‘Who sent it?’ Cathy wondered, looking at the envelope. The postmark was smudged beyond interpretation.
‘Who cares? It’s amazing! That’s just what we need – if we can prove they want to take Jamie out of the country the whole situation changes. The judge will see what a shit Charlie really is. We can turn the tables on them!’ Monty sprang to her feet and seized the large-brimmed hat of apricot felt which she wore to the court in an attempt to hide her Jimi Hendrix explosion of hair and make her look sane and trustworthy.
Although Cathy now doubted that anything could prevail against the might of the Coseley clan, Monty was proved right. The actress gave evidence on their side and was as good as her word, sturdily accusing Charlie of drinking, drugging and beating her up. When Charlie at last gave evidence and was forced to admit that he planned to live abroad, the judge adjourned the case to his chambers. Charlie began to bluster, as he always did when caught out in deception, and the judge’s attitude towards Cathy became sympathetic.
In the small, oak-panelled room, the atmosphere grew tense as the lawyers worked out a compromise. Cathy listened intently and avoided Charlie’s eyes. She was too afraid to hope, but with every fibre of her being she willed the judge to give Jamie back to her.
‘I am inclined to think that the child will do best where he is, with his paternal grandparents.’ The judge at last looked up from his papers at Cathy, who at close quarters did not appear to him to have any potential for sadism or instability at all. She gasped with disappointment and he continued kindly, ‘But the court will be able to make another order in time, if you can demonstrate that your life is stable and that you are a fit person to care for your child.’
He gave Cathy access to her son every weekend and for a fortnight in the school holidays, and made an order for £12,000 in lump-sum alimony which, Cathy saw from her barrister’s face, was more than had been expected.
Charlie left the court hurriedly with Lisa on his arm.
‘The pigs. Charlie never wanted Jamie at all, or the money. It’s all that woman.’ Monty glared after the couple as they scurried into a taxi.
‘That’s about the size of it.’ Her lawyer took off his wig and smoothed his hair. ‘Men who argue about their children in court are usually arguing about money. No one has ever succeeded in putting a price on love.’
‘Charlie never cared about money.’ Cathy watched her exhusband’s taxi pull into the traffic in the Strand.
‘I expect he cares enough about spending it and the new wife won’t like that at all,’ the lawyer told her.
Her ex-father-in-law, Lord Shrewton, took her to lunch at his club the next week. Cathy had felt desolate and aimless for days and was grateful for his invitation.
‘I want you to know that you’ll always be welcome whenever you want to see little James,’ he said, his normal tone of dispassionate reason leaving no doubt that this was the complete truth. ‘And I’d also like to say that I don’t much admire the way my son has acted over this.’
‘I think he had a certain amount of pressure on him,’ Cathy chose her words with care.
‘That child-woman, yes. Very determined young lady. Of course, Charlie’s been bullied by women all his life.’ From the Marquess, this was an indiscretion. ‘Now, any idea what you’re going to do?’
Cathy shook her head, aware that she felt comfortable in this male world of scuffed leather, polished wood and serious talk. The bleak days of anxiety were over, Jamie’s future was settled and there was hope that she would one day be able to get him back. Cathy was also aware that by the time she had paid the final bill from Pasterns her money would be barely enough to buy a small apartment. She would need to work, and she had never earned a penny in her life before, or seriously considered doing so.
‘Why not come and work for me – for my company, rather? You can type a bit, can’t you?’ Lord Shrewton sounded sincere, almost eager to employ her.
‘I’ve probably forgotten everything I learned in college,’ Cathy admitted.
‘Soon pick it up. Nothing to it. You can start whenever you like – on Monday if it suits you?’ He was trying to atone for Charlie’s behaviour. She agreed. No one else was likely to employ her.
Her divorce settlement was just enough to buy a cramped dark apartment in a huge building south of the Thames in Battersea. Prince of Wales Drive was crammed with every type of person who would have preferred to live across the water in Chelsea but could not afford it; there were many new divorcees like Cathy, fitting furniture meant for more grandiose homes into the narrow rooms, making their new lives with out-of-work actors, secondhand car salesmen and threadbare ex-service families as their neighbours.
