The Nightingale Sings

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘What better recommendation?’ Joel returned and settled back in his seat.

  In contrast to the other restaurant everything was perfect from the moment they walked in Blaney’s door. They both had the same superb food – courgette flowers stuffed with sweetbreads and fried and fresh Irish salmon en feuilleté washed down with a 1971 Gerwutz Traminer, most of which Joel drank. In just as stark a contrast was the level of conversation, Joel being positively voluble for him which meant talking occasionally in sentences with subclauses. Not that he ever talked while he was actually eating, but in between courses he opened right up, telling Cassie more about his wild and brilliantly talented mother and his pianist younger brother who Joel confessed was far and away still the best friend he had ever had. It wasn’t a highly detailed history, but what information was put before Cassie was so carefully selected and filleted that it built up a totally coherent and accurate picture of the young Joel Benson’s life, a life which was apparently as sunny and happy as could be expected until his mother’s premature death in the plane crash. His father while still alive, and also a painter, was finding his work increasingly difficult, since he suffered from arthritis.

  At first Cassie was not so forthcoming about herself, more out of modesty than out of reluctance. Whenever people had asked her before about her life with Tyrone and her existence since she had often thought her listeners must have found her insufferably smug, for apart from Tyrone’s tragic death and her long uphill struggle to re-establish Claremore, over which she usually glossed, since she had met and married Tyrone it appeared as if much of her life had been nothing less than a fairy story.

  Now of course with The Nightingale’s mutilation Joel knew the twist in the tail, and Cassie found that beneath all his apparent prickliness and monosyllabia Joel was a most fair-minded and genuinely curious person.

  When they got home it was well after two o’clock in the morning. The moon was full and very bright and for a while they stood on the drive at the front of the house leaning on the car and gazing bewitched at the velvety blue landscape.

  ‘What is it about moonlight?’ Cassie wondered. ‘Why is it so haunting?’

  ‘According to Joseph Conrad, because it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul,’ Joel replied, ‘and something of its inconceivable mystery.’

  ‘Look at it tonight,’ Cassie continued, slipping her arm through his. ‘Tonight it’s as full as a summer’s rose.’

  Two large bats flew suddenly out of the great cedar of Lebanon and swooped silently off into the blue.

  ‘Do you want a nightcap?’ Cassie asked, looking at the man starting up at the sky. Joel shook his head. ‘You sure?’ she asked again. Joel nodded. ‘You don’t want anything?’ Joel nodded again. ‘You do want something. What?’ He turned and looked down at her for a moment.

  ‘I want to kiss you.’ Which he did.

  After he had kissed her again Cassie put her two hands on his chest and tried to push him away.

  ‘No. No.’

  ‘No what?’ Joel wondered, stroking one side of her hair while he looked at her.

  ‘Just no, Joel,’ Cassie replied, keeping her hands firmly on his chest.

  ‘You didn’t want me to kiss you?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘If you had, you wouldn’t be saying no now.’

  ‘It’s not as easy as that.’ Cassie freed herself and took a step back, turning away. ‘I mean, I wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘All I did was kiss you, Cassie,’ Joel sighed. ‘I haven’t asked you to go to bed with me.’

  ‘You didn’t have to,’ Cassie replied, remembering the passion of his kiss.

  ‘And you don’t want to.’

  ‘I’m not going to stand here discussing it, as if we were deciding whether or not to go out to dinner.’ Cassie began to walk off towards the house and Joel ambled after her. ‘Making love isn’t something you decide like that. At least I don’t anyway.’

  ‘I know, it’s just something that happens. Organically. You turn out the light and something beautiful happens.’

  ‘Now you’re being facetious.’

  ‘And you’re being self-indulgent.’

  Cassie stopped and swung round to face Joel only to find herself back in his arms once more.

  ‘The king is dead, Cassie,’ he said quietly.

  ‘It just isn’t as easy as that. So please – just leave me alone, right? Please just leave me alone!’ She pulled herself free, ran inside the house and pulled the heavy old door shut behind her.

  Eleven

  The next day she was gone. Joel, up late as usual, had come up from the cottage and was making his way through the house en route for the kitchen and some fresh hot coffee when he overheard Rosemary Corcoran on the telephone in Cassie’s study informing the caller that her employer would be away until at least the weekend.

