To Hear a Nightingale Page 10

  Cassie looked at Sister Joseph once more and realised that the nun wasn’t just sitting there looking at her hands doing nothing, but that she was in fact telling her rosary.

  ‘I’m praying that you’ll come back, Cassie darling,’ Sister Joseph said, with a smile. ‘I’m praying that you’ll come back here and visit us just whenever you wish.’

  ‘It won’t be the same,’ Cassie replied. ‘All my friends are here – everyone I’ve grown up with, everyone in my class and you. And all the other nuns. I don’t have any other friends. All my friends are here, and they’ll be staying here, and I won’t be. I’ll be gone. And soon we won’t know each other any more.’

  Cassie felt the tears coming, but fought them back.

  ‘You can write, darling,’ Sister Joseph said. ‘And there’s always the vacations for seeing your friends.’

  Cassie looked at Sister Joseph, who now dropped her eyes, because she knew that what the young girl was saying was true. Soon they wouldn’t know each other any more, vacations or no vacations. The child’s grandmother was doing a quite unnecessarily cruel thing. But despite all Sister Joseph’s written pleadings to try and get her to change her mind, this latest letter of her grandmother’s had spelt the sentence out quite finally. Cassie was to leave them at the end of term.

  The nun looked back up at Cassie and saw the change in the young girl’s eyes. There was a look in them of open hostility and even bitterness. Sister Joseph had seen that look many times before. She recognised it as the look in a person’s eyes when they have given up the struggle to believe that the world could be a kind and loving place.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to pray with me, Cassie,’ Sister Joseph suggested.

  ‘No thank you,’ Cassie answered. ‘There’s no point.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s how it seems now,’ said Sister Joseph. ‘Now it must seem to you like the end of the world has come. But it hasn’t, Cassie. This is just a separation, not a severance.’

  She offered Cassie her hand but Cassie turned away from her. Sister Joseph remained silent, as she knew she must, respectful of the struggle the child was having to make sense of her feelings, and mindful of the pain she was suffering in her young heart.

  Instead she stood up and straightened out her habit.

  ‘I’m going to the church to pray for you now, Cassie,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to come with me, but I’d be delighted if you did.’

  Cassie sat unmoving, staring out of the window across the playing fields and into the woods.

  Sister Joseph waited a moment then turned and went out. Cassie remained sitting where she was.

  Now the time flew by. Just when Cassie didn’t want it to, the rest of the term seemed to go at the speed of the express train she took every vacation down to Locksfield.

  Cassie tried to come to terms with the change which lay ahead. But try as she might she couldn’t. She just couldn’t imagine her life without her friends, at a different school. A quite different school, according to her grandmother. It wasn’t a convent for a start. It was an academy for well-brought-up young ladies of good families. Cassie couldn’t think what it must be like to be at a school which wasn’t a convent. It seemed to be so alien for children to be taught by people who hadn’t dedicated their lives to God.

  She tried convincing herself that it would be better, that it would be freer, and so more fun. She also tried to convince herself that her time at the convent hadn’t been everything she’d made it out to be and that the nuns, kind though they were, weren’t really that special, and that there was every chance life at this new school could well be a darn sight brighter and better. In fact, she thought as she walked the corridors by herself in the late afternoons, the convent was really quite shabby and uncomfortable, despite its highly polished wood floors and the shining taps in the bathrooms. It was cold and damp in the winter, and the nuns weren’t always kind and smiling. They were often pretty cross with the children: why, only the other week Sister John had put three girls outside the classroom door to kneel in the corridor for ten minutes, and that sort of thing quite obviously wouldn’t happen at an academy for the well-brought-up young ladies of good families.

  But this self-inflicted brainwashing had no real effect on Cassie. It was a glorious summer, and the roses in the convent garden smelled sweeter than ever. Even though everyone knew she was leaving them, her friendships, instead of fading, deepened even more. Every night Cassie would sit on her bed in the blue-flower-papered bedroom she and Mary-Jo now shared together, watching the groups of elder girls sitting in circles talking on the grass below, while Mary-Jo sat in silence, braiding her long dark hair and winding it round and round her head into a crown. She knew at those moments that the thought of leaving the convent was unbearable.

