The Nightingale Sings

by Charlotte Bingham

  The story delighted Cassie as much as it once more delighted the teller. And so they talked on until the clock above the fireplace in the drawing room where they now sat chimed midnight, making Cassie stare at it in disbelief.

  ‘I should have been home hours ago.’

  ‘If you should have been you would have been,’ Theodore replied with a smile. ‘Now since as they say we have the drink taken, why don’t you let Paul drive you home? Paul is the other half of Silent Mimosa who served our dinner and he is a thoroughly excellent driver. He can bring your car over to you first thing in the morning and believe you me, Mrs Rosse—’

  ‘Cassie, please,’ Cassie insisted.

  ‘Likewise Theo,’ Theodore replied. ‘And as I was saying, first thing will really be first thing since Paul is up and ready to go at five o’clock sharp.’

  On the way home, driven by Paul, Cassie reflected on her evening. By the time Theo’s magnificent old burgundy Rolls Royce turned in at the gates of Claremore she thought she had not enjoyed herself quite so unconditionally in the company of a man since the last time she had sat across a table from Tyrone.

  Having once again forgotten to leave her answering machine on, she found Erin had left a list of messages for her on the silver salver on the hall table. Altogether there had been seven calls for her, and four had been from Joel.

  Fifteen

  ‘I wasn’t going to ring you, but then this came up,’ he said.

  ‘Why weren’t you going to ring me? I rang you. What makes you so different?’ she demanded.

  ‘Hang on. I rang you because I have something to tell you.’

  ‘Isn’t that the usual reason people ring each other up?’

  ‘Don’t make this harder than it is, Cassie. You never once called me back.’

  ‘Wait. Wait up, Joel. Give me a such as.’

  ‘Such as the last time. I left a message with Erin.’

  ‘You mean tonight.’

  ‘I mean days ago. You were out somewhere, as usual. I rang, spoke to Erin, and said to make sure you got the message.’

  ‘I didn’t get it.’

  ‘Then that takes care of that.’

  ‘No it doesn’t. Not necessarily. I might not have wanted to call you back. Not after you just walked out of here and vanished without trace.’

  ‘I’d rather explain that when I see you, Mrs Rosse.’

  ‘If you see me, Mr Benson.’

  ‘This can’t wait.’

  ‘Then tell me over the telephone.’

  ‘No. It concerns the horse. How is he? I understand he’s making a miraculous recovery.’

  ‘Then why ask?’

  There was a short but exasperated silence from the other end of the phone.

  ‘I didn’t have to make this call, Mrs Rosse.’

  ‘Yes you did. You should have made it the day after you walked out of here.’

  ‘I said – I’ll explain when I see you.’

  ‘For when read if, remember?’

  ‘I’m not telling you any of this over the telephone.’

  ‘Why don’t you just give me a clue what this is all about?’

  ‘Very well. How’s your vet?’

  Now it was Cassie’s turn to be silenced.

  ‘I’ll be on the early bird tomorrow,’ she heard Joel saying while she was still trying to puzzle out his last remark. ‘I get into Dublin at nine forty.’

  Then the phone went dead.

  How was her vet? How was Niall? What had Niall got to do with it? Joel surely couldn’t have meant that Niall Brogan had something to do with Nightie’s disappearance?

  Surely that can’t be what he meant?

  From the desk where she had taken the call Cassie stared across to the portrait of Tyrone over the fireplace.

  Oh, God, Tyrone, she sighed. This way surely madness lies.

  Sixteen

  ‘Of course that’s not what I meant,’ Joel sighed as Cassie headed the car out of the airport and joined the Dublin road. ‘Ridiculous.’

  Cassie had made sure she got her question in early, just as soon as Joel had chucked his hold-all onto the back seat and settled his long-legged frame in the passenger seat of her car.

  ‘Fine,’ she said tightly. ‘So what precisely did you mean? And where exactly have you been?’

  Joel looked round at her and gave a small nod. ‘Let’s get that one out of the way first,’ he said, rummaging in his pocket for his cigarettes.

