To Hear a Nightingale

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘I wanted to see you again, because I missed you.’

  ‘You don’t even like me.’

  ‘What are you talking about? I’m mad about you! You’re my best friend! Sure we’ve had our misunderstandings, but you’re the only person who’s ever stood up to me. I really admire your style, you know that?’

  ‘You still haven’t told me why you wanted to see me.’

  Leonora got up, restless as always, looking frantically for another packet of cigarettes. Finding them, she tore them open, lit one, and then stood gazing out of the window, smoking her cigarette very quickly.

  ‘I’m going to buy some racehorses,’ she suddenly announced. ‘And I want your husband to train them.’

  Cassie didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t expecting this, and was totally unprepared. All she could ask was why.

  ‘Because he’s the best racehorse trainer in Ireland, that’s why.’

  ‘Who told you? Your mother?’

  ‘My mother can go jump. She’s a stupid, selfish cow.’

  ‘How many horses are you thinking of buying?’

  ‘I thought I’d start with a dozen.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because a dozen’s a nice round number, I guess.’

  ‘Why do you want to buy some racehorses?’

  ‘I was told that’s what one did in Ireland.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘It was my husband’s idea at first. And I just thought what the hell? Then I don’t know. I guess I thought it could be fun. You know. Why not? It might be a bit of fun winning a Derby.’

  Cassie shook her head and smiled, and got up to leave. Quite wacky. It might be quite wacky winning a Derby. The trouble was, Cassie thought, with all her own vast wealth, and her new husband’s even greater riches behind her, Leonora Von Wagner was the sort of person who might quite possibly do just that.

  Tomas was waiting for her by the door. The butler handed her coat to her. Leonora strolled out from the sitting room and called to Cassie as she was leaving.

  ‘You will ask, won’t you, darling? Ask Tyrone and if he agrees, maybe he’ll give me a ring!’

  Because he had an appointment with Tyrone, Tomas drove far too fast on the way home and as a consequence, had to stop twice for Cassie to be sick.

  Tyrone wouldn’t agree. In fact he was quite adamant.

  ‘I’m never going to rely on just the one big owner ever again,’ he informed Cassie. ‘Particularly one big owner by the name of Von Wagner.’

  ‘Twelve horses,’ Cassie pleaded. ‘She’s prepared to start with twelve horses, all of which you can find and buy, and she says she might even be able to persuade her husband to buy another six.’

  ‘Over my dead body.’

  ‘Leonora and Franco are great friends with the Mahmoud’s son Tonan – who’s just taken over his father’s string of horses in France.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So Leonora’s serious. There’s nothing she likes more than rivalry. She’d want to do better than Tonan.’

  Tyrone paused before pouring his second whisky.

  ‘She said she’ll pay off her mother’s debt to you,’ Cassie said, pressing home her momentary advantage. ‘You’d be in the clear again with the bank.’

  ‘Until the moment your chum decides to move all her horses,’ Tyrone replied, ‘or give up the game altogether when she discovers how tough it is. When she finds out what the chances are of owning even the winner of a selling plate at Limerick junction.’

  ‘Please. For me.’

  ‘Why for you?’

  ‘Because I want to see your yard full again.’

  ‘Even if the horses belong to Leonora Von Wagner?’

  ‘Even if they belonged to Khrushchev.’

  Tyrone stood by the fireplace, drinking his whisky in silence and looking into the fire. Then he put his glass down and turned for the door.

  ‘Over my dead body,’ he said as he went out.

  But, Cassie thought, with slightly less conviction.

  By the beginning of December, there were nineteen horses back at Claremore, and eight of those belonged to Leonora. Common sense and Cassie had prevailed over the previously intransigent Tyrone. It would have been financial suicide, Cassie had told him, to turn away the blank cheque Leonora was offering Tyrone to go and buy her some racehorses. Not only that, a week after the two girls had lunched together, a cheque had arrived in the post from Leonora which effectively discharged all her mother’s training debts. As a consequence, there was now no valid reason for Tyrone to continue to ignore Cassie’s pleas.