  ‘Where’s she gone, Erin?’ he enquired of the housekeeper after he had arrived in the kitchen. ‘I didn’t know she was off somewhere.’

  ‘Neither did I, Mr Benson,’ Erin replied, putting his coffee in front of him. ‘But then generally I’m the last to be told anything. Sure I’m expected to rely on second sight – and Padraig, love?’ She took hold of her child by one hand and lifted him back onto a chair. ‘Padraig will you just please sit down and finish that biscuit like I told you and not be climbing all over poor Mr Benson again?’

  Joel tried not to smile as the child ignored Erin’s strictures, at once climbing down off his chair again and making his way over to Joel’s side. When Erin’s back was turned Joel lifted the boy onto his knee before continuing to wonder in as offhand a way as he could manage where Cassie might have taken herself.

  ‘Ach she’s away to Dingle I imagine, Mr Benson, where she usually goes when she has this sort of mood on her,’ Erin replied, turning to give him his coffee and shaking her head at her child when she saw where he had put himself.

  ‘This sort of mood,’ Joel echoed, pushing the cup well out of Padraig’s reach.

  ‘When something upsets her,’ Erin said with a particular glance at him. ‘Or somebody.’

  Joel ignored the remark and lit a cigarette which predictably enough induced a bout of disapproving coughing from Erin.

  ‘How you can ever smoke them things,’ Erin said, flapping a tea towel at the smoke. ‘They smell like a burning muck heap.’

  ‘And I don’t know how you bake such wonderful soda bread,’ Joel replied, pushing away the plate he had emptied. ‘I have never eaten bread like it.’

  Erin eyed him and at once stopped flapping her tea towel. ‘Mrs Rosse has gone to Dingle,’ she said. ‘Do you know where that is? It’s in County Kerry, a sort of peninsula thing that goes out into the Atlantic. As soon as her car was back from the garage, off she went. She has a wee holiday house down there, in a village called Coomenhoule – but sure you’d have little chance of—’

  Erin stopped with a shake of her head, for there was little point in continuing now that Joel had placed Padraig back safely on his own chair and fled the kitchen.

  Mattie said he could borrow the yard’s old runabout if it was for only a day, showing him where the Datsun truck was kept. Joel already had his old Harrods carrier bag packed with the few things he needed and was about to start the engine when Mattie stuck his head back in through the driver’s window.

  ‘What’s going on, if you don’t mind me asking?’ he enquired. ‘It’s probably none of my business, but my mother’s last words to me before she left were to make sure you were out of here by the time she got back.’

  ‘I’m out of here,’ Joel said, now firing the engine. ‘So stand aside.’ He would have backed the truck out of the hay barn were Mattie’s head not still stuck in through his window.

  ‘So what’s going on, Joel?’ Mattie asked. ‘I thought you two were – well, friends.’

  ‘We are, Matt,’ Joel replied. ‘And you know what they say about friendship. It’s infinitely more demanding
than love.’

  ‘So where are you going?’

  ‘If you must know, to try to alter the balance.’

  The roads were not busy, so driving as hard as the old truck would let him across the tip of Kilkenny, through the heart of Tipperary and the middle of Limerick, Joel was in Kerry within a couple of hours where ignoring the spellbinding scenery which began to build up around him he kept the throttle to the floor until he had reached Dingle itself. Stopping to fill up with petrol he found out from the garage proprietor that the village for which he was searching lay at the western tip of the peninsula opposite a now all but deserted set of islands called the Blaskets. It was raining hard when he reached Coomenhoule, a heavy dense rain driven inland by a strong autumnal gale coming fresh off the Atlantic which was apparently keeping everyone inside. Having of course forgotten to ask Erin the location of Cassie’s house let alone its name, at a small all-purpose shop in the village all he could do was ask if anyone of the small group of people huddled in the bar at the back of the shop knew the whereabouts of Mrs Rosse’s holiday house. When they saw him and heard his question as a man they all fell to silence.

  ‘Mrs Rosse is a friend of mine,’ he assured them. ‘And I understand she has a house somewhere round here.’

