To Hear a Nightingale

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Hello, Mattie,’ Cassie said. ‘Another rotten day, my poor darling?’

  And she came towards his bed, only to be intercepted by Erin.

  ‘Now away with you and out of those wet clothes,’ Erin ordered. ‘We don’t want you down ill in bed as well now, do we?’

  ‘Just time for one big bear hug, surely, Erin?’ Cassie asked, picking up her son.

  ‘Sure you’re soakin’ wet! You’re wet right through! You hold that child to yous and it won’t just be you down with the pneumonia!’

  Erin took Mattie back from Cassie and rubbed his back.

  ‘Go along now,’ she chivvied, ‘or you’ll catch your death.’

  Cassie leaned forward and kissed her son, then went, wiping the sweat from her still soaking brow. Erin was right, of course, as usual. Already her clothes felt damp on her, as her body began to chill. So she went, as she always did after her training session, and showered herself off under cold water. She took the shower in the children’s bathroom, unable to face the memories sealed in what was now her bathroom, but which just like the main bedroom had once always been known as theirs.

  The bitterly cold water coursed over her, but Cassie shut out the sensation, as she had shut out most other sensations for the past twenty months. Father Patrick had once hinted that God had sent Mattie’s asthma to deflect her attention away from the memory of Tyrone, and Cassie had to restrain herself from attacking him physically. He had further hinted that her son’s asthma might also be due to her professional activities with her horses: that it was a child’s call for attention and that a mother’s place was in the home. Cassie had listened to him in silence, refusing to enter an argument, and point out that the children would have no home if she lingered too long in the nursery, and that there would be no point in her business if there were no children to feed and clothe.

  When the priest had left, fortunately Doctor Gilbert had called on his rounds, and he and Cassie sat into the small hours talking the problem out. Cassie was so glad for Doctor Gilbert, and so ashamed of her previous mistrust of the old man, for at the times of her worst stress, he had been a rock, turning up sometimes as if he instinctively knew when she was teetering on an emotional precipice. Poor Doctor Gilbert, whose smoking and old-fashioned attitudes used to drive Cassie to distraction. He was now her St Peter.

  Then there was the worry about Josephine not eating, Cassie thought, as she reached for a towel still damp from yesterday’s shower and stood shivering on the children’s faded Mickey Mouse bathmat. Josephine had stopped eating about the same time as Mattie suffered his first asthma attack, and Cassie thought it was probably also about the time her daughter had finally realised that her Daddy really wasn’t coming home any more. Now she just picked at her food, and sometimes would go two, maybe three days without actually eating anything at all.

  ‘If you ate yourself,’ Erin would volunteer, ‘then your daughter would eat. What sort of example are yous setting her anyway?’

  ‘She sees you eating,’ Cassie would counter. ‘And your mother. She has plenty of examples.’

  ‘’Tis not the same as the mother eatin’,’ Erin would answer. ‘’Tis not the same thing at all.’

  Erin would sigh and sit with her eyes raised to heaven. Cassie would want to scream in return, but didn’t, instead retiring to her little bedroom and lying on the bed with her teeth sunk deep in her wrist to stop herself from crying. When she had recovered, she would go in search of Josephine, and take her outside for a walk if it was fine, or sit and play a game with her if it was raining, and try and find a way to reactivate her daughter’s appetite. But nothing she could say, nor anything anyone of them cooked, aroused the slightest interest in Josephine, and plate after plate of specially prepared food would be taken and thrown away.

  ‘Listen, Mrs Rosse,’ Tomas would tell her. ‘Sure dogs and childer. They never starve themselves.’

  He advised Cassie to leave well alone, and Cassie knew it was good advice. But she couldn’t. It preyed on her mind to see her little girl pushing away everything which was put in front of her, rejecting even biscuits and the occasional bar of chocolate with which Cassie would try to bribe her. And then, which Cassie found even harder to bear, she started to eat a little, but not for her. She would eat for Erin, or for her mother Mrs Muldoon. But as soon as Cassie came into the kitchen where they were all sitting, Josephine would push her plate away and refuse point blank to eat anything more. It was as if she was blaming Cassie for her father not coming home any more.

