When, at last, they lay still—sated, sweat-soaked, breathing hard and deep—she laughed, and said, “My God, Tom. My God.”
“Nope,” he said, and drew a finger along the length of her arm. “Just a regular middle-aged man.”
They made no promises, no plans to meet again, but she would carry the memory of that night with her for a long time. The shape of Tom’s body under the thick white hotel sheets. The taste of his mouth. The sounds she had made as she came—unconscious, primitive, atonal. The blur of movement and breath and noise and then, finally, stillness.
Cass would see both her mother and her aunt Lily for the last time at Home Farm.
In the years since Cass had left Rothermere, walked out on the sorry mess her marriage had become, her mother had actually managed to surprise her. In those first raw days after Cass had left Rothermere with Anna, Margaret had obtained Johnny’s number, telephoned, and insisted that she fly to London at once.
“Len and I have enough saved up for the flight,” she said. “Let me do this for you, Cass. I know I’ve made mistakes. I know I haven’t always been there for you. Let me be there for you now.” Cass had felt her eyes fill with tears, and realised in that moment that she had forgiven Margaret: that she simply had no more use for all that anger.
“Thank you, Mum. I appreciate the offer. I really do. But we’re all right. We will be, anyway. It’s the right thing to do. We’re staying with my friend Johnny for now. But we will find a place of our own.”
And so Margaret hadn’t flown over—but Cass had taken Anna to visit her in Toronto, and since then there had been regular phone calls, letters, gifts. And then, one day early in the autumn of 1993, Cass had resolved to call her mother—to invite her, Len, and Josephine to spend Christmas at Home Farm. She would invite Lily, too. She would ask them all to forget their differences. She would present it as a chance for Anna to have her family, such as it was, around her—albeit without her father, of course. But surely this was something worth doing. Something to remind Anna that it was possible to repair even those relationships that had been fractured for so long.
Josephine hadn’t been able to make the trip—she was married now, with two children aged five and three—but the others had agreed to come.
That Christmas hadn’t quite turned out as Cass had imagined it. Margaret and Lily had been frosty with one another—Lily, at seventy-seven, had become a thin, restless chain-smoker with a sharp tongue, all of her old energy and lightness occluded by her grief. Anna had had an argument with Tasha on Christmas Eve—some sort of altercation about a boy, from what Cass could gather—and Len Steadman had spent most of the visit asking Cass, exhaustively, how much everything in the house had cost. But for Christmas dinner—the dinner Kim had helped Cass prepare in advance, leaving her extensive notes about how to bring it all to the table on the day—they had all been together, raising their glasses, filling the Home Farm dining-room with light and noise. And Cass had looked around them, from face to face, and raised a toast to absent friends.
And then, just three weeks after she and Len had flown home, Margaret had telephoned. Breast cancer, she said, diagnosed at a late stage, with a rapid deterioration. Yes, she’d known for a while, but she hadn’t said anything because she didn’t want to spoil Christmas; and she, too, had wished to escape the shadow of her diagnosis, if only for a few weeks.
A short time later, Cass had flown over with Anna to Toronto to see her mother, and found that, instead, they were attending her funeral: a hundred or so people in a suburban church. A finger buffet afterwards at the house with the white veranda. Embracing Josephine in the garden; hearing the whispered voices of the other mourners. That’s Cass Wheeler, you know, the singer, the girl Margaret left behind in London. And that must be her daughter.
And then, Lily, just four weeks later. A stroke sustained quite suddenly in her bedroom that had caused her to fall and hit her head. She had not been found until the morning.
Why, Cass asked herself so many times, had she gone along with Lily’s insistence on staying on alone at Atterley, instead of bringing her to live with them at Home Farm?
She was haunted by the idea that, had she only telephoned that day—gone to see Lily, even—she might have been able to raise the alarm. Something, surely, might have been done for her.
Instead, again, she had failed; and the knowledge of that failure settled over her, and would not shift.
She remembers an afternoon in 1994—a weekday, it must have been, in spring. The headmistress’s office at Anna’s school: beige paint, heavy curtains, an insipid watercolour of the school buildings above the fireplace.
