Greatest Hits

by Laura Barnett

  “You’re such a good listener, Cass,” Simone told her. “Most people aren’t, you know. With most people, it feels like they’re just waiting until you shut up, so that they can talk.”

  Cass nodded.

  “It’s taken me a long time,” she said, “to learn to listen.” There was Johnny, who telephoned often, and visited whenever he could—he was so often away, working, travelling. And then, in the year Cass turned fifty-seven, Johnny fifty-nine, he had fallen in love.

  “It’s the real thing, this time, Cass,” he said. And she could see that it was. The man, Alastair, was Johnny’s own age—a hedge-fund manager, recently retired. A sensitive, mild-mannered man: a lover of opera, theatre, Stravinsky, and a collector of art. It was this that had brought them together: Alastair had wished to purchase an extensive set of Johnny’s photographs, and Johnny’s galleries had, given the size of the acquisition, agreed to allow him to meet the artist in his studio.

  “I was bloody annoyed about it,” Johnny said: he had come to Home Farm with Alastair for lunch. “I had a deadline—a Vogue cover, for God’s sake—and there I was, having to stop what I was doing in order to meet some bloody banker.”

  “And then I opened the door,” Alastair said, “and swept him off his feet.”

  Johnny beamed. “You did, my love. You absolutely did.”

  It was a warm, soft afternoon. Alastair and Johnny had brought a hamper from Fortnum’s—“A treat, darling,” Johnny said as he presented it to her—and they had feasted on smoked salmon, venison salami, dried figs. They sat outside on the terrace, and Johnny poured them each a glass of Chablis, and as Cass toasted the men’s newfound happiness, she felt almost . . . How to describe it? Not happy, no. That she could not imagine. But easier. Lighter. Less afraid.

  None of them spoke of what had happened—of the hospital, or of what Cass had lost, and what she had given away. Her marriage, her music, her daughter: everything that had once offered meaning and structure to her life. There was just that moment, that transient ration of time: the three of them together, the sun on their faces and the low singing of the bees in the flowerbeds. And that, she had felt then, was enough; was more, surely, than she deserved.

  And then, a few months after that, she’d found the magazine, carelessly deposited by Simone in the downstairs bathroom.

  Simone had not read it, perhaps; or if she had, she had simply forgotten to gather it up with her other belongings. Cass did not often use the downstairs bathroom, but she did that day; and there, trapped between those glossy pages, she found him. Ivor. Tanned and white-toothed and smiling, hand in hand with the former model Cindy Russo. Meeting Cindy has given me a reason to get back on track. She has given me something to live for. Throwing the magazine out through the open door, onto the hallway’s polished parquet. Hearing its resounding thwack as the pages buckled and splayed.

  Perhaps it was that—the knowledge that Ivor was happy, that he had permitted himself the privilege of starting over—that drew her back to the edge of the darkness. Or perhaps she would always have found herself back there, staring down into its mirrored depths. The water seemed so cool, so inviting; its silence so absolute. She stood there, watching her reflection, edging a toe towards the water. Then, at the last moment, she drew back, and telephoned Kim.

  “I need to go back to the hospital, I think. Could you come and collect me?”

  Another room, this time; this one at the back of the building, overlooking the terrace where patients were invited to sit in the mornings. The gravel path, and the walled outline of the rose garden. And, beyond that, the terraced beds of Mediterranean herbs, and the sundial, and the tall cypresses, waving their slender branches in the breeze.

  It was different the second time. Cass wasn’t numb but angry: a wave of rage seemed to well up in her from some previously untapped source. Restless, too: no more long hours in bed, watching the sun shift across the floor.

  She slept poorly: the rage wouldn’t permit her the oblivion of sleep. She rose early, went out into the garden, walked up and down the gravel paths. She stalked from floor to floor, snarled at those who came near. The nurses, especially, annoyed her, with their clear youthful skin, their neat uniforms, their studied patience. Please, Ms. Wheeler, you’re disturbing the other patients. Come now, this is no good at all. Please calm down, Ms. Wheeler, or we’ll need to take you back to your room.

