To Hear a Nightingale

by Charlotte Bingham

  Cassie watched until the car was well out of sight down the long drive, then turned to go back inside the house. Erin was waiting with arms outstretched to take the baby, as always, while Cassie took herself upstairs to do her exercises.

  She lay on the floor of her bedroom, and tried to concentrate on what she was doing. It was still agony to raise each leg and hold them above the ground only ten seconds, but even the pain couldn’t distract her from the great wave of sadness and loneliness which was rapidly engulfing her. She was going to miss Tyrone so much it was unthinkable. He’d only been gone half an hour, and yet already it seemed half a lifetime. As she tucked her feet under the bed and started to do her sit-ups, her eyes filled with tears. She pulled her aching body up from the floor, and let it back slowly again, but the pain she was feeling in her muscles couldn’t begin to match the pain in her heart.

  She lay back on the floor, staring at the ceiling, and let the tears slide sideways out of her eyes, down her cheeks and on to the bare wooden floor. She lay there for what seemed like hours, staring at the ceiling through a mist of tears, suddenly as unhappy as she had been when she was a child locked away by herself in her room.

  It was probably just post-natal depression, she thought, as she wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes. She knew Tyrone had to go away to the sales: that was part of their life, that was part of his business. What she was actually crying for was herself. She hated what pregnancy had done to her young body. All those lines and wrinkles in the now sagging flesh across her stomach, which had been so taut and firm before. She had even made sure that there was a catch now on the bathroom door lest Tyrone should wander in when she was bathing and catch sight of her misshapen body. She was so appalled at what giving birth had done to her, that she would slip her nightdress on over her head before she had taken her underslip off, lest she herself would catch sight of her own body.

  Tyrone would tease and cajole her, saying she’d be back in shape in no time, as if it was no more than having her hair cut too short. And she would get cross with him, as he paraded his long, lean, muscular body in front of her. How would he feel if his body had suddenly been changed when he was twenty-two? It was all right for men. Even God was a man. But Cassie was a woman, just twenty-two, and all she’d done was have a baby – albeit a beautiful baby, whom she loved passionately – and as a result she had lost her youthful figure, and not only that, she now felt dulled and depressed by the whole experience.

  This inexplicable melancholia, which got worse the longer Tyrone was gone, made her feel ashamed as well as miserable. She should be so happy. She was married to a wonderful man, she lived in a beautiful house, she had people to help her, she had her health, she had a simply adorable baby. And she had lost her happiness. In desperation she wrote over-bright letters to her friends in America, to Gina and Maria, to Arnie, to Mary-Jo asking her to be a godmother, to Mrs Christiansen to give her all the news and to say that Tyrone might be calling, and to Mrs Roebuck. They all replied to her at once, thrilled at the birth, and delighting in Cassie’s happiness. They told her how much they missed her and how they shared in the joy of Josephine’s birth; and Mary-Jo wrote back to say how touched she had been at Cassie’s request, and how honoured she would be to be young Josephine’s godmother.

  Cassie sat in her bed and read all the replies as she received them, but the love and humanity expressed in them only served to increase her despair. Mrs Roebuck was the last to reply, and her letter was over ten pages long. Cassie noticed how shaky her hand had become, yet nowhere was there a complaint nor mention of her obviously worsening arthritis. If only she hadn’t had a baby, Cassie thought, she could have gone to America with Tyrone and visited Mrs Roebuck, and perhaps found some way to help her. If only she hadn’t had a baby!

  Josephine suddenly started to cry for her food, and in a second Cassie was out of her bed and lifting her baby from its cradle. What can she have been thinking? she asked herself. Wishing the fact of Josephine’s birth away? How selfish had she become? How vain? What was the state of her figure compared to the wonder of what she now held cradled in her arms? She hugged the baby closer, and kissed her – something Erin could never bear to see her do without taking Josephine from her on the pretence that she needed changing, or winding. She fed Josephine, and then walked round and round her bedroom, the baby falling asleep on her shoulder. Cassie remembered the first time she, Cassie, had been kissed. It had been by Mrs Roebuck. That was the first kiss in her whole life which she remembered. So she kissed her baby again, and again. And again. She vowed she would kiss her every day that they were part of each other’s lives.