“Ms Wheeler. May I ask whether I have your full attention?”
What was her name again? Mrs. Baker. Mary. A plain name for a plain woman: stout, thick-waisted, grey hair cut unflatteringly short, a small silver chain nestled beneath the high neckline of her blouse. A cross on that chain, perhaps: this was a Church of England school, after all. Or half a silver heart, the other half kept by Mr. Baker in an embossed leather box. Was he the sort of man to give his wife such a gift? Cass had met him only once, at the school founders’ day charity raffle. A short, moleish man, with a grating, nasal voice.
“Ms Wheeler.” Impatient now, and not bothering to conceal it. Was it Cass the woman so disliked—her fame; her residual glamour; the fact that she had never, to Mary Baker’s mind, played by the rules—or did she dislike all the parents equally?
No, there must be some she liked. Claire Harris, perhaps—the mother of that girl in Anna’s form group whom Anna dismissed as a “dweeb.” Even Cass could see she was irritating, with her perfectly ironed uniform and matching pair of red-scrunchied plaits—plaits! At fourteen! What was her mother thinking of? Claire Harris had baked cakes for the raffle, as Cass recalled. A Victoria sponge and a chocolate cake, their icing slowly curling inside Tupperware.
Reluctantly, Cass lifted her eyes from the carpet and returned them to Mary Baker’s round, fleshy face. She was nothing like her own headmistress, Mrs. Di Angelis, had been, with her glamorous red beehive and green silk shoes. What had become of her? Cass wondered fleetingly. She would be, what, eighty now, if she were still alive?
“Of course you have my attention, Mrs. Baker,” Cass said finally.
The headmistress gave a small cough. “Good. Thank you. So, as I was saying, we are really rather worried about Anna.”
Anna. Cass forced her attention back to the matter at hand. There had been a school trip to Paris. Several members of the class had, apparently, run wild, disappearing from the hotel after hours, when their teachers had specified that their lights must be turned out. They had got drunk—had been unable to conceal it from the teachers—and had then repeated the whole sorry affair each night they were away. Anna, it appeared, had been the ringleader, with Tasha following on behind.
And what was worse—here Mary Baker fixed her with a basilisk stare—there had been a most unpleasant incident. A girl, Polly O’Reilly—a quiet, studious, religious girl—had been peer-pressured into consuming half a bottle of vodka. She had been violently sick, later, in the basin of the hotel room she was sharing with Anna. And Anna, rather than helping her, had grabbed her by the shoulders and slapped Polly’s face.
(“She just wouldn’t stop, Mum,” Anna had said at home, offering her own account. “It was all over the floor. I mean, what was I meant to do?”)
“I understand, Ms. Wheeler, that there have been difficulties at home,” Mary Baker said.
“Difficulties?”
The headmistress’s lips tightened. “Yes. Your divorce. The . . . tricky relationship she has with Mr. Tait. The death of her grandmother.”
“And her great-aunt,” Cass said.
“Indeed.” A pause. “Well, that’s a great deal for a young girl to cope with, isn’t it?”
Yes. There had been difficulties. A fog had seem
ed to roll in over Cass, between her mother’s funeral and Lily’s. A blunting of perception, a distancing; a sense that nothing that was happening to her was quite real. She had been unable to write; hadn’t written anything new at all, come to think of it, for the last three months. She was spending a lot of time just sitting, quietly, in the small, comfortable room in her studio that she had come to call the listening-room. It was equipped with a fridge, a kettle and a cafetière, and a state-of-the-art audio system with CD-player, cassette deck, turntable. She would sit there, drinking coffee, and somehow the time just seemed to slip by.
Even Anna seemed unable to reach her. Since the two funerals, Cass had been observing her daughter remotely, as if through a thick pane of opaque glass. No wonder, then, that Anna felt free to do whatever she liked. And as for Ivor—well, tricky was the least of it. He had stopped drinking, it was true, but his other habits were proving harder to break: there was a different woman at the house every weekend, from what she could make out.
