To Hear a Nightingale Page 18

  Doctor Fossett paused on the porch before leaving.

  ‘I don’t like to bring this up at a time like this, Cassie,’ he said. ‘But your poor grandmother’s account is outstanding some three months now. And I thought perhaps in lieu of what is still owed—’

  Cassie didn’t allow him to finish.

  ‘Grandmother’s account has been paid up until these last two visits,’ she replied. ‘Anything outstanding will be settled once her affairs are in order.’

  She then closed the door on him, and on any hopes Doctor Fossett might have nursed of getting his hands on the pretty little silver cream jug.

  Cassie next turned her attentions to Delta, who was still sitting in the kitchen weeping copiously, in between taking slugs of Grandmother’s brandy. Cassie knew that her tears were caused more by the fact that she was now out of a job, rather than by the sudden death of her employer.

  ‘Pull yourself together, Delta,’ Cassie ordered, ‘and tell me what you’re owed.’

  ‘Two weeks and one half, Miss Cassie,’ Delta sniffed. ‘The Lord have mercy on her soul.’

  Cassie opened her grandmother’s purse, which she had been carrying around in order to keep it out of Delta’s clutches. It was a strange feeling, opening the stiff clasp and rummaging inside. Cassie felt as if she was robbing a grave. She took out what Delta was owed and paid it to her, then put a piece of paper and a pen on the table in front of her.

  ‘What’s this for, Miss Cassie?’ Delta asked, knowing full well.

  ‘It’s a receipt, Delta,’ Cassie answered. ‘Please sign it. Like you always did for Grandmother.’

  Delta signed it, narrow-eyed. She never had liked Cassie, sharing her late employer’s view that there would be far less work if there was no child in the house.

  ‘I’m not sure as I can come back this evening, Miss Cassie,’ Delta said on her way out, in an attempt to pay Cassie back for her lack of trust. ‘My sister’s coming over, do you see?’

  ‘That’s perfectly all right, Delta,’ Cassie said, ‘I shall be quite all right by myself’.

  It wasn’t as if Delta would be much company anyway. They were hardly going to become devoted friends just because Grandmother had died. Besides, Cassie wanted to be alone. She had even turned down Joe’s offer to come round and sit with her that evening, because she had wanted to be by herself.

  At first Cassie thought she would be nervous, left alone in the house where someone had just died. But she soon realised that she felt the very opposite. An enormous calm settled over her and, Cassie imagined, over the house itself. Cassie could now go where she liked in the house, and when she liked. She could go in and out of the front door a hundred thousand times if she wanted, singing at the top of her voice and slamming the door or leaving it wide open. She could invite her friends in and have a party. Or she could just ask Joe over and they could sit in the kitchen discussing their future. And there would never again be the presence lurking behind her, that shadow in the doorway, or that banging of Grandmother’s stick on the floor, should Cassie raise her voice in laughter when she was napping in the afternoon, or play the radio too loudly when she was upstairs trying to read. Grandmother was dead. Grandmother was gone.

  Cassie sat in her grandmother’s chair, which the dead woman had treated like a throne, ruling her little kingdom with a rod of iron. Now Cassie stretched her own self out in it and tried to discover if she felt any grief at all. She had felt a terrible shock when she realised that the body on the floor was no longer a living body, and a kind of numb terror as she replaced the still warm corpse back as she found it, lest anyone should suspect her of what she understood to be called foul play. But once the body had been taken away, and Cassie had been left alone in the empty house, all she could feel was this extraordinary calm.

  She looked over to the desk which her grandmother had always kept locked. Cassie had the key to it now, and access to all the dead woman’s secrets. She wondered what it contained. Perhaps there would be letters, proving to Cassie that she had misunderstood her grandmother completely, correspondence which would reveal her in a totally different light, as a woman put upon by a child she had never wanted, who had consequently ruined her life. And perhaps there would be pictures of her mother, something Cassie had never seen, because Grandmother had never shown her photographs of either her late mother or her father. Cassie stared at the rosewood bureau, sorely tempted to open it there and then, but decided against it, in case she was not yet ready to deal with the information it could well divulge. It could wait. There was no hurry any more, and no need for privacy. Grandmother was dead.

  It was Joe who telephoned her with the results of the post mortem, which had been carried out at Haven Hills hospital. Her grandmother had died from a massive coronary occlusion. The pains she had been suffering in her chest, diagnosed by Doctor Fossett as having their root cause in gastric disturbance, were quite obviously anginal. The state of her grandmother’s arteries made this absolutely plain. Had her angina been correctly diagnosed, and had the usual nitroglycerin tablets been prescribed, instead of anti-indigestion remedies such as magnesia tablets and carminatives such as soda mint, her grandmother would have been able to live with her faulty arteries and enjoy a next-to-normal life. As it was, however, the post mortem revealed that she was lucky to have lived so long.

  Cassie listened to all this calmly. Lucky for who? she couldn’t help wondering. Certainly not for her granddaughter.

  ‘You still there?’ Joe asked in the silence.

  ‘Sure,’ Cassie replied. ‘I just got to thinking, that’s all.’

  ‘You want me to come round?’

  ‘No, Joe, I’m fine. Really. Let’s wait till after the funeral.’

  ‘They’re going to go for old Fossett, you can bet,’ Joe said. ‘A lot of people are going to thank you for this.’

  ‘I don’t want their thanks, Joe,’ Cassie told him. ‘It’s just nice to know maybe there’ll be a little less suffering in the town.’

