Greatest Hits

by Laura Barnett

  Her records still sold. Touts still loitered outside the doors of the concert halls. The shiny young things cited her as an influence: in the summer of 1988, she was invited to lend guest vocals to the debut single by a twenty-two-year-old singer-songwriter from Long Island named Dinah McCombs.

  Standing in the vocal-booth in the New York studio, she looked across at the younger woman—so lithe and smooth-skinned, so filled with the expectation of imminent success—and felt a maternal stirring of fear for her, and the hope that she would not make the same mistakes Cass had made. But of course, she reminded herself, Dinah would make them—or she would find others of her own.

  She missed Ivor, sometimes, in those early years of separation: yes, that Cass couldn’t deny.

  There was a film she played, sent spooling across the blank screen of her closed eyes, when she was sleepless in the night, and the house was creaking and shifting around her. The man she had seen for the first time in the garden at Atterley, his hair falling across his face as he sang. The sudden touch of his hand on her chin; the memory of that, and of all the other ways he had touched her—tenderly, hungrily, awakening in her reserves of sensation, of pure feeling, to which she had never before had access. The sure, solid, beloved presence of him, beside her in the van on all those endless motorway journeys; and on stage, carrying, with her, the weight of their music: its layers and rhythms, its restless ebb and flow. There had been all this between them, and so much more, for so long: and she cried for it, those nights, and cried for how quickly, how irrevocably, it had all slipped away.

  But by day, she knew that Ivor was lost to her, to both of them. His drinking had worsened since she had left: she knew it, because he telephoned Home Farm, woozily issuing his bitter recriminations; and because, many times over the months it had taken to settle the divorce, he had driven over to the house to stand shrieking, blind-drunk, at the gates.

  How Cass hated him then: how she hated seeing Anna turn to her, furious not with her father but with her, saying, “Why won’t you just let Dad in?”

  And then that dreadful encounter in the Royal Oak. Ivor had waited for Cass and Anna outside the pub in his Mercedes, and driven slowly beside them along the High Street, alternating between abuse and assurances that he missed them, that there would be no more women, that Cass should throw over this whole divorce idea and come home.

  By the time they had reached Home Farm, and her father had finally slunk away, Anna had been shaking. “Why can’t we go home with Dad, Mum? I want to go home.”

  Cass, drawing her arm around her daughter’s shoulders, had been unable to keep the frustration from her voice. “This is your home, Anna. For God’s sake, can’t you see I’m doing the best I can?”

  Her solicitor, eventually, had put a stop to it, obtaining an injunction from the county court to prevent Ivor from harassing Cass, or coming within a mile of Home Farm until the terms of the divorce had been settled. Ivor was to maintain contact with Anna, but on the understanding that he limit his consumption of alcohol and illicit substances.

  Rothermere was sold as part of the divorce settlement. Ivor bought a house on Hampstead Grove, close to the heath, and it was to London that Cass had to dispatch her daughter every other weekend, buttoning her into her coat with a bright, “Have fun, darling,” and then watching the chauffeured car slink out along the drive, then disappear.

  She always quizzed Anna carefully on her return, but her daughter would say little of the visits other than, “Dad’s house is massive, Mum.” Or, “We got a puppy! He’s called Ziggy. Dad says he’s my dog, really, and I can look after him whenever I’m there.” And then, after a few months, “There’s a woman living at Dad’s house now. She’s called Jenna. She’s all right, I guess.”

  Yes, Cass watched her daughter for signs of damage, and believed—hoped—that those she could see went no deeper than the surface. There were still those moments of occlusion, of withdrawal, when Anna seemed to turn in on herself—but that was natural, wasn’t it, in an only child, and one who had seen what she had seen?

  Anna no longer accompanied Cass on tour. It was important, they all agreed, that she should have consistency in her schooling, and come to know Home Farm as just that: home.

