On the last day of the holidays, Lily helped Cass pack her bags, and carried them out to the car. On the drive home, she left the radio on, and they sang along to Lonnie Donegan and Elvis Presley and Ricky Valance as the hedgerows and the fields turned back into the high walls and dusty pavements of the city.
Outside the vicarage, Lily turned off the radio.
“You can come back whenever you like,” she said. “Anytime at all. You just telephone and I’ll come and get you right away. Your father, too, if we can persuade him. It’s not good for him, wrapping himself up in his work.”
Cass said nothing. There was a tight, uncomfortable feeling in her chest.
“Right.” Lily’s voice was falsely bright. “Let’s get you home, then.”
Inside, the vicarage hallway was cool and dim, and the only sound was the offbeat pulse of the grandfather clock.
“I’ve laid your tea in the front room,” Mrs. Souter said.
Lily thanked her, and removed her light summer coat. They went through to the front room, and Cass looked around her, and wondered how it was that she could feel like a guest in her own home. As her father came into the room—looking tired and drawn, but smiling when he saw her, coming over to clasp her in his arms—she realised that a part of her had remained in Atterley, with its red brick and its low, pitched roof, and its music climbing softly up the stairs to her room as darkness fell.
Her new name didn’t stick: not in the vicarage, where Mrs. Souter came every day to cook and clean, and to give Cass her tea.
She collected Cass from school now, too. Cass would come out into the playground, expecting to walk home with Irene—she’d been permitted to do that, most days, before her mother had left—and find Mrs. Souter waiting, thickly upholstered in her woollen greatcoat, her frizzy hair covered by that ugly yellow wrap.
“That’s quite enough of your silly business,” Mrs. Souter said a few days after Cass’s return from Atterley, when she refused to answer to “Maria.” “Your Christian name is Maria, and that’s what it will remain.”
Oh, how Cass hated Mrs. Souter, with her red chilblained hands and perpetual stench of bleach and carbolic soap. How she hated the way Mrs. Harrison, with her thin, wrinkled face and her white gloves, regarded her with a blend of pity and frustration that, to Cass, made the woman look as if she was struggling with trapped wind.
“You poor thing,” Mrs. Harrison said frequently. “You poor, poor little motherless thing.”
Cass, then, would grow quietly furious, wanting to shout back, “I’m not poor at all! She never cared about me. I don’t ever want to see her again!” It would seem miraculous to her, later, that she managed to restrain herself.
Irene she still loved, and Irene’s mother, and even doddery old Mrs. Dewson, whom she still visited for piano lessons, now the happiest hour in each passing week. And she loved her father, naturally; but the sense that had come over Cass as she sat with him and her aunt Lily in the front room—the unnerving feeling that she was watching her father disappear before her eyes, like a pencil drawing gradually erased—grew stronger over the next few years. In church on Sundays, Francis no longer walked tall and proud: he was a faint, shrunken man, a shadow of his former self. (Cass heard this phrase many times on the lips of the church ladies.) His voice no longer boomed and commanded from the pulpit; it lurched and fell away, and the worshippers grew bored, and shifted in their seats. Some of them even decided to take their communion elsewhere; by the year Cass turned twelve, she was growing accustomed to seeing half the church pews empty.
At home, too, Francis remained distant, remote. He no longer read to her—she was too old now, perhaps, for that, but still she longed for those sessions in his study, the book in his hand, the soporific rise and fall of her father’s voice. She was simply longing, in fact, for him—for the nearness of him, for their old familiar intimacy, and the comfort she might take in the knowledge that he, at least, loved her; and that she might offer him in turn. Margaret had left them both, had she not? And so why could he not turn, in the face of their shared loss, to his daughter, and draw her close?
During the evenings, then, and on long Saturday afternoons, she took to following her father from room to room—from the kitchen, where they sat in near silence, eating the meal Mrs. Souter had left out for them (the dining-room was hardly ever used any more), to the living-room, where Francis might sit for a half-hour with his Daily Telegraph and his mug of tea. Cass would take up a book, sit opposite him in her mother’s armchair, looking up at her father from time to time; and after a while, he would return her gaze, and gently, kindly, say, “Cassandra, haven’t you something to be getting on with? Homework, perhaps? I do hate to think of you getting bored.”
