Greatest Hits

by Laura Barnett

  Another meeting with Eleanor Lichtenstein.

  The painting behind her desk was of a man, black-suited, turned slightly away from the frame; his hair neatly parted, his tie tightly looped, his fingers resting on his knee.

  “A portrait of Hockney’s father,” the doctor said, following Cass’s gaze. “My own, incidentally, gave it to me. Picked it up for a song in Whitechapel. I’ll never part with it, however much it’s worth.”

  She was about Cass’s age, or a few years older: an attractive, well-dressed woman who took care of herself. An appreciator of art, literature, and music, who had discreetly let it be known that she owned several of Cass’s albums, and had even seen her in concert. The Hammersmith Apollo, 1976; Eleanor and her friends sitting spellbound in the upper circle.

  “It was the first time,” Eleanor Lichtenstein had told her, “that I’d ever felt a singer was speaking directly to me. To my own experience. Uncanny, really. But I suppose you’ve heard that a thousand times.”

  Cass had absorbed the compliment, and smiled.

  Now, after a polite moment, she said, “I really am very worried about Anna. I think it’s back—and worse, this time, than before.”

  A stave of furrowed lines marred the smooth expanse of the doctor’s forehead. She pushed an errant sheaf of black curls back behind one ear, and said, “I’m so sorry, Cass. But there’s very little I can do, especially as Anna’s living abroad. In order to intervene, I’d need to be convinced that she presented a real danger to herself. And to establish that I would need, of course, to see her for myself. And even then”—her eyes lingered on Cass’s face—“the decision to intervene against her will could not be taken by me alone. Or by you.”

  A silence. The tactfully averted gaze of Hockney’s father. Looking at the painting again, Cass fancied she saw an awkwardness in the man’s pose: a stiffness of the shoulders, a rigidity in the set of his features. What had he been thinking, as his son had moved behind his easel, committing his image to canvas? Had the older man understood the younger? Had he looked back over his life, his decision to have a child, and felt it had all been for the good, that it could have led to no moment other than this?

  “If I can offer you any advice,” the doctor said, “it’s to respect Anna’s desire for distance. Don’t push her. Give her the time and space she is asking for, and then, gently, try to talk to her. If she responds, try to make her understand that she’s not alone, that you’re here for her, whenever she needs you. And, of course, encourage her to seek psychiatric help as soon as possible, in Germany—I can ask around for recommendations—or here. I am still of the view, as you know, that the anorexia is a symptom of Anna’s broader spectrum of psychiatric issues, rather than a diagnosis in itself.”

  Dr. Lichtenstein paused, and poured herself a glass of water. Then she met Cass’s eye and said, “If you can bring her here to see me, well, I’ll do all I can for her. On that, Cass, you have my word.”

  The time and space she is asking for. How could Cass offer Anna those, when every instinct, every sinew, every muscle, ached to run to her daughter and bring her home?

  Some six hundred miles separated them; six hundred miles of sea, farmland, forest, and motorway. Anna had moved to Berlin a few months after graduation, with Chris Polarski, and a few other friends from Saint Martin’s whose names and faces Cass could never quite keep straight in her mind. The rent, Anna said, was cheaper there, and the scene looser, more authentic, less focused on the grubby compromises of the marketplace.

  Cass liked Berlin, and had been there many times, though her experience of the city had, she was forced to acknowledge when she flew out to visit Anna, grown closer to that of a pampered tourist. Cass’s Berlin, now, was a discreet, elegant hotel in Charlottenburg; cocktails before dinner; the Brandenburg Gate scrubbed, cleansed of history, and the ashes of Potsdamer Platz rising as a soaring, glass-walled shopping centre. Anna was chasing the Berlin of Lou Reed and David Bowie; graffitied squats and damp pavements, huddling for warmth in freezing, uncurtained rooms stalked by the ghosts of the city’s past.

  Anna had not wanted her mother to see her flat. It was a scruffy old place, she said, in a former Soviet block on the Karl-Marx-Allee: not a squat, exactly, but uninhabited for a long time; the landlord couldn’t decide what to do with it, and had let them have it for a peppercorn rent. Four of them lived there permanently, with others passing through; the living-room served as a shared studio, though Chris had a lead on a derelict warehouse in Kreuzberg that they might be able to occupy for free.