  When she’d dried herself and changed, Cassie went back into the nursery to say goodnight to Mattie. She kissed the pale-faced little boy, who put his arms up round Cassie’s neck and kissed her in return. Erin was seated by his bed, knitting, as she did every night until Mattie fell asleep, when she would creep across the corridor into her own room, and go to sleep herself, fully clothed and lying under only the eiderdown, in case of an emergency. Cassie then went to Josephine’s room, but Josephine was sound asleep, her face turned to the wall, a little tear-stained handkerchief grasped in one hand.

  Watching her daughter in sleep, Cassie suddenly felt more lonely than she had ever felt before in the whole of her life. She had her children, she had Erin and Tomas and Mrs Muldoon, she had Doctor Gilbert, and she had friends. But she also had no one. There was no one in her life who understood what it was like one moment to have been standing in full sun and the very next moment to have been plunged into the darkness.

  Later, in the spare bedroom, in her bedroom, in her own single lonely bedroom, she wearily turned off the light and, lying back on her pillow, talked to Tyrone.

  ‘I’m so tired, Ty,’ she told him, ‘so very tired, I really don’t think I can go on. It’s so hard without you. And so pointless. What’s the point, Ty, of all this pain and anguish? I can’t bear it, I promise you I can’t. I can’t bear coming home, with your hat not thrown any old how on the hall stand any more. And no race glasses on the chair. no crumpled race card. Not hearing your voice. Oh how I miss your voice, Ty. Oh Ty – how I miss you. I die a little more each day when you don’t come home. I die a little more each morning, every morning when I wake up and know you’re gone.’

  She just managed to cover her face with her pillow to stifle the sob she had cried which was now turning into a howl. She wrapped both her arms tightly around the pillow, pulling it against her face until it almost suffocated her. But she held it there until she stopped crying. No one had seen her cry yet. No one had heard her. And no one was going to.

  Turning on her side, she stared into the darkness of the small room, and thought about tomorrow. Tomorrow she had to go and see the bank manager. She had to go and see ‘Old Flann at the Bank’, as Tyrone had always laughingly prefaced his own visits. Tyrone’s premature and tragic death had left his affairs in a terrible state, a confusion which was only now beginning to be unscrambled by his lawyer and his executors.

  The debts had been collossal. For every pound Tyrone had earned or won, he had spent five. Cassie naturally had never queried whether or not everything was paid for, because since Tyrone had been doing so well, she had naturally assumed he was managing his affairs responsibly. Even when he showered her with expensive presents, which he did with increasing regularity whenever he was on a winning streak, despite her delighted protests that he really shouldn’t be so extravagant, never for one moment did it occur to Cassie that he couldn’t afford them. Everything had been going so well and so successfully that it never crossed Cassie’s mind to doubt their solvency.

  It never crossed Tyrone’s either.

  So the more he earned, the more he spent. New stables, better stables, new gallops, new machinery, new tack, new clothing for his beloved thoroughbreds, better conditions for his lads, better wages, new horseboxes, expensive yearlings bought on spec to be sold on, new cars, new clothes, the best food, champagne and presents. Always presents. Happy day presents, Tyrone would call them, when for no apparent reason at all he would
return laden with surprises for Cassie and the children. Even sometimes for Erin and Mrs Muldoon. Not forgetting his beloved Brian, who was constantly bought new beds, leads, chewy bars and rubber bones. Life with Tyrone had been like one long birthday party. But now it was over. The balloons had burst and the moon had been taken away.

  And the piper had to be paid. No income tax had been paid for what Cassie’s lawyer called a considerable period of time, which when decoded meant over four years, not counting the year of Tyrone’s death. And a good eighty per cent of the new machinery, plant and equipment that had been bought for the yard had been purchased so on credit. So the goods had to be either returned or paid for. The yearlings were sold off at absurdly low prices in order to satisfy the most impatient creditors, and Cassie was finally reduced to selling off silver, paintings and even her jewellery to meet other less pressing but equally unavoidable debts. By the time probate was granted, what Cassie still actually owned could be hung and stored in one small wardrobe.

  What she didn’t own, the bank did. She was only still at Claremore because the bank hadn’t foreclosed on the mortgage (which Tyrone had taken out to cover his debts), due simply, as the manager Mr John Flannery put it, to ‘an old and happy arrangement’. The old and happy arrangement emerged to be extended credit at prohibitively high interest rates.

  For the first year, Cassie had met the mortgage payments with some difficulty, but met they had been simply because of the loyalty and generosity of some of Tyrone’s owners, who had kept their horses on in the yard, to be trained nominally by Tomas for the remainder of the season subsequent to Tyrone’s death. Luck for once was also on Cassie’s side, because two of Townhend Warner’s horses won four more good races, with Annagh Bridge who had won at Royal Ascot topping it off by running third in the Prix del’Arc de Triomphe. But the second year had been a disaster, with the defection of the majority of Claremore’s owners, and with a simple attack of a virus which decimated the rest of the yard.

  Leonora had started the defection, naturally. And in true Leonora style, she had picked her moment perfectly.

  The funeral had been extraordinary, even by Irish standards. Cassie had at first wanted family only, but Tomas had been quite astonishingly adamant on the subject.

  ‘You’ll have a riot on your hands, Mrs Rosse,’ he warned her, ‘if you deny the people the chance to pay their last respects. Mr Rosse was Claremore. And Claremore won’t be denied its farewell.’

  He was right. The day before they buried Tyrone, the whole village and surrounding community walked up the drive to shake hands with Cassie, who stood alone dressed in black at the top of the steps of the house, alone except for Brian, who lay silent at her feet. Each and every person from the vicinity climbed the steps and shook Cassie by the hand, old men, young men, young and old women, and even children.

  ‘I never knew my husband was so loved,’ Cassie said afterwards to Tomas.

  ‘There wasn’t a man to touch him,’ Tomas replied. ‘There’s not a man born.’

  On the day of the funeral it rained: a fine light summer rain that barely dusted the mourners with its damp. They laid Tyrone to rest in a grave dug next to that of his infant son, and the earth Cassie threw on to his flower-strewn coffin was the earth from a graveyard where Tyrone had once played as a boy. Josephine stood beside Cassie, her hand in her mother’s, looking with bewilderment at a box which she had been told contained the mortal remains of her father. Everyone who had brought flowers with them, and there were many such people, filed past the open grave and dropped their flowers on the coffin of a man they were all going to miss grievously, while a young boy from the village, with cheeks like peaches and a thatch of black hair, played a lament on his bagpipes.

  Nobody said a word, and the graveyard seemed silent except for the piper’s lament. As the women filed by, Cassie saw that they were weeping.

  Nobody said a word, except Leonora. As Cassie was leaving the graveyard, Leonora appeared at her side, dressed in black velvet with a lace veil over her blonde hair, and touched Cassie on the elbow.

  ‘I’ll take the horses away, of course,’ she’d said, as if she was relieving Cassie of an enormous burden, rather than taking away her major source of income.

  ‘There’s really no need—’ Cassie began. ‘Tomas is going to carry on.’

  Leonora laid a small and heavily ringed hand on Cassie’s arm.

  ‘I wouldn’t hear of it,’ she said. ‘I mean it. Not even I could be that heartless. I’ll make arrangements for them to be moved next week. Now you’re not to think another thing about it.’

  Cassie turned and looked up into Leonora’s eyes. Even under her veil they still glittered with malevolence. Cassie knew at that precise moment what bitterness really was.

  ‘I won’t forget this, Leonora,’ Cassie whispered. ‘Not ever.’

  ‘That’s all right, darling,’ Leonora said, giving her arm another consolatory squeeze. ‘If there’s anything else I can do, call me. Anything.’

  She moved off to her waiting Rolls Royce, with Cassie’s eyes and her silently uttered curse following her. Cassie asked God to forgive her, because she truly had cursed Leonora: not with a swearing hopeless kind of curse, but with a deep and fully intentioned one, the sort of curse which people make and intend to keep, and which follows the accursed around forever, until they are avenged.

  ‘May she know no peace,’ Erin suddenly said from behind her, as if she had been reading Cassie’s thoughts.

