Greatest Hits

by Laura Barnett

  He had loved her on his first visit to her little corner of England, to that big old farmhouse where she had locked herself away for so long, like a character from some old fairy tale; and on his second visit there, his third, his fourth.

  He had loved her in the mornings, when he usually woke before her, stole quietly from her bedroom, made coffee in her kitchen downstairs. Then went up to her top-floor art room to attempt a few desultory sketches (his work was suffering, and he didn’t care) until she rose and came to join him, her fine, grey-blonde hair unkempt, and all the lovelier for being so.

  He had loved her on the night he had asked her the question he’d been carrying inside his mind for months. He had loved her even as she’d pushed him away, and he’d had no choice but to call a taxi and drive away.

  He still loves her now. He will love her even if she opens the door to him at Home Farm, in a few hours’ time, and then closes it again in his face. He will love her even if he has to drive back to the airport, board another plane, trace his lonely route back across the Atlantic, to another night, another continent. He will love her even if she affirms, despite the pain she knows it must cause him, that she doesn’t love him; that it has all been an illusion, a mistake.

  For at least then, Larry tells himself for the twentieth time, settling his head against the window, he will know that he has done everything in his power to make Cass understand that, whatever she has lost, whatever the messes she feels she has made of the past, there is still a future to be had. And to show her that he, Larry Alderson, wants nothing more than to share that future with her, and to make of it, together, what they can.

  Oh, Larry.

  Cass has checked her mobile. No messages. She will not call him again—not now, not today. She is wearing her new black-and-white shirt, her good black trousers, her black velvet shoes with the low heel. Her make-up is done; her hair is as sleek as she can make it.

  Downstairs, the guests are arriving; and finally, now, after so long, she is ready.

  Such noise. Music—her music—overlaid by the xylophonic chiming of glassware and a chorus of voices.

  Cass stands for a moment in the living-room doorway, unseen. And then Kim turns, meets her eye, and cuts her way towards her through the crowd (for yes, already the living-room is thronged with people), singing out a greeting. “She’s here!”

  The crowd falls quiet. Faces turn towards her, smiling; glasses are lifted against the light. Someone—Alan?—begins to clap, and then they are all clapping, palm on palm.

  Cass can feel her cheeks flushing, the blood pounding in her ears. Kim takes her arm. “All right, all right—that’s enough, everyone. Let’s get our woman a drink.”

  A glass of champagne, pressed into her hand. Bill: a broad, large-featured man, turned jowly in late middle age. She has always liked him, with his affable, guileless face. How deeply he had fallen for Kim, on those sessions in Los Angeles. Cass remembers Bill turning to her in the green room, late one night, during a break in recording, and saying, “Do you think there’s any chance for me, Cass? Do you think she might give me a second glance?”

  And Cass, looking over at him—a good man, a true man, a man worthy of Kim—had said, “Yes, Bill. I really think she will.”

  Now, he leans down to kiss her on both cheeks. “You’re looking really great, Cass.”

  “Thank you, Bill, you old charmer.”

  Beside him, his daughter, Tasha, smoothes a hand over her long, straightened hair, and then offers Cass her own embrace. She smells delicious—hairspray, vanilla, and some light, floral scent Cass can’t identify. Orange blossom, she will think later, remembering that Ibiza terrace where she and Ivor had sat late into the evenings on their honeymoon, drinking Rioja, believing themselves to be so deeply, so inextricably, in love.

  “I’m so happy to be here,” Tasha says, and Cass nods.

  “I’m happy you’re here, too, Tasha.” Placing a hand on her arm, she adds, with emphasis, “Lovely, special girl.”

  “Thank you,” Tasha says, and they stand together for a moment, forehead on forehead.

  Sipping her champagne, Cass takes in the people arranged around the room, the groups forming and re-forming as if to the steps of some quick, instinctive dance.