At the end of her first week at work, Monty came round with a bottle of claret which she had selected for its pretty label, and they celebrated Cathy’s independence. Monty poured the wine into two of the enormous glasses which had been a wedding present from one of Charlie’s hard-drinking friends.
‘So what’s it like?’ she asked. Cathy’s navy-blue suit looked businesslike and her shoulders, bony as they were, had lost the miserable droop which had crushed them in the past months.
‘It’s extremely boring,’ Cathy said, holding her glass to the light to appreciate the wine’s colour. ‘But I don’t care, I won’t be there long. I’ve made a decision, Monty. I’m going to make money, lots of it. I’m going to get Jamie back and I’m going to get so bloody rich I won’t need a penny from the Coseley trust. It’s what makes the world go around, money, and now I want my share.’
‘But how – what are you going to do?’
‘Do? I shall do whatever I have to do.’ Cathy kicked off her shoes and put her feet up on the end of the oatmeal tweed sofa that had been too small for Royal Avenue and was now too large for this poky apartment. She had no idea what she was going to do.
Chapter Sixteen
London in 1968 was the worst place in the world in which to fall out of love. The music from every boutique on the King’s Road chanted, ‘Love, love, love, love is all you need,’ at Monty as she made her way to Swallow’s office.
Everyone thought that at last there was enough of everything; as much money, freedom, food, drugs, music and love as could possibly be necessary to live a perfect life. The remorseless spirit of the city was sweetened with a sense of abundance. If there was enough for everyone, the right thing to do was to give it away. Kids boarded buses and handed out flowers to the startled, work-weary passengers, wishing them “love and peace”. Swallow’s clients seldom paid their bills. Girls with pre-Raphaelite hair set up free restaurants at every pop concert. People rolled joints and passed them out into the surrounding crowds to turn on strangers to the simple beauty of co-existence in a world of plenty.
Monty’s existence was neither simple nor beautiful, because she could not, no matter how she tried, reawaken her love for Simon. She threw herself into supporting Cathy, finding a purpose for her own life in saving her sister’s, but once Cathy was well again and working, Monty looked for something else to quieten her uneasy heart.
‘Why aren’t you playing with this group?’ Rosanna Emanuel asked her over lunch one day. She saw Rosanna less and less frequently; their meetings were usually disrupted by her noisy year-old son, and they never seemed to have very much to say to each other.
Monty shrugged. ‘What could I do? I’m not really a musician.’
‘Yes you are. You’re incredibly talented, Monty, you know you are. My parents still talk about you. My mother keeps trying to make me take up singing again, and every time I refuse she says, “Ah, if you had a voice like that Monty your gift would call you to use it.”’
Monty shrugged and dug her fork into her spaghetti alle vongole. ‘I only write songs to amuse myself, I’d be embarrassed to show them to anybody.’ What she meant was that she loved her music with a passion that she did not want to share.
‘There you are – that’s your gift calling you.’
‘My voice is us
eless now, anyway. I smoke too much.’
‘Excuses, excuses.’ Rosanna decided to drop the subject. She knew Monty well enough to appreciate that she would resist pressure with anger. ‘How’s the group doing, anyway?’
‘Not too bad. They play a couple of gigs a week now, and Simon’s getting bigger bookings. He’s decided to book some studio time and cut a demo disc.’
The studio had the latest four-track recording equipment, but the walls were cheaply soundproofed with eggboxes. Simon booked it for one night only – the nights were cheaper – and the first hour was wasted in an argument about what they were going to record. Simon wanted the A side to be ‘Don’t Go Now’, the best of their own songs. Rick complained that it was ‘doomy’and at last they compromised and decided on an old Chuck Berry number to back it.