Aloud, she said, “I appreciate your raising this with me, Mrs. Baker. I’ll talk to Anna, set some boundaries. You’re right—there has been a lot going on at home.”
The headmistress sat back in her chair. “Well,” she said, “I suggest you talk to your daughter sooner rather than later. I’ve seriously considered suspending her, but in the circumstances, I am going to give her the benefit of the doubt. Should anything like this happen again”—a meaningful flash of flinty, grey-blue eyes—“I shall not be so lenient, Ms Wheeler.”
At home that evening, Cass found Anna, still in her uniform—her shirt untucked, her skirt hoisted up in a familiar way that, despite herself, made Cass smile—sprawled on the sofa before the television.
Looking up at her mother, Anna didn’t return the smile, but she moved her feet a few inches to the right, to make room for her, and together they watched the remaining minutes of Neighbours: white-toothed Australians shouting at each other across manicured suburban lawns. Cass knew better than to interrupt. But as the credits rolled, she placed an arm around her daughter, drew her closer, and Anna, still pliable, still affectionate, did not resist.
“You are all right, aren’t you, darling?” Cass said into her daughter’s hair. “You would tell me if you weren’t?”
“Of course I would, Mum,” Anna said, as the final credits were replaced by the sombre bell-toll of the Six O’Clock News. Cass said no more, then, than, “I love you,” and went through to the kitchen to see what she might make for dinner.
Why had she not done more, asked more, forced Anna to talk? Cowardice, she thinks now. Cowardice, and that peculiar, deadening feeling of remoteness. That belief—instilled in childhood, and so difficult to shift—that if a thing was not talked about, then it did not, could not, truly exist.
Cass had never wanted Anna to go on Ivor’s tour.
She had been categorical, in fact, in her refusal. An argument had inevitably ensued—the worst she and her daughter had ever had—followed by a terrible silence, Anna steadfast in her decision to ignore her mother for as long as it took to persuade her to change her mind. She was stubborn, after all: she was her mother’s daughter.
Fifteen years old: long blonde hair hanging to just below her shoulder blades; her mother’s brown eyes, her father’s sharply angled face. A wardrobe filled with blush-coloured, lace-edged under-slips that she wore tucked into short woollen skirts. (Cornelia, long since departed this earth, would have been appalled.) Men’s plaid work shirts, thick black tights, and purple Doc Martens threaded with multicoloured laces.
“Grunge,” they called it, this artfully dishevelled style. When its high priest, Kurt Cobain, had been found dead the year before, Anna and Tasha had mounted a candlelit vigil in the living-room at Home Farm: all the lamps turned out, and nightlights guttering in jars, and Nirvana’s scratchy, restless music playing on repeat into the small hours.
Cass, too, had been saddened, as she was each time one of her own kind fell: Hendrix, Morrison, Moon, Joplin, Denny, Mercury. It seemed to her, in her more melancholy moods, that her greatest achievement lay not in the music she had written but in simply managing to remain alive to write it—though not, admittedly, with the same ease with which she had once done so. It would be another three years before she would release her next album, Silver and Gold.
Ivor, however, had made a new record, a collection of jazz standards reconfigured with a smoky, porch-blues feel. He was to tour America: Brooklyn, Nashville, Seattle, San Francisco. No buses: first-class flights between each city, and bookings in good hotels. Five weeks from late July, coinciding, as it happened, with Anna’s summer holiday.
“Kim said Tasha can go,” Anna told her mother.
This was soon proved to be incorrect. Tasha had been offered her first modelling assignment, in New York; the girls might fly over together, Kim had said, but Tasha would not be able to join Anna on the tour.
“Anyway,” Kim said, “I’m not sure I’d let Tasha go, even if she were free. Not without one of us there to keep an eye on her.”
“No,” Cass agreed. “But hell hath no fury like a fifteen-year-old girl scorned.”
Anna’s silence lasted two weeks: two weeks during which she said not a single word to her mother, but regarded her, each time she spoke, with a sullen, dark-eyed glare.