  She did find some comfort in the hatred she felt for her grandmother, but it was short-lived, because, as Sister Joseph told her one day during one of their many heart-to-heart talks, hatred never warmed a loving heart. And she soon grew tired of trying to hate someone for whom she felt little more than duty anyway.

  She was still going to be able to go and stay with Mary-Jo that vacation, even though she suspected that it would probably be the last time she would be allowed the privilege. Mary-Jo and she would spend every evening as the end of term approached discussing plans for the vacation: who was going to be there and what horses they were going to ride. And of course they talked endlessly about Mary-Jo’s wonderful mother, and every time they did they sighed and their faces softened at the mention of her name.

  ‘When I grow up, I want to be someone like your mother,’ Cassie told Mary-Jo one midnight, as they lay whispering. ‘But I don’t suppose I ever will be. Not now I’m leaving here.’

  They lay in their beds, silent at the thought of how different both their next terms were going to be. Mary-Jo knew how much she would miss her friend, and how her life would never again be the same. And Cassie knew how lonely and angry she would be at her new school, alone without her friends, and angry at the injustice which had been done to her.

  ‘I wonder what my mother was really like?’ Cassie suddenly whispered, although this was something the two girls wondered quite regularly, at least twice a week.

  ‘I think she must have been dark like you, Cassie,’ Mary-Jo said.

  ‘She could have been red-haired like Grandmother,’ Cassie replied.

  ‘If she had been,’ Mary-Jo countered, ‘you’d have had the same sort of skin and eyes as your grandmother. White skin and small grey eyes.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ said Cassie. ‘I couldn’t bear it if she’d been like Grandmother. If she’d been like Grandmother, I’d have hated her!’

  ‘If she had, Cassie,’ Mary-Jo whispered back, ‘which she obviously wasn’t, it wouldn’t have been your mother’s fault. After all, your grandmother was her mother.’

  Cassie lay staring out through the crack in the curtains at the night sky and gave this some thought. She had never really thought of her mother like that before, as the child of her grandmother – possibly because she could never have tolerated the thought: it would have clouded the vision Cassie had always had of the mother she had never known.

  ‘I wonder if she loved me?’ Cassie thought out loud.

  ‘Of course she loved you,’ Mary-Jo replied. ‘Every mother loves her baby.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ asked Cassie, looking across at Mary-Jo.

  ‘Of course, silly,’ Mary-Jo replied.

  Cassie reached across the gap between their beds and took Mary-Jo’s hands.

  ‘We will always be friends, won’t we?’ she said.

  ‘Always,’ said Mary-Jo. ‘We’ll always love each other, always and forever.’

  Cassie let go of her hand and pulled the sheet up under her chin. She stared hard at the ceiling, then closed her eyes tightly, hoping that sleep would come. But it didn’t. Instead, tears rolled down her cheeks, warm, soft, satisfying tears; tears that were for herself and no one e
lse.

  Chapter Five

  They gave her holy pictures. A holy picture was the largest gift one child was allowed to bestow upon another. Cassie put them all in her missal, where she would keep them for all her life. Whenever and wherever she opened the book, they would always bring memories of those shiningly happy days: days spent playing in ‘paradise’ woods, holding hands and jumping up and down on the lines cheering their teams, slip-sliding their shoes down the immaculately shining floors, jumping in and out of low windows on to newly mown lawns, painting pictures on rough grey paper and learning to dance waltzes to their precious collection of shiny black gramophone records.

  The pictures were all placed lovingly at Cassie’s place at breakfast on the last morning of term. Cassie read them all one by one and thanked every girl individually. She wanted to hug them all and kiss them, but she knew it wasn’t necessary. She knew they loved her from the presents they had given her, just as they knew Cassie loved them by her smiling thanks.