At about 3 am, Monty was sitting beside the engineer, watching in fascination as he flipped switches and pulled knobs on the mixing deck, when Simon came out of the studio to get her.
‘We need a bit of piano,’ he told her, pulling her to her feet. ‘Come on, I’ll show you what to play.’
On the other side of the glass he sat her down at a scarred old upright piano and gave her a short phrase to play in the song’s middle section. They tried it a couple of times, then Rick suggested, ‘Do a bit more, Monty – play around with it a bit.’ She developed the phrase, and they nodded.
‘Maybe a spot of echo …’ the engineer reached forward for a knob at the far side of his desk.
‘Hear it through the cans,’ Simon gave her his headphones and she heard her music played back.
‘But it sounds awful,’ she protested, hating the bouncy, sentimental sound she had produced. The band shook their heads as one man.
‘No, no, it’s great,’ they reassured her, and Monty shrugged and smiled and played on to the end of the session, feeling embarrassed.
From then onwards they dragged her with them to every gig, sitting her down at a variety of beer-stained, cigarette-burned instruments where she tried her best to hide from the crowd out at the front of the stage. She did not like the packed, passive mass of people who stood waiting for the music to take them out of themselves, and began to take a perverse pleasure in playing with more and more aggression until she could see that she was getting through to them.
Rick insisted that she should sing, too. ‘It looks pathetic having someone on stage who isn’t singing with the others,’ he told her, refusing to argue. Monty sang, and loved it. The sound of her voice, rich, smoky and slightly ragged, complemented Rick’s harsh tone to perfection.
‘It’s good having you with us, Monty,’ Rick said one night when they were momentarily on their own by the van. ‘It makes things kind of smoother with Simon, you know? It’s easier to talk to him sometimes if you’re around.’
Before she could respond, Cy and Pete appeared, lugging one of the giant amps in its silver casing, and Rick ran over to help them; but Monty knew what he meant.
There was a permanent awkwardness between Simon and the others. Musically they were perfectly compatible, but socially the fact of Simon’s wealth and upbringing was a gulf between them. Simon never walked into a bar expecting to be thrown out or saw a policeman and expected to be stopped and searched.
Simon, like Monty, viewed the new era of love and peace with almost religious feeling as an opportunity to prove that human nature could change for the better. The boys, particularly Rick and Cy, saw it simply as a golden opportunity to score – sex, drugs, or whatever was on offer from people too stupid to look after their own interests. One summer weekend they staged what they called a love-in at their house.
‘It was great,’ Rick told them afterwards. ‘We just went out on the street and stopped everyone we fancied and told them to come and join us. We had about twenty chicks in there at one point.’
‘Yeah, it was great,’ Cy nodded, his long hair swaying. ‘Every time some chick decided to split she’d start looking for her clothes. ’Course, we’d hidden them, hadn’t we? Then she couldn’t find them, then somebody grabbed hold of her, then that was it for another couple of hours.’
Monty forced a smile. She and Simon still made love occasionally, but it was a hypocritical performance on her part. She had grown to detest everything about Simon, from the line of black hairs that grew down the nape of his neck to the way he always started his guitar solos the same way. She was profoundly shocked at the speed with which their love had degenerated to the kind of shell which she recognized as the embryo of her parents’icy sham of marriage. If love was the most important thing in the world, how could it just pop like a balloon, and vanish?
It was a punishing summer for all of them. Simon had twenty copies of their demo disc made, and sent them to every record company in London. There was no response whatsoever and so he patiently called every one of the executives to whom the disc had gone and swallowed dismissal, condescension and rejection with grim good humour as he tried and failed to make them come to hear the band. Monty spent more and more time with the others. The band were like a tribe now, always together, and it was somehow more tactful to go to Rick’s filthy room than to invite the boys to Simon’s luxurious apartment.
‘I can’t bear to listen to him,’ she told Rick. ‘He’s so patient and so polite always, and they’re such motherfuckers …’
‘Yeah. He’s a trier, old Simon.’ Rick tipped sugar into his coffee and stirred it, looking at Monty at length while she, unaware of him, stared at the grimy, rain-streaked window.