  They had met for drinks in Cass’s hotel bar: a mistake, she had understood immediately. She was an artist like them—or had once been—and now here she was, ordering cocktails, wearing the green designer trouser-suit Kim had picked out for her, her hair neatly blow-dried that morning in a salon on Savignyplatz. Chris had come with Anna, wearing a khaki military jacket over a black T-shirt that was far from clean; black jeans; army boots. Anna was dressed similarly, her clothes baggy, oversized in a way that set alarm-bells ringing in Cass’s mind.

  “Darling,” she’d said as they embraced, Anna stiff in her arms, as she had been as a child, those times when Cass had just returned from a tour. “You’re very thin.”

  Anna stepped back, shook her head. “Mum, we’ve only just got here. Please don’t start.”

  She had not been sullen, exactly, but withdrawn: Anna had, Cass noted, watching the two of them carefully, adopted some of Chris’s attitude: cynical, world-weary, arrogant. Over dinner, Anna had eaten very little (cutting everything, again, into small pieces, leaving most of those on her plate), and had allowed Chris to do much of the talking.

  His conversational style was adversarial, each statement issued as a challenge. He made it clear, very quickly, that he disapproved of the association of art with money, in any and every respect.

  “Take your music, Cass,” he said. “I mean, no offence, but wouldn’t you have felt freer to make the kind of music you wanted to make if you hadn’t signed a big corporate record deal? Weren’t you just selling yourself to the highest bidder?”

  Cass sipped her wine, and settled herself more firmly on her chair. She wanted to take Anna by the shoulders, shake her, shout at her, Don’t you understand how deeply you are loved? But she could not, of course. Instead she closed her eyes, opened them again, and said, as mildly and evenly as she could, “No, Chris, to be honest, I didn’t. I was just grateful that I wasn’t going to have to work in a shop for the rest of my life.”

  After dessert (skipped by Anna, enthusiastically consumed by Chris), Anna went off to the ladies’. Cass, watching her as she crossed the dining-room, turned to Chris. “You do know about her illness, don’t you?”

  He sat back. His dark brown eyes, fixed on hers, seemed not so much affronted as amused. How much he reminded her of Ivor, in that moment. Ivor as a young man. Ivor as a man who’d had the world at his feet. “Yeah, I know about it.”

  He was not going to make it easy, then. Cass drained her glass, returned it to the starched white tablecloth.

  “Please just tell me,” she said, “that you’re looking after her.”

  “Oh yes.” Chris reached for the bottle, refilled his glass, and hers. “I’m looking after her. But then, that’s not something you’d know much about, is it, Cass?”

  That, surely, was too much. Her fist met the table with a thud; a few diners, startled, turned to look at them. “Just who do you think you are? You don’t know the first thing about me, or about what Anna and I have been through.”

  Chris was cool, unperturbed. Sipping his wine, he said calmly, “That may be so. But I think I know a lot more now.”

  When Anna came back to the table, Chris turned to her and said, “I think we’re done here.”

  Anna looked from her mother to Chris. “What’s happened? Mum, what have you done?”

  “Darling. Please.” Cass
reached out, placed a hand on Anna’s arm. “I’m worried about you, and so is your dad. We don’t think you’re well. We’d really like you to come home.”

  “Mum.” Anna placed her own hand on top of her mother’s, and gently, kindly, said, “Please. You have to stop this. I’m fine. Really. And the only place I want to be is here.”

  Cass didn’t want to leave, but she couldn’t see that she had any other choice.

  She boarded her flight; stared, unseeing, over thin wisps of cloud. Kim collected her from Gatwick, and Cass unwound the story as they went.

  “In a sense,” Kim said, “Anna may be right. You can’t live her life for her, can you? Hard as it is, I think you might have to take a step back. Trust her. Just let her know that you’re there for her when she needs you.”

  The email arrived a few days later. A Saturday in early autumn: leaves turning on the trees, Cass’s office window thrown open, admitting the smells of sap, damp earth, and the drifting traces of manure from Dearlove Farm.