  In December 1988, Alberte returned to Denmark, having broken off her engagement to Mark. So Kim and Cass employed a new nanny, Juana—a good-natured twenty-five-year-old from Toledo, with a twin passion for Real Madrid and the Cocteau Twins. Juana would look after Anna when Cass was away, and Alan and the booking agent would ensure that each tour lasted no longer than two weeks.

  Cass was aware, each time she returned home—exhausted, thinking only of her daughter, of how desperate she was to hold her in her arms—of a slight awkwardness between them. Anna would greet her a little stiffly, not quite returning her embrace; and she’d give only brief, curt responses to Cass’s enquiries about school, homework, Juana, the weekends with Ivor and his latest girlfriend.

  It would be a couple of hours, at least, before Anna relaxed, and Cass could feel their old intimacy returning. The two of them, curled up together on the sofa, Anna’s head lolling back against the curve of her mother’s arm. Cass reading aloud to her—The L-Shaped Room; A Stitch in Time; the Chalet School novels—as Francis had once, all those years ago, read to her. It was as if, each time she left, Anna wasn’t fully assured of the fact that her mother would be coming back. But Cass did come back. She was not Margaret. She would always come back.

  Anna was not at all musical, despite those early indications to the contrary: that babbling soundtrack she had maintained, almost without respite, through her early years; that first word—sing!—uttered into the Fairlight CMI. And she did not, as she grew older, display a great deal of interest in her parents’ music. She seemed to take it for granted, as a thing that would always be there, regular and predictable as the rising and setting of the sun.

  Her fascination lay, instead, with art. Drawing, at first—she filled sketchbook after sketchbook—and then, as soon as she was old enough to manipulate a brush with sufficient skill, creating abstract images in splashes and daubs of acrylic paint.

  In the autumn of 1989, Cass had the attic room adjacent to Anna’s bedroom turned into an art room, the small window replaced with a sheet of glass that, in the mornings, admitted shimmering shafts of sun. At weekends, when Cass was home, they would spend hours there together, lost in concentration, Cass’s larger easel placed next to Anna’s smaller one; the radio playing the Happy Mondays and Sinéad O’Connor and “Love Shack” by the B-52s, to which they both loved to dance, whirling and laughing until they collapsed on the floor in an exhausted muddle of limbs.

  In the early months of 1990, Cass began planning her music studio. Anna was fascinated by the drawings she made, carefully measured on graph paper, as precise and meticulous as the blueprints that had once hung on the walls of John’s study at Atterley.

  John had died, with dreadful suddenness, from a heart attack the year before, and Cass thought of her uncle—his kindness; his absolute devotion to Lily, and to Cass herself—as she produced her plans.

  The architect Cass employed was the new partner in John’s practice, and about her own age. (Forty! Incredible, really, that she had reached it.) His name was Luke Bennett: a serious-minded man in a black polo neck and jeans, and heavy square-framed glasses that would once have been disdained as unfashionable, but were now, Cass understood, the mark of a certain kind of intellectual.

  He looked, she thought, rather like Elvis Costello, though Luke was a jazz fan, and one—she could tell, though he was polite enough to conceal it—who knew little of her music, but a good deal of how much she had meant to John, and how much he had meant to her.

  As the building project was nearing completion—the glassroofed studio looming above the garden like some sleek, space-age machine—Luke Bennett asked her out to dinner. He did so diffidently, casually, s
o that Cass needed a few seconds to understand his meaning.

  “Of course,” Luke added quickly, his clear blue eyes shifting behind his glasses, “it’s no problem at all if you’d rather not.”

  “It’s not that I wouldn’t like to.” He squared his shoulders, anticipating her rejection. “I really have enjoyed working with you. But I . . .”

  What was she to say? How was she to explain that it was as if that part of her life, that whole section of herself, had shut down the night she had packed Anna and their suitcases into the MG and left Rothermere, left Ivor, behind? It was just Cass and Anna, now, and the few intimates with whom she had surrounded them; and that, for now, was how it must remain.

  But Luke made it easy for her, in the end.

  “So sorry. It was presumptuous of me. I really shouldn’t have asked.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m glad you did.”

