5 #2
Lyssa was about to do the same when she heard, above the disconnected sound coming from the other end of the line, a slight whine.
It was high-pitched and short-lived and then abruptly cut off.
It was a sound she’d never heard over the wire before and, as she hung up, she wondered if there might be a fault on her landline.
She knew BT were in the process of changing from the old technology to digital, but she’d had no notification of it in her area yet.
Slowly, she put the phone down. It was an old model and had already been in situ when she and Kyle had first bought the place nearly six years ago.
Then, not quite knowing why, she picked up the receiver again and put it to her ear.
She thought she heard a faint click. But then just the dialling tone.
She put the phone back and told herself not to be so silly.
She was acting like a heroine from a woman-in-peril film!
Besides, she didn’t have time to start getting paranoid about her phone line.
Today, she had somewhere she needed to be, and she needed to get herself to the train station within the hour.
She didn’t often get up to London, and she wasn’t totally sure where Monica Farley’s home was situated, so she wanted to leave herself plenty of time to find it.
If necessary, she could always get a taxi from the nearest train station in the general vicinity, for Elizabeth had assured her that she’d pay any necessary expenses.
In the end, the taxi was necessary, for Lyssa found herself not far from Kew Gardens before she got off the train, and even then Monica’s home was still several miles away, set in a very leafy suburb-of-a-suburb which, by rights, probably couldn’t claim to be in London at all.
But it was very nice for all that (maybe because of that?) and as she stood outside a well-proportioned terraced house in an affluent-looking street, she had to conclude that either Monica had done very well out of her divorce from the Lucky Cuckoos’ lead guitarist, or her second marriage had been to a man with plenty of money of his own.
Or maybe she had made it the good old-fashioned way, by working hard!
She knew from her research that ‘Racey’ Joiner had married young, and to a girl from the same poor neighbourhood as himself. What must it have been like for her to go from working-class poverty to the status of a celebrity’s wife, and all the sudden affluence that came with the band’s bigger hits?
Well, she supposed she was about to find out.
Walking up a smart front garden, she rang the bell set beside the conservatively black-painted front door and waited.
This was one of the things she loved about her job.
Like all ways and means of earning a livelihood, there were highs and lows no matter what career you followed, and in her case the isolation involved in working alone and the painstaking but necessary checking and rechecking of facts could get her down sometimes.
But meeting new people and listening to their interesting stories was definitely one of the bonuses.
Lyssa knew that the woman who answered the door had married Racey Joiner in 1969, when she was just twenty years old, and that just after this the band had finally split up for good.
Which, according to her mental arithmetic, meant that Monica must now be seventy-five or -six years old, but she looked a lot younger.
Slim, not too tall, with well-coiffured silver hair and pale grey eyes, her bone structure had stood her in good stead, for she was still a handsome woman. She was wearing a floor-length kaftan-style turquoise dress with lots of silver jewellery, and she gave a wide, welcoming smile.
‘You must be Lyssa Moore?’ she greeted her, thrusting out a bony hand.
‘I was so curious after you got in touch that I’m currently reading a couple of the biographies that you’ve done.
I must say, I’m enjoying them enormously – please come in.
I’m afraid my daughter, Jennifer, couldn’t make it today, though she wanted to, but I gave her your number and she’ll be in touch. ’
As she spoke, she ushered Lyssa through a spacious hallway and into an even more spacious lounge, done out in white, but with accent colours of turquoise (her favourite colour, maybe?) and different shades of green. The whole effect was cool and restful.
‘But I’d better warn you now, my daughter probably won’t be a pushover,’ she added.
At this, Lyssa felt her spirits drop a little. ‘Oh? I hope the idea of the book doesn’t upset her?’
‘Oh, lots of things upset her,’ Monica Farley said with an attempt at a careless smile that didn’t quite come off.
‘She was an only child, and I think she felt lonely. I tried my best to reach her, but we found it hard to connect somehow. Perhaps that’s why her father meant so much to her – though, to be honest, he never really spent much time with her.