Cass knew she ought to hold firm, but she could not bear it: instead she found herself, one bright May morning when Anna was at school, stepping into her MG and driving to Hampstead. She parked on a side street not far from Ivor’s house; at his gates, she announced herself at the intercom, then walked up the pristine sweep of weedless drive.
It was not the first time she had seen the house: there had been a party here, six months before, to celebrate the first anniversary of Ivor’s sobriety. Everybody had been invited—Alan, Kim, Graham, and Kit, and all the old crew: Kate, Serena, Bob. Not Hugh: he was not yet on the wagon, and Ivor, resolved to keep his distance, had replaced him with another drummer.
“I think it’s a good idea,” he’d told Cass over the telephone, “to get everyone together and ask forgiveness of you all. Step nine: make direct amends to the people you have harmed.”
“I’m not sure,” Cass had replied after a moment, “that you’re meant to do that to everyone at once.”
But she’d gone to the party, all the same. As Ivor had made his speech—his hair longer, his beard newly trimmed, his face still hatefully free of wrinkles—she had felt a wave of shame wash through her; for if Ivor was asking forgiveness, she thought, then surely she ought to be doing the same.
Now, on that fresh, summery morning, it was Leah who answered the door. Leah, Ivor’s latest live-in girlfriend—twenty-two years old (half Cass’s age, she acknowledged with a shiver), with a fine, elfin face, and endless legs bare beneath her cut-off denim shorts. The dog, Ziggy—long since grown beyond a puppy—wheeled and growled at her heels. Leah leant down, petted him, said, “Oh, hi, Cass. Well, I guess you’ll want to come in.”
They drank coffee together, she and Ivor (Leah did, at least, have the tact to make herself scarce) in his spotless white kitchen, with its glass pendant lights and leather barstools and cavernous American fridge.
“I’ll look after Anna, Cassie,” Ivor said. “I’d never let anything happen to her. You know that. She means everything to me.”
Did she? Cass had had enough cause to doubt it. His drinking—one party, one year of sobriety, was not enough to erase those ugly years. Those women—an endless stream of them, models and dancers and waitresses and yoga instructors—moving into his home in quick succession, Ivor not thinking of the impact this would have on Anna. His daughter, believing herself replaced in her father’s heart by a shifting series of women, most of them only a few years older than Anna herself. Any fool could see that she longed for her father’s attention, for his love. Any fool, it would seem, apart from Ivor.
But look
ing at him now, clean-shirted, barefoot, drinking cappuccino in his expensive kitchen, Cass realised that she had no choice but to believe him. Anna would not forgive her if Cass didn’t let her go. She would make her mother the villain, as she had done so many times, even when it was Ivor drunk, forgetful, wrapped up in a new girlfriend—who had let her down.
“All right,” she said. “I can see I’ve got no option. But you’re to make sure she calls me every day. And we’ll get someone along to watch her—a chaperone. You’ll be busy, after all.”
Anna was too excited about her mother’s change of heart to put up a fight about the chaperone.
Kim found a girl called Rosie: twenty-one, in her final year studying French at Bristol University. She was the daughter of a sound engineer who’d once worked with Bill at Abbey Road; there wasn’t time to meet her, but Cass conducted a brief interview over the phone, and Rosie seemed sensible enough. She worked part-time in the university library, and was planning to train as a teacher after graduation.
“How cool to be a chaperone,” Rosie said. “It’s like something out of Jane Austen.”
“Yes,” Cass replied drily. “But a major US tour is hardly a restorative excursion to Bath.”
“No.” Rosie coughed, turning serious. “Of course not. Please don’t worry, Ms Wheeler. I won’t let Anna out of my sight.”
And so, soon after the school broke up, Anna was off—packing and repacking her things, spending hours on the phone with Tasha, poring over her new Lonely Planet guide to the USA.
“Thanks, Mum,” she said as Cass embraced her, fiercely, at the door. “Thanks for letting me go.”
It was a warm summer, that year. Cass remembers long, easy days on the terrace at Home Farm, windows thrown open, reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. She had resolved to take some time off to rest, to see if she could throw off that enervating feeling of remoteness, and maybe even find the energy to paint or write.
Greatest Hits Page 33