  Then she sat in the rocking chair Tyrone had brought back for her from Dublin one day, strapped on the roof of the old Ford, and wished it was evening and that Tyrone was there, sitting rocking the wooden cradle and singing a lullaby to his daughter.

  The October winds lament around

  The Castle of Dromore,

  Yet peace is in her lofty halls,

  My loving treasure store.

  Tho’ autumn leaves may droop and die –

  A bird of Spring are you.

  Sing hushaby loo la, loo la lan –

  Sing hushaby loo la lay.

  Nearly one month after Tyrone’s departure, Cassie and Erin were walking to the village, taking it in turns to wheel Josephine’s pram. It was a hot August day, so they took their time, strolling leisurely and talking all the while. At one point, Erin stopped her gossip when she saw a cow down in a field they were passing. She left Cassie and ran at once to the nearby farm buildings, and then returned red in the face to take the pram from Cassie. When Cassie enquired what the matter was, Erin replied, still short of breath, that the cow had been about to calve, and that she seemed to be in difficulty.

  ‘I was brought up on a farm, you see, Mrs Rosse,’ she explained. ‘We’d still have it, too, hadn’t Da lost it all on the horses.’

  ‘Your father farmed, then lost it all gambling?’ Cassie repeated, unable to reconcile the gentle baby-faced Tomas with a man capable of gambling his family’s livelihood away.

  ‘’Tis why we’re all now in service.’ Erin replied. ‘We’d take enough off the land to keep the ten of us.’

  ‘Your mother had eight children?’

  ‘My grannie had sixteen. Then adopted two more.’

  Cassie stopped and looked back at the field where the cow lay, now being helped in her labour by the farmer and one of his sons. The creature suddenly became to Cassie the symbol of the whole of Mother Ireland.

  Then she felt her own stomach, as Erin strolled on ahead, cooing at the baby. If her stomach was like this after only one child, what would it be like after the five or six children Tyrone was demanding? By the time she was thirty-five or so, she’d be the same shape as the animals that were grazing in the field before her, their huge udders swinging between their legs as they ate their way slowly across the field.

  ‘Women are made to have babies, Mrs Rosse,’ Erin told her as they continued their progress. ‘That’s what God put us on this earth for.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Cassie retorted. ‘I’m not going to have a baby every year. At my age? By the time I’m forty-five, I could have had twenty.’

  ‘And isn’t that what Mr Rosse wants? At least a round dozen anyway, so he says.’

  ‘He says he wants enough boys to ride out for him, that’s what he says. But I hope it’s only a joke.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to do what me mam did to Da after the last. She locked him out of her bedroom.’

  Cassie smiled at Erin, but she wasn’t really amused. The last thing she wanted was to be forced to lock Tyrone out of her bedroom. His lovemaking was something wonderful.

  Erin parked the pram outside the village store, and taking the shopping list from under the cover, and unhitching the basket from the string on the pram handle, wandered inside the shop. Cassie remained outside, sitting on a small wooden bench, rather than expose herself to the cloud
of pipe and cigarette smoke within, because, like so many small stores in Irish towns and villages, O’Leary’s was a bar as well as a grocer’s. And to Cassie’s mind, the day was far too beautiful to be sullied by the smell of nicotine and porter.

  Mrs O’Leary carried a box of groceries out from the shop and carefully laid it across the end of the pram. Erin followed with a full basket, which was duly hitched back on to the handle of the pram. Cassie and Mrs O’Leary exchanged a few words, Mrs O’Leary constantly pushing a strand of grey hair out of her eyes and wiping the sweat from her lined brow with the back of her hand. Then wishing them all good day, she returned inside the shop.

  Erin insisted on pushing the laden pram back all the way, considering Cassie not strong enough.

  ‘I feel sorry for poor old Mrs O’Leary,’ Cassie said after a while. ‘That’s only the second or third time I’ve seen her since I’ve been here, but even in such a short space of time, she seems to have aged terribly.’

