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“Yes,” Cass said, sounding strangled. “I can sing. I’ve been meaning to take some lessons, but never got around to it. If nobody else wants the solo… I’ll do it.”
This was clearly a big thing for the young woman, who had seldom said a word in front of the choir before. I noticed a few surprised expressions, but fought to keep mine in its usual neutrality.
“Any other takers for the solo?” I looked around at the rest of the choir, noting the shakes of their heads. “Going once, going twice… sold! Cass, come find me at the end and we’ll organise a time to go over it in detail. In the meantime, as there’s no piano, Petra will sit next to you and give you a helping hand.”
Petra moved to sit between Cass and Felicia, and we cracked on with the rehearsal. I was buoyed to see that they all seemed to like the medley – particularly some of the juicier harmonies – and it made the hours of work I’d put into it over the winter worth it.
At the end of the two hours, we were able to stand up and sing the whole thing through. Shakily, yes, and with a number of uncertain or completely wrong notes, but I could tell they enjoyed it by the smiles on their faces.
“This one’s going to be a cracker, everyone!” I declared as they started packing up. “A proper showstopper! See you all next week!”
At that moment, I looked over at Petra and Cass. Together with Felicia, they had their heads together and were poring over Cass’s copy of the music. Petra had her ever-present pencil out and was annotating it, and as I looked she said something that made the other two burst out laughing. I smiled, but couldn’t go over there due to being interrupted by another member of the choir with a question.
The hall emptied fairly quickly compared to normal, with even the usual malingerers dashing outside to catch the last of the gorgeous sunset. Cass and Felicia were the last out, with Cass agreeing to go over the solo at home, calling one of us if she ran into any issues that couldn’t wait until the following week.
“I’ve never seen Cass like that before,” Petra commented as we finally got in the car and began to drive through the Cornish twilight. “So… animated. She was always quite flat when she worked at the school; I could never get much personality out of her. She seems much happier now.”
“It’s probably love,” I suggested. “She found Felicia around that time, didn’t she? Maybe Felicia loved her back to life, as it were.”
“Like we did to each other,” Petra said with a smile in her voice that I couldn’t see in the dusk.
“Yeah,” I murmured.
It was true. Even if the opposite seemed to be happening now.
Chapter Sixteen
To give her her due, Cass seemed admirably committed to her newly-acquired role as soloist. On my break at work the next day, I received a text from her, asking if we could meet to go over the solo privately. ‘I’m having a crisis of confidence and need you to tell me it’ll all be okay!’ she wrote in her message, followed by a crying-laughing and a floods-of-tears emoji.
‘That sounds like something I can do!’ I wrote back. ‘I finish work at 3 and will be back home by half past. Come over any time after that and we’ll bash it out on the piano!’
I followed it with our address, and Cass said she’d be there as soon as she’d finished work at five. We rarely had people over these days, what with Petra being so busy all the time, so when I got home from work I immediately went into panicked-hostess mode. The house wasn’t dirty by any stretch of the imagination, but I whizzed around with the vacuum cleaner and the duster, before setting up the makings of a hot drink.
At five twenty-five, she knocked on the door, and we wasted no time in getting set up in the music room. Cass had brought her copy, and we spent a full five minutes laughing at Petra’s annotations, including one that simply said ‘RIP altos’ under one particularly deep, bass-y line.
“I will confess, I like to give the altos the most satisfying lines when I arrange music,” I said with a wry chuckle. “Because I’m naturally an alto, and when I was in the choir, we always got the weakest lines. I find that so many arrangements forget the lower parts. Audiences are so captivated by the dizzying heights the sopranos can reach, they forget about the altos who support them underneath. You may not always be able to hear the alto line, but take it away altogether and the piece is much weaker for it.”
“You were in the choir?” Cass said.
“Yep. I was in it right from the start, back in the nineties. Petra joined when she moved to the village ten years ago, and we took it over six years ago. Its songs have been the backing track of our love story, really.”
I tailed off, because a wave of desolation had just overtaken me. One of the songs we were singing this year was a break-up anthem. I didn’t like to think about that.
“Anyway…” I cleared my throat. “Not all of them. Not the sea shanty medley, obviously. We’re not pirates.” I tried to laugh.
Cass laughed obligingly, but her expression was serious too. “I didn’t like it when I first joined. The choir. You may not remember, I came for a trial run just after I moved here. I had… well, what I now recognise was a panic attack. Too many people, I think, and I wasn’t in a good place mentally. But I’m glad Heather convinced me to try it again.”
“Heather?” I said, running through the list of choir members in my head. “Heather Chappell left long before you arrived.”
“No… Heather, as in my girlfriend.”
I squinted at her. “Felicia? I don’t follow.”
“Felicia has a condition called Dissociative Identity Disorder. Her mind is essentially split into five separate alternate personalities, all of whom are their own identities. Heather is the one you know as Felicia, but Felicia is simply the body’s legal name.”
“Oh,” was all I could find to say while my mind absorbed the unexpected information. “I didn’t know that.”
“Not many people do,” Cass replied. “Just after we got together, the system decided to stop keeping it a secret, but it’s been easier said than done to actually tell people about it. I have their full consent to tell you this, by the way.”
