The Singer

by Cathi Unsworth

  ‘Yeah, this a great service,’ I said. ‘Much better than the tube.’

  ‘Aye,’ he nodded, leading the way out to the car park. ‘We don’t miss any of that shite out here. Beautiful day, eh?’

  Allie had one of those sleek four-by-four jeeps, also in black, which he unlocked with the remote control on his keys, stashing his groceries in the back before opening the passenger door for me.

  ‘Nice,’ I said, appraising the vehicle.

  ‘It helps with the kids I teach, you know,’ he said and winked. ‘They think I’m Dr Dre drivin’ this. Helps with my own kids an’ all. But unlike the housewives of Chelsea we actually do need an off-road vehicle where we are. As you’ll see.’ He spun us niftily out of the car park and out of the tiny city.

  ‘You wouldn’t think,’ he said, as we stopped at a crossroads, ‘that this was once the busiest road in Britain.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t.’ I took in the smart shops and comfortable-looking pubs, the well-heeled old market town ambience.

  ‘Aye. This used to be Watling Street, the main road to London.’ Allie accelerated away, down the hill. ‘It’s still the same road as the Romans built, really. This ends up being Edgware Road.’

  ‘How long have you lived here?’

  ‘Just over twenty years.’

  We drove on winding lanes past rows of beautiful old white houses with thatched roofs and leaded windows. I had no idea this place was so genuinely ancient and well preserved. It made Guildford look positively nouveau riche.

  ‘Looks like a great place to live,’ I said, thinking, Mother missed a trick here.

  ‘Aye, we took a chance but I wouldnae change a thing. My wife, Helen, she had a really successful fashion business, that was what gave us the money to do it. Mind you, if we were in the same position now, we’d probably have to move back to Scotland to get what we’ve got here.’

  We’d left the city and were travelling down green, leafy roads, the verges white with the froth of cow parsley, mirages forming in the bumps on the tarmac ahead, shimmering in the midday sun. It gave me a sudden pang for the Surrey Downs and childhood days spent wandering with Dad through the woods while Mother cast aspersions at the WI fête. It was the only time the old boy had ever come alive, pointing out the various species of trees and flowers, birds and creatures to me.

  My dad was a lot older than all my friends’ parents. He had actually fought in the Second World War and whatever he had seen there, he still couldn’t bring himself to talk about it. The Downs were his solace, I think, that perfect piece of England that had never changed and represented everything he held dear. The only story he ever told me about that time in his life was the day that he was demobbed and was so happy to be free that he’d walked all the way back from the outskirts of London, over twenty miles, through the night. As the dawn came up he had reached the ridge of the Downs that overlooked Guildford, and as he stopped to drink in the splendour of that dawning day, in a clearing he had seen a group of weasels, dancing round in a circle.

  ‘It was the most incredible thing,’ his voice was full of wonder and his eyes took on a faraway gleam when he recounted the tale. But I could never understand what had so fascinated him. It was as if he had seen Blake’s angels nesting in a tree, not a bunch of frolicking rodents. But then, I had never been one for bucolic bliss; I had escaped to the city as fast as I possibly could. Now, watching the expression of pride on Allie’s face as he turned his jeep down a rutted side road, all but hidden by the tall hedgerows from the B-road we’d just been travelling down, I got the sense he would have recognised the old man’s feelings.

  And it made me feel sad, wondering if I would ever know what it was like to be a father.

  ‘This was all my wife’s idea really,’ Allie was saying, as we bumped our way towards a white house with a red roof, surrounded by fields. ‘See, her parents had a place like this, it’s kind of how she grew up, she was always a country girl at heart. When she gave up the fashion business she wanted to start something else that was creative in a different way. We couldnae manage a lot of land, so we specialised in organic fruit, veg and poultry. I reckon only Helen and Prince Charles had the same idea back then. And it was bloody hard work, the first ten years, right enough. But it’s all paid off now…’

  We rumbled past the house to the end of a drive, where an old barn had been converted into a garage. Beyond was an orchard full of fruit trees, where little brown and black hens wandered around, pecking at the grass.