How close she came, so many times, to voicing the words that gushed and gathered in her throat. Why did she leave us? Why didn’t you try to stop her? Why did she leave me behind? What are we going to do now? But each time, fear gripped her—the fear that her father might collapse under the weight of them, and it would be her fault. Your father is in pieces, Lily had said. She saw him, now, as something fragile, in need of protection; and so she said nothing. With each dismissal, she slunk off upstairs to her room; and a few moments later, she would hear the door of her father’s study swinging shut.
He was spending much of his time in there, and she was at a loss to understand what he was doing—writing his sermons, she supposed, as he always had, though when he stood up in church, his thoughts, once so lucid and clear, seemed poorly organised, scattergun. And when she knocked on the study door—she would sometimes have to rap two or three times before he answered—she would often find her father sitting in silence behind his desk, simply staring into space.
There had still been no communication from Margaret other than the note she had found on her father’s desk, and Cass was beginning to doubt that there would ever be. But Lily telephoned once a fortnight or so, and wrote Cass letters, usually with a photograph enclosed: Louis, snoozing in the sun; the front façade of Atterley, rendered in stark monochrome; a blue-and-white china bowl on the kitchen table, sunlight seeming to pour into it like honey. Cass treasured these photographs, and lined them up along her bedroom mantelpiece.
She went back to Sussex for other holidays. Their first Christmas without Margaret, when her father came with her, and his presence there seemed jarring, like a character from one book stepping into the pages of another. And the following summer, though just for a week, as John and Lily were to spend the rest of August with friends in the south of France.
Each time she caught sight of Atterley—those high redbrick walls; those tall arrow-slit windows and round portholes—Cass felt the same rush of excitement, the same sense that here was light, and colour, and noise, while in the vicarage there was only sadness, and shadows, and silence.
On Cass’s thirteenth birthday, she received a package from Canada.
It was evening when she opened it. Irene’s mother had hosted a birthday tea at her house, with finger sandwiches and cake, and “Please Please Me” by the Beatles—Irene’s present to Cass—playing on repeat in the front room.
Her father had not been invited—it had been a girls’ party, really, though Irene’s brothers (grown tall and handsome by now) had hung around, causing much fluttering and preening. And when Cass arrived back at the vicarage, she found that another tea had been laid out. Sausage rolls, and salted crisps, and a Victoria sponge studded with thirteen silver candles.
“Thank you,” Cass said, wondering how on earth she would eat another thing. “But I had tea at Irene’s, Dad.”
“Well.” Francis was hovering in the doorway, holding a present wrapped in blue paper. “Perhaps you can manage a little something.”
She smiled: it was so much more than she had expected, and she would not let him down. “Of course, Dad. It looks wonderful.” She cut herself a slice of cake, and another for her
father, and then opened her gift: a handsome edition of Great Expectations, bound in tooled green leather. Inside, on the ornate frontispiece, Francis had written, For my daughter, Cassandra, on her thirteenth birthday. From her loving father.
“I know how much you enjoyed it when we read it together,” Francis said.
“I did, Dad.” Cass held the book for a moment, feeling its weight in her hands. “It’s really beautiful. Thank you.”
He disappeared out into the hallway for a moment, and returned carrying another package. “This came for you today, too.” The parcel was the rough size and shape of a shoebox; and indeed, when Cass opened it—discarded the brown paper wrapping, with its unfamiliar foreign stamps, and the address of the vicarage written in her mother’s looped, oversized handwriting—that was what she found: a dark blue shoebox, with the word “Eaton’s” emblazoned in gold letters across the top. Inside, there was a bottle of perfume; a jar of maple syrup; a sketchbook, its cover printed with the Canadian flag; and a white envelope. From the envelope, Cass drew out a letter, and a photograph. The photograph was of her mother and Len Steadman—Cass would not have recognised him had he not had his arm around Margaret—sitting on a bench on a broad, white-painted porch. In her mother’s arms, there was a small, blanket-wrapped bundle, its tiny hands just visible.