  Alan is here, of course, standing with Rachel, Callum, and Andrea. Jerome and Katie are talking to Gav, as the engineer’s quick, deft fingers roll out a cigarette. Kate is elegant in teal silk, hand tightly clasped in that of a handsome, wild-haired man wearing a green velvet three-piece suit: Omar. Irene and Mike are standing together in a corner; Cass meets Irene’s eye, and her old friend lifts her glass and smiles.

  Bob and Serena are just coming through from the hallway, talking to a waitress who is offering to take their coats. Serena smiles at the young woman, shrugs off her bright pink mac. Then her eye falls on Cass, and she moves towards her, Bob (who has preferred to keep his denim jacket on) following in Serena’s wake.

  “You’re looking amazing, Cass. God, I should really get out running, shouldn’t I?”

  Cass laughs. “Oh, Serena, thank you, but I know I’m still a fat old lady.” And then Serena, shaking her head, looks at her again, and asks, more seriously, “So. How did it go today?”

  The others fall quiet, listening. Kim, Bill, Tasha, Bob, Serena: five pairs of eyes, watching her with kindness, with the wordless understanding afforded by only the oldest and best of friends.

  Cass sips her drink, allows herself a moment before answering. “Quite well, I think. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I mean, it was . . . strange, of course. Painful. But also, in many ways, a relief.” She smiles. Brightly, she adds, “You know, some of those old songs of mine really aren’t too bad.”

  “I should bloody say so.” This from Alan, approaching their circle, brandishing an empty glass. He greets Bob and Serena, places an avuncular kiss on Tasha’s cheeks—“Go and find Jerome and Katie, won’t you? They’re desperate to see you”—and then he draws Cass aside.

  “We’re mostly here, I think,” he says in a low voice. “Shall we get started? I’ll say a few words, and Callum wants to talk about the production. Do you want to speak?”

  Cass is silent for a moment, watching Alan’s face: those soft, dark eyes, that neatly trimmed beard, superimposed over all the other images she has of him. The boyish twenty-five-year-old in elbow-patched tweed. The slim, worldly thirty-four-year-old, sporting a narrow handlebar moustache, informing some slippery American promoter that there was no way, absolutely no way, Cass Wheeler would play under such terms (an argument Alan almost always won). The stout, comfortable fifty-year-old, long married, father to two children, master of his own empire.

  She remembers Alan’s face on the night, ten years before, when she had told him she was retiring—that she could no longer stand to hear her music, any music.

  He had composed himself carefully, setting aside the weight of his own disappointment, and had turned to her with an expression that spoke far more of his own love for Anna, for both of them—and his grief—than of any professional anxiety. That American producer, Hunter Forbes; the musicians, their bookings already confirmed; all of that would need to be dissolved. And yet, in that moment, none of it had seemed to matter.

  “My first duty, Cass,” Alan had said, “is always to you, and to what you need and want. And if this is what you need and want, then of course I will respect that, and make it happen. I will set you free.”

  Those eyes, untouched by age, watching her again now, without expectation, without prejudice, but with the cautious, informed concern of a man who, by now, must surely know her better than she knows herself, despite the fact—or perhaps because of it—that they have never been anything more to each other than the most intimate of friends.

  Cass has prepared nothing, failed to think ahead to this moment; but now, in her living-room, before all these people, she
reaches a decision that surprises her, even as it presents itself.

  “Yes, Alan,” she says. “I think I will say a few words after all.”

  And so another kind of silence. Busy, expectant. A rustling, a cough. The clank of ovenware from the kitchen; a muffled burst of laughter from the garden. Rows of faces turned towards her, not to hear her sing but to hear her speak.

  She has never been comfortable talking on stage: between songs, she would smile out at the audience, accept a retuned guitar from a technician, perhaps offer some small, banal observation about whichever city she was in. Hello, Birmingham! Some weather we’re having, isn’t it?