  I don’t think I would have made the same trade as Allie had. But he was certainly the healthiest looking ex-punk I had ever met.

  ‘It’s great,’ I enthused. ‘So do you work the land as well as your teaching job?’

  ‘I dunnae have to now.’ Allie led me towards the back door of his house. ‘We’re making enough money for Helen to hire a manager and she and the kids do the rest. I did miss my music…’ He stopped for a moment, looked down at the ground and then back up, towards the horizon. ‘So it was quite nice to get into teaching it. You know. Pass on a few old tricks to a new generation.’

  We had reached the back door by now and after the brightness of the sun, it seemed impossibly dark and gloomy in there.

  ‘Helen?’ called Allie.

  I heard a distant voice calling back, and after a couple of minutes, a woman appeared. She was almost as tall as he was, and strong-looking too, with long ginger hair tied back in a ponytail, an unmade-up face with wire rim specs perched on a little nose, and kind hazel eyes, flecked with green.

  ‘Hello there,’ she extended an arm that had round, hard, bicep muscles and gripped me in a handshake as firm as a man’s.

  ‘Go on out and have some lunch,’ she said. ‘It’s all ready. I’ll be with you in a minute.’

  They’d made a patio area in the sun-trap outside the back of the house, surrounded by trellises twined around with grapes, passion fruit and honeysuckle that filled the air with a heady aroma. There were sturdy wooden chairs around a table and a canopy for shade, a tinkling fountain rising out of a little round pond. It almost felt like we were in the Mediterranean.

  Such a bright, homely place for such a dark story to unfurl.

  Once we had got settled with Helen’s mounds of bread, cheese, chutneys, hams, scones and cupcakes, she came from the kitchen to join us. The small talk began to falter after we’d eaten as much as we could and it didn’t seem like she was going to drift off and leave us to talk about old times. In fact, as soon as I broached the subject, Helen took hold of Allie’s hand and they exchanged meaningful glances.

  ‘Before we start,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘I have to level with you, Eddie. When Ray called us up, I wasnae really sure about digging up the past. We’ve had our fifteen minutes and there’s no way either of us wants to go back to that life…’

  ‘But I persuaded him to,’ Helen cut in. ‘Because of Sylvana.’

  She fixed me with a steely gaze, although her voice remained amiable.

  ‘Ray said that it was Gavin Granger who got you interested in this, so I suppose you have been talking to all his friends about her?’

  I nodded.

  ‘In which case, I bet nobody’s had a good word to say, have they?’

  ‘Er, not many of them, no.’

  Helen grimaced and shook her head. ‘They’re all such bloody lying bastards.’

  The venom with which she spat those words out was quite alarming.

  ‘Sylvana never did anything to anyone, it was everyone who did everything to her. Do you know, I thought about her when Princess Diana went into that wall in Paris. I thought, are you happy now, you bastards? Got what you wanted now she’s dead? It’s the same misogyny that’s at the core of the music business. If you’re beautiful and perceived to have come from a privileged background, men want to destroy you. That’s all they could say about Sylvie, that she was a spoilt Jewish princess. Never mind her talent, never mind the fact her parents actually treated her like shit, never mind t
hat she was as fragile as glass. No, the fact she was so naturally gifted just made them want to stick the boot in still harder. Then it becomes Vince Smith was a genius and she ruined him.’

  I expected to see smoke coming out of her ears at any minute, or for a black cloud to suddenly sail over the sun and send a lightning bolt down to fry my sorry male arse. Helen was fucking scary.

  ‘What bollocks!’ she went on. ‘Sylvana sold thousands of records, hundreds of people came to see her gigs. Blood Truth barely dented the bottom of the indie charts. If anyone ruined anyone else’s career, it was him, not her.’

  Allie put a hand on his wife’s back, muttered: ‘Are you sure about this, hen?’

  ‘Yes, I bloody well am,’ she snapped. ‘Get the tape recorder out, Eddie. If this is going on the permanent record, I want you to know the truth. You don’t have to say anything, Allie. But I do. She was my friend.’

  Meekly, I complied.

