The Nightingale Sings

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Why?’ Cassie asked carefully. ‘What has being pregnant got to do with staying married with a man who cheats on you?’

  ‘Because that’s why I got pregnant. Right?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘I agree,’ Mattie said. ‘Blank.’

  Josephine flicked her hair back and then lit a cigarette in defiance of the tears now in her eyes. ‘Mark has been cheating on me from the word go,’ she said. ‘Forget the girl on honeymoon. He was still having all his old girlfriends after we’d met, apparently, even after he’d asked me to marry him. When I found out I thought perhaps if I got pregnant—’ Josephine stopped and took a deep pull on her cigarette. ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Really it doesn’t.’

  ‘Of course it matters, Josephine,’ Cassie said. ‘If this doesn’t matter then I want to know what does.’

  ‘It’s just that I thought if I got pregnant it might make him reform his ways – you know, be the faithful husband and father-to-be. But instead it’s only made things ten times worse. It seems – it seems he hates kids.’

  Cassie frowned and stared hard at her daughter. ‘He doesn’t like children?’ she said, as if reacting to a blasphemy.

  Josephine shrugged. ‘Can’t stand them, apparently.’

  ‘Didn’t you discuss all this before you decided to get married?’

  ‘No. I just took it for granted – well. You know, growing up in this family you sort of do. Take these sorts of things for granted. That people fall in love, want to get married, and raise a family.’

  ‘So why did he marry you?’ Cassie asked.

  ‘Why do you think?’ Mattie sighed, collapsing into an armchair. ‘Why do you think? And of course you being a good little Catholic girl, you can’t or won’t divorce him.’

  ‘I don’t want to divorce him, Mattie!’ Josephine burst into angry tears. ‘I told you you wouldn’t understand!’

  ‘Of course I don’t understand!’ Mattie replied forcefully. ‘Just give me one good reason why you want to stay married to the sod! Just one!’

  ‘Because I love him! Is that good enough for you?’

  Mattie looked at his sister appalled while Cassie took a deep breath and got up to walk about the drawing room, trying to collect her thoughts.

  ‘Look,’ Josephine said with sudden sarcasm, wiping away her angry tears. ‘Look, I don’t expect you to understand, either of you – you, Mattie, because you’ve never had a serious relationship, and you, Mum – you wouldn’t understand because of Dad. Because of your famous fairy tale romance. You couldn’t begin to understand what I feel, not for a second.’

  ‘You could try me.’

  ‘There isn’t any point,’ Josephine returned, pulling her hand away to twist it in her lap with her other one. She stared down at them with her head bent, her tears falling unchecked onto her fingers. ‘I honestly thought the only way to keep him was to have a baby. I thought he might change if I got pregnant. He can be very kind and loving at times, you see, so I thought if we had a baby he’d change and go back to being the Mark I met. The one I fell in love with.’

  ‘You mean the one you dreamed up you were in love with,’ Mattie said from behind her. ‘The one who was still bonking all his old girlfriends.’

  ‘Shut up, Mattie! You don’t know what you’re talking about because you haven’t grown up yet! You haven’t even started to! And you won’t – not as long as you stay here you won’t! As mother’s favourite darling little boy!’

  ‘Stop it, both of you,’ Cassie ordered. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying, either of you. And until you do it’s better you don’t say anything. Am I making myself quite clear?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mattie said quietly. ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t understand,’ Josephine said, still staring down at her hands, which she was wringing even more frenetically than ever. ‘Like I knew this was a mistake. I should never have come home. I knew you wouldn’t have time for me.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ Cassie asked. ‘How could you even begin to think that?’

  ‘Because you only really have time for your bloody horse, that’s why,’ Josephine replied. ‘And as Mark said you’ve made a right mess of him as well.’

  ‘As Mark said?’ Cassie wondered.

  ‘As Mark said,’ Josephine repeated.

  ‘He said what happened to Nightie was my fault?’