  Cassandra, in her vintage gowns, her feathers, and her pearls, was a woman who preferred to preserve a certain mystery; she had surely given enough away in the songs, and did not need to maintain a showman’s patter in the spaces in between. So Cass had told herself, but really, she knew it had been her shyness, her fear, that had prevented her from speaking, from building the rapport that seemed to come so easily to other performers. To Tom Arnold, for one—he was so natural on stage, telling stories, offering jokes, as if to a crowd of friends in a small-town bar. Ivor, too, could be relied on to fill any unnatural silence. And yet it had seemed to Cass that with one wrong word, one burst of unkind laughter from the audience, it might all come toppling down—the edifice she had built for herself. The character she had inhabited, in order to be able to step out from the wings and play.

  That feeling, the therapist had told her in the hospital, was not uncommon in performing artists. The perception of a distance between one’s true self and the self one must assume on stage.

  “It only really becomes problematic,” she had said, “when you start to lose sight of the person you really are.”

  Cass had stared at her, trying hard to focus on the woman’s face. “Yes. That’s it. I really have no idea who I am. I’m not sure I ever did.”

  And now, here she is: standing not on stage but in a corner of her own living-room, among friends, musicians, fellow survivors. Alan and Callum beside her; Kim standing a few feet away. Irene and Mike, examining the framed photographs arranged on the Steinway’s closed lid. Kit and Graham, clutching glasses of brandy. Martin Hartford over from Los Angeles with his Chilean wife, Anaís.

  Martha, the young musician who still reminds Cass of Kate, back in their years in Savernake Road. Dark-eyed Javier, from Granada, whom Callum had brought in on percussion; Will, the twenty-four-year-old pianist from Cornwall who had played so beautifully.

  Pauline, her old fan-club secretary, now a grandmother living in Tunbridge Wells with her white-haired husband, Jeff. Simon, of course, and his partner, Nick. And huddled around them, a small cabal of carefully selected journalists. Don Collins, a full-bellied, balding sixty-six-year-old, mellowed in his old age, who is now given—against all possible expectations—to writing lengthy appreciation pieces about Cass’s music; even spearheading a campaign, five years before, to persuade her back into the studio. It was not Don, of course, who had finally drawn her back there; but still, it had been good to know that there were people who cared one way or the other. Even such a man as Don.

  Now, across the room, she catches the eye of her old adversary, and he offers her a twitch of a smile. What was it he had said to her in that pub all those years ago, while Ivor had shifted uncomfortably across the table? Do we really need to hear your nice little middle-class songs, when there’s a much bigger world out there, calling for our attention?

  Well, perhaps the world hadn’t needed to hear them; but she had. And she had needed, above all, to hear them today.

  In a second, she will open her mouth to speak; not as Cassandra, the kohl-eyed singer in velvet and silk, but as herself. Cass Wheeler. Ex-musician. Ex-mother. Ex-daughter. Ex-wife.

  What remained of her, through all those years when she defined herself only by the people she had lost, and the absences that they had left? A dried-out husk; an empty, silent room. How to explain, now, the way in which music had returned to her, note by note, chord by chord; how she had found herself, ever so slowly, drawn back to her guitars, her microphones, to the old ways she had relied upon to frame this impossible, incomprehensible world? And how, eventually, that music had settled, layered itself, formed the new songs that she will play to them tonight. “Edge of the World”: Anna standing on that Hebridean beach, arms outstretched, stepping off into a place where her mother could not follow. “Gethsemane”: Cass’s guilt, her fear, her loss of faith. “When Morning Comes”: Cass’s hope, however small, however tentative, that there, beyond the limit of the horizon, is a rising arc of light.

  Impossible to explain it, but she will try.

  And at the centre of it, underpinning every syllable, she will see a face—the face around which it all spins. And it will be to that face—the face of Larry Alderson, the man she knows, now, that she loves—that she will speak, in the nonsensical belief that perhaps, through some crack in time and space, he will be able to hear her, and understand.