  It was not all plain sailing, however. As far as Tyrone was concerned, when he met Leonora it was hate at first sight. Leonora was far too vain to notice Tyrone’s lack of interest in her as a woman, as she considered that she only had to get up in the morning for the world to fall at her feet. Tyrone was appalled by Leonora’s manner and her conceit, and informed Cassie privately that the only way this new business arrangement was going to work was for Leonora to keep well out of his way. Fortunately, at least in the beginning, Leonora was not interested in travelling to horse sales, or visiting remotely situated studs in Ireland, England and America. Tyrone informed her what he was looking at on her behalf, but Leonora just waved a hand at him and granted him carte blanche.

  ‘I can’t tell one end of a horse from the other, darling,’ she’d told him one evening when he and Cassie were struggling through one of Leonora’s appalling dinner parties. ‘All I want to know is when they’re going to win.’

  She then turned the conversation loudly and generally to her current favourite topic of conversation, which was the extremely indiscreet affair the British Secretary for State and War Mr John Profumo had engaged in with a girl called Christine Keeler, whom Leonora dismissed as nothing more nor less than a tart.

  ‘I was there when it started,’ she told her guests, whether they were interested or not. ‘Franco and I were at the house party at Cliveden in July. This Keeler girl was taking a swim in the river in the nude, and Profumo couldn’t take his eyes off her. Franco says the secret services stepped in and put a stop to it, because of some Russian connection or other. Isn’t that right, Franco?’

  She called down the table to her husband, who had not been paying the slightest attention to her, concentrating instead on an elegant young interior designer he had specifically invited for himself.

  Tyrone and Cassie left early, Cassie pleading her pregnancy as their excuse.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ said Leonora, walking them across the marbled hall to the door. ‘This is going to be one hell of a party. Tristan, the guy you were sitting next to at dinner, he’s brought some really good grass.’

  ‘The only good grass I use,’ Tyrone replied, ‘is the stuff I give my horses. Oh and by the way’ – he turned back to Leonora as the butler was helping him into his coat – ‘I bought you a horse yesterday. A yearling, by the ’54 Derby winner, Never Say Die. He’s very small, which is why he failed to get his reserve at Ballsbridge. But he’s decently made. And I only gave three and a half thousand for him.’

  ‘Great,’ Leonora replied with a singular lack of interest. She then turned back to Cassie. ‘Just stay for an hour. Come on. We’ll have some fun.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Cassie replied. ‘I get awfully tired, and then it’s not fair on Tyrone.’

  Leonora’s eyes slid round to Tyrone and she stared at him for a moment. Tyrone wasn’t paying her the slightest attention. Leonora threw her half-finished cigarette out into the driveway past them.

  ‘Babies,’ she said. ‘Yuk!’

  Then she turned away and walked back to her party.

  At lunchtime on Christmas Eve, Tyrone threw a drinks party for all his old friends and one or two of his new owners. Fortunately Leonora and Franco had gone back to America for Christmas, so Tyrone and Cassie avoided having a row about whether or not to invite them. The party was enormous fun, and although one or two of Tyrone’s hard-drinking friends lin
gered until nearly teatime, by dark the house was their own again.

  The weather had turned very cold, and as Cassie dressed for dinner, she thought she’d never known the house so icy. The wind which had got up that afternoon seemed to be howling through the whole place. As she went downstairs, she found the reason. Someone had left the front doors open. Cassie closed them, shivered, pulled her cardigan even more tightly round her shoulders and went into the drawing room. Luckily there was a huge fire burning.

  Tyrone wasn’t down yet, as he’d only just finished supervising the stables, and was lying upstairs in the bath singing carols. Cassie threw another log on the fire and once again felt a draught that practically whipped her skirt up over her knees. She looked out into the hall once more and, sure enough, both the doors were once again open. She went and reclosed them, and this time shot the bolts, in case the wind blew them back open.

  She had hardly sat down again by the fire when Erin was in the room.

  ‘Begging your pardon, Mrs Rosse,’ she said, ‘but someone keeps shutting the front doors.’

  ‘You bet they do, Erin,’ Cassie replied. ‘That someone is me.’

  Erin frowned at her, as if Cassie was mad.

