Greatest Hits

by Laura Barnett

  “Really?” Linda’s eyes widened, impressed; and then a pretty blonde girl whose name Cass didn’t yet know, but who wore a shiny red badge—“Class prefect”—pinned prominently on her blazer lapel, leant over and put a finger to her lips. Linda met Cass’s eye, and stifled a giggle; and then the hymn started—“Dear Lord and Father of Mankind”—and it was all so familiar, and yet so different, that Cass knew that it was going to be all right.

  By the spring of 1967, when Cass turned seventeen, she had grown her hair long—so long it almost reached her waist, and she usually wore it, Rapunzel-like, in a long plait, coiled across her left shoulder—and learnt, after many failed attempts in her bedroom mirror, to paint her lips red.

  She had acquired ten O-levels—six of them at grade A—and was taking music, English, and art at A-level, with the aim of applying to art school.

  “You should really take a humanities subject,” her form tutor had said after Cass had announced her choices. “History or geography. You’re narrowing your options.”

  But Lily had shaken her head, and told her niece to take no notice. “Choose the subjects you’re really passionate about, Cass. The art schools won’t care a jot whether you’ve taken history or geography or astrophysics if they can see you’re any good. And you are good.”

  Cass could, by now, speak passable French—decent enough to make stilted conversation with the pair of local boys she and Linda had sneaked out of their host families’ homes to meet each evening during their fourth-year exchange visit to Amiens. She had read four Shakespeare plays in their entirety, and several sonnets; a stack of novels by Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, and Graham Greene; and, on her aunt’s advice, Bonjour Tristesse (in translation: her French didn’t stretch quite that far). And she had acquired a boyfriend, Stephen Lomax, who was in the upper sixth at the boys’ grammar, and had the pale, consumptive look of a Romantic poet.

  They had met the previous summer, on a camping trip to Chanctonbury Ring. Linda and Cass had begun to spend a good deal of time with Linda’s older brother, James, owing to the fact that he was permitted to drive their parents’ car, and was their most accessible conduit to the other grammar-school boys. James had heard that Chanctonbury, once an ancient burial ground, was haunted—possibly even by the devil—and had got it into his head that he wanted to spend a night there. With a reluctance they did their best to conceal, Linda and Cass had agreed to go with him, on the condition that he bring along his best-looking friends. Stephen Lomax was one of these friends; and with his black eyes, and his long brown hair just inching over the collar of his jacket, Cass had to admit that James had been true to his word.

  Stephen had kissed her as the sun rose, after a night that had begun with the boys running seven times anti-clockwise round the tall circle of beech trees, summoning the devil. Lucifer had not chosen to respond; but an hour or so after they’d all bedded down—the moon already high and full and seeping down through the densely knitted branches—they’d been woken by a series of high-pitched shrieks that nobody would admit to having made. The sound—unearthly, searing—had raised goosebumps on Cass’s skin, and Stephen, taking advantage of the general hysteria, had shifted over to her in his sleeping bag, rolled a joint with swift, practised fingers, and offered her a smoke. Hours later, when he’d reached for her in the cool bluish morning light, Cass had tasted the grass on his breath, and her own, as they kissed.

  Stephen’s interests lay in science—he’d won the school founders’ prize for biology four years in a row, and he planned to become a biomedical scientist, specialising in haematology. But he loved music, too—he worshipped the Byrds, Pink Floyd and a new band from San Francisco called Jefferson Airplane, whose debut LP he had managed to acquire, on import, through a record dealer in Brighton. His intention, after A-levels, was to apply to Stanford, and immerse himself in the California scene.

  Stephen’s parents disapproved—they couldn’t see what on earth was wrong with Oxford or Cambridge—but Lily and John considered his plans eminently sensible.

  “It’s all happening over there, Stephen,” John said. “Why not go and be a part of it?”