Too busy with his music – you know how it is with artistic types? ’
She sighed, then indicated a large sofa.
In front of it was a coffee table, upon which rested a large jug of something with a lot of ice cubes in it.
‘Pimm’s,’ Monica said, catching the direction of Lyssa’s gaze.
‘I know what you’re thinking – what’s the former wife of an old rock-n-roller doing drinking such a posh drink?
But I became hooked on it when I was with Racey, and it sort of stuck.
Please sit down. I can get you something else if you prefer? ’
Lyssa had never tasted the drink before but wasn’t about to put her hostess to any trouble so early in the interview.
‘Oh no, that sounds lovely, thank you.’ She took out a digital recorder she used for such occasions, put it down on the table in front of her and turned it on.
‘You don’t mind if I record this, do you?
I’ll be jotting down a few written notes as well. ’
‘That’s fine, go ahead,’ Monica said airily.
‘It’s been so long since I gave an interview, I’ve almost forgotten the thrill!
’ She sat down on the sofa facing her and poured out the drinks.
‘I think it appeals to my vanity. Mind you, by the time I married Racey, the Lucky Cuckoos were a bit of a spent force, but I’d been around a few years before we actually tied the knot, so I still remember the fuss about their last big hit, even if Racey and I weren’t officially an item then.
That didn’t stop the press from pestering me for quotes though. ’
‘This would be their last hit song you’re talking about? The one in’ – she quickly rifled through her notebook and found the page she wanted – ‘er . . . 1965, I think, “Take it All”? Is that right?’
Monica leaned back and nodded. ‘That would be it. My, my, I haven’t listened to that in some years now.
’ She hummed a few bars of the melody and then sighed.
‘For a while, after Racey died, I played the Cuckoos’ hits a lot but .
. . well . . .’ She gave a shrug of her rather scrawny shoulders and spread her hands in a ‘what can you do’ gesture.
‘Time goes on, doesn’t it? I remarried, and now – what, it’s been, what, sixty years?
Sixty years,’ she stressed, sounding mock-scandalised. ‘How on earth did that happen?’
She shook her head and took a long sip of her drink, and Lyssa followed suit, almost choking when she discovered that Pimm’s, whatever else it contained, certainly contained alcohol.
For some reason – perhaps because it was a hot day, or perhaps because the drink came in a jug full of ice, she’d been expecting a soft drink.
She hastily put her glass down well out of the way. ‘You must look back on those days with fondness,’ she prompted.
‘Yes, but so many people do, don’t they?’ Monica mused philosophically. ‘Even those who barely remember them or hadn’t even been born in the 60s still talk about them as if they wish they could go back there.’
‘Perhaps that’s not so surprising,’ Lyssa replied. ‘They were iconic times, after all. The fashion, the music, the emerging youth culture – it must have been a great time to be young and in the midst of it all.’
‘Oh, it was! We had the time of our lives, I can tell you,’ Monica enthused.
‘I can still just about remember there being rationing as a kid – it didn’t phase out until the mid-1950s, you know.
Growing up in those dreary years just after the war with nothing to call your own – wearing my sister’s hand-me-down shoes, which didn’t quite fit and gave me blisters on the back of my heel.
If you got an orange and some nuts in the Christmas stocking you’d be glad, and a bar of chocolate .
. . !’ She threw up her hands with a grin.
‘Nowadays kids have all these fancy toys and gadgets and whatnots, and they still never seem satisfied. It makes me sad to see my great-grandkids so spoilt. Back then, we seemed to be happier with the little we had, but then we were all in the same boat, so we didn’t know any different, did we?
I went to the same primary school as Racey’s kid sister, Valerie, that’s how I met him, back when they first got together as a band.
Oh, I was only a kid then, mind you, but even at the tender age of thirteen or fourteen, I knew that I wanted Racey! ’
She gave a laugh, then shook her head. ‘Drove Mum mad, me hanging around them, but it was so exciting, and actually marrying the lead guitarist . . . ? That shut Mum up, you bet! All that money, and a respectable ring on my finger. She soon changed her tune then – if you’ll pardon the pun.’