  Talking, this time, was what she longed for: she couldn’t stop talking, unleashing a babbling stream of rage. Her therapist was a woman of about her own age—a sad, defeated-looking, slump-shouldered woman who wore a series of baggy cardigans. Cass hated her. She was furious with her. She was furious with everyone. Her mother. (How could she never have properly confronted her, never made her understand the consequences of what she had done?) Her father. Ivor. Anna. And, most of all, herself.

  The therapist closed her eyes as Cass talked—shouted, often and said, “Good. Good. It’s good that you’re finally letting it all out.”

  And perhaps it was good, for after a few weeks of this, Cass felt the rage begin to subside, dimming to a persistent, low-level irritability.

  Bored, one day, of the moronic monotony of the television in the shared lounge, she found herself wandering towards the library, and signing out a stack of paperbacks. David Copperfield, Our Man in Havana, The Alchemist, pressed upon her by the librarian, a young, softly spoken woman with a tumble of reddish, hennaed hair.

  “Many of our patients enjoy reading Paulo Coelho, Ms Wheeler,” she said. “He’s a spiritual writer, in the broadest sense of the word.”

  Undeterred by Cass’s unfriendly stare, she added, “I know I shouldn’t say this, but I really am the most enormous fan. Huntress has to be my favourite album of all time. I found my mum’s copy in her record collection when I was a teenager. It just blew me away.”

  Cass tried to read, but found that she could not. At the end of a paragraph—a sentence, even—she found that her attention had wandered, and she would have to go back and start again. After several attempts at this, she gave up. She placed the books on the bench she was using as a dressing-table, beside the framed photograph of Anna she had brought from Home Farm, and the lotions and creams Kim had stowed in her case, and that seemed to her the incomprehensible ephemera of another person, living entirely another life.

  And then, a few days later, that sign on the noticeboard: a course on flower-arranging, of all things. Cass snapping at the nurse with the sleek ponytail, and then, quite to her own surprise, finding the room, slipping inside, and standing behind a bench laid with gypsophila, roses, floral foam. That vase of yellow flowers on her dressing-table, their colour shockingly bright against the bland neutrality of the walls.

  The following week, it was white carnations—never her favourite flower. The week after that, she asked the course leader if she might gather her own materials from the Mediterranean garden. Permission was sought and granted, and Cass brought back to her room a glass jug filled with a fragrant bouquet of lavender and herbs. The smell flooded the room for days, lifting her spirits each time she opened the door.

  Her anger, she realised gradually, was evaporating. Cass bent her head low over that vase, and drew in a scent that seemed to speak of warmth, and ease, and limitless freedom.

  She asked for visitors, that second time, and they came.

  Alan, Rachel, Katie, and Jerome, bearing a huge basket of fruit, and a bouquet of calla lilies that Cass placed on her dressing-table beside her own smaller display.

  Kim, Bill, and Tasha—the young woman so vivid, so alive, walking beside her in the hospital garden in her short striped dress. Cass held her hand and said, “I’m glad Anna had you, Tasha. I’m so glad that you were there for her.”

  Kate, hair expensively highlighted, skin glowing, looking around her with a horror she made no attempt to conceal. “Jesus Christ, Cass. We need to get you out of here.
”

  “It’s all right,” Cass said. “I think this is where I need to be.”

  Serena and Bob, exactly as they had always been: Serena in a long dip-dyed dress and Birkenstocks, Bob’s shirt untucked, his collar unbuttoned, his expression serene.

  “I’m still on the good stuff,” he admitted over tea in Cass’s room. “Sundays and school holidays, anyway. Pure sativa. Grow it in the back garden. Neighbours haven’t noticed—they’re far too square.”

  Serena rolled her eyes. “Ignore him, Cass. Sarah had her twins last month. Lucy and Nancy. They’re a handful, of course, but goodness me, if they aren’t the most wonderful babies.” She reached into the pocket of her cardigan, withdrew a sheaf of photographs in a plastic folder. “I brought some photos to show you. Unless . . .” She stopped herself, bit her lip. “Well. I didn’t think, Cass, to be honest. You know what I’m like. Bull in a china shop. Perhaps you’d rather not.”

  Cass put down her mug of tea. “No. Please, Serena. Show me.”