The Juice played one or two gigs a week all through the winter, acquiring a group of supporters who crowded to the front of the stage to freak out in Simon’s solos or roar at Rick as he baited them. Monty grew more confident on the stage as she realized people liked her; she even had a few fans who were specially her own, who sometimes left flowers on her piano or waited to talk to her at the end of the set.
Although the demo disc was a failure, the Juice’s following grew and every call Simon made to book the band into a club was a little easier.
‘We’re getting through,’ Simon told them with reassurance.
‘Yeah, but not fast enough. I don’t wanna die before I cut my first album,’ Cy snarled, spitting out of the van window for emphasis.
Towards the end of the following summer, word went round the pubs in London that there was to be a pop festival on the Isle of Wight, an idyllic fragment of farmland off the south coast of England, a white-cliffed holiday paradise. The summer had seen one or two small festivals already; a few thousand people had discovered the pleasure of sitting together peacefully under the stars to listen to music.
Simon abruptly cancelled the Juice’s bookings for the weekend and told them, ‘We’re going to the Isle of Wight for our holidays – we deserve it.’
From the outset the excursion was not the carefree picnic Simon intended it to be. Cy grumbled ceaselessly in the van. ‘Will somebody tell me why we’re going to hear a lot of psychedelic garbage with this weekend hippy instead of staying in London to get smashed?’ he whined. On the ferry to the island, he found a bottle of whisky and drank most of it in forty minutes.
As they drove to the festival site he suddenly flung open the van door and started throwing out everything he could reach, shouting, ‘Free, free!’ to the amused villagers at the roadside.
The stage had been erected at the focal point of a natural amphitheatre of green fields, behind which the sea gleamed in the sunlight like polished steel. The narrow lanes, their hedges gay with yellow toadflax and late foxgloves, were crowded with people who walked without haste to the concert ground to merge with the huge carpet of humanity.
Monty felt obscurely hopeful in the middle of the amiable crowd. Her blood tingled in her veins with a premonition of adventure, and as soon as she could she escaped from the ominous atmosphere around Simon and spent a few hours with a group of French hippies who had erected a Red Indian tepee at the edge of the site. They had expensive clothes and some powerful
black hash. The children twined starry white camomile flowers in her hair and one of the women pulled off Monty’s T-shirt with distaste and gave her an embroidered voile jacket which tied provocatively under her breasts.
‘There you are,’ she heard Rick’s voice in the crowd as the evening star was beginning to shine through the early shades of dusk. ‘Where’ve you been? Simon’s been going frantic.’
‘It’s so beautiful here – I couldn’t stand the hassles any more,’ she told him, feeling dreamy from the drugs. ‘It’s so heavy around Simon at the moment. It really brings me down. Where’ve you been?’
‘Seeing the future’ – he jerked his thumb to the stage where a boy in a spangled caftan with a cloud of dark curls was singing something about children with stars in their hair – ‘and I don’t like it.’
They walked uphill in companionable silence, leaving the huge, peaceful crowd below them. At length they came to the cliff-edge and sat down on the springy turf. The stage was a tiny illuminated picture in the distance, but the sound from the vast banks of speakers floated up to them clearly.
‘Look, the chopper!’ Rick pointed to a helicopter which floated like a glowing spark over the sea. ‘They said the Airplane would be flying in from a yacht. That must be them.’ They watched as the helicopter hovered at the rear of the stage, bringing in Jefferson Airplane, the headline band. It set down and became invisible as its lights were extinguished.
‘That’s what I want. I want to top the bill, make a million and fly in by helicopter, not be down here, grovelling around in shit.’ Rick stubbed his cigarette out in a rabbit hole. ‘You know that, don’t you? I want it all. I’m hungry, Monty, we’re all hungry. That’s what all the trouble’s about.’
‘Simon’s not hungry,’ she said, lying back and looking up at the indigo sky.
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