An evening at the theatre with Kate and her new boyfriend a set designer, much younger than Kate, named Troy McCabe. Lunch in Kingston with Irene. (They had managed, if only sporadically, to keep in touch.) A barbecue at Kim and Bill’s new place in Oxted. An enquiry from a publisher, conveyed by Alan, as to whether Cass had ever considered writing a memoir: it was not the first such enquiry she had received, but had been the first to root itself in her mind and set her wondering.
And then, the phone call, rousing her from sleep. The private line, known only by a few. “Hello?”
A small, strained whimper of a voice. “Mum. I want to come home.” Breaking, swallowed by a sob. “Can you book me a flight, please? I want to come home now.”
She sprang immediately into action, had the flight booked within the hour. Called Ivor but was unable to reach him—found herself talking to his manager, Charlie, instead.
There had been an incident, Charlie said. Ivor and Anna had had some sort of row after the concert in San Francisco. Anna had run off somewhere with Rosie. They’d had the whole crew out looking for them for hours, and when they’d finally tracked down the girls at a club in Haight-Ashbury, Anna had been almost hysterical, incoherent. Neither she nor Ivor would be drawn on what had gone on between them.
“Well, bloody well make them tell you,” Cass snapped down the line.
After a second’s crackle and hiss, Charlie’s reply came back, “I hate to tell you this, Cass, but I can’t really make them do anything right now. To be frank, I think Anna and Rosie might have taken something. And Ivor’s pissed as a newt. He’s in a bad way again, Cass. I can’t get anything out of him.”
Late that night, Anna’s flight landed at Heathrow: Cass drove to meet her, not caring whether she was observed. Shuffling through the arrivals gate, her daughter seemed so small, so thin: a child, really, her skin carrying a sickly, greenish hue. She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt Cass didn’t recognise (NYC, NY, read the white letters emblazoned across her chest) and tracksuit bottoms. Her hair, tugged into a low ponytail, looked greasy and unwashed.
There in the arrivals hall, they embraced.
“Anna darling,” Cass said into Anna’s neck—breathing in that particular smell that was her daughter’s, and hers alone. “What on earth happened?”
But Anna shook her head; in the car on the way home, she was silent, too, her eyes closing, diving immediately into sleep. On the gravelled drive at Home Farm, she woke suddenly, confused. Cass, sitting beside her, said, “Anna. Really. Please tell me what happened, before we go inside. What is this all about?”
A long silence followed. It was very late now, and the darkness absolute.
“Dad’s drinking again,” Anna said eventually, her voice curiously blank, emotionless. “It started in New York—he had a crap review and he went off on one. Nobody could find him. I kept telling him he should stop drinking—reminding him about AA, and his sponsor and everything, and what he’d told us at that party. That he was sorry.”
She drew a breath. Cass, beside her, resisted the desire to take her daughter in her arms. “And yesterday in San Francisco, he just lost it with me. He started saying all these crazy things.”
“What things?”
“That I was a mistake. That you never wanted me. That you always cared more about your music than about him, or me. That you thought having a child would destroy your career.”
A lead weight, falling with a thud. Cass reached across for Anna’s hand, but her daughter snatched it away.
“Well?” she said, turning to her mother, her brown eyes fierce. “Is it true?”
“Of course not, Anna. You know how it is when your dad’s been drinking. He says things he doesn’t mean, just to hurt people.”
Anna shook her head. “No. I’ve been thinking about it all the way back, on the plane. I did destroy things for you, didn’t I? For both of you. You were fine together until I came along. And you were . . . well, so successful. Famous. Everyone knew your name. And what are you now?”
“A mother,” Cass said. “Your mother. And a musician. Both. And we were not fine until you came along. We were always wrong together, Ivor and me. Your great-aunt Lily always knew it, and I know it now. But I don’t regret a single moment of that relationship, because it brought me you.”
But Anna wasn’t listening; her face, staring out through the windscreen, wore the stricken expression of a frightened child. “You used to hit him. I remember. I saw you hit him, and I was afraid that one day you’d hit me, too.”
A gasp, welling up from deep within Cass’s throat. A small, pitiful voice—surely not her own?—saying, “It wasn’t just me, Anna, was it, remember? Your dad used to hit me, too.”
“You think that makes it better?” Snarling, Anna’s face contorted, strange. “You think that makes it all right? For fuck’s sake, Mum. I hate him. And I hate you, too. I wish you’d never had me. You should have had me aborted, like you must have wanted to.”
Anna opened the car door, marched across the gravel to the front porch. The security light snapped on, and Cass stayed where she was, watching the heavy black door slam behind her daughter as she went inside. She closed her eyes; she was dizzy, her breath coming in fast, tight gasps.
The girl was exhausted, overwrought: she’d let her go upstairs to bed, leave her to sleep it off. With this, Cass reassured herself, steadied her breathing. But she knew then, even as she thought it, that this would not be enough; that something, somewhere along the way, had been broken, and she might never find a way to put it back together.