  She hung up, with a promise to see him again as soon as it was right and proper. In the meantime, she’d call him whenever and if ever she wanted to talk.

  The Requiem Mass seemed to take forever. Cassie kept staring at the velvet-draped coffin in an attempt to find an eleventh-hour grief. But her heart remained unmoved, and her tear ducts dry. She didn’t feel any hate, and of that she was glad. Mindful of what the nuns had taught her, she had cleared her heart of any hatred for her grandmother, even after the horrific beating she had received at her hands. Instead she had felt nothing. Nothing at all.

  Before the funeral, she had taken the train out to the convent to talk to Sister Joseph.

  ‘There’s nothing in the Bible which says you have to love your parents, and I should imagine that goes for your grandparents as well, Cassie darling,’ Sister Joseph had told her. ‘Respect them, yes. Forgive them their trespasses, certainly. Honour them, of course. But there’s nothing about having to love them, because it wouldn’t make sense. Love is a special magic, and we can’t expect to feel real love for everyone. Especially people who wish to do us harm.’

  ‘What about the instruction to love our neighbour?’ Cassie had asked. ‘If we’re expected to love our neighbour, then surely we must be expected to love our parents and grandparents?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Cassie,’ Sister Joseph had replied thoughtfully. ‘I think the instruction to love our neighbour is meant to make us think more carefully about him and his problems. And if people did that, and gave more thought to those who lived next door, who knows? Maybe we wouldn’t be fighting so many wars.’

  Cassie had thought about what Sister Joseph had said all the way back to Westboro Falls. She was grateful to the nun for her reasoned advice, because now and then, when she woke in the night and the death of her grandmother became more and more real to her, she had been frightened by her total lack of sentiment.

  Now she sat in the church, before the coffin containing the mortal remains of he
r only known relative, while the priest for whom Grandmother had never had a good word read out an address in remembrance of the life of their sister Catherine. Cassie suddenly wondered why they had never heard from any other members of the family, at times such as Christmas when other people’s long-forgotten aunts or faintly related cousins might suddenly send a card, or a greeting, or even stop by and call in. Cassie had only the earliest and vaguest recollections of any relatives calling or even just being mentioned. She dimly remembered a rather tall aunt who spoke with a most peculiar accent, and a cousin who once telephoned on his way up to Canada, wishing to call by and pay his respects. Cassie had been about twelve, and she remembered talking to this voice for a few minutes, with a mounting and inexplicable sense of excitement, before Grandmother, late back from the beauty parlour, snatched the telephone away from her, and explained for some peculiar reason that they were moving house and unfortunately would no longer be living in Westboro when he passed through. Cassie had begun to ask her grandmother where they were moving to, only, she now remembered, to be told to go up to her room and mind her own business.

  After they had buried her, friends and acquaintances called back at the house to pay their respects. The friends of her late grandmother were frostily polite to Cassie, having always been fed the hand-out of what a difficult and impossible child she had been. While Cassie’s friends expressed their sorrow for Cassie, but didn’t pretend any false devotion to a woman whom they knew had been to put it mildly a little over-hard on the child. They didn’t say her grandmother had always been so kind, because they knew she hadn’t; and they didn’t say they were sorry she was gone, because they weren’t. They did say and mean that they were sorry for the small dignified figure in black who stood receiving their condolences. They felt truly sorry that Cassie had suffered so much, and that now, at the end of her childhood, she stood alone in the world, with no loving family behind her.

  But then Cassie had Joe. Joe was beside her in the house, while her friends came and paid their respects, and Joe was the last to go when the visitors had departed, and Cassie was left with a half-drunk Delta to clear up the house. Once more, she wouldn’t let him stay, lest people talked, finding such behaviour improper, but promised to meet him in exactly two weeks, when they would once more start walking out together, and would pick up exactly and precisely where they had left off.

  But then one morning a month after her grandmother had died, Joe’s father, who was her grandmother’s lawyer, telephoned Cassie, and asked her most politely if she would be good enough to call at his office to see him. Cassie knew at once from the tone of his voice that there was something he had to tell her, and that that something wasn’t necessarily to her benefit. She had met Joe’s parents, naturally, and had been to lunch and dinner several times at their house, giving the lie to Grandmother’s threat that they would never accept her. In fact Joe’s parents liked Cassie and seemed openly delighted with the prospect that their much loved son Joe might be about to propose marriage to such a charming girl.

  They were, however, Joe had hinted, just a little worried about Cassie’s family background. Being pillars of the Westboro community, it was of course very important for them that if Joe was intending to get engaged, the family into which he was going to get married should be of good if not impeccable stock. Of course all the town knew how respectable Mrs Arbuthnot had been, even if most of them disapproved of her over-strict rearing of her grandchild. And there had never been as much as a hint of scandal about her. But for someone who claimed to be able to trace her lineage back to old England, whenever Mrs Harris attempted to glean a little more information, she ran up against a brick wall. Everyone could take her back to a certain point in Mrs Arbuthnot’s history, namely the day she moved into Westboro Falls, but before that her life seemed veiled in mystery. Mrs Harris had in fact been intending to call upon Mrs Arbuthnot the very week she died, in order, she hoped, to learn a little more about her family and background.

  So Cassie knew that it wasn’t simply a matter of going through the motions of clearing up her grandmother’s affairs when she called in at Mr Harris’s office later in the day. Normally when Joe’s father telephoned Cