To Hear a Nightingale

by Charlotte Bingham

  As they lay talking, back in their own bed on Sunday morning, Cassie turned to Tyrone and laid her head on his chest.

  ‘Can I ask you something, Ty?’ she said.

  ‘Supposing I said no?’ he laughed. ‘You’d still ask me.’

  ‘I know. I just like to have your permission.’

  ‘My permission is granted.’

  He stroked her hair, which Cassie had grown till by now it fell round her shoulders.

  ‘You know what you said about the three things in life? Compassion, commitment, and celebration?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Well. What with my horse winning, and you being the top trainer, and having Josephine and Mattie, and each other . . .’

  ‘Yes, woman? Come to the point.’

  ‘I think it’s high time we celebrated. Do you realise we’ve never had a party? I’ve never had a party.’

  Tyrone turned her round so that he could look at her.

  ‘You’ve never had a party?’

  Cassie shook her head.

  ‘You must have had a birthday party.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Jesus God!’ he said, leaping out of bed. ‘Then I will throw you the greatest damned party ever!’

  And he did. For Cassie’s twenty-seventh birthday, which fell on 20 July, Tyrone, with Cassie’s calm approval, invited nearly five hundred guests. Three marquees were erected on the lawns and the nursery paddock which ran down one side of the house, and everyone was instructed to wear white – all except Cassie, who was expressly forbidden by Tyrone even to think about what she might wear. He told her she would find out just before the party.

  She found out something else just before the party, too. At the beginning of the week, Seamus O’Connor called them to tell them that he’d managed to get the adoption hearing brought forward, and could they present themselves in court that Thursday. Tyrone and Cassie couldn’t believe their luck, but Seamus quickly dampened their enthusiasm by telling them the presiding judge was not wholly sympathetic to cases such as theirs, with a split nationality parenthood. It was, he agreed, a quite unreasonable bias, but the mitigating circumstance, besides the glowing report the supervising officer had prepared on them as potential adoptive parents, was the fact that Cassie had applied for Irish nationality. On the other hand, if they wanted to wait for a more sympathetic judge, then they could take the other date which had been offered to them in September.

  Cassie was all for waiting, but Tyrone would have none of it.

  ‘We’re to be judged for what we are, Cassie,’ he said. ‘For the sort of people we are. For the kind of parents we are. Not for the colour of our damned passports.’

  And so it was with a certain amount of trepidation that Cassie sat in the chambers with their lawyers, the supervising probation officer and the stern-faced Judge Kenneally.

  The judge read the report out loud to them, making all the good points which the officer had made about them sound like criticisms. He then turned to Tyrone.

  ‘You’re a racehorse trainer I see, Mr Rosse.’

  ‘I am, your honour.’

  ‘Are you a gambling man?’

  ‘Only where horses are concerned, sir.’

  ‘Isn’t racing a rather suspect activity?’

  ‘Only where dishonest humans are concerned it is.’

  ‘Is it a proper world in which to bring up a child, would you say?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then why are you applying to adopt this child?’

  ‘Because I intend to bring this child up in my home, your honour. In my house. Not in my stableyard. Nor on the racetrack.’

  The judge looked over his glasses for several seconds at Tyrone, then turned his attention to Cassie.

  ‘Mrs Rosse. You have one healthy daughter, you unfortunately lost a son, and at present you are unable to conceive another child. Am I correct?’

  ‘Yes, your honour.’

  ‘I gather though that you once tried to buy someone’s child.’

  Cassie looked at Tyrone, who took her hand and nodded for her to answer the question.

  ‘How did you know that, sir?’

  ‘Please just answer my question, Mrs Rosse.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, sir, I did once offer to buy the child of someone I mistakenly believed didn’t want her baby.’

  The judge nodded and made a note.

  ‘I was not very well at the time.’

  ‘You were suffering a severe nervous breakdown, I gather.’

  ‘That is quite correct, sir. I was. It was immediately following the loss of our son.’

  ‘Your mental health since this incident.’

  The judge looked over his glasses at her, making the statement into a question.

  ‘Perfectly fine, sir. I believe you have two independent reports in front of you which will underwrite my mental stability.’

  ‘I have.’

  The judge opened them and flicked through them.

  ‘But oddly enough,’ he said, closing the folders, ‘neither make mention of the time you made a murderous attack on your husband with, I gather, a pair of scissors.’

  Cassie fell silent.

  ‘Do they, Mrs Rosse?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I wonder why.’

  ‘Because that was my fault, your honour,’ Tyrone interrupted. ‘My wife thought I was being unfaithful.’

  ‘So I understand.’

  The judge removed his glasses to wipe them carefully with a spotless white handkerchief, before looking slowly up at Tyrone.

  ‘But of course you were not.’

  ‘No, sir. I was not.’

  ‘Do you have many such violent misunderstandings, Mrs Rosse?’

  ‘That is the only misunderstanding we have ever had, your honour.’

  ‘I see. You believed your husband when he told you he was not being unfaithful.’

  Again a statement, not a question.

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because my husband never lies to me.’

  ‘Ah. Rather like George Washington, I suppose. He is quite incapable of telling falsehoods.’

  ‘I am perfectly capable of lying like the rest of us, your honour,’ Tyrone announced. ‘But not to my wife.’

  ‘Good. I was beginning to think you might be a little bit too much of a paragon, Mr Rosse.’

  The judge smiled, but not very warmly, then turned back to Cassie.

  ‘You are an American, Mrs Rosse, but have applied to become an Irish citizen.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I wonder why that is now.’

  ‘Because I intend to spend the rest of my life here.’

  ‘It’s not because your parents were perhaps Irish?’

  He paused and looked at her, tapping his pencil on the desk in front of him. Cassie bit her lip and looked at Tyrone.

  ‘Well, Mrs Rosse?’

  ‘It’s not because my parents were Irish.’

  ‘What were your parents?’

  Cassie swallowed then looked up.

  ‘My father was a theatrical producer, and my mother was once a singer and an actress. Before she gave birth to me.’

  ‘And were you ever an actress?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Tyrone, his eyes beginning to flash dangerously, ‘but I fail to see what relevance this has to our suitability as adoptive parents, your honour.’

  ‘It has every relevance, Mr Rosse,’ the judge replied. ‘I am considering the sort of backgrounds you have both come from, in an attempt to assess what kind of characters you may be. In which case, you would do well to control your temper. Now then, Mrs Rosse, you were going to tell me the sort of career you were pursuing when you met and married Mr Rosse.’

  ‘I was training to be a fashion buyer in Bergdorf Goodmans in New York, sir.’

  ‘That is a department store, I take it.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You were working as a shop girl.’

&nb
sp; ‘I was training to be a buyer, your honour.’

  ‘In which department were you working?’

  Tyrone was on his feet.

  ‘Your honour—’

  ‘Not another objection, Mr Rosse?’

  He stared up at Tyrone, who for once bit his tongue and sat down again, as bidden.

  ‘I was working in the lingerie department, your honour.’

  ‘Thank you. If I may return to the matter of your parents.’

  There was a silence, then Cassie slowly looked up, straight into Judge Kenneally’s eyes.

  ‘They were unmarried. My father was a drunk, who used to beat my mother, then he abandoned her when she became pregnant, quite late in her life, with me. My mother then moved from the West Coast to the East Coast and pretended I was her grandchild. I didn’t find out until after she was dead what the truth was. That she was my mother. And that I was a bastard.’

  ‘And your grandmother. Or rather your mother. How did she treat you?’

  Cassie fell silent again, and searched for Tyrone’s hand under the table.

  ‘Her mother beat her constantly, publicly humiliated her, locked her in her room for days, starved her, and did everything she could to make my wife’s childhood as wretched an experience as possible,’ Tyrone informed the judge. ‘My wife won’t tell you that, your honour. She won’t tell you because she’s too proud. And she wouldn’t want you feeling sorry for her. That’s the sort of person my wife is.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The judge nodded, and closed the folders which lay open in front of him. Then he removed his glasses and stared up at the ceiling.

  ‘This would have been a fairly straightforward case upon which to have ruled,’ he said, ‘and I could have made a far speedier conclusion had it not been for this eleventh-hour opposition from the father, Gerald Secker.’

  Cassie and Tyrone exchanged an astonished look.

  ‘But the father has no rights, your honour!’ Tyrone protested.

  ‘His consent isn’t needed, certainly,’ the judge replied. ‘But that doesn’t mean that he is prevented from putting his point of view to the court. Unfortunately, after we received this letter from him, we were unable to trace him, and we have since been informed that he has left the country on some sort of pilgrimage to India.’

  ‘May we be told what the letter contained, your honour?’ Tyrone enquired.

  The judge took some papers out from his folder, and pushed them across the desk to Tyrone. Cassie and he read through them quickly. The typewritten letter contained all the salient facts about Cassie’s upbringing, her mental breakdown and her attack on Tyrone. It ended by asking whether or not this really made her a suitable adoptive mother for his illegitimate son.

  Tyrone returned the letter to the judge.

  ‘You realise that letter couldn’t possibly be from Secker, don’t you?’

  The judge nodded.

  ‘Even if it had been, what’s to say it’s nothing but a pack of lies anyway?’ Tyrone added.

  ‘This letter is quite palpably not from the child’s father,’ the judge replied. ‘Young Secker disappeared off to India two months ago. This letter is dated three days ago. The point is, however, that it contained certain allegations which had to be examined. And from my examination of Mrs Rosse, it seems that whoever wrote that letter, a person who quite obviously wished Mrs Rosse harm—’

  Cassie looked at Tyrone once more and saw from his face that he’d already guessed the identity of the writer.

  ‘It seems that the sender of the letter is indeed extremely familiar with Mrs Rosse’s history and is of the opinion that she would not make a suitable adoptive mother.’

  Tyrone gripped Cassie’s hand even more tightly under the table.

  ‘Indeed, were I to consider a case such as yours just on paper, on its face value, I would have no hesitation whatsoever in refusing to grant you an adoption order. Which is why these hearings have such a value. If I had not met and talked to you both, I would have had no idea of your characters. I would have had no chance to witness Mrs Rosse’s truthfulness and courage, and I would not have been able to witness the strength of your love for each other. In other words, I would never have been able to conclude that there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever, particularly after seeing the way you have faced the tribulations of this hearing, that you will both make ideal parents for this child whom you wish to adopt. It is therefore without any hesitation or qualification whatsoever that I am happy to grant you the adoption order for which you have applied.’

  Cassie remembered the drama and exhilaration of the day before yesterday as she now sat in her dressing gown, waiting in her bedroom as instructed for Tyrone to return from Dublin, while downstairs she could hear the caterers and organisers frantically putting the finishing touches to their preparations. Then she heard Tyrone’s Aston Martin roar up the drive, and from her window she watched as he unloaded several boxes from the rear seat.

  Tyrone looked up, and seeing Cassie standing at their bedroom window, grinned, poked his tongue out at her and hurried inside the house.

  ‘Where on earth have you been, Ty?’ Cassie asked him as he burst into the bedroom, barely visible behind the boxes piled up in his arms.

  ‘I had to go to the blasted airport!’ he replied, arranging the boxes on the bed. ‘And would you believe it? The bloody flight was nearly an hour late!’

  ‘Who were you meeting?’ Cassie enquired. ‘I didn’t see anyone with you.’

  ‘I wasn’t meeting anyone, Cassie McGann,’ Tyrone answered. ‘I was collecting this.’

  He tapped the largest of the boxes on the bed.

  ‘May I open it?’ she asked him.

  ‘No you certainly may not,’ he retorted. ‘What you have to do is to stand there and close your eyes.’

  Cassie did as she was told. She heard Tyrone walk up behind her and felt his lips brush the top of her shoulders as he took off her robe.

  ‘Not now, Tyrone,’ she sighed. ‘Our guests will be here at any moment.’

  ‘Ssshhh,’ he ordered, and for a moment the room was quite silent.

  Then Cassie felt the silk of one of her scarves as Tyrone tied it into a blindfold round her eyes.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Cassie gasped.

  ‘Sssshhh,’ came the reply.

  Cassie stood there in nothing but the silk scarf. She started to laugh, but was at once hushed into silence again by Tyrone. She heard him undoing one of the boxes, and then the rustle of thin tissue paper. More silence.

  ‘Which way round does this damned thing go anyway?’ Tyrone muttered to himself.

  ‘May I help?’ Cassie asked.

  ‘No you may not,’ Tyrone replied. ‘Ah.’

  Tyrone put his arms round her waist, and kissed her neck as he fastened something round her waist. Cassie knew what it was from the feel of the satin straps which hung loosely against her thighs.

  ‘Now lift up your left leg, Cassie McGann.’

  She did as she was told.

  ‘And now your right.’

  Likewise.

  She felt the silk of another garment as Tyrone gently pulled it up over her naked body. Over her hips, until the elastic rested just below the line of her stomach.

  ‘What about a bra?’

  ‘No bra.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  Next Tyrone pulled on to her legs a pair of silk stockings. He’d given her silk stockings previously, but he’d never rolled them on and up to her thighs before – particularly not when she was standing there helplessly blindfolded. Cassie was so happy that she wanted to turn round and take hold of Tyrone and make love to him there and then. But there wasn’t time. Besides she didn’t, because she knew that her present submissiveness would make the lovemaking they would later enjoy all the more enthralling.

  So she just stood there silently as Tyrone carefully attached the top of the stockings to her garter belt.

  ‘I’ll bet you’ve
got your tongue stuck in the side of your cheek,’ she said laughing.

  ‘You’ll get a smack on that wonderful backside of yours if you don’t keep quiet,’ he replied.

  ‘May I look now?’

  ‘No you may not.

  ‘I’d love to see what I look like.’

  ‘If you look, I’ll make you go downstairs and greet your guests just as you are.

  There followed a longer silence while she heard Tyrone undoing what Cassie imagined must be the largest of the parcels. She heard the sound of more tissue paper being removed, then the soft swish of material, coming nearer and nearer.

  ‘Left leg.’

  ‘It would be easier over my head, surely.’

  ‘Left leg.’

  Cassie lifted her left leg.

  ‘Right leg.’

  Right leg.

  Left arm, right arm. Long sleeves. Cassie plunged her arms into them, sleeves that softly clung to her. And then the dress was on. Except for something draped round the front of her waist which she was aware that Tyrone was now lifting up over her head, and arranging behind her. Silence, while Cassie imagined Tyrone standing back to appraise his handiwork.

  ‘May I look now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When may I look?’

  ‘When I say so.’

  The dress was very soft and clung to Cassie like a second skin from the tops of her thighs, up her stomach and over her bare breasts. There seemed to be no back to it, at least not until dangerously far down. Then there seemed to be a sort of bustle, which must have been the swathe Tyrone had lifted over her head and arranged behind her. Finally she felt him lifting each of her silk-stockinged feet and fastening them into what she guessed must be latticed evening sandals.

  ‘Now?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he replied, taking her by the hand and sitting her down on a chair. ‘I said I’d tell you when.’

  ‘I have to do my hair.’

  ‘You’ve done your hair.’

  ‘I’ll need to check it.’

  ‘No you won’t. I’ll check it.’

  Cassie felt his hand and her hairbrush on her hair, carefully reshaping any strand which might have fallen out of place.

  ‘It looks fine,’ Tyrone told her. ‘Now sit there and don’t move until I come for you.’