  ‘No smoking in the car, remember?’ Cassie reminded him.

  Joel sighed heavily, but all the same left the pack of cigarettes unopened. The traffic was heavy and slow but Cassie was in a hurry, so she changed down from drive to two and shot the BMW past a line of cars.

  ‘And I wouldn’t mind arriving at Claremore in one piece.’

  ‘Certain people thought your disappearance might have been because you were jealous,’ Cassie said, looking round at him.

  ‘Just watch the road, Mrs Rosse. I really don’t want to end up on a slab.’

  ‘Well?’ Cassie persisted, even so switching her concentration back to the traffic ahead.

  ‘Jealous as in jealous over your horse, I take this to mean?’

  ‘Jealous of the amount of attention the horse was getting, maybe.’

  ‘I should stick to horse training and forget about psychology,’ Joel replied. ‘If I’m to get jealous, it won’t be over a horse.’

  ‘People get jealous of everything and everyone. Particularly people—’ She stopped. Joel waited for a second before prompting her.

  ‘Yes?’

  Cassie sighed heavily. ‘It doesn’t matter, really it doesn’t.’

  ‘Fine. So it doesn’t matter.’ Joel fell to silence for a while, finger drumming a bossa nova on his cigarette packet.

  ‘To get back to your vet,’ he said. ‘Fact is I bumped into that dear friend of yours – Leonora de Medici.’

  ‘You saw Leonora? Where?’

  ‘It’s a small world and Mrs Charles Whojit Whatsit knows some people I know and we met in their house. So my remark about your vet was because she said you were having it off with him. Almost for openers.’

  ‘That’d be Leonora. Go on.’

  ‘According to her, Niall Brogan’s been the only real thing in your life since Tyrone but it’s always been an on-off affair because you couldn’t make up your mind whether or not to marry him. The latest bulletin was that it was all on again.’

  ‘Great.’ The traffic had slowed almost to a standstill now, so Cassie could take another look at the man beside her in perfect safety. ‘And you believed her.’

  ‘I’m just telling you what I was told.’ Joel wound down his window, staring out at nothing in particular. ‘She’s quite a spark, though, your old chum. After she’d put you in bed with your vet, she then tried to pull me into hers.’ Joel turned and eyed her, trying to note her reaction, if any.

  ‘That’s Leonora all right. Anyway, whatever. That can’t have had anything to do with your leaving Claremore without a word. Unless you were nursing a theory about Niall as well?’

  ‘That wasn’t the reason I left.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘OK if I smoke out of the window?’ he wondered, taking a cigarette out of the packet. ‘I won’t blow smoke in the car, promise.’

  ‘You can do what you like,’ Cassie replied, edging the car forward another dozen yards.

  ‘The reason I left Claremore was because my father was suddenly taken ill,’ he said, lighting up his Gitane. ‘You and Niall were just deciding what to do and what not to do about the horse when your secretary gave me a message.’

  ‘I forgot about that,’ Cassie said quietly.

  ‘My father had been rushed to hospital.’ He blew a long curl of blue smoke up out of the car window, holding the cigarette out of the car up above the roof.

  ‘I’m sorry. But even so couldn’t you have left a message to say where you’d gone and why?’

  ‘Yes. I did.’ Their eyes
met as they both looked round at each other. ‘I told Dick to tell you. Your handyman cum butler bloke.’

  Cassie shook her head once more. ‘You might as well have told one of my horses. Dick’s a dear, but he has a hole where his head should be. And if he doesn’t remember to tell you something and you ask him if there’s anything he might have forgotten, he just gets even more confused and runs away.’

  ‘Sorry. But then I wasn’t exactly thinking with a full deck myself.’

  The traffic began to move on a little more quickly, so Cassie slipped the automatic box into drive and kept apace.

  ‘Tell me about your father. Is it serious?’

  ‘It was,’ Joel replied. ‘He died an hour after I got to his bedside.’

  ‘Oh, Joel, I’m so sorry.’ Cassie frowned deeply. ‘I really am so sorry.’