  ‘Well, who else’s? You were warned by everyone! Everyone with any sense told you – they all said don’t keep the horse on in training. I told you, Mattie told you, everyone told you – but you did! You wouldn’t listen to anybody because you thought you knew best! Like you always do! You had to keep Nightie on in training, and not only that! You didn’t even bother to insure him properly! I don’t know what you thought you were doing!’

  ‘OK, fine,’ Cassie said, trying to take the steam out of things. ‘Whatever you and Mark may or may not think, that’s another subject altogether, Josephine. It really has nothing to do with why you’re here back home.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’ Josephine retorted. ‘You should hear Mark on the subject. Mark can’t believe it. He says only a woman could be so stupid. He thinks you’re mad, and I’m mad – and you have to be because look what’s happened! I mean, our whole future, gone! Just because you wanted to have your own way!’

  ‘I don’t think you heard what I said, Josephine,’ Cassie said quietly. ‘I said this is a subject for another time. What we have to deal with first is you – and what’s going to happen to you. What’s the matter?’ Cassie hurried to her daughter’s side as she saw Josephine suddenly double up in pain. ‘What is it, Jo? What’s the matter, darling?’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Josephine said suddenly, leaning forward and putting both her hands to her stomach. ‘Christ almighty. There’s something very wrong.’

  * * *

  The family doctor was no longer old Dr Gilbert, who had helped deliver Josephine into the world but had long since retired and recently died, but his son Derry, a totally different character. His father had been, in Erin’s words, an awful grumpy auld stick, addicted to nicotine and not averse to the odd ball of malt, whereas Derry was fastidious, scrupulous and meticulous, and again according to Erin a terrible loss to the Protestant church. He was also punctilious and as soon as he heard the urgency in Cassie’s call he dropped everything and was at Josephine’s bedside within quarter of an hour. He subjected Josephine to a long and thorough examination, leaving Cassie to pace the floor of the drawing room below and to wonder to herself how everything had gone so terribly wrong.

  What can I have done?’ she asked herself, watching Mattie outside throwing a frisbee for Wilkie. What can I have possibly done to invite all this bad luck and disaster? I’ve done everything I could to hold house, home and business together, and now it’s all falling apart. All I’ve done is kept my head down and kicked on, through thick and thin, and all for this.

  And then she remembered the words whispered at her back that day at Longchamps, after the Arc, when The Nightingale had just raced to his famous victory.

  Mind you don’t go getting too successful, the voice had warned her. Mind you don’t go getting too successful.

  Her reverie was broken by a discreet tap on the door behind her and the entry of Dr Gilbert.

  ‘There’s not a moment to be lost, Mrs Rosse,’ he said. ‘Your daughter has to be admitted to hospital immediately. I shall ring the Rotunda at once.’

  Fourteen

  ‘A what sort of pregnancy?’ Erin wondered when Cassie told her.

  ‘Ectopic. It’s when a fertilized egg becomes stuck in one of your fallopian tubes,’ Cassie explained to Erin the next morning as her housekeeper busied herself in the kitchen making lunch while Cassie sat drinking strong black coffee. ‘Apparently it can be caused by any number of things, which is something I didn’t know.’

  ‘I thought things like that could only be caused by a termination,’ Erin replied, wiping her han
ds down her check apron. ‘Or at least they only happened to women who’d had a termination.’

  Cassie waited before she replied, taking a sip of her coffee to buy time. The last thing she wanted at this moment was an argument with Erin about the Church’s standing on birth control and the termination of unwanted pregnancies.

  ‘No, apparently ectopic pregnancies—’

  ‘Ectopic indeed?’ Erin interrupted, following her interruption with a barely concealed snort, as if the condition itself constituted some sort of sin. ‘They give all these things such fancy names, as if to take your mind off what they really are.’

  ‘Be that as it may, Erin,’ Cassie continued patiently, ‘but apparently this sort of pregnancy can be the result of all sorts of things, so the doctors told me. Of everything from congenital abnormality to perfectly straightforward infection.’