  Those weekend afternoons in the attic art room, before their neighbouring easels, music playing from the radio and the soft patter of rain falling on the roof.

  Weekday evenings, exultant in their mundanity. Anna home from school, or wet-haired and aching after an away-match with her hockey team. (She was athletic in a way Cass had never been.) Drinking warm Ribena at the kitchen counter while Juana taught her rudimentary scraps of Spanish, and Cass moved around them, stove to worktop, preparing some new recipe from the cookbook Kim had given her, and through which she was, slowly and methodically, working her amateurish way.

  The nights when Anna couldn’t sleep, and would appear, wrapped in her towelling dressing-gown, her feet comically oversized in her fleece-lined Snoopy slippers, at the control-room door, while Cass and Kit and Graham and whichever producer they were working with crowded around the console, smoking, listening back to the day’s new mix. Cass would open the door to her daughter, draw her in, and hold her close; her breath lifting loose strands of Anna’s long hair as they sat together on the sofa, the girl’s eyes gradually drawing shut, undisturbed by the music pouring out from the monitors.

  Those annual holidays on Mull, beached at the very limit of the land. Ocean before them, moorland behind them; Cass, Kim, Bill, Alan, and Rachel perched on deckchairs with glasses of wine as the children wheeled and screeched and ran, matching the stuttering trajectory of the gulls.

  And yes, reaching further back, to the music room in the Muswell Hill flat, where Cass and Ivor (Cass could almost allow herself now to think of things as they had once been, rather than as they had become) had lost whole mornings to the painstaking elaboration of a new melody, a rhythm, a teasing, elusive skein of song.

  Those summer parties at Atterley: Cass drawn from her bed by the drifting strains of jazz rising up to her open window, and the people laughing and chattering on the lawn below.

  And, back beyond those memories, to the afternoons at Irene’s house across the common, with its comfortable familial chaos, and the boyish clamour of Irene’s brothers, and Alice gently guiding Cass’s hands to the keys of the piano, black on white, smooth as the iridescent undersides of shells: their attraction, as yet, unfathomable to Cass, but calling her, calling, calling.

  All this Cass was thinking of with the song that she would, eventually, give the title “Home.” She had intended, at first, to keep it for herself, and for Anna. It would be a gift (among others, of course) for Anna’s twelfth birthday: a celebration of the safe berth that Cass had, despite it all, managed to find for them.

  But Iain Urquhart and the label had bigger ideas. A Christmas single, the proceeds going to homelessness charities. Guest spots from other stars.

  Cass was unsure at first. She had never been part of such a thing before; she and Ivor had lent their financial support, quietly, to Live Aid, but had preferred not to join the throng on stage at Wembley. But Alan, as always, was pragmatic.

  “What if,” he said, “we ensured we kept ultimate control—chose the producer, held the sessions here? It would raise your profile for the next album, and”—he looked a little sheepish—“raise a lot of money for charity, of course.”

  And so the recording went ahead, at Home Farm—five shiny cars parked on the gravel drive, the studio crowded, swarming with publicists and managers and personal assistants and, beyond the gates, the inevitable paparazzi. The project was meant to be kept under wraps, but someone along the chain had let something slip; a tabloid newspaper chartered a helicopter that flew low over the studio at regular intervals, requiring several of the early sessions to be scrapped.

  At the end of it all, a party: a marquee on the back lawn; champagne and canapés. (The papers would have a field day with that—“Stars sip champagne while lecturing the rest of us about homelessness.”)

  Anna and Tasha standing together in vintage prom gowns and denim jackets: tall and long-necked, awkward as cygnets still carrying the downy plumage of babyhood. Blushing deeply as a pair of boys—somebody’s sons, Cass presumed—approached them with that brave, vulnerable adolescent swagger.

  How clear that moment is in Cass’s memory now. She’d been standing in the lee of the studio, smoking a cigarette, taking a moment alone. Her daughter’s face had been lit by the kitchen’s electric glow, and by the flickering torches Kim had placed around the garden.