  She was aware of these visits as the mirror-image of those she and Ivor had received at Rothermere when Anna had just been born. And yet Anna was absent, now: not only physically but emotionally, too—referred to only obliquely, in allusions and silences and glances held a moment too long. They were all, her old friends, too concerned that saying Anna’s name aloud might upset Cass’s fragile equilibrium.

  Cass didn’t blame them for that; but she was grateful, so grateful, for Irene, who came one dull, overcast Saturday in September, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on CD—“It’s brilliantly escapist, Cass”—and a mango gift-set from the Body Shop.

  They went out that day: Cass was desperate for a change of scene. Irene drove the short distance to Ascot, the fields and roads and houses seeming surreal, flooded with colour and sound, after the silence and seclusion of the hospital.

  They parked, found a café; ordered coffee and two indecently large slabs of cake.

  “Let’s talk about her,” Irene said when they were settled. “Let’s talk about Anna. All the best things you remember about her. The woman she was before her illness. The woman she would have become.”

  Cass looked at Irene across the table. She was wearing a long blue denim skirt and a white short-sleeved blouse that exposed the soft flesh of her upper arms. Her dark shoulder-length curls were shot through with grey streaks. Irene was who she was—who she had always been, since they were children—and she had never made any attempt to disguise herself.

  Cass opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. After a moment, she tried again. “Thank you, Irene,” she said. “Thank you.”

  On their way back to the car, Irene said, “It’s not so bad, you know, Cass. Ordinary life. You’ll miss her, of course—you’ll always miss her—but you might find some peace there, I think. Away from all the craziness and the attention. People recognising you in the street, having opinions about your life. I’ve never understood how you managed to cope with it, really.”

  “No.” Cass looked around her—took in the pharmacy, the newsagent, the bank, the pub, with its freshly painted woodwork, and the ladies’ clothes shop with its mannequins posed with hands on hips. The passers-by seemed calm, unhurried; she watched a pair of women stop in front of the clothes shop, nudge each other, smile, and step inside.

  “I don’t know how I coped with it, either. And I don’t want it any more, Irene. I just want some quiet. I want to be left alone.”

  It wasn’t long after Irene’s visit that Cass began making arrangements to leave the hospital.

  There were tablets she would take, and a therapist she would agree to see, once a week, at Home Farm. The humiliating exit interview—the pretty young doctor, a size six at the most, solemnly informing her that she had gained two stone in weight. Healthy diet, plenty of exercise.

  And then, it seemed, she was free to go.

  She drove herself home this time—Alan had sent Jerome over the previous day, with the MG. It was a cool, blustery day; the roads were clear, and Cass took her time, reacquainting herself with the unfamiliar mechanisms of the car. At the turning to the M25, she made a sudden, unexpected decision, and pulled not onto the eastbound carriageway, towards Kent, but onto the M3, following the signs for London. Twickenham, Richmond, Putney, Battersea. These once-familiar places slipped past, and then, all at once, there she was, broaching the common, the white cupola of the church standing tall and bright where it had always been.

  She parked a few streets back from the common, on the road where she had once taken her piano lessons, in Mrs. Dewson’s sour-smelling front room. That was the house, wasn’t it—the one with the green front door, and the black-and-white mosaic tiles leading up from the street? She stood before the house for a moment, considered ringing the bell, then thought better of it: Mrs. Dewson was long gone, of course, as they all were.

  Before the vicarage, she stopped once more. It was all exactly as she remembered it: the high gables, the sooty London brick. The apple tree, heavy once again with blossom. Looking more closely, she saw minor changes: the front door had been repainted in primrose-yellow—the new vicar, perhaps, was a moderniser—and the old sash windows had been discreetly replaced. A child’s muddy wellington boots stood in the porch, and beside them, a red plastic ball, scarred by the tooth-marks of a dog. This family, whoever they might be, was happy here, it seemed.

  She crossed the road, and took the gravel path leading to the church. She wasn’t expecting to find the door unlocked—churches never were, these days—but she tried it, and found that it swung open.