  ‘Right,’ she said, as soon as I had switched it on. ‘This is what you need to know…’

  It ended up being Allie who went back and forth from the kitchen, taking in the plates, bringing fresh drinks and disappearing to answer the phone when it rang. Helen had a lot to let out. Long shadows were cast across the lawn and the sun was turning everything that mellow gold of early evening by the time she was finished.

  Thankfully, she hadn’t poisoned any of those scones. I slowly realised that the vitriol of her initial outburst wasn’t actually meant personally. Although good luck to Gavin, Tony or Steve if they ever crossed her path again.

  According to Helen, Sylvana had been the innocent victim of a series of abusers. The picture she painted was so vastly different from everything else I’d been told that I couldn’t work out why people had hated her so much. Especially Tony Stevens. He’d made out she was nothing but a gold-digging groupie, when it seemed obvious she was nothing of the sort.

  ‘It was almost as if she had the words “kick here” painted on her forehead in some kind of invisible ink that only predators could read. Robin was the worst,’ Helen said, ‘which is why Allie hates to talk about it. They were childhood friends and Allie had always protected him – like all bullies, he was bullied himself first, of course. I understand that Robin had a terrible childhood. His father was a wife-beater and probably worse and the boys left Scotland thanks to him. Robin’s father had put him in hospital. He broke his jaw. But the terrible thing was, it was to do with him stalking a girl and his behaviour towards women got worse, not better. I suppose, what he saw his dad do, he ended up doing. Only much more sneakily, nastily. I’ve read a lot about domestic violence since then and he followed all the classic patterns. But he never let anything show. She never had black eyes or anything.’

  I got the cold chills then, thinking of what he might have done to Louise. I thought about telling Helen about my meeting with the bastard, but I didn’t want to stop her flow.

  ‘And the thing that still gives me sleepless nights,’ she went on, ‘was that he was doing it to her for years, for nearly the whole time they were together. But she never told me…’ Her voice faltered and she stared for a moment into the distance, the corner of her mouth wobbling. ‘She never told me until right near the end, the last tour they ever went on. And I tried, I really tried to get her out of it as soon as I knew. But it all went horribly wrong…’

  Helen took off her glasses and picked up a napkin to dab her eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter how many times I go through this in my head, I still feel that I failed her.’

  As if by telepathy, Allie came back outside then, sat back down beside her with his big, muscled arm around her shoulder. ‘Where are you up to?’ he asked.

  ‘New Year’s Eve,’ she replied.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Allie sadly. ‘All the skeletons came tumbling outae the cupboard that night, eh?’ He looked at me. ‘I didnae know it then, but Helen and Sylvana had cooked up this plan to get her out of the country on New Year’s Day, 1981. But we got invited to this big posh party at Tony Stevens’s house on New Year’s Eve and everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong.’

  I felt an excited prickling, like hairs standing up on the back of my neck. I just knew Allie was about to make some vital connections, and despite his obvious discomfort and Helen’s distress, I couldn’t wait to hear it.

  I remembered what Tony Stevens had told me back in January: ‘Other people will probably tell you, continue to proliferate that tall story about them falling in love with each other over the sausage rolls at my Christmas party…’

  Yeah, right, I thought. Let’s have it.

  ‘We’d not really met Stevens before,’ Allie continued. ‘But Donna, our manager, knew him really well and she’d brought him to our gig at the Rainbow a few nights before, with a couple of guys from Blood Truth, Lynton and Steve. It was the biggest gig we’d ever done and it had sold out an’ all. I was on top of the world that night. See, I don’t know if Helen told you, but that was the place that we met.’

  Helen smiled lovingly at him as she put her glasses back on.