  “Your aunt and uncle are really something,” Stephen said later as they lay on her narrow bed. (Lily and John didn’t mind the two of them spending long periods upstairs, either, as long as they were, in Lily’s words, “careful, responsible, and respectful. After all,” her aunt had added the first time they’d discussed the matter, “I’d rather you were here with him than off who knows where. Just don’t, for God’s sake, tell your father.”)

  “They are, aren’t they?” Cass said, and she fitted her hip to his, and ran her hand down the narrow expanse of Stephen’s back, feeling the sharp ridge of his spine beneath her hand.

  Stephen was the only person—apart from Linda, Lily, and John—for whom Cass would play her guitar.

  She still spent hours practising, her long fingers moving easily now over the fretboard and strings. And she had begun to write songs of her own—songs that seemed to pour from her, unbidden and unstoppable, in the time it took to race home to her guitar and transfer to her hands the music only her mind could hear.

  Most of these songs, she knew, were no good—piteous, embryonic things that, after emerging one day in a rush of enthusiasm, would, by the next, have lost their lustre and be set aside. But there were a few—perhaps three or four, in all—about which she felt differently; moments in which the words and the music seemed to have caught hold of each other, and circled, hand in hand, around a thought she wouldn’t quite understand until the song was finished. And then, playing the song back to herself, she would recognise it, and think, Yes—that’s right. That’s exactly what I meant to say.

  But Cass still thought of her playing as a private thing: too intimate, somehow, to expose to others’ eyes and ears. She did not perform at school—except in her music examinations, which she completed on the elderly piano in the hall—or at the parties she went to with Linda and Stephen and their other friends, when an acoustic guitar would at some point be produced for chorused renditions of “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

  But for Lily and John, Cass would, when the mood took her, play; and for Linda, sometimes; and, now, for Stephen. And Stephen, when she played, would watch her, a small, stoned smile lifting the corners of his lips.

  “That’s really special, Cass,” he’d say when the last chord had died away. “You should record your songs. I could play them to my guy in Brighton. He knows everybody. He could send them to a label.”

  She would shake her head. “No. God, Stephen—I get scared enough just playing for you. How could I ever play in front of anyone else?”

  He was kind to her, Stephen: kind, and considerate, and careful. Never more so than the weekend in the autumn of 1966, when Lily had asked them both to come downstairs, made a pot of her mint tea, and told Cass that she had some news. Her father had failed to turn up to the church to celebrate the previous weekend’s Eucharist. He insisted he had simply mixed up the days, been sure it was Saturday, not Sunday—an easy mistake; surely anyone could make it? The bishop, however, was unconvinced. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, and there had been complaints—incoherent sermons, lateness, an overall sense, as one of the lay clergy had put it, that Reverend Wheeler was not fully present. It had been decided that it might be better for all concerned—for the parish, whose number of regular worshippers was still dwindling; for Francis himself—if he took early retirement.

  Francis was to move, Lily told Cass, to a flat in Worthing—a nice little block, church-run, with a warden to keep an eye on things, and only a short distance from the sea. “I’m also,” Lily said, “going to make sure he sees a doctor. As you know, your father hasn’t been himself for a long time, but this feels like more than that. We’ll wait to see what the doctor says, but I am concerned about him, Cass, and I feel you are old enough to know.”<
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  She had nodded, held Stephen’s hand. Upstairs in her room, she had thrown herself onto her bed, sobbing for her father—for his humiliation, for his loss and her own, and for her fear of what might lie ahead. Stephen had eased her head into his lap, stroked her hair, and said, “Don’t cry, Cass. Don’t cry. I’m here. I’ll always be here.”

  And so, the spring Cass turned seventeen, she was starting to feel that she might very well be falling in love with Stephen Lomax. And then, one evening as that spring was just starting to slip into summer, Ivor Tait walked into the garden at Atterley, and she realised that she knew nothing about love at all.

  It began with a man named Jonah Hills, who arrived at Atterley one afternoon unannounced, a knapsack slung across his right shoulder, and a guitar—long-necked, with a steel plate covering its sound hole, and two cross-hatched metal circles hovering above like a pair of unseeing eyes—hanging from his left.