She turned over the photograph. On the back, Margaret had written, Your sister, Josephine. She looks so much like you did when you were born. Underneath, with a different pen—black ink, rather than blue—she had added, simply, I’m sorry, Maria. I really am.
Cass tried to picture her mother, pink-painted lips drawn taut as she resolved, at the last moment, to add that message—so small, so inadequate—and found that she could not quite summon the precise composition of her features.
She placed the photograph back inside the envelope, and the envelope inside the box, alongside the perfume, the syrup, the sketchpad. And then, quite calmly and clearly, she said to her father, “I don’t want any of this, Dad. Please throw it all away.”
After that, something changed in Cass; something inside her seemed to thicken and harden. She can remember it so clearly, even now, all these decades later: that new sense of distance; the way she began to see herself moving ghostlike through the days, impassive, impermeable.
She no longer answered to the name Maria. She would simply ignore Mrs. Souter, and Mrs. Harrison, and her teachers (she and Irene had gone up to the girls’ grammar school two years before) until they all eventually gave up, and were left with no choice but to adopt the name she wished to use.
She tugged her school skirt shorter, tucking the excess fabric up over the waistband. She practised applying kohl pencil in the loos—thickly, with an upturned flick at each corner—and learnt to smoke, and stopped bothering to listen in class. She perfected an expression of slow-lidded indifference, as if her teachers were of no more interest to her, now, than a chorus of yapping dogs.
She still applied herself in art lessons. Her art teacher, Mr. Evans—a sweet-natured, rather rumpled-looking man in his early thirties, with whom several of the pupils believed themselves to be in love—said she had “real potential,” and despite herself, she remained thirsty for his praise.
She continued to visit Mrs. Dewson for her piano lessons, and did not give up her place in the school choir. But she shifted her position to the back row, rolling her eyes as the choir mistress handed out the song sheets. A hymn, inevitably—Cass no longer found any comfort in the sacred songs of her childhood—or some crass reworking of a big-band number from thirty years before. “Chattanooga Choo-Choo”; “Blue Moon”; “Tea for Two.” How tedious it all was—how obvious. Nothing like the music she had begun to listen to in her room on the radio, after her father had gone to bed. Bob Dylan. The Beatles. The Kingsmen. That music—its beat, its urgency, its frenetic hue and cry—seeming to be the only thing that could stir her to feel anything at all.
In 1964, the year she turned fourteen, Cass began spending less time with Irene. A coven of girls in the year above invited her to join their lunchtime sessions smoking at the bus stop on the east side of the common. Chief among them was a slender, almond-eyed girl named Julia Adams, who wanted to be a model, and was rumoured to have already gone all the way.
It was with Julia that Cass met the boy they called Nanook of the North. (She never did learn why: his real name was Kevin Dowd.) He wore a green anorak with a fur-lined hood, and Hush Puppies, and rode a scooter to which he had attached sixteen wing mirrors, eight on each side, so that when Cass rode pillion, she could see sixteen fragmented reflections of herself, her long blonde hair flying out behind her.
Kevin was eighteen, and no longer went to school, so he could see no reason why Cass should keep going, either. He took her to rhythm-and-blues clubs—he disdained the rock bands she was beginning to love—where Cass drew from the palm of Kevin’s hand a series of small, round tabs he called “purple hearts,” allowing them to dissolve like sherbet on her tongue.
Some days, Kevin would come to meet her from school on his scooter, and she would feel the other girls staring as she slipped onto the back, her arms snaking around his chest. Then they would go somewhere and park up—Kevin still lived with his mother, and Cass certainly had no intention of taking him back to the vicarage—to kiss, and Cass would let him sneak his hands up under her school blouse, and feel the warmth of them spreading over her skin.