  TRACK SIXTEEN

  “When Morning Comes”

  By Cass Wheeler

  New and exclusive

  I have spent so many nights, love

  Restless and alone

  Sleepless in my own bed

  Weary for the dawn

  Well tonight I am awake, love

  Like all those nights before

  But nothing is the same

  I’ve found a cure

  When morning comes I will reach for you

  When morning comes I call you

  When morning comes

  I can throw off the darkness

  I have lived in for too long

  And I will listen listen listen

  To the song

  To your song

  I knew that nothing

  Could turn me around

  Nothing of my own doing

  Could help me be found

  When you came around to me

  You opened something closed

  And when you let the light in

  Love grows

  When morning comes

  I will reach for you

  When morning comes I call you

  When morning comes

  I can throw off the darkness

  I have lived with for too long

  And I will listen listen listen

  To your song

  To your song

  * * *

  RELEASED 18 May 2015

  RECORDED January 2015 at Home Farm, Kent

  GENRE Folk rock / blues / pop

  LABEL Lieberman Records

  WRITER(S) Cass Wheeler

  PRODUCER(S) Callum Sutherland

  ENGINEER(S) Gavin Bryant

  Sunrise over Washington, DC.

  Below, the pale stone colonnades, pillared porticos, and red-roofed domes of Pennsylvania Avenue; above, the pink and orange wash of the dawn. Slashes of cloud, silhouetted against the fiery glow; and to the right, screened by the broad, still-dark crowns of trees, the White House, with its whispers and scurries, its urgent early-morning stirrings.

  Cass had not slept: she had closed her eyes, settled herself into the warm space offered by Larry’s crooked arm, and remained alive to each moment as it passed. She was too wired to sleep, too attuned to these new sounds (he snored—a steady nasal rattle, bellying up from the base of his throat), and to the unfamiliar weight of his arm on her shoulder. His body, stretched out next to her in the king-size hotel bed; the grey-white sweep of his hair. The pits and craters of his craggy, closed, sleeping face: mouth half open, the extraordinary brightness of his blue eyes concealed behind shuttered lids.

  The way that mouth had covered hers; the way those hands, now lying motionless beneath white sheets, had moved across her body, drawn shivers from it, brought it back to sudden, vibrant life. How long had it been sleeping, her bod
y, before such a delirious reawakening? She could not think how long. And now, her body would not sleep. Every inch of her seemed to pulse with the memory of his touch.

  Towards five, she had gently pushed back the covers and climbed from the bed. Larry had not woken: he had shifted slightly, turned his face towards her vacant pillow, and slept on. She had pulled on her towelling robe, returned to the chair before the window where, just a few hours ago, she had sat waiting for him, watching her reflection in the darkly mirrored pane. Her glass was still on the table, with its shallow meniscus of red wine. Larry’s, beside it, was still half full. She had poured the wine for him, but he had hardly touched it; he had sat watching her, his legs stretched out before him. They had talked, and the talking had been easy. She had shed her shyness; had raised her eyes to meet his. And Larry had laid down his glass, stood up, come over to her chair and bent until their faces were level, and their lips met in a kiss.

  The first kiss: the giddy fixation of a teenager, a giggling ingénue. Not these two almost-strangers in late middle age, their reflections conjoining in the uncurtained window. And yet a first kiss was what it had been. And then, drawing the blind down across the glass, Larry had lifted Cass to her feet, and encircled her in his arms.

  Now, it was almost six, and there, before the raised blind, was the Washington dawn. Still he slept, but Cass, sleepless as she was, did not yet feel the tiredness that would come.

  It would be only very rarely like this between them, though of course she could not know that yet: soon, very soon, sooner than she could imagine, she would learn to sleep next to him, grow used to his muttering, to his rattling snore. (Love such things, even, if she could not dismiss such a thought as absurdly sentimental.) And then it would be Larry who would wake before her, and she who would shift and resettle in the bed, and allow herself to tumble back into sleep as he moved off downstairs.