It would be that first morning she would think of six months later, in her studio at Home Farm—newly reopened, cleaned and painted, brought lurching into the digital age under Alan’s careful supervision—as she committed to guitar the first tentative outline of a song.
That pink and orange dawn; those pale grey offices of governance. Larry sleeping soundly, and she awake, restless, flooded with an exhilaration that was as true, as undeniable, as it was unexpected; waiting, before that wide plate-glass window, for the coming of morning, and whatever the day might bring.
He wanted to see her again: he would not, he said, play games with her and pretend otherwise. He was planning a trip to England: to London and Yorkshire.
“And Kent, of course, if you’ll have me.”
“Of course I’ll have you,” she replied.
In the intervening months, Larry telephoned her often from Chicago, from his vast loft apartment with its parquet floors, its bare brick walls hung with the art he had painstakingly acquired over many years. (None of it his own, bar a discreet series of studies for some of his most famous works.)
He emailed photographs of the apartment, and of his studio: a similarly cavernous, echoing space, filled with workbenches and lathes and mysterious bundles of discarded materials—wood, glass, chicken-wire, misshapen lumps of clay.
In winter, the cold in here could freeze a man to death, he wrote. But we have to suffer for our art, don’t we? Even we who are old enough to know better.
Larry sent photos of his children, too. Todd, as tall as his father, serious in a well-cut charcoal suit, his arm cast loosely around the stylish shoulders of his wife, Lisette. Maddy, long-haired and smiling, at the centre of a happy trio of laughing, sticky-faced boys. Harper, the third child, complex, uncertain: a thin, white-blonde woman with Larry’s cornflower eyes, pictured against the Vancouver skyline. Cass thought she saw Anna in Harper, though she did not say so; as she did not, yet, send Larry photos of her own daughter.
The facts of Anna’s death, Cass’s grief, Cass’s breakdown, hovered at the edges of their conversations; not ominously, as storm-clouds threatening to mar their sunny passage towards intimacy, but as elements of her past that Larry seemed to understand, instinctively, without her needing to explain.
It was this, perhaps, that made Cass feel—on the phone with him, reading his emails, reconstructing in her mind the precise composition of his face—a sense of ease, of safety, that she had not felt for decades.
Larry seemed to ask of her to be nothing more, or less, than who she was; and for that, Cass was more grateful than she knew how to express.
His visit was set for July. He would spend a week in London and Wakefield, with his gallerist, Diana (plans were afoot for an exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park), making a round of the London shows and studios, and catching up with friends.
He asked her to join him in London—a dinner at Diana’s Shoreditch gallery; a party at the home of friends in Dalston—but Cass demurred.
“I think I’d rather see you on home ground,” she said, “if that’s all right with you.”
Across the miles of sea and earth that separated them, she sensed him smile.
“Home Farm,” he said. “Home ground indeed.”
Johnny, however, was furious when he heard that she’d refused Larry’s invitation.
“Go, for God’s sake,” he said—echoing, unwittingly, Kim, all those years ago, urging Cass to join Tom Arnold in his Dorchester suite. “You’ve spent far too long cooped up out here like a bloody nun. Men like Larry Alderson don’t come around often—you and I both know that. So what in Christ’s name, Cassandra, are you playing at?”
Discreetly, Cass met Alastair’s eye. Johnny, it was plain to see, was not himself: irritable, deflated, his thick-limbed build slackening to fat.
“Prostate cancer,” Alastair said in a low voice when Johnny was out of the room. “He starts chemotherapy on Monday. He doesn’t want anyone to know.”
The living-room shifted, blurred. “Even me?”
“Well.” Alastair looked down at his hands. “I’ve told you now. I had to. So he’ll just have to accept it, won’t he?”
This was two weeks before Larry’s scheduled visit. Not wishing to betray Johnny’s confidence, she told Larry that a close friend of hers was ill, and they both wondered whether to postpone their plans. But Johnny, hearing this, insisted that they did not.