6.15 P.M.
There are some songs, Cass thinks, sitting silently for a moment on the sofa in the listening-room, that are not so much written as transcribed; that obey no will but their own, and refuse to conform to any shape other than the form in which they arrive.
This is what she has struggled, over the years, to explain to those who have asked her why she is so committed to cataloguing her own life in song, to weaving music from the raw stuff of her own experience. She has often sensed, in this question, an implicit criticism, as if this makes her a lower kind of artist: a hack, grubbing in the dirt, unable to fully inhabit the vivid landscape of the imagination.
Don Collins, for one, had been good at making her feel that way.
“Isn’t it all a bit . . . well, obvious?” he’d asked her once, in the early years. “We’ve got Bowie coming up with Ziggy Stardust—bringing performance art to music, turning pop into something really substantial. And there you are, writing about babies and break-ups. It’s just whimsy, isn’t it? Self-indulgent whimsy?”
She had smiled at him: already she was learning, with Collins, to conceal her anger beneath a smile. “You’re probably right, Don. Perhaps it is. But I don’t have a choice, you see. I don’t decide what my songs will be about. They arrive with that decision already made.”
He had looked at her, head on one side, a smirk drawing his mouth into a narrow arc. It had been clear that he’d had no idea what she was talking about: “airy-fairy hippy-dippy nonsense” he’d called it in the article. And she has wondered, over the years, whether Ivor also felt the same way. His own lyrics have always had a remote, emotionless quality to them, as if he were observing life from a safe distance.
But Larry understood it immediately. Larry knows what it is to lose oneself for hours—days, even—in the act of creation; and to only understand, when the mind and body are finally calm once more, what it is that has been created. What, in that act, the artist is trying to make sense of, even though no sense can ever truly be made of this dizzying, maddening, impossible, beautiful life; and, of course, of its culmination, its crescendo, and its inevitable loss.
Cass stands, moves over to the door. There is Otis, again, sitting on the terrace, facing her, his tail tucked around his front paws.
She slides open the door, and the cat draws himself up o
nto his feet, steps unhurriedly into the room; traces a sinuous circle around her legs, the tip of his tail curling into a question mark. The low vibrato of a purr, rising up from his throat. Hungry not for food but for company. She picks him up, buries her face, for a moment, in his fur. He smells of grass and earth and, faintly, of the ripe musk of fox: he must have found their den, somewhere in the deeper recesses of the garden.
The house, she observes through the open door, is quiet now. Faintly, she hears Kim’s laugh floating across the garden, and Alan’s deep, answering bass.
They’ll be standing together in the kitchen: assistant and manager, friends, long-time colleagues. Alan will be admiring Kim’s handiwork with the food—her deft marshalling of the caterers, her expert arrangement of drinks, glasses, buckets of ice. Kim will be asking Alan how the masters sound.
In a moment, Kim will excuse herself and go upstairs to the spare room, where her dress (a silken sheath, splashed with a bright, painterly pattern of flowers) is laid out on the bed. She will run the shower in the en suite, dress, apply make-up, spritz herself with mimosa and cardamom, and then sit for a moment in silent meditation before the first of the guests arrive.
Alan, in the meantime, will pour himself a drink—a gin and tonic; thin slice of lemon, three chunks of ice—and offer the same to Callum. And together, in the living-room, the men will sit, waiting for the evening to begin.
Cass, too, must get ready. She is running late, has spent too long chasing the shadows of the past. Her own outfit is waiting for her in her bedroom: a black-and-white printed shirt, a pair of wide-legged black trousers. She must change, arrange her hair, try to make something acceptable of her face.
But there is still one more song to listen to, one more strand of her past she must try to weave into some kind of sense. And it is the most important part: the keystone; the vortex around which everything has whirled for so long. A song that she did not wish to write but which came to her, fully formed, one black endless night, as some songs—the best ones, usually—tend to do.
Yes, she thinks, still holding Otis in her arms, this is probably her best song. And yet it is one that only two people have heard. Herself, of course. And then, just a few months ago—ten years since she had recorded it, sitting alone in her studio in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, finding some kind of solace in the pressure of her hands on the piano keys—Larry.
She had invited him into the listening-room. Had sat with him on this sofa, slid this same cassette into the player, the tape that is sitting on the coffee table now, waiting for her, beneath the discarded sleeves of the other albums she has played over the course of this long, cathartic, necessary day.
Larry had listened carefully, his attention finely attuned to each cadence, each smooth sequence of notes. And then he had turned to her, taken her hand in his, and said, “Thank you, Cass. Thank you for sharing that with me. I think I can understand it, now. I think I can understand something of what it must have been like.”
She had nodded, and held his hand. It was only when he’d reached out the other hand to meet her face—drawn his long, calloused fingers across her skin with such lightness, such tenderness—that she had realised that her cheeks were damp with tears.
It strikes her now, as she wished it might have struck her in that moment, that she can allow herself to feel that sorrow—the sorrow from which she had shied away for so long, afraid of its power, of its ability to swallow her whole—and no longer feel that it is threatening to break her.
She can, perhaps, miss Anna, mourn her, and still sit with Larry, holding his hand, waiting for whatever might come next.