  They all knew also somewhere in their hearts, whatever age they were, that something was going to happen to them all, as it was now happening to Cassie. That life would change them, and none of them would remain the same; and that they would go their separate ways, until the chance moment they met in a street, or a shop, or in a friend’s house. Then as they remembered each other any tiredness, or tedium, boredom, restlessness or disappointment they were feeling would vanish, and they would be young again, and children; they would once more be standing on the threshold between youth and childhood, and the blessed plot where the flowers of their childhood had been sown would once more be in bloom.

  Cassie was to leave at the same time as everyone else, and it had been arranged that Mrs Roebuck would bring her home with Gina and Maria. But Grandmother changed her mind and sent a cab, early, instead, before anyone else had left. There was no explanation, since the driver turned up alone. Sister John summoned Cassie, who was just finishing her packing, and she went downstairs while the other girls were still busy running up and down the polished wooden corridors, shouting in excitement as they cemented their vacation plans and collected almost forgotten articles of clothing. Cassie paused at the bottom of the stairs wondering whether or not to call a last goodbye, but with the din coming down from above there seemed little point.

  Sister John saw her to the door and out to the waiting cab. The driver took her case and put it in the trunk. Sister John squeezed her hand and Cassie thought she saw tears in her eyes. Then she shut the door on Cassie and the cab driver started the engine.

  As the cab moved away, Cassie looked back through the rear window. Sister John had gone back inside. There was no one to wave to. Then halfway down the drive the cab driver looked in his driving mirror and stopped. He turned in his seat and grinned at Cassie, nodding his capped head back at the convent. Cassie turned round again, a frown on her face. At every upstairs window there were children waving. Cassie got out of the car and for a moment stood there, watching. It seemed as if the convent was a sea of waving white handkerchieves. Cassie pulled her own handkerchief from her pocket and waved back. Then as suddenly as it had started, it stopped and the children remained at the windows, silent and still, as Cassie got back into the cab.

  The driver restarted the engine and drove off down the driveway. Cassie stared ahead. There was nothing else she could do.

  Chapter Six

  Miss Truefitt’s Academy for Young Ladies,

  Glenville, West Virginia

  Leonora Von Wagner sat on the front of Miss Truefitt’s desk, chewing gum and swinging her long, shapely legs. The other girls in the classroom were all watching her, silent except for the occasional unsuppressed giggle.

  ‘As a result of the voting,’ Leonora announced, ‘Cassie McGann is once again voted the most unpopular girl in the class of ’52.’

  Every girl turned in Cassie’s direction and grinned. Cassie was sitting in a corner at the back of the room, paying no attention to Leonora Von Wagner’s baiting. Instead she was busy reading a book about the breeding of horses that Mary-Jo’s mother had given to her at the end of her last vacation in Locksfield.

  ‘Pay attention, Paddy McGann!’ Leonora called.

  Cassie ignored her.

  ‘Whether you look up or not,’ Leonora continued, ‘makes little difference. I shall still pass sentence.’

  Cassie turned over a page in her book and continued reading.

  ‘Since Cassie Paddy McGann has been voted yet again the most unpopular girl in the class, she will not be spoken to by anyone until someone else is voted more unpopular than her.’

  Leonora jumped down off the desk and pulled the chewing gum out of her mouth, tossing back her long blonde hair.

  ‘And frankly,’ she said, coming to where Cassie was sitting reading and slamming her book closed in front of her, ‘the way things have been going, I see little chance of that happening.’

  She stared down spitefully at Cassie. Cassie regarded her steadily, with complete disdain, then reopened her book and went on reading. Leonora snatched the book away and for one dreadful moment Cassie thought she was going to tear some pages out, or pour ink over it, like she had done with her book of the lives of the saints. But someone gave warning of Miss Truefitt’s imminent approach, and Cassie took the chance while Leonora was off guard to snatch her book.

  Leonora bent right down, level with Cassie’s face, and hissed at her.

  ‘I’ll get you, Paddy,’ she seethed, ‘don’t worry.’

  Then she hurried back to her place.