  ‘Anyhow, we’s all in high spirits, getting stuck into the rider and that, and at the end of the after-show party, he just invited us all. We thought, great, we’d nae proper plans of our own. So we all rolled up at his great big house in Little Venice, couldnae believe our eyes. The fuckin’ guy was loaded all right, it was like a house of dreams with his own private recordin’ studio in the basement. So naturally, us men end up down there, with some German electrobop guys, Ludwig and Leo, I think they were called, messing about with all these top of the range synths and sequencers. After a couplae hours of this, I thought, shite, where’s my wife, she might be fed up of us ignoring her. So I went looking for her…’

  Helen gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Meanwhile, I was on Sylvie patrol. Our plan was to get Robin as drunk as possible so we could get to the airport in the morning while he slept it all off. She was so scared of him that I’d had to go to her flat while they were on tour, get her passport and everything and buy her a suitcase full of clothes and stuff to take away with her. She was terrified that if Robin saw a single thing out of place when they got back, he’d realise what she was doing. She was terrified that night too. I think as the hours went by, she was getting more and more afraid, either of actually going through with it, or getting caught out in the process. So I was watching her like a hawk, trying to make sure she didn’t get pissed. Not that she was much of a boozer, but when she was unhappy, she tended to drink herself into a stupor, and I really think she was in that frame of mind that night. Silly girl was scared of hurting Robin’s feelings, scared of hurting my feelings, scared of doing anything to get herself out of the situation.’

  ‘So, unware of any of this, I come up and drag Helen off to the basement to show her all this amazin’ stuff we’d been doing with these Germans,’ said Allie.

  ‘And I spent half an hour trying to get back upstairs again,’ Helen said. ‘I mean, I had left her talking to that Lynton guy from Blood Truth, we both liked him, so I thought she was safe enough. You know, so long as Robin didn’t see them together. But I just had this awful feeling that if I left her, I would never see her again. And then, when I finally got back to the kitchen, there was Lynton standing there with two drinks in his hands and she’d disappeared. I started to panic then and he was trying to calm me down, saying she’d probably just gone to the loo or something else entirely logical but I just knew she’d gone, I just knew it. And then they started counting down to midnight, you know, the whole rest of the house partying away.’ She shuddered. ‘Then the next thing I knew, bloody Donna came running round the corner screaming blue murder at me and trying to beat me up. Only she missed and sent poor old Lynton flying across the room.’

  ‘Blimey.’ I tried to picture the scene. Obviously Ray hadn’t been exaggerating about his ex. ‘What was wrong with her?’

  Allie and Helen exchanged glances.

  ‘Well, what we didn’t know
was Donna had been having this secret affair with Vince Smith for months. And she saw Sylvie leaving the party with him about five minutes before I’d got back to the kitchen. Whatever it was that had been going on between them, the sight of him and Sylvie together sent her totally round the bend. Of course, Sylvie would have been completely oblivious and I don’t even know if she ever found out about it, I’m sure he didn’t tell her. No one knew until then. But Donna had always hated Sylvie anyway. The very first moment we met her she tipped a pint of beer over Sylvie’s head to try and start a fight, but I stepped in and she didn’t have the guts to take me on.’

  I wasn’t surprised about that. Helen looked like she could punch out an ox.

  ‘Then, as soon as she found out that Sylvie was an heiress, she was bloody all over her, pretending to be her best friend. I tried to get rid of her for nearly two years, I knew she was bad news; all she ever wanted to do was social climb her way to the top. But as soon as she started seeing Ray Spencer and found a way of using him to get a record company all set up, there was nothing I could do. We were stuck with her. But she’d always kept her distance with me; she knew I didn’t trust her as far as I could throw her. Until that night.’

  ‘Aye,’ Allie nodded. ‘But it gets worse. That whole scene kicked off in Stevens’s kitchen. It took three guys to get her off Helen and poor old Lynton was knocked unconscious. So old Stevens runs in and finds this whole bloody scene ruining his la-di-da party and he hits the roof too.’

  ‘My God.’ Helen shook her head. ‘He got her in an armlock and pulled her out of there, still kicking and screaming. I don’t know if he locked her in a padded cell or threw her back in the street or what, but he got rid of her somehow. Of course, everyone who is anyone was there, looking at all this chaos, taking it down. Must have embarrassed the hell out of him. Meanwhile, someone called an ambulance for Lynton, and there were a lot of people in that house that probably assumed the police would be coming too, so half the people there just scarpered. It was almost funny the way they swarmed out of there. So much for Happy New Year.’