  ‘Or even following the failure of certain types of birth control,’ Erin announced with a certain amount of undisguised triumph. ‘That’s something else I heard. That when pregnancies go wrong, it’s more often than not the result of taking the pill.’

  Cassie watched Erin virtuously rolling out the pastry topping for the pie she was busy making and bit her tongue. Even though she herself was a Catholic, for the life of her Cassie was unable to understand the mind of a person who on the one hand was capable of giving such love to all those who surrounded her and most of all those whom she had helped raise, while on the other she could forget the humanities and begin pontificating like the worst sort of bigot about matters of doctrine. Much as she loved Erin, Cassie found this difficult to take from a woman who had fallen in love with and got herself pregnant by their local parish priest.

  But she said nothing for she loved Erin dearly and knew that these two sides of her character in no way constituted a whole, for the real and entire Erin was the one who loved and cared for them all while the other one was the ghost of a frightened little girl who had been brought up in fear and trembling of the Church.

  ‘I hope that pie’s not for lunch, Erin,’ she said by way of changing the subject. ‘I really only want something light because I have to be at the Rotunda by three if I’m to see Josephine before she goes down for her operation.’

  ‘I cut you some sandwiches ready,’ Erin replied, folding the pastry over the top of a dish. ‘The pie’s for this evening, all being well, please God.’

  ‘Everything has to be fine, Erin. Josephine’s being operated on by the best gynaecologist in Ireland.’

  ‘But she still has to lose the babba.’

  ‘I’m afraid so. And it isn’t a case of saving the baby over the mother if that’s also concerning you. There’s no way a foetus can survive being conceived outside the womb, and anyway Dr Gilbert told me that in ninety-nine per cent of these cases by the time they operate the foetus is already dead.’

  ‘Ninety-nine per cent is not one hundred per cent, Mrs Rosse,’ Erin replied, picking up the pie and placing it carefully on the side. ‘At least it wasn’t when I was at school. And you know as well as I do what the Church says about such matters. If there’s a chance of saving the baby—’

  ‘There is no chance, Erin,’ Cassie said, cutting in quickly. ‘None whatsoever. And even if there was, there’s absolutely no way I’d ask the surgeon to save its life at risk to my daughter’s. Now I have some things to attend to, if you’ll excuse me.’

  Cassie took her plate of sandwiches from the table and went before anything more was said, leaving a speechless and highly indignant Erin behind her. She ate half the sandwiches while she was getting herself ready to leave and hurried out of the house to drive into Dublin half an hour early.

  By so doing she missed the telephone call that came through on her direct line and because in her hurry Cassie had forgotten to switch on her answering machine Erin took the call, and because she was still arguing the pros and cons of the Church’s standing on birth control and abortion in her head she completely forgot to write down the message she was given to say that Mr Benson had called.

  The operation carried out by the distinguished Mr Theodore Pilkington on Josephine late that afternoon was perfectly straightforward, even though as Mr Pilkington informed Cassie immediately afterwards he had been required to remove the damaged fallopian tube as he considered it beyond repair.

  ‘Nil carborundum, however, Mrs Rosse,’ he announced as he walked her down a hospital corridor. ‘Nil carborundum. The young lady has another perfectly good fallopian tube and given a fair shot at it there is no logical reason why she should not still be quite capable of conceiving, provided this conception was the result of post-coital contraception. Yes? And not a uterine infection.’

  ‘Could you not tell when you were operating?’ Cassie asked, and then corrected herself. ‘That was a silly question. I meant, wouldn’t you have been able to see signs of any infection when you were actually doing the operation?’

  ‘Hmm.’ Theodore Pilkington removed his tortoiseshell half moons and twirled them casually around between finger and thumb as they continued to walk down the corridor. ‘I would say the jury is still out on that one, Mrs Rosse. I did detect some abnormal swelling and tenderness of the pelvis when I performed my pre-op examination, but we shall not know for certain until we have the results of your daughter’s cervical smear.’