  ‘She was pregnant when you arrived,’ Erin answered, ‘and she’s had twins since.’

  ‘Twins? Heavens, that must mean—’

  ‘It means she’s now blessed with nine children altogether. And every one of them bonny.’

  ‘That’ll be her last I hope, Erin. The poor woman must be nearly fifty.’

  Erin stopped the pram and stared at her.

  ‘Fifty, Mrs Rosse? Mrs O’Leary fifty? Sure she’s not yet reached thirty.’

  Cassie stopped in her tracks, horrified, remembering a tired woman in a black dress, with prematurely greying hair and a figure that had gone to middle age. Erin pushed the pram on ahead. If she’d wanted to shock Cassie, she’d succeeded.

  Cassie followed on behind, slowly and thoughtfully. If Tyrone had his way, she too could be looking like Mrs O’Leary by the time she was thirty.

  Rather than have that happen, she decided, she’d send to America for something.

  Although Cassie had done nothing but live for the day of Tyrone’s return to Claremore, she now began to fear it. When he was back, naturally they would resume their lovemaking. They had done little but talk of anything else prior to his departure, Tyrone even ringing the day on his office calendar when, as he teased her, normal service could again be resumed. But once he was back in her bed, the outcome would be inevitable. Cassie would get pregnant, and the whole cycle would start up all over again. Cassie knew it. She knew she could get pregnant just from looking at Tyrone.

  It started to worry her, and it worried her so much that her milk started to dry up. She supplemented Josephine’s feeds with a bottle, only to meet with stern disapproval from Erin.

  ‘Me mam says you’re to try beer,’ she told Cassie.

  ‘Tell your mother I have,’ Cassie replied. ‘I’ve tried beer, I’ve tried water, I’ve tried everything everyone’s recommended. But I just can’t produce enough.’

  ‘Ah well then,’ Erin sighed, ‘sure there’s nothing for it so. But don’t worry about the nights. I’ll get up to her meself.’

  Erin made herself indispensable to Josephine, finally taking over her feeding completely, while Cassie’s figure, helped by the rigorous exercises she put herself through, started to return to something like its original shape and size.

  Tyrone was due back at the end of the week, and meanwhile Cassie was in a terrible confusion. Making love was one thing. But ending up looking like Mrs O’Leary was another thing altogether.

  But she knew she couldn’t deny Tyrone what he laughingly called his rights, nor in truth did she want to. She loved him far too much and she needed him. The only way of approaching the problem was to talk to him. Which would not be easy.

  He arrived back from his long trip looking if anything even more handsome and attractive than ever. He had bought all sorts of presents for Josephine, from soft toys to a pretty little broderie anglaise dress which was far too big for her. He’d also bought a brand new dress in silver for Cassie, with a pair of sparkling silver tights to match.

  They drank champagne before dinner, which was to be freshly caught salmon poached in herbs, accompanied by the white wine they had drunk that night in Glenbeigh. Cassie had rung up the hotel to find out what it was, then despatched poor Tomas off into Dublin to buy half a dozen bottles.

  ‘Pully-Fumey?’ he had muttered. ‘I’ll never get me tongue around that. Pully-Fumey indeed. You’d be far better off writing it down for them, Mrs Rosse.’

  And she had put on Tyrone’s favourite dress, her red silk jersey. By the time they had talked, and embraced, and drunk their champagne, and had their candlelit dinner, Cassie was quite convinced that she would be able to argue away all Tyrone’s native superstitions about childbirth, and women being purely machines for reproduction, and bring him around to her way of thinking.

  Happily, although he had missed Cassie quite terribly, a fact which was more than vouchsafed by the kisses with which he greeted her, Tyrone’s trip had been a great success. He had bought a dozen yearlings for a man called Peter Guthrie, and although they all remained in America to be trained, Guthrie was so pleased with his purchases, and the prices Tyrone had paid for them, that he had commissioned Tyrone to buy and train for him two horses in Ireland. He had also introduced Tyrone, on this his first visit to Keeneland, Lexington, to several wealthy and influential American owners, several of whom had expressed great interest in having horses in training in Ireland. He had also met at Laurel Park races a man called Townsend Warner, destined to become one of the most influential American owners of European horses ever.

