the critics were kind, the fans—those that she had retained—relieved that she had returned to the sound they loved. For Cass, it all seemed to be in the natural order of things. She was thirty-eight years old, and music, as the saying went, was a young man’s game. Or woman’s.
Greatest Hits Page 31