  Mum, Chris and I think it’s better if we don’t speak for a while. There are some things I need to get straight in my head. I don’t mean to hurt you. I hope you understand that. I’m not going to be talking to Dad, either, if that makes it any better.

  God, the pain of it: Cass had placed her head in her hands, and heard a low, keening sound coming from her own throat. Her father. That closed door. That rising, modal melody of loss.

  What else was there to do, then, but to beat a reluctant retreat? What choice did she have but to return her attention to her music, to lose herself in that, as she had always done? A new album, The Eagle and the Hawk. A small-scale tour, with orchestra, proposed by Alan and the new booking agent, Mike.

  She looked there—behind the closed door of her office; at her piano, her guitar; between the velvet drapes, looking out on rows of expectant faces—for answers, as she had always done. But she found, for the first time, none, nothing, nobody at all.

  It was Tasha who brought Anna home.

  She had flown to Berlin for a fashion shoot; had emailed her old friend suggesting they meet for a drink, but had received no reply.

  She had no phone number for Anna, but Kim had passed on the address of the flat on Karl-Marx-Allee. And so, one freezing morning—it was November, and Tasha had spent the last three days shivering on the Reichstag lawn in a series of flimsy dresses—she had gone to the flat to see for herself.

  Out on the street, before the noisy blur of traffic, she’d pressed the buzzer and waited. No response. Pressed it again, and then, finally, heard a foreign voice. A woman, not German: Turkish, perhaps.

  “Anna Tait?” Tasha had said, over and over again, into the intercom, but the woman had issued an incomprehensible stream of words, then fallen silent, and the door had remained closed.

  A man in a black bomber jacket had been standing a few feet away, smoking, watching. Just as Tasha turned to go, he’d said in precise, barely accented English, “They moved to Kreuzberg. A warehouse, I think. Somewhere by the canal.”

  A needle in a haystack, surely. Impossible—but still, Tasha would try. She’d returned to her hotel, emailed Anna again, given her mobile number. Then she’d taken the U-Bahn to Hallesches Tor and walked the banks of the Landwehr canal, not knowing quite where to begin. She was sitting in a café, drinking Milchkaffee, when her mobile rang.

  Anna sounded breathless. “It’s me, Tasha. I only just saw your emails. Where are you? Tell me where you are.”

  Cass didn’t know what Tasha said, or did, to convince Anna to come home. Perhaps she had required no convincing, but had simply surrendered, as she had, so suddenly and unexpectedly, in Eleanor Lichtenstein’s office all those years before. Perhaps it had just been easier, in the end, for her to submit than to keep on fighting.

  Neither of the women would say much about the situation in which Anna had found herself, either. Anna would say only that she and Chris had broken up months before, that she’d moved out of the warehouse and into a squat in Friedrichshain.

  She’d been unwell for a while—could feel the illness returning, moment by moment, week by week—and the break-up had only tightened its grip. By the time Tasha had got in touch (it was sheer chance that Anna had seen Tasha’s emails—she had no phone or computer, and had only popped into an internet café for a moment to warm herself up), she’d known she was in a bad way, but couldn’t bring herself to reach out. Hadn’t wanted to reach out, really; had felt that this—her isolation, her illness—was her lot, and was nothing more than she deserved.

  “I don’t expect you to understand, Mum,” Anna said. “I don’t understand it myself. But I know it’s bad this time. The voice—that voice we talked about with Dr. Lichtenstein before. It’s back. It’s so loud in my head now. I can’t drown it out.”

  They were sitting in the living-room of the house on Mull, before the wood-burning stove. Outside, an icy Atlantic wind was whipping the gorse and the heather and the testy, winter sea, but in here, with all the radiators turned to full and the fire burning, it was hot enough to raise beads of sweat on Cass’s skin. But still Anna was cold: she sat wrapped in jumpers, blankets, feet curled under her, her hands laced around her mug. So thin that Cass had forced herself not to gasp when she’d arrived at Home Farm that night with Tasha; had forced herself not to betray the horror that had surely been written on her face, and that Anna must have seen there as she allowed herself to sink into her mother’s arms.