  Looking up at the boys as they came closer—Anna’s expression shy, embarrassed; not coquettish, but intrigued, and wishing to intrigue. Nudging Tasha (already so like her mother, with those slender, coltish looks that had already invited the attention of three modelling agencies). Meeting the eyes of the taller boy—the one Cass could see was the better-looking—for a brief second, and then gazing down at the ground, a small smile lifting the corners of her lips.

  Anna had seemed so alive, in that moment—so full of youth, and happiness, and health—that it seemed impossible that it would not always be so; that Cass, in the space of just a few years, would be forced to watch her daughter shrink before her eyes, inch by inch, pound by pound, as all that vivacity, that lightness, was gradually worn away.

  It had been so good, during the “Home” sessions, to see Tom Arnold again.

  Fifty years old—a short, tanned, gym-toned man with a platinum Rolex and a flawless set of too-bright teeth. But still the man who had, all those years ago outside Jake’s cabin in Laurel Canyon, leant down to kiss her, and had never blamed her for gently turning her face away.

  Tom was recently divorced, and Cass sensed the renewal of his interest in her from the moment he arrived at Home Farm—an interest that ran deeper than the platonic friendship that they had maintained over the years. She had kept her distance, offered him no encouragement, though she had, it was true, found herself drawn to him, and returned, in the days after his departure, to thinking of him, picturing the outline of his face.

  And then, a week or so after the party, he had telephoned, asked whether he might take her out to dinner.

  “I’m not sure, Tom,” she said quickly. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  He was gentle, amused. “Take my number at the Dorchester,” he said. “Call me back. But I’m flying home tomorrow. Just so you know.”

  “Go,” Kim said when Cass went through to find her in the office. “Juana can stay with Anna, and I’ll look in on her in the morning. Just go.”

  So she went. She showered, dressed carefully in cropped black trousers, a loose shirt in dark green silk that contrasted flatteringly with her eyes. From the drawer of her dressing-table, she took out a bottle of Chanel No. 5 and sprayed a little scent onto her neck, wrists, and in the narrow cleft between her breasts.

  “Where are you going, Mum?” Anna asked when she went in to kiss her goodbye. “Why are you all dressed up?”

  “Just out for dinner with Tom,” Cass said. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  Anna shrugged. Looking down at her—her lovely thirteen-year-old girl, sprawled on her bed in jogging bottoms and an oversized
T-shirt—Cass had almost changed her mind. And then she thought of Tom, dining alone in the hotel restaurant, and of how long it had been since she had felt the touch of a man’s hand. A man with whom there was no fractious history, no simmering resentment. It wasn’t wrong, was it, to crave the warmth of another’s body?

  “I won’t be late, darling,” she said.

  “Whatever,” Anna said, and turned away.

  It was different between Tom and her that night, as Cass had known it would be.

  She had been alone with him plenty of times: on their first American tour; during the sessions at Home Farm. But they had never been alone like this, with a long evening stretching before them, and neither of them bothering to hide their understanding of where it might lead.

  They ate, they talked, they drank two very good bottles of Château Margaux. Cass talked about Anna, and a concert she’d been asked to play at the Festival Hall, and her concerns for Lily, growing increasingly frail since John’s death. Tom talked about his next album, and (briefly and without bitterness) his ex-wife, and their decision not to have children.

  “I do admire you, Cass, you know,” he said over coffee. “I do admire how you’ve managed to raise such a gorgeous girl and still keep the music going.”

  She brushed the compliment away. “Don’t admire me,” she said. “I’ve made enough mistakes to last a lifetime. It was . . . bad, with Ivor, when Anna was younger. About as bad as it could get.”

  “But it’s over now. Long over.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s over.”

  Cass had thought, since having Anna, that it would be impossible ever to forget her existence, even for a second; but she did that night, upstairs in Tom Arnold’s room at the Dorchester. There was only his body, and hers, and the rhythm they made together: slow at first, controlled; then faster, looser, hungrier.