Did she desire him? She wasn’t sure; she had nothing against which to measure her feelings, other than the breathless, whispered accounts of sexual adventures offered by Julia and her coterie, much of which she was wise enough to recognise as pure fantasy. But she knew that Kevin desired her—that he loved her, even though he had not yet said as much—and the awareness of his desire was thrilling, dizzying, glorious; and she sought it, and kept the knowledge of it to herself, as a precious, secret thing that was hers, and hers alone.
One day in April, when they had parked the scooter in the middle of the common and were locked together against a tree, Kevin looked over at her father’s church, rising white and stately across the grass, and said, “Take me inside.”
Cass shook her head. “I can’t.”
Kevin’s mouth tasted of chewing-gum and cigarettes. Cupping her neck with his hand, he said, “Go on.”
Perhaps it was the pill that Kevin had pressed against her tongue an hour earlier that made her say yes: later, Cass would never quite be able to understand under what other circumstances she could possibly have decided to get back on Kevin’s scooter, let him bring it to a screeching halt in the churchyard, and then push open the heavy wooden door of the church.
Inside, all was coolness and silence. The fresh flowers, the polished wood, the dust motes floating on shards of coloured light were exactly as Cass had always known them; and a terrible sadness suddenly seemed to well up in her, and threaten to overflow.
“Come on,” Kevin said; he didn’t bother to lower his voice, and the sound of it echoed up towards the high vaulted roof. Then he drew her by the hand, down the nave, towards the altar, which was covered with the starched white cloth that Cass had, for so many years, watched her mother iron in the vestry. Now, she supposed, it was ironed by another woman’s hand.
It was there, in front of the altar, that Kevin suddenly clutched her to him, and covered her mouth with his. It was there that his hand began to creep up the inside of her bare leg. And it was there, just a few minutes later, that Mrs. Harrison found them, and all hell broke loose.
When Lily came to take Cass to Atterley a few weeks later, she said, “Got yourself in a right little pickle now, haven’t you, lovey?”
She was wearing her red lipstick, and cropped navy-blue trousers, and a white-and-blue striped top, like a Frenchman’s. She leant against the doorway, regarding Cass with an expression that was half angry and half amused. Cass loved her aunt in that moment, felt the full weight of that lov
e settle over her shoulders, though all she said was, “I know.”
Lily leant forward, took Cass’s hand in hers. “Well, I’m not saying I wasn’t rather taken aback. I mean, what could you possibly have been thinking?”
Her aunt’s hand was smooth, warm, her nails smooth slivers of scarlet lacquer.
“I wasn’t thinking, I suppose,” Cass said. “I just wanted to feel something. Something real.”
Lily sighed. “Too real by half, I fear. Now, let me have a word with Francis, and then you can help me load the car.”
Cass waited in her bedroom while her aunt and her father talked downstairs. She had packed all her things—her books, her clothes, her stack of sketchpads, her radio, and her collection of LPs—into two ancient trunks that Sam Cooper had dragged down from the attic.
She sat on her bed, stripped of its sheets, looking around at the bare shelves, the empty chest of drawers, and heard, quite suddenly, a melody, as clearly as if somebody were standing right beside her and singing into her ear. A high, pure tune, plain and unvarnished as a church pew. Something by Paul or John or Mick, perhaps, caught on the radio she still listened to most nights; or by one of the bands she’d danced to with Kevin in the clubs. Howlin’ Wolf. Georgie Fame. Booker T and the MGs.
She closed her eyes and listened. No. This tune was different. This tune was her own. There were no words to it, yet; she had the disconcerting feeling that if she only listened hard enough, the words would come.
But there would be no more time to listen, not then: her father was calling her downstairs. Lily made herself tactfully scarce as Cass stood before him in his study, where she had stood so many times over the last few weeks, as the lectures were issued, the plans set in place. Her father had been angry, of course, and she had understood his anger, had accepted it as her due—at least, it had occurred to her as she’d stood before him silently, chastened, her eyes downcast, he was feeling something. At least, now, there were words between them, even if these were not the words she had longed to hear.
Greatest Hits Page 6