  ‘But what about the Holy Family?’ she enquired.

  ‘What about the Holy Family, Erin?’

  ‘We always leave the doors open for them, ma’am, and the fires well lit, and the kitchen table piled high with food, in case, as me mam says, this house’ll be the lucky one.’

  Cassie hadn’t heard of this belief before, and as she looked into Erin’s round green eyes, so full of childlike conviction, she suddenly felt envious, as if she herself had lost some of her innocence. Looking at Erin, she found her belief in a paradise renewed, and only hoped and prayed it was not a paradise that was lost.

  ‘Our Donal still believes in Santa,’ Erin confided, piling yet more wood on the already blazing fire, ‘and he’ll be fourteen next month.’

  Cassie smiled as she read the warning in Erin’s voice. Woe betide anyone who chose to try and disillusion young Donal. Or, for that matter, young Erin.

  She pulled her cardigan round her and resigned herself to the draught.

  As it happened, the Holy Family didn’t avail themselves of the Rosse hospitality that year, but everyone else in the neighbourhood seemed to. By nine o’clock when Tyrone and Cassie finally sat down to dinner by themselves, it was as if the whole village had tramped through the house, most people bearing gifts, and all of them offered sustenance by Tyrone. The stable lads all called for their Christmas box, and for a drink; and Tomas, too, who would have stayed talking all night had Mrs Muldoon not physically dragged him away. Tyrone laughed over dinner at Cassie’s exhaustion, and said the celebrations had hardly started yet. By the time New Year’s Day had arrived, he warned her, she’d be ready for the sanatorium.

  But Cassie loved it all, each and every moment: her first Christmas in her own house with Tyrone, and their baby safely inside her. Tyrone took her hand and made her make a wish under the Christmas tree, which he had undertaken to decorate personally, in between tearing backwards and forwards to the stables, or dashing into Dublin for last-minute gifts. Cassie, although only three months pregnant, was treated as if she was expecting the following day, and not allowed to do a thing – particularly anything which involved lifting her arms above her shoulders. Even when she got undressed for bed, Tyrone was there to put her nightgown over her head and carefully pull it down.

  After they’d been to Midnight Mass, and seen in their first Christmas together they came back to the house and turned all the lights off except those on the tree. Then they stood in the hall where the tree was, with their arms round each other’s waists. They stood there in silence, just looking at the lights and smelling the wonderfully Christmassy smell of warm pine cones and log fires, and aware of the nativity they had both just celebrated. Then Tyrone led her up to bed and Cassie fell asleep with the side of his head on her stomach, listening for any signs of life from their own but as yet unborn baby.

  After lunch on Christmas Day, when Cassie had happily sat at the large dining table with just Tyrone for company, peopling all the empty seats with the children they were planning to have together and trying to imagine what a huge happy family Christmas must be like, they opened their presents for each other in front of the fire, with a bottle of champagne.

  ‘That’s not all you’re getting,’ Tyrone told her, as Cassie opened yet another extravagance.

  He took her upstairs to the nursery, which for some strange reason had been kept bolted for the past two weeks. Tyrone unlocked it and stood aside. Cassie stood silently in the doorway, unable to believe her eyes. It had been completely redecorated, ready for the baby, and in pink.

  ‘One thing you’re not short of, Tyrone Rosse,’ Cassie said, hugging him, ‘is confidence.’

  ‘I know it’s going to be a girl, and so do you,’ he replied.

  Then he pointed to something in the corner, a large shape made indistinguishable by the brown paper which was wrapped all over it. Cassie took off the wrapping. It was a beautiful old cradle, hand-carved in oak.

  ‘Tomas and I restored it,’ Tyrone told her shyly. ‘It took us hours. It was mine, you know. I used to lie in that, would you believe?’

  Cassie looked down into the empty cradle, and touched it, seeing the young Tyrone in it and now, after him, his daughter. She rocked it, and Tyrone laughed.

  ‘They say that’s why I’m such a good sailor,’ he said. ‘Because I was rocked for so long in that very cradle.’