TRACK FOURTEEN
“Edge of the World”
By Cass Wheeler
Previously unreleased
On the beach
Threw your arms out wide
Closed your eyes against the sun
Turned your face up to the sky
If I could find a way to stay there
One moment in time
Stay behind each other’s closed eyes
“This feels like the edge of the world,”
You said,
“The land bleeds into the sea
And the wind blows free.
This feels like the edge of the world,”
You said,
“I am the body of the sea
And my mind is free.”
On the beach
No one but us
Nothing but the wind in its rush
If I could find a way for us back there
One moment in time
Behind each other’s closed eyes
“This feels like the edge of the world,”
You said,
“The land bleeds into the sea
And the wind blows free.
This feels like the edge of the world,”
You said.
“My body is the sea
And my mind is free
And my mind is free.”
Oh the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea
* * *
WRITTEN January 2005
RECORDED January 2005 at Home Farm, Kent
The house was silent, still; the digits on her alarm clock glowed 4:00.
The worst hour, neither night nor morning. A threshold. A blank, featureless place, where not even the birds were singing.
There was music, however, in her mind. A piano picking out a loose series of arpeggios. Bare, unadorned, as the music she and Ivor had made together had once been, all those years ago in the folk clubs, the basements, and riverboats. Beer-mats and sticky floors and bearded men nodding sagely into pints of ale. Joe’s bar, and Angus Mackinnon staring up at them from his round table at the front. Bob and Serena, and Kate, and poor, sad Paul, who had never, as far as Cass knew, found the courage to call himself a writer. And standing behind them, the faint, spectral outline of Ursula, and all Ivor’s other women: shadowy, nameless, indistinct.
But Ivor was not singing with Cass now. It was her own voice she could hear, high and pure as it had been back then: its pitch, by now, in her fifty-fourth year, had commenced its gradual descent towards a lower register.
The lyric was complete, crystalline. Lying sleepless, Cass doubted herself, and wondered whether it belonged to a song she had heard before. These words had the ageless simplicity of the old tunes—“Scarborough Fair”; “Mary Hamilton”; “The Trees They Do Grow High.” And yet she knew that they were hers and Anna’s. This song couldn’t possibly belong to anyone else, couldn’t reflect another’s suffering. It was new. It was theirs. It was demanding to be heard.
4:15. Cass rose from her bed, drew her woollen dressing-gown on over her pyjamas, pulled on her slippers. The air was icy, sharp: it had been a long, brutal winter. Downstairs, in the dark hallway, she wrapped herself in her warmest coat. In the kitchen, she turned on the lights, tapped the alarm code into the keypad beside the back door, and stepped out into the night.
Grey shapes loomed freakishly in the darkness, assuming their familiar forms only as she drew closer: the wrought-iron table and chairs, the mahonia bush, the twin olive trees standing sentry in their terracotta pots. The crisp grass crunching underfoot, frost soaking through the soles of her slippers. She hastened her pace to the studio, entered the door-code, and slid her key into the lock.
Through all this, she could still hear the song. Moving around the control room, turning on lamps, flicking switches on the console, the computers, the monitors. She left the live room in darkness, and sat down at the piano.
The black leather stool; the Neumann microphone. The keyboard solid and true beneath her fingers. The pop-shield cocked conspiratorially towards her mouth like the whorl of a lover’s ear.
The song, played from beginning to end, as it had asked to be played: no hesitation, no stumbling, no delay.
&nb
sp; When the last note died away, Cass sat on silently with her eyes closed, waiting. It wasn’t long—fifteen minutes, perhaps, or twenty—before the telephone rang. And then, walking through to the control room to answer it—not rushing or running; her feet steady, sure, as they would not be again for a very long time she realised that she knew, now, what she had been waiting for.
“Hello?”
A brief, pregnant, endless pause.
“Cass Wheeler?”
Shani. The kind, Kenyan nurse, about Cass’s age, who had always, over the last few terrible months, spoken to Cass frankly, neither intimidated by her nor patronisingly dismissive. No apology for calling at this hour: for such an apology, of course, would be obsolete. There was now only one possible apology to make.
Cass said nothing. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
“I’m so sorry, Cass,” Shani said.
And then, with a simplicity, a directness, for which Cass would always, in some small way, be grateful, she said, “It’s bad news, I’m afraid. The very worst.”
How to trace back to the beginning, follow the trail back to its source?
That wriggling, perfect baby, opening and closing the tiny buds of her fists. That toddler, with her mop of sandy-blonde curls, and that wordless, tuneless song always on her lips. Propped on the lid of the Steinway as Cass’s hands moved over the keys; eyes following those hands, legs swinging, tapping out an ungainly, juddering rhythm on the piano’s polished hull. That child, watching wide-eyed from the wings, noise-cancelling headphones pulled down over her ears. Kim beside her, with Tasha, and Cass looking over at them every so often between songs: meeting her daughter’s eyes with her own, and smiling, then turning her attention back to her audience.
Greatest Hits Page 34