“If there’s one thing that’s all too clear to me now, Cass,” he said, “it’s that we don’t have that much time. None of us do. So don’t waste any more of yours, all right? Please, do that for me.”
Larry arrived on a Friday afternoon in a rented Audi convertible, wearing a pair of mirrored Ray-Bans and a short-sleeved shirt that displayed his tanned, sinewed arms, with their light scattering of still-dark hair.
“I have a weakness for nice cars,” he said as he stepped out. “European ones, especially. You’re not disgusted with me, are you?”
She shook her head. “There’s a racing-green MG parked in my garage.”
He moved forward, placed a hand on each of her shoulders, and regarded her squarely. His blue eyes were brighter than she remembered; but his lived-in, contoured face was exactly as she recalled.
“Now,” he said, “you’re talking my language,” and then he leant down to kiss her.
These were warm, golden days: the sky untroubled by cloud, the garden heady with flowers, and the Weald hazy with reflected heat. Afternoons in bed, learning the rhythms of each other’s bodies. Evenings on the terrace, drinking her best wine, cooking, eating, and talking, talking, talking.
She loved the cadences of Larry’s voice; the emphatic dance of his hands that accompanied the points on which he was most passionate. There was nothing in Larry’s life, it seemed, that he was not prepared to discuss. His two divorces (one amicable, one less so; both, by his own estimation, entirely his fault). The years he had lost to drugs and the all-consuming power of his own ego. His anxieties for Harper, so restless, so unable to settle; his concern that Todd, who remembered his parents’ tricky years, had never quite forgiven his father his mistakes.
But of Cass, Larry demanded nothing other than her company, her opinion, the warmth of her body and the cool precision of her mind. And it was because of this, perhaps, that she found herself reciprocating, talking to Larry with an honesty and clarity that she had only ever achieved before with her therapist; and perhaps in the earliest of her days with Ivor, before their relationship had soured, become so broken and confused.
It was after one of these conversations—a monologue, really; Cass talking and Larry listening, his eyes fixed on her face—that she led him upstairs to the second floor, pushed open the door to the art room where she and Anna had spent so many happy hours.
It was years—two, maybe three—since Cass had been up there: she had resolved, before her second admission to the hospital, that she would close the door to that room, as she had to so many other things, and leave it alone. When she had wished to paint, she had done so in her office downstairs. Simone, she assumed, would keep the room clean and tidy, and it was true, she had—the easels were neatly folded, the boards carefully stacked, the skylight free of dust.
Cass stood with Larry in the centre of the room, where she had used to stand with Anna, before their twin easels, music playing on the old stereo. She drew a deep breath, and let it go. “It’s just a room, Cass,” Larry said softly. “Nothing to be afraid of.”
Across the inches that separated them, she reached for his hand.
“I know,” she said. “I know.”
“Don’t you miss it?” he said.
It was the day before he was due to fly home to Chicago, and he had taken her to lunch in Canterbury. A heavenly day, cloudless and fine; finishing his breakfast, Larry had said, “We’ll go out today, I think. I’ve never seen Ca
nterbury.” And she, sitting across from him, had put down her mug, and nodded her assent.
Now, in the restaurant a few hours later, she said, “I don’t know, Larry. I’d always thought that music was a part of me. That I had no choice but to write. But I did have a choice. And now I’ve chosen to leave it behind.” After a moment, she added, “So no, I don’t miss it. Not any more.”
Did her voice falter a little as she spoke? She did wonder at the truth of her words, as soon as she said them; and Larry, finishing his last mouthful of steak, narrowed his eyes a little, and said nothing. But later, after the bill was paid, the table cleared, he said, as if the thread of their earlier conversation had not been severed, “It’s still a part of you, Cass. It will always be a part of you.”