  Then they both stood and watched as Leonora’s chauffeur settled her into her seat, before closing the door on what to anyone else would seem like a sweet and deeply sympathetic smile.

  For once Cassie was glad of the almost suffocating heat in Mr Flannery’s office. It seemed that the gas fire was kept on throughout the year, regardless of the weather, and usually Cassie found the temperature of the room overpowering. But now, having been forced to turn the heating off in every room in her own house save the children’s, Cassie found the warmth very comforting, having just stepped in from a particularly vicious March wind.

  Mr Flannery offered Cassie a dry sherry and a biscuit, as was his habit, and enquired how she was.

  ‘I’m just fine, thank you,’ she replied, crossing her silk-stockinged legs and sending up a prayer of thanks to Tyrone for always buying her such expensive clothes, because they lasted. Even so, she was careful which leg she crossed on which, lest a run had appeared without her knowing.

  ‘You always look most attractive, if I may say so, Mrs Rosse,’ Flannery told her, ‘in that fur coat of yours. Most attractive, yes indeed.’

  He leaned over her to top up her sherry glass, and Cassie tried her best not to move away from him. The last thing she wanted was him guessing how repulsive she found him, with his soft rounded almost female body, and his smooth white unlined face and little cherry-red lips.

  ‘You wanted to see me,’ Cassie said, unbuttoning her coat and allowing it to fall open, revealing her figure-hugging blue cashmere dress.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ Flannery replied, eyeing her slyly, ‘yes indeed I did, and who wouldn’t? No, no it would be a very strange sort of person who didn’t want to see someone as pretty as you. Yes? Yes?’

  Cassie laughed politely with him as he enjoyed his own joke, and thought how wise Erin had been to make her keep all her fine clothes.

  ‘You’ll get nothin’ for them, Mrs Rosse,’ she’d said. ‘Nothin’ at all. And you’ll get nothin’ for Mr Rosse’s either. Sure you’d be better off keepin’ them, and sellin’ somethin’ you’ll not be needin’. ’Cos if yous intend stayin’ on here in Claremore, please God, then yous is goin’ to have to keep that dirty old man down at the bank happy for a start.’

  And Erin had been right. As long as Cassie looked smart and, as Erin coyly called it, dead sexy, then Flannery, besides enjoying the company of a well-dressed and quite visibly attractive woman, was also deceived into believing that Cassie was coping and surviving better than she indeed w
as.

  In fact Flannery had now broken out into a mild sweat as he enquired whether or not Cassie would like to remove her fur coat.

  ‘Do you know I think I will, Mr Flannery?’ Cassie agreed. ‘Your office is so lovely and warm.’

  Flannery helped her remove the coat and took the chance to run his hands down the sleeves of her dress. Cassie noticed in the mirror above the fireplace that he also buried his face momentarily in the fur of her coat before hanging it on the hatstand.

  ‘Now then,’ he said, his white face for once quite flushed as he sat down. ‘To business.’

  ‘You know, Mr Flannery,’ Cassie interrupted, ‘for a man who works as hard as you do, you look amazing. You look as if you haven’t a care in the world.’

  Flannery looked up at her, pursing his little red lips into a smile.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Mrs Rosse,’ he replied, ‘but I’m really no chicken, you know. I shall be fifty-two come Michaelmas.’

  ‘Never,’ Cassie said, clasping one hand to her breast and hating herself deeply. ‘I just don’t believe it.’

  ‘Fifty-two come Michaelmas.’

  ‘I’m still amazed that no woman in the town hasn’t snapped you up, you know.’

  ‘Ah. Ah well perhaps now. Perhaps I’m waiting for the right woman – for a very particular woman to come and snap me up. Yes? Yes?’

  He looked over his glasses at her and did his best to get his beady eyes to twinkle. Cassie smiled demurely back, and lowered her own eyes, while her stomach turned over at the thought of even eating dinner with him, let alone sharing his bed. She made a private bet with herself that he was the sort of man who’d keep his singlet on under his pyjamas, at the same time hoping she would never be in a position to find out.

  ‘Anyway. To business, Mrs Rosse. I’m afraid it’s time for us to review your position.’