  ‘Me too,’ Joel replied. ‘We were seriously good mates.’ He pinched dead the end of his cigarette and dropped it out of the window then began to rummage through some of the loose cassettes in the holdall between the two front seats.

  ‘The Grateful Dead?’ he wondered, holding one up.

  ‘Mattie’s,’ Cassie replied, seeing the turn coming up ahead for her favourite short cut which would take them through the west side of the city ahead, avoiding most of the rush-hour traffic.

  ‘Joe Cocker,’ Joel said, picking up another tape. ‘Another of Mart’s, I take it?’

  ‘No, the Joe Cocker’s mine,’ Cassie replied, taking a right and accelerating down a deserted side street.

  ‘Nice,’ Joel said, slotting the tape into the deck and turning up the volume, putting an end to any further conversation until the car finally drew up in front of Claremore.

  Even had she not known the news about his father, Cassie would have sensed a change in Joel. Rather than abstracted, which was his usual state, he now appeared distracted, saying and doing things by rote rather than with any real sense of purpose while all the time looking backwards as if to make sure the person following him was really no longer there. By now of course she knew enough about him not to try too hard to draw him out when it came to talking about things that mattered. As she had already found out, Joel was a Piscean and like all his particular type of Pisceans he dived down deep into the waters when people came after him too vigorously, but even so, accustomed as she had become to his long, thoughtful silences, she now found a different sound to them, a deep melancholic silence born out of the grief that follows loss.

  At first she sat out his silences patiently, knowing that he had things to tell her as well as things that he might perhaps wish to discuss. When they finally reached Claremore she had put him in the charge of Erin who saw to it that he was settled in a room in the house itself this time and not left to his own devices out in the cottage. He did not appear for lunch, nor give any word that he would not be coming down, but since Cassie had to be off to saddle two runners in the fourth and fifth races at Leopardstown that afternoon she imagined him to be sleeping and so took an early lunch by herself, Mattie having already left for the track.

  Her run of bad luck showed no signs of abating, at least as far as the form of her horses was going, for neither of her two well-fancied entries won or were indeed even placed, her first runner, a handsome son of Strong Gale who was having his third run over fences, falling at the last when six lengths in the lead, and her second horse, a previously unraced mare by Orchestra, breaking down at the second last flight of hurdles when well in contention.

  ‘That’s her out for the season,’ Mattie said as Fred and Bridie were loading the lame horse back into the horsebox. ‘In fact from the shape of that tendon I’d be surprised if you get her back into training at all.’

  Cassie noted the change from the usual we to you but said nothing, knowing that anything she said to Mattie nowadays generally sparked some form of argument. Instead once she had made sure that both horses were safely loaded Cassie went to her car and rang the hospital on her mobile, asking to be put through to her daughter’s room.

  ‘Your daughter discharged herself at lunchtime,’ the receptionist informed her. ‘Would you like to speak to Mr Pilkington? He’s just come out of the theatre as a matter of fact, and I know he was planning to ring you himself as soon as he was free.’

  A moment later Theodore was talking to her on the telephone. ‘I did everything I could, Cassie, but you know your daughter better than I,’ he said. ‘She’s as unbending as an elephant’s leg.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she’s taken herself back to Claremore,’ Cassie asked without much hope.

  ‘Not unless they’re running a taxi service between Clare more and the airport, for I gather that was where she was headed. Not that she’s in a fit enough state to make her way down half a corridor here let alone fly back to London, I might say. Let us just hope she has someone good looking after her across the water for she’s a fair way to go before she’s out of the woods yet, not just physically but mentally. Perhaps on my way home tonight I might drop by and make a plan of action? Just to ensure there are no loose ends left untied. Although that is probably not the most comfortable of metaphors in this instance.’

  Cassie hesitated, a moment of uncertainty Theodore quickly picked up.

  ‘No, no,’ he said easily. ‘If you’ve other plans – no, no. No matter. We can do it all on the telephone. I was simply being social.’

  ‘It’s just that I haven’t left Leopardstown yet,’ Cassie explained. ‘What time were you thinking of stopping by?’

  ‘I’d not be there before half seven.’