  ‘I’d have said,’ a man replied from the far end of the bar, taking his pipe from his mouth and staring into the bowl as he spoke. ‘I would have said, so I would, that were you a friend of this person you mention you would know the name of her house at the very least.’

  ‘I’ve forgotten it,’ Joel replied, with no attempt at charm.

  ‘And I’ve never heard of your friend Mrs Cross,’ the man returned, sticking his pipe back into his mouth.

  There was a muttered chorus of agreement from the other men at the bar, who all stood staring at Joel while shaking their heads in ignorance.

  ‘Ah now if it’s a Mrs Cross you’re seeking there’s no-one of that name,’ another man ventured out of the gloom of the bar.

  ‘Her name is Mrs Rosse,’ Joel repeated.

  ‘Ah God there’s no-one here of that name either, sir,’ the second man said with a nod. ‘Not even adjacent to it.’

  ‘There is, you know,’ Joel said, lighting up a cigarette. ‘I know for a fact Mrs Rosse has a house here, and this is hardly a very large village.’

  ‘No, it is hardly that, sir,’ another man agreed. ‘This place is so small sure don’t you sometimes expect it’s yourself you’ll meet turning a corner?’

  ‘Ah God now and isn’t that true enough?’ the chorus asked variously. ‘Isn’t that exactly what you’d expect?’

  Joel ordered himself a whisky and sat down at the bar. ‘Mrs Rosse owns a horse called The Nightingale,’ he said. ‘You must all have heard of him.’

  ‘The Nightingale,’ the chorus mused. ‘The Nightingale, you say, sir?’

  ‘The Nightingale.’

  ‘The Nightingale,’ the first man who’d spoken repeated. ‘Would this horse have run this year at Killarney, sir?’

  ‘Nope,’ Joel said, drawing on his cigarette.

  ‘Ah well sure I wouldn’t know it then, sir, for I never go near a racecourse except for Killarney.’

  ‘Nor I, nor I,’ his friends chorused. ‘Nor I, nor I.’

  Joel drank his whisky in silence then ordered another. ‘What would you say if I bought you all a drink?’ he asked.

  ‘Thank you,’ the chorus replied. ‘That’s what we’d probably say, sir, we’d say thank you, and God bless you, sir.’

  ‘Let’s try again,’ Joel said. ‘What would you do if I bought you all a drink?’

  To a man they all laughed, one or two of them slapping their knees with their caps.

  ‘God sir, we’d drink it, sir!’ they cried. ‘God sir what else should a man do?’

  Joel shoved a hand into his back pocket, took out a fistful of notes and ordered up a round of drinks which were demolished practically as soon as they were set down. Joel drank his own and then looked up to find a line of faces staring at him in anticipation.

  ‘Same again,’ he ordered the old man behind the bar. ‘Large ones.’

  Four rounds later and considerably poorer he appeared to be no nearer finding out where Cassie lived than he had been an hour earlier. The conversation was certainly flowing a lot more freely thanks to the amount of lubrication he had supplied, yet every time he tried to reintroduce the subject of Mrs Rosse, however casually, every one of the men in the bar became as ignorant as they had been the moment he had set foot in the place.

  ‘OK,’ he said, standing up and collecting the few coins he had left. ‘Thank you for your company, gentlemen, but not for your help.’

  Once again half a dozen pairs of eyes fixed on him, although with no longer quite such a steady focus.

  ‘Good man yourself,’ the farmer with the pipe said from the end of the bar. ‘You’re welcome to drink in here any time.’

  ‘There won’t be another time,’ Joel said, putting his change back into his pocket. ‘Not unless I find Mrs Rosse.’

  ‘God now, ’tis surely not a matter of life and death now, is it?’ the barman said, wiping the bar down with a cloth he’d had dropped over one shoulder. ‘If ’twas a matter of life and death you’d not have been in here drinking all this time.’

  ‘Ah well it would be a matter of life and death, so it would,’ said a tall and gangly simple young man who’d silently joined in the drinking without anyone apparently noticing. ‘Ah sure if I was you and yous and lookin’ for her, wouldn’t I be of just the same complexion? Sure I would. Ah sure I would, I would. I would so.’

  The lad jiggled up and down on the spot where he stood and grinned foolishly at the other men in the bar who had now turned to stare at him in stony silence.