  Miss Truefitt came in, immaculate from head to toe as always, and the girls obediently rose to their feet.

  ‘Good morning, young ladies,’ she said.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Truefitt!’ the girls carolled back.

  ‘I don’t think we saw you say good morning, Cassie McGann,’ Miss Truefitt called to Cassie, who had been the last to her feet. ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning, Miss Truefitt,’ Cassie answered, as flat and as dead as she could. ‘Again.’

  Miss Truefitt sighed and stared at the truculent youngster, before ordering the class, with the exception of Cassie, to be reseated.

  ‘I know you’re new here, Cassie,’ Miss Truefitt told her, ‘but it’s no excuse for bad behaviour. You must follow the example of your classmates.’ The headmistress smiled warmly at the rest of the class.

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to do,’ Cassie replied.

  Miss Truefitt frowned at her.

  ‘I don’t understand, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’m doing my very best, Miss Truefitt,’ Cassie said, ‘to behave exactly like the rest of my classmates.’

  Cassie regarded Miss Truefitt evenly. As far as they were both concerned it had been hate at first sight. Cassie McGann was precisely the sort of girl Miss Truefitt had always endeavoured to keep out of the Academy, a Catholic girl with a distinctly Irish-sounding name. But her grandmother had apparently impeccable connections, a lineage which could be traced back to old English stock, and an extremely generous hand when it came to writing a cheque towards the new library fund. So, much against Miss Truefitt’s better judgement, she had accepted the McGann girl, considering that one swallow did not always make a summer.

  The rest of the class, like the rest of the Academy, were angels. Miss Truefitt was especially fond of Leonora Von Wagner, whom she regarded as a particularly good influence on the rest of her young ladies. The fact that she was the only child of one of the richest men in America was neither here nor there. Leonora Von Wagner was a model pupil.

  With this thought in her head she smiled at Leonora, who dimpled and smiled demurely back, all the time pinching as hard as she could the ample thigh of the girl sitting next to her.

  ‘Good,’ said Miss Truefitt, running her hand down one of her own soft cheeks. ‘So today is poetry-reading day. If you recall, I asked you all to choose a favourite piece of verse and to prepare it for reading out loud to me. Since, Cassie, you are st
ill on your feet, you may commence proceedings.’

  Cassie picked up her book of verse and turned to a poem.

  ‘What have you selected to read, please Cassie?’ Miss Truefitt asked her.

  ‘A poem by Walt Whitman,’ Cassie answered, and then began to read with quite astonishing authority and conviction.

  Come lovely and soothing death,

  Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,

  In the day, in the night, to all, to each,

  Sooner or later, delicate death.

  Prais’d be the fathomless universe,

  For life, and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,

  And for love – sweet love – but praise! Praise! Praise!

  For the sure-endwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

  There was complete silence, as all the class and the Headmistress stared at the defiant-faced Cassie.

  Cassie stared evenly back at them all.

  ‘Thank you, Cassie,’ Miss Truefitt managed finally. ‘Thank you. That was very . . . very interesting.’

  Cassie sat back down and closed her book.

  ‘Leonora?’ Miss Truefitt said, and Cassie at once shut herself off from the rest of the class, and Leonora Von Wagner in particular.

  For it was all Leonora’s doing that she kept being voted the most unpopular girl in the class. Not that the other girls were much better, but Leonora Von Wagner was the worst of them all. She had picked on Cassie the moment Cassie had arrived on that miserable first day, and she hadn’t let up since, over two months later. She had persecuted her so much that Cassie hadn’t even had the chance to try to make any friends at all so she decided instead, to retreat into herself, and not bother with anyone. Mary-Jo still wrote to her twice a week, as did Cassie to her. Several times Leonora had stolen her letters from Mary-Jo and read them out to the class, mocking their friendship and the fact that Mary-Jo lived on a farm. Cassie had wanted to kill her at those moments, but decided instead that she would just hide her pain and anguish behind an expressionless mask. And wait for the moment when she could get her revenge on this stuck-up and spoilt little rich kid.