  ‘In that case that will be fine. I just wasn’t sure what I’d be doing for a moment, that was all.’

  Joel was lying stretched out fast asleep on the sofa when Cassie, back from the races, came into the drawing room. Automatically she found herself looking for signs of drinking, an unstoppered decanter or a whisky glass left down somewhere, but the room was just as she had left it earlier, all except for the tall figure stretched out one side of a roaring fire.

  The telephone woke him, just as Cassie was tiptoeing out of the room to make all her calls from her study.

  ‘You go back to sleep,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll take that next door.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what I was doing falling asleep like that.’

  Since he was now awake Cassie took the call at the desk, and while she did so Erin brought in a tray of tea and hot buttered scones piled high with jam.

  ‘I would guess you’ll be half starved,’ she said to Joel as she set down the laden tray, ‘what with no lunch insides you. There’s cake and biscuits as well as scones and you can always holler if you’re wanting more.’

  By the time Cassie was through on the telephone Joel had eaten most of what was on the tray. He looked faintly embarrassed as Cassie came across to pour herself a cup of tea but said nothing, getting up and seeing to the fire instead while Cassie sat down in the armchair opposite the sofa. When he had finished rebuilding the fire they talked for a while first about the races and then about Josephine.

  ‘Hmmm. Maybe it’s just as well I didn’t have any children,’ he said when she finished.

  ‘Really?’ Cassie wondered. ‘I’d have thought you’d have made rather a good father. You’re much more patient than I am, for a start.’

  ‘You’re the very soul of patience, Mrs Rosse,’ Joel assured her, helping himself to another scone. ‘Although I wasn’t really thinking of that particular virtue. What I was thinking of were the sorts of responsibilities parents have to face. Would you have children again? I mean, given the choice. Would you have children second time around?’

  ‘I can’t, so the question’s academic.’

  ‘You know what I’m trying to say. Do you regret having had children?’

  ‘No. Not for a moment. Except when they get in the way of what I want to talk about, in this case why you’re here. It must have been something urgent to bring you all the way across here. In the circumstances, I mean.’

  ‘Yes,
it was,’ he agreed, now lighting a cigarette and staring into the fire while Cassie poured herself some more tea.

  ‘You said it had something to do with The Nightingale. Didn’t you?’

  Joel did not appear to have heard the question, since he sat staring into the fire in silence, persistently flicking non-existent ash off his cigarette.

  ‘Joel?’ Cassie said carefully. ‘Has your return here got anything to do with Nightie?’

  ‘That was the original script,’ he replied, still not looking at her.

  ‘I don’t understand. Either it was or it wasn’t. And why couldn’t you tell me on the phone?’

  ‘Jesus,’ Joel groaned. ‘All these bloody questions.’ He threw his half-finished cigarette on the fire and then lay back on the sofa, his eyes closed, his face turned up to the ceiling. ‘If you really want to know, Cassie,’ he said after a long pause, ‘the reason I came over was because I couldn’t bear not being with you for one moment longer.’

  Quite at a loss for words, Cassie rose and went to sit down beside Joel. He sat still staring into the fire until finally Cassie took his hand. As soon as she did, he gripped it hard in return as if he never wanted to let go of her again and when he did all at once she knew that if he asked her anything then she would say yes. Yes to going upstairs to bed with him, yes to going anywhere with him, yes to doing whatever he wished them to do, yes yes yes even to marrying him, such was her sudden love, such was her pity and her sorrow for the terrible hurt she knew he was feeling. But he asked nothing of her. He asked nothing because at that moment all he wanted from her was there in her hand, warmth, security and love.

  So there they sat with Joel’s one hand in Cassie’s two, in a silence broken only by the crackle of the fire flames and the sigh of the winter’s wind outside the house until it seemed that Joel was about to say something, for he took a deep breath and opening his eyes with a start as if he’d fallen asleep turned to look Cassie full in her own. At that moment there was the sound of someone charging down the corridor outside the drawing room, running steps which came to an abrupt stop as whoever it was slid to a halt just in time outside the door of the room.