  Inside, at the opposite end of the nave, before the cloth-covered altar (the place where she had once, incomprehensibly, kissed Kevin Dowd), a woman in a black shirt and trousers was deep in conversation with a man wearing a grey anorak. The woman turned at the sound of Cass’s entrance, and Cass saw the white flash of the clerical collar at her throat. She looked away, embarrassed, making for the door; but the vicar called out to her across the cool, echoing interior. “Don’t worry. Please. Do come in, if you would like. We’ll be here for a few more minutes.”

  Cass nodded and took a pew. The ancient wood was hard and solid beneath her, as it had always been; but the hassocks were new, embroidered in bright primary colours. A white and gold banner hung from the pulpit, and twin displays of flowers (lilies, hydrangeas, white orchids) had been placed on either side of the altar. The smell was as familiar as her own skin: dust, pollen, incense, beeswax. She closed her eyes, breathed it in, and allowed her forehead to meet the cool wood of the pew in front.

  In her mind, she saw a garden: cypresses, rosemary, lavender. Gethsemane, she thought, and from somewhere deep in the recesses of her memory emerged a passage from the Bible—studied, no doubt, in Mrs. Harrison’s Sunday school, so many years ago. The Gospel of Matthew. Jesus in the garden with Peter, and the two sons of Zebedee. Turning to them, saying, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow,” and then falling to the ground, praying to the Father to take his cup away.

  Cass sat like this for some time, in silence. And then, after a while, aware that the voices from the other end of the church had fallen quiet, she stood up, thanked the vicar, then walked out of the church and drove home.

  7.45 P.M.

  Late evening, gathering its shadows, inching slowly towards dusk.

  In his narrow airline seat, Larry Alderson wakes from a fitful sleep, lifts the plastic window blind beside him, and stares out at a broad vista of cloud: plump, white, cottony, like a child’s painting of heaven. On the horizon, a narrow band of diffuse, yellowish light, and above it, the sky deeply, inkily blue.

  They are flying too high for him to be able to see the ocean, but he knows that it is there: its fathomless drop, its tall, deepwater waves. It seems, in that formless, elastic plane-time, marked by the passage of drinks trolleys and meals and the flickering of two hundred tiny screens, that they have been cross
ing the Atlantic for ever; but of course they have not. It is five hours since the plane took off from O’Hare, launching off into a crisp, windswept Chicago morning; there are roughly three hours still to go until it will land at Heathrow, where it will be night-time, red lights marking the runway and no stars visible beneath the velvet canopy of sky.

  And here, above the cloud: what time is it here? Who knows? No time. All time. Yesterday, tomorrow, and today.

  Larry draws down the blind, stretches his legs a little further out beneath the chair in front. A few rows behind him, a child stirs, and he hears its mother say, in a low English voice, “It’s all right, Alfie. Go back to sleep.”

  He smiles to himself, and closes his eyes, and sees Cass’s face projected on his closed lids. Its fine lines and puckers. The firm sweep of her nose, and the shy, tentative arc of her lips.

  He had been surprised to find that shyness, the first time they had met in Washington, in the Library of Congress. And yet he had, instinctively, understood it: he knew, after all, what it was to have been alone for so long—or to have felt alone, even in the context of a long marriage.

  He had loved her from that moment, he supposed—the moment he had first seen Cass moving across the room towards him, as if in response to a question he hadn’t yet voiced. The moment he had turned to her, said something unbelievably banal—“Gaudy, isn’t it?”—and seen that shyness stalk across her face.

  Absurd, probably, to feel such a thing at his age, but he didn’t care. Cass was shining, luminous; the air around her seemed thicker, denser, more potently charged. He’d grown dizzy on it, high; he’d smiled at her, cracked some silly joke, and willed her not to walk away.

  To love a woman so suddenly and with such intensity at this time of life was a surprise, of course. A surprise to them both. And yet it was undeniable: he had loved her then, on that first meeting; he had loved her the next day, at the gallery, walking from room to room, looking at the Andrew Wyeth paintings, but seeing only her deep brown eyes, the quizzical tilt of her chin; drinking coffee, but thinking only of her. Had loved her in the hotel room, that night: loved her sudden boldness, her voice on the telephone; her body, opening up to him, shaking off, he felt—he had hoped—all those years of loneliness, grief, and fear.