  After that he’d travelled up to Canada to see a horse by the great stallion Ribot, who had finished his racing career unbeaten. But he’d faulted the young horse, considering him too long in the pasterns, and so had rejected him. He did not return to America empty-handed, however, having been tipped off about another yearling standing in a field not twenty miles away. It was sired by an American stallion unknown to Tyrone called Drum Roll, out of a mare by Native Dancer, but the mare had failed lamentably on the racetrack. The colt, however, was a big strapping sort, to be described by the lads, when he finally arrived at Claremore, as a nice store sort, meaning that he could either race on the flat, or grow into a good jumping type. Tyrone bought him out of the field in Canada for a shade under $3000. The asking price for the Ribot colt was $30,000.

  So he was in a very good mood as he sat down to one of his favourite dinners, served by Cassie, whom he thought he had never seen looking lovelier.

  Cassie was about to broach the subject of Mrs O’Leary and her nine children when Tyrone smiled up at her.

  ‘I saw your friends the Christiansens,’ he said. ‘I can see why you rate them so dearly.’

  ‘You never told me!’ Cassie answered indignantly. ‘How were they?’

  ‘Very well, and they sent their special love. I even bought a horse for John Christiansen’s uncle.’

  They talked about the Christiansens. It appeared that Tyrone had been welcomed into the family like a son, and had stayed for two nights on his way back to Saratoga. John Christiansen’s uncle, James, had been staying, and was a mad racing man. He’d just lost his best horse, found dead in his box with a twisted gut, and so Tyrone took him to the sales at Saratoga and bought him a grandson of Nearco. The old man was delighted, and tried unsuccessfully to persuade Tyrone to move to America to train for him.

  Cassie was thrilled with the story of Tyrone’s trip, which took the whole of dinner to tell. He continued regaling her with anecdotes about America and the characters he’d met while they had coffee and brandy in the drawing room, by the ever-burning fire, and she was still laughing helplessly as he carried her up the stairs and started undressing her.

  ‘Tyrone,’ she said rather feebly, as her red dress slid to the floor. ‘Tyrone, I have something to say to you.’

  ‘And I have something to say to you, too, Cassie McGann,’ Tyrone whispered, ‘I love you. I love you more than ever. And I’ve thought of nothing but this since the moment I st
epped out of the house six weeks ago.’

  He then made love to her. And, as always, it seemed to Cassie like a totally new experience.

  The end result of their lovemaking, however, was anything but a new experience. Cassie knew as she lay in bed late the next morning. She just knew that she was pregnant again. She didn’t feel any physically different this time. She didn’t feel sick. She just felt pregnant.

  She laid her hand on her naked stomach, which she had worked so hard to get flat and strong once more, and she swore she could feel the new life that now lay within her. She stared up at the ceiling, and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In the end she did neither. She just lay there in her bed all morning and stared at the ceiling.

  Cassie waited for two months until she told Tyrone, just to make sure. Even then she hesitated, for the eight weeks since his return had been blissful. Because she knew she was pregnant, Cassie had become even more ardent and adventurous in her lovemaking, surprising even the worldly Tyrone. As a consequence, he became even more enthralled with his elf, as he called her – so much so that events outside Claremore seemed to have no reality or importance. But Cassie was afraid of telling him of her pregnancy, because even if he was excited by her news, as she felt sure he would be, she also knew it would be the end of an idyll, and with a second pregnancy, and ultimately another baby in the house, the end of the honeymoon of their lives together.

  As it happened, it was an outside event which finally triggered Cassie’s admission. The American-Russian confrontation over the Russian missile build-up in Cuba came to a head, and while the world held its breath to see whether or not it would survive the show-down between the two super-powers, Cassie, terrified at the possibility of a nuclear war, broke the news to Tyrone. It was on 24 October, the day the Polaris subs were instructed to begin their deep runs towards the USSR, and as the Russian ships carrying the missiles to Cuba were approaching the quarantine line. Tyrone switched off the news, and poured them both a large drink. Then he sat down beside Cassie, and she held both his hands.