  It was half-past four; both John and Lily were out at work, and Cass was only just home from school. Stephen had driven her home; he had his own car now, a battered Vauxhall Cresta that frequently broke down, but had managed to cough and splutter its way along the narrow country lanes to Atterley. He’d wanted to come in, but she had homework to do—an essay on Piers Plowman, already several days overdue—and she could feel the faint, hovering presentiment of a song.

  Cass had just poured herself a glass of lemonade—it was one of the first warm evenings of the year—and was sitting out on the terrace, considering this as yet formless, tuneless song, when the man appeared: a looming presence, bearded and ancient, moving across the gravel path towards her.

  She stood up, trying not to give the impression that she was alarmed. As he came closer, she saw that the man was not as old as he’d seemed: his beard was dark, with no trace of grey, and the deep lines across his face that she’d taken for wrinkles were, in fact, dirt. He stopped a few feet away from her, allowed his knapsack to swing heavily to the ground, and smiled.

  “Hey there,” he said. He was American, and spoke with a deep, rounded drawl. “This John and Lily’s place? They around?” She relaxed a little: if he knew John and Lily, he was probably not, on balance, planning to rob them. “Yes. I mean, yes, this is their place.”

  The man nodded, still smiling, and drew his guitar from his shoulder. “Back’s killing me,” he said. “Walked all the way from Brighton.”

  She stared at the instrument, with its steel embellishments. Its strings, she noted, were raised higher on the fretboard than the strings on her own guitar.

  “That’s a long way to walk,” she said. He followed her gaze.

  “You play?”

  After a second’s hesitation, she nodded.

  “Well, then, missy,” he said, “why don’t you let me get cleaned up, and then maybe we can have ourselves a little jam?”

  Upstairs in the bathroom, she set the hot water to run, poured in a little of Lily’s bath salts (how long had it been since the man last had a wash?), and then realised that she hadn’t even thought to ask his name.

  She peered out of the little porthole window that overlooked the front terrace. He was sitting where she’d left him, drawing a leather pouch of tobacco from his pocket. He certainly seemed harmless enough—but still, she went up to John’s study under the eaves, found the number for his London office on a sheaf of headed notepaper, and dialled it into the phone. His secretary, June, answered, and said her uncle was out on a site visit all afternoon. Back in the bathroom, Cass glanced out of the window again, wondering what she ought to do; and then she saw Lily’s little car coming up the driveway.

  That night, Lily made one of the spiced, fragrant casseroles she called tagines, and they sat out on the terrace to eat, just warm enough in the blankets John had brought out from the living-room, the garden lit by candles. Cass learnt that Jonah Hills was from a town called Clarksdale, Mississippi; that he had spent a good portion of his late parents’ life savings on the boat fare to England, where he’d been living for the last year, playing around London bars and clubs; and that it was in one such club, a few months ago, that he had first met Lily and John, and they had issued him with an open invitation to visit Atterley.

  Cleaned up, wearing one of John’s loose-collared shirts, his black curls drying from his bath, Jonah had an easy, weathered handsomeness that rendered Cass uncustomarily shy: she barely spoke through dinner, sipping her glass of red wine and trying as hard as she could not to be caught in the act of staring.

  After dinner, John rolled a joint, and Jonah took up his guitar, and from it he drew a sliding, plangent wail, deep-bellied and resonant, over which his voice swooped and plummeted, raising each tiny hair on Cass’s arm. When he finished, she found herself still quite unable to speak. Then Jonah said, “Well, now it’s your turn, missy.”

  And so, emboldened by the wine and the hazy light of the candles, she played for him: first “The Trees They Do Grow High,” which she loved, and which she had transposed to a new tuning—one that, to her ear, was more sinister, more unsettling, than the version she had learnt from Lily’s Joan Baez LP. And then, not pausing for applause or to allow her nerves to reassert themselves, the song she had begun writing the previous year, and that, secretly, she was proudest of: “Common Ground.”