The cobbled streets of Canterbury were cool and shadowed; tourists in shorts and T-shirts wandered with cameras, and gaggles of half-naked teenagers posed and preened on the banks of the river. Larry and Cass walked slowly, arm in arm, like a long-married couple out for an afternoon stroll. Nobody stared; nobody watched. If the eyes of some of the older passers-by did flick over them, they did so discreetly, drawn only by the fleeting sense that they had seen this woman’s face somewhere before, but could not, in that moment, quite remember where.
Before the cathedral gates, Larry paused. “I’d like to go in, if that’s OK.”
“Of course,” she said.
The astonishing grandeur of that buttressed stone, the ribbed pillars, soaring up as if to infinity, and the afternoon sun throwing kaleidoscope patterns through the stained glass. A crowd had gathered in the quire, was filing into the high wooden stalls. A white-haired woman, holding printed service sheets, asked if they were here for evensong.
“Yes,” Larry replied, and from the woman’s hand, he took a sheet, and led Cass off after the crowd.
“Larry,” she whispered, “shouldn’t we be getting back?”
And he, squeezing her hand, said, “Not yet, Cass. Let’s just stay for this.”
Later, it would occur to her that he had planned it all: the outing; the innocently phrased question over lunch; the apparently casual coincidence of their entering the cathedral just as the choir was coming in. If this was so, she thought, Larry had known exactly what he was doing, and what its effect would be.
The choristers in their long robes, standing at the bidding of the choirmaster; the cushions scarlet-bright against the dark polished wood, and the master lifting his billowing white sleeve. The singers’ voices, rising, soaring, offering their music to the rafters and beyond: the high clarity of the boy sopranos, and the answering bass and baritones of the men. A great flock of open mouths issuing that sublime plainsong chant, building and swelling, riding a wave of glorious tonal harmony.
Cass was lost to it, her ears ringing with its music. A swimmer, backstroking in a cool, calm sea; the waves carrying her with them, refusing to let her go.
Was it there that it returned to her, under that ancient canopy of stone? With that chanting ebb and flow: the psalms, the responses, the hymns? The music she had first heard as a child, in that other church, under her father’s commanding eye: an indifferent choir, theirs, but one to whose song she had first become attuned; melodies she had tried, as a toddler, to draw from her own small throat. Replaced, over time, by another kind of music: the weight of a guitar on her knee, the pressure of her fingers on its taut strings. The hot urgent rhythms of bass and drum, and the ancient communal responses of the crowd. How she had loved that music. How she loved it still.
That night, in bed with Larry, sleepless, dreading the morning’s parting, she heard it: the singing of the choir, that layered music, that sacred offering. And some time towards the morning, her own response: the small, fragmented quickening of a song.
It was Alan who suggested she open up the studio again.
They were standing together in the back garden of Johnny’s mother’s terraced house in Walthamstow, sharing a cigarette. (She was supposed to have given up—Larry hated smoking, and so, it had occurred to Cass, did she—but this seemed an appropriate occasion to allow herself a small indulgence.)
Around them, a flock of other mourners dressed, in accordance with Johnny’s wishes, in a rainbow spectrum of colours. At the crematorium, his mother—eighty-two years old, heart-broken in fuchsia pink—had stared bravely at the wicker coffin from under eyelids daubed in garish ultramarine. She was now installed in her living-room, attended by her daughters—Johnny’s four sisters, as quick and slight as he had been broad and strong-limbed—and a gaggle of grandchildren.
“Why don’t you let me take a look?” Alan said. “Dust off the cobwebs. We’ll need to replace that reel-to-reel. Technology’s moved on a bit, of course.”
Cass drew deeply on the cigarette, watched the smoke hang for a moment in the air and then disperse. “I’m not sure, Alan. I don’t know if I’m ready.”
He looked not at her but through the window to the kitchen, where one of Johnny’s sisters was opening another bottle of champagne. Drink champagne all day, Johnny had written in the note he’d left for Alastair. And then drink champagne all night. As you know, my darling, the cellar’s overflowing with the stuff. No black, please. Dress up. Dress brightly. Dress for a party. Laugh, and be happy. For I was happy with you, my sweetest love—as deeply, and as truly, as I knew how to be.