  And every day after that, until their baby was born, in her quiet moments Cassie would sit by the empty wooden cradle and rock it herself. She sat wondering, and wondering still more, what it would actually be like, having a baby.

  The months sped by, as fast as the March clouds that had scudded across the sky, and as briskly as the April showers that came and went, suddenly rattling their raindrops against the windows, and then disappearing in a brisk blaze of early sun. Tyrone ran two of Leonora’s horses before April was out; one was second at Leopardstown, and the other won a very hot maiden at the Curragh. Leonora was present on the second occasion and led in the winner. She posed for the photographers, who couldn’t get enough pictures of the glamorous owner, and then disappeared with a supercilious English baronet she seemed currently to have in tow.

  The win was all the encouragement certain owners needed to send their horses back to Tyrone. Leonora’s colt, called Charmed Life, had beaten a Vincent O’Brien hot shot, and won on the bridle, so by May, the yard was once more practically full. Tyrone had no Classic hopes, naturally, because the horses he had bought Leonora were all now only two-year-olds, with the exception of a five-year-old handicapper called Slang. And besides, by now all the candidates for the Guineas and Derby had wintered with the trainers who were now busy preparing them for their all-important races.

  But Tyrone was happy. His yard was full, the lads were back, and Charmed Life’s victory proved he hadn’t lost his touch.

  The York Spring meeting underlined the strength of his young horses. An unraced two-year-old, Willowind, ran a blinder in a five-furlong sprint, to be caught just on the line by the odds-on favourite, who’d won his last three races. Leonora’s handicapper Slang, off bottom weight, led from pillar to post, only to lose his race in the Steward’s room, for coming off the rails and bumping the second horse so badly, it in turn nearly knocked the legs from under the third. Slang was disqualified and placed last, and Dermot Pryce was suspended for the rest of the meeting.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ the jockey told Tyrone after the enquiry. ‘Taffy James fecked my whip, and I’d nothing to keep the bugger straight.’

  Tyrone knew it wasn’t Pryce’s fault, because he’d seen the incident through his glasses, and also knew that Slang always hung badly to his right when tiring. But Leonora, although absent in the south of France, rang Tyrone the following day and banned Pryce from ever riding a hor
se of hers again. Tyrone tried to reason, explaining that he was possibly the most promising jockey in the whole of Ireland, and even the great Vincent O’Brien had his eye on him, but Leonora simply hung up the phone.

  But Tyrone wasn’t bothered. His horses were running well, and much more importantly, Cassie, in the final weeks of her pregnancy, was keeping well. As the birth approached, Tyrone turned the yard over to Tomas, and Cassie became his sole concern.

  ‘You just watch him,’ Erin said. ‘The next thing he’ll be doing, at least that’s what me mam says, the very next thing he’ll be doing is nesting. Just like the birds, that’s what me mam says. Tidying up something here, tucking up something there.’

  And sure enough, as time ticked on towards the end of June when the baby was due, Tyrone, who was normally only concerned whether or not his dinner was ready when he came back from the stables, became totally preoccupied with the state of the house. Cassie even found him dusting their bedroom.

  ‘Look at this, Cassie, will you?’ he cried. ‘Look, Erin hasn’t as much as moved these things! She’s simply dusted all round them!’

  Windows would be shut because of any possible draught, then the next day they’d all be flung open again because there was nothing so good for you as fresh air, then they’d all be shut again and newspaper would be stuck under the bedroom door. Blankets would be added to the bed, and then blankets would be taken away again. It was the same every night with the question of how many pillows Cassie should have. Or shouldn’t. And every night there was an agony which Tyrone had to endure.

  ‘I think I’ll go and have a cold bath,’ he’d say with a deep sigh. ‘I think I’ll have to.’

  ‘Why, Tyrone?’

  ‘God, because you’re so beautiful, damn it! Look at you! I’ve never seen you look so beautiful! I’ll have to go and have a cold bath.’

  Then he’d turn miserably on to one side, and then back on to the other, until Cassie would find herself kissing him and smoothing his brow as if it was he who was just about to give birth.

  ‘It won’t be long now,’ she’d say, as she started to fall asleep. ‘Be patient. It won’t be long now.’