  Normally Cassie would have been amused by the distinguished surgeon’s idiosyncratic use of emphases and charmed by the Anglo-Irish lilt to his voice, but the implications of what was being said far outweighed any other observations. Instead she continued to match the tall surgeon stride for stride as they walked the polished hospital corridor and listen to what he had to say in answer to her few but carefully chosen questions. There was it seemed a possibility that Josephine could have been and indeed still was suffering from a syndrome called pelvic inflammatory disease, and if the tests proved this to be the case Cassie was assured it would explain Josephine’s recent malaise.

  ‘PID being?’ Cassie wondered.

  ‘Pelvic inflammatory disease,’ Theodore Pilkington reiterated.

  ‘How would someone contract such a disease?’

  ‘Hmmm,’ the surgeon mused, before all at once exhaling childishly through his lips to distract from what he had to say. ‘IUD for instance, though I understand the young lady in question does not favour the device. Intrauterine device, yes? The infection can often follow a miscarriage, or an abortion – even childbirth. But generally speaking ’tis sexually transmitted. As in chlamydial infection and gonorrhoea. Now. Do you think your wonderful horse will ever race again?’ he added still intent on distraction.

  Cassie smiled politely and shook her head. ‘I really can’t discuss that at the moment, Mr Pilkington,’ she said. ‘I’m so worried about my daughter. If I understand what you’re saying—’

  ‘Of course, of course, and I’m sure you understand well enough what I’m saying, Mrs Rosse,’ Theodore Pilkington assured her. ‘NSU as in nonspecific urethritis is still the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United Kingdom.’

  ‘I know my daughter to be perfectly faithful,’ Cassie put in defensively.

  ‘Then in that case, Mrs Rosse, we shall soon know the source of the infection. I shall naturally keep you fully informed.’

  With that he was gone, accelerating his pace to round a corner and disappear into a ward.

  Cassie arrived home around midnight, having waited to be with Josephine when she finally recovered consciousness. Erin had left her supper on a tray in the library but she was too tired and worried to eat, so she took the food to the kitchen and put it in the refrigerator, and instead made herself a hot chocolate which she carried up to her bedroom where she slowly drank it sitting on the edge of her large double bed wondering over and over if anything was ever going to start going right again.

  She brought Mattie up to date as they rode out two recuperating horses the following afternoon. The news Cassie had received from the hospital at midday certainly heralded no upturn i
n fortune. Jose was diagnosed as having suffered from PID which according to the evidence had been sexually transmitted.

  ‘Whether she likes it or not, she really should divorce him,’ she said.

  ‘She won’t divorce him because she loves the sod. You heard her,’ Mattie replied.

  ‘That was before she lost the baby,’ Cassie said. ‘And had to undergo an operation.’

  ‘She’s in his thrall, Ma,’ Mattie said, taking a pull on his horse who had taken to fooling around. ‘They have this thing. Jose told me. It’s very good physically, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘No, of course I don’t know what you mean,’ Cassie said lightly. ‘It’s been so long since I was married I’ve forgotten all about it.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ Mattie groaned. ‘I’m sorry. Anyway, to get back to the question of divorce. How can Jose divorce Creepy Carter-James, being the good Catholic girl that she is?’

  ‘From what we know now, and particularly since he said quite categorically he doesn’t want children, she can go for an annulment and believe you me she’ll get one.’

  ‘Supposing she doesn’t? I really think she’s seriously stuck on this guy.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me your sister will stay with a man like Mark just because he’s good in bed?’

  ‘It’s more than just that,’ Mattie said quietly, breathing in deeply. ‘Apparently – well, not to put too fine a point on it, apparently he’s the first man who’s actually satisfied her.’

  Cassie looked round at him sharply. ‘OK,’ she said after a moment. ‘But that’s no real reason surely to stay with someone who’s not only consistently unfaithful but is so to the point where he infects her with his filthy diseases? In this instance with a disease which could have led to her dying in childbirth and which certainly accounted for the loss of her first baby?’

  ‘I thought we were to refer to it as a foetus,’ Mattie remarked, keeping his horse at the walk.

  Cassie turned and glared at him. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she demanded.