  ‘Now get away, lads,’ the boy giggled. ‘Don’t yous all be starin’ at me like yous are, for yous all know what a beautiful lady she is, sure you do, you do, you do. For aren’t yous all always making sheep’s eyes at her, whenever she comes here? So yous are, so yous are. Ah so don’t all be starin’ at me like that, boys. It makes me feel an eejeet. So don’t be starin’ at me like that, or I’ll tell this gentleman exactly where Mrs Rosse lives so I will, I will, I will.’

  Joel said nothing. He just looked at the men who’d just drunk him broke. Then he turned back to the youth but before he could speak a huge man in an old full-length cracked black oilskin who had said nothing at all but had done his share of the drinking coughed into a huge fist of a hand before blinking slowly at Joel.

  ‘The house you want, sir, is about five mile out of Coomenhoule itself,’ he said. ‘You have to take second right after the last house on the left, sir, till you come to a sign which is now just a post and turn right there, sir, and drive up into the hills. When you come to a herd of sheep grazing—’

  ‘They’ll be grazing at a specific point, will they?’ Joel wondered, opening his eyes mockingly.

  ‘Where else would they be, sir, at this hour of the day?’ the man replied. ‘And when you see them drive straight on to the right.’

  ‘To the left,’ someone said. ‘If he drives on to the right won’t he be into the bog?’

  ‘You’re right, Mick,’ the big man agreed. ‘You must drive straight on to the left—’

  ‘Ah no, Donal,’ someone else interrupted. ‘He must drive on only slightly straight. If he drives on utterly straight sure he’ll be into the stream.’

  ‘Thank you, Pat, I stand corrected.’ The big man put his hand on Joel’s shoulder and nodded at him slowly. ‘You must do as Pat said. Drive slightly straight for the next several miles taking care to keep the largest of the mountains in front of yous and not to the left, turn again by a pile of stone you’ll see on the right, then right again further on opposite a next left turning which will take you right up to the house itself. Isn’t that right, lads?’

  ‘It is, it is,’ they chorused. ‘You’ll not go wrong if you follow what Donal has said.’

 
; ‘You’ll not,’ the old farmer said. ‘Sure a bat could find it in daylight with instructions like that.’

  ‘On the other hand, Tim,’ a voice said from behind Joel. ‘He could just follow me.’

  As one the men all looked to the door and when they saw who was standing there they hung their heads in shame.

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Rosse,’ the old farmer said. ‘We thought your man was from the newspapers.’

  ‘I’m sure you did, Tim,’ Cassie replied. ‘But he’s not. Mr Benson’s a friend. I just wasn’t expecting him, that’s all.’

  Joel didn’t look round. He just picked up his cigarettes and lighter and nodded his farewell to the men in the bar. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, and then turned and followed Cassie out.

  Cassie had been amazed when she had caught sight of him in the bar at the back of the shop. The old Datsun pickup parked outside might have given her advance warning but since in the Irish country such vehicles were two a penny she never gave it a second glance. But then as she was waiting at the counter for Mrs McGovern to load her ordered groceries into some cardboard boxes she had caught sight of him through a window dividing the shop from the snug, sitting at the corner of the bar with his chin propped up on his fists. A moment later her surprise had turned to fury as she realized he had pursued her all the way from Claremore without as much as a word so she had stepped back from the window in case he caught sight of her and allowed Mrs McGovern to do all the talking as she collected Cassie’s groceries together.

  She had listened while she waited, not to the shopkeeper’s prattle but to the conversation which was drifting in from the bar, and the more she had overheard the quicker her anger had abated and she began to smile, realizing the dance the farmers were busy leading Joel. For a moment she had almost let the men have their way as if to serve Joel right for invading her privacy, but then her heart had softened when she understood that far from being furious with him she was in truth quite touched that he had followed her to the west, and with an eye on the weather which was worsening by the minute she had realized she could not possibly disappear and leave the poor man to get lost in the swirling mists and rains which were obliterating the hills which rose up behind the tiny village. So she had rescued him, allowing him to climb into her car beside her after they had loaded up the groceries and supplies and drive back to the house with her, leaving the old pickup where he had parked it.