“But you are writing again?” Alan’s voice was light, studiedly casual. She watched the side of his face—that slope-nosed face, with its tufted silver-grey goatee. How generous he had always been to her, how good, even when it had all fallen away.
“I am,” she said. “One song so far, anyway. ‘Gethsemane,’ I’m calling it. It’s good, I think. It feels good, anyway.”
He smiled. She handed him the cigarette. “And Larry?”
She returned his smile; she could not help it. “Oh, Larry’s really good. He’s coming over again next week.”
Alan nodded, his grin broadening. He took a drag, and then said, “Well. That’s great, Cass. That’s really great.”
It was great. It was more than great: it was a gift.
She missed him. The days, in Larry’s absence, seemed dull, lonelier than they had ever felt in the years in which she had been, by choice, so often alone.
She spent her time listening to music—not her own, not yet (the Washington concert had been enough, for now), but a selection of the new records she had been sent. Kim had, for many years, replied to all such missives with a brief, polite I’m afraid Cass is not available at the moment, but Cass had asked Kim to start passing the best of these albums on to her.
A pair of sisters from Oregon, pictured long-legged and tousle-haired, their layered, fluid harmonies betraying their love of Fleetwood Mac, the Beach Boys, and, yes, Cass herself, in her Huntress era.
A young singer-songwriter from south London, her clever, uncompromising songs swelling to full, Wall of Sound-style choruses inspired (so the woman’s accompanying letter said) by the call-and-response hymns that she had sung, throughout her childhood, in her parents’ church.
To these albums, and others, Cass listened, stretched out on the sofa in her living-room, drinking in the music; thinking of Larry, thinking of Anna, thinking of all the years that had, with such incomprehensible swiftness, rolled by and disappeared.
And thinking, too, of the music she might make now, of the future it might offer her. Her own music, made by and for nobody but herself—just as those earliest tunes had emerged, making their own stuttering journey from her mind, to her hands, to the guitar she hadn’t yet known how to play.
Larry had returned to Home Farm in October, and stayed six weeks.
A routine evolved. In the mornings, he took himself up to the top-floor art room to draw, and every other evening, he prepared dinner. He was an excellent cook—far better than Cass—addressing himself to each recipe with a skill and enthusiasm that re
minded Cass of her uncle John.
He suggested outings to London (gradually, he introduced her to Diana, and to a carefully curated selection of his friends), to Brighton, to Oxford. He joined her on the morning runs that she was, under Kim’s tutelage, beginning to enjoy. Usually, on their sorties across the Weald, he ran a few steps ahead of her, surprising her with his easy, long-limbed grace.
He walked with her through the village, down the High Street, into Sally Jarvis’s shop—he charmed even Sally, who had begun to order in a special selection of his favourite American foodstuffs (Oreos; Big Red chewing gum; Buffalo Trace bourbon)—and past a large thatched house on the green, a “For sale” sign standing to attention at the white picket fence.
“This,” Larry said as they passed, “is exactly what Americans think of when they think of England.” And from there, he’d drawn her on to the Royal Oak, where Cass had not set foot in years.
She had, she realised, never made any real attempt to be a part of village life, even when Anna had attended the local school. She had kept her distance from her neighbours not only because her fame, at one time, had required it, but because she had believed that distance to be necessary for Anna; that in sequestering her away at Home Farm, down that long drive, behind those high stone walls, she might keep her daughter safe. And yet she had not kept her safe; and so she wondered, now—aloud to Larry, too—whether she ought never to have tried to hide them both away. Ought not to have allowed her music to stand for her in the world, while she edged further and further into isolation.
Larry sipped his beer, then said, “You do know that it’s not your fault, what happened to Anna, don’t you?”
Greatest Hits Page 40