  When the performance was over, Cass sat with her eyes closed, not daring to open them. There was a brief silence, and then a chorus of cheers. When she allowed herself to look at Jonah, she saw that he was grinning, displaying a set of only slightly yellowed teeth.

  “My, my,” he said, taking the joint from Lily’s outstretched hand, “if we aren’t in the blessed presence of Miss Joan Baez.”

  Cass smiled and looked down at her hands. Jonah leant towards her, the tip of the joint glowing amber in the semi-darkness. “I’m not messing, Cass. We need to get you out there. Folks need to hear this. They’re going to love what you do.”

  “That’s what we’ve been telling her,” Lily said. “But she’s shy, you know. Doesn’t really like playing in public.”

  Jonah, still staring at Cass—his dark eyes fierce in the candlelight—said, “Plenty folks feel that way. Just got to find a way through it—or find someone to share that fear with you.” He drew deeply on the joint, then handed it back to Lily. “I know a guy—a great musician—looking for someone to work with. A woman. Needs a voice to blend with his. Harmonies, that kinda thing. Why don’t we get him down here? Meet the missy here, see what he thinks. See what she thinks, too.”

  Cass looked from her aunt to her uncle, her pulse quickening. “Why not?” Lily said. “We were going to have a party next Friday, get the summer started. Why don’t you stay on for it, Jonah, and see if he wants to come down? What’s his name, anyway? Would we have heard of him?”

  “His name,” said Jonah, “is Ivor Tait. And if you haven’t heard of him yet, you damn sure will have soon.”

  TRACK FOUR

  “I Wrote You a Love Song”

  By Cass Wheeler

  From the album My Loving Heart

  I wrote you a love song

  But I forgot all of the words

  The melody in my head

  Just sounded like all the others I’ve heard

  So I started again

  And wondered how I could tell you

  That life looks so different

  Now I’m under your spell

  I need to tell you

  How deep and far I fell

  There’s just something about you

  And I don’t know what it is

  Your face in the morning

  And the taste of your kiss

  And the shape that your body

  Leaves in our unmade bed

  Your hand in my hand

  And your voice in my head

  The look in your eyes

  Says it’s better left unsaid

&nb
sp; Ahhh ahh ahh ahh

  Ahhh ahh ahhh ahhh

  So this is your love song

  It’s simple, I know

  Cast your spell on me, darling

  And don’t let me go

  Don’t let me go

  Don’t let me go

  Don’t let me go

  * * *

  RELEASED 15 March 1976

  RECORDED November 1975 at Harmony Studios, Los Angeles

  GENRE Folk rock / soft rock / pop

  LABEL Phoenix Records

  WRITER(S) Ivor Tait and Cass Wheeler

  PRODUCER(S) Bob Wright

  ENGINEER(S) Bill Freeman / Isaiah Jones

  Ivor Tait at twenty-two. A man with long, dark hair—almost black—brushing his shoulders, and often, when he plays, half covering his face in a way the women who admire him—and there are already many such women—consider impossibly alluring.

  A man who stands six foot tall in his brown suede boots. His eyes not quite green, not quite brown, and framed by thick, patrician brows. His cheekbones two sharp ridges defining the topography of his face. Beneath them, shadows gather and pool, lending him a rather gaunt, skeletal look, especially when he is tired, or high, or both.

  A man whose appearance, and his voice—low, a little faltering, so that those he is speaking to often need to lean in close to hear him—and the music he draws from the strings of his guitar all seem to speak of a sensitivity, an intensity, a tenderness. And yet at the core of him there is an emptiness, an inviolable absence, a void, and he knows it, and he is afraid.

  A man who hasn’t spoken to his parents in four years, not since the day he left for London, closing the door behind him on that tense, impossible, suffocating house—the house in which the words his father did not say rang loud as bells, and his rages were almost silent, white-knuckled, fist on bone, blood on linoleum as his mother’s gasping, voiceless cries floated out through the party walls.