  She would go to Dr. Lichtenstein, but before that, Anna wondered if they might take a week on the island. She’d thought of it so often over the last few months, in Berlin: that rocky strip of land, at the very edge of the world; that inlet, where she and Tasha and Jerome and Katie had played as children, stalking seabirds, chasing the black-faced sheep across tussock and cairn.

  “Just you and me, Mum,” Anna had said. “You and me, and the island. Can we go?”

  They’d gone. Cass had called Dr. Lichtenstein, discreetly, from her office the next day, and made an appointment for Anna for the following week.

  “Have her eat little and often,” Eleanor had advised. “Soup, if she’ll have it. Hot water with a squeeze of lemon, and a teaspoon of cayenne pepper. Nothing too heavy. Her body won’t be able to cope. And, Cass, promise me something, all right? Please don’t expect too much.”

  It would seem to Cass, later, that this was where Anna had wanted to say goodbye: here, on the island, between the thick whitewashed walls of the cottage, with the tide drawing in and out a few metres from the front door, in its endless, rhythmic cycle.

  She had not said as much, of course—she had said very little, in fact; had been too weak to do much more than sleep, or rest under her blankets before the fire.

  But one day, they had driven to a beach they both loved on the island’s south-western tip: a wide arc of wet sand backed by the native machair, with its fine, friable layers of soil and scree and tough grass. The ocean that day was broad, silvery, calm: the wind had dropped, and the sun, breaking through the layers of cloud, had been suddenly dazzling. The horizon had cleared, and there, at its blurred limit, they had made out the shimmering outline of Jura, its peaks rising grey and blunt above the reaches of the open sea.

  Cass would try so hard, in the coming years, to think of Anna as she had been in that moment: closing her eyes, tilting her face towards the sun. Her long hair streaming out across her shoulders, and her arms spread wide, as if offering a welcome to something, someone, only she could see.

  Better, of course, to think of Anna there, on that beach, holding her face to the light, than as she was a few months later, in the hospital: drip-fed and wired to machines; her pale, hollow face painfully pressed into a stack of starched white pillows.

  Hiss, spit, pulse. The slowing of a heartbeat. A cymbal crash, a drum.

  A phone call in the night, and that song—that beautiful song; the last Cass wou
ld write in almost a decade—already playing on repeat in Cass’s mind. Demanding to be heard, and committed to memory, before Cass could allow herself to stop and rest her hands on the keys. To sit motionless on the leather piano stool in her studio; listening, as if for the first time, to the many-layered textures of silence, and following its call.

  7 P.M.

  The party is almost under way.

  Kim has put on the music. They are playing Cass’s back catalogue in consecutive order, album by album: Alan’s idea, a way to get people in the right frame of mind, and to work up to the new songs. “Common Ground,” then, is wafting up the stairwell and across the landing to Cass’s room, where she is standing at her dressing-table, watching her reflection.

  Her own face stares back at her. Straight, greyish fringe; faded brown eyes shaded with a thick ring of kohl; the worst of her under-eye wrinkles blurred with a pot of magical concealer. A sixty-five-year-old woman—and not, Cass hopes, one who is trying to pretend to be anything other than who she is.

  How long is it since she last held a party at Home Farm? Only Anna’s wake, of course, and that bears no comparison, though its echoes are with her, as they will always be. Her daughter’s illness, drawn to its terrible conclusion; the result of her decision to withdraw, moment by moment, from this beautiful, broken world.

  The flowers, lining the front lawn, and the grass verges on either side of the drive. Returning from the crematorium in the mourners’ car—Kim beside Cass, gripping her hand; Ivor on her other side—they had found the flashes of cameras, and the reporters’ disembodied shouts, and the crowds staring in, pressing their faces to the glass as the chauffeur made slow, painstaking progress towards the house.

  All those flowers, Cass had thought, whatever will we do with them? She had imagined them all wilting and decaying in their cellophane wrappers there on the grass—withering away to dust and soiled plastic—and had closed her eyes to ease the dizziness that washed over her; that had come over her in waves since she had first heard the words Anna is dead, and had experienced the disorientating sense that the world had tilted, shifted on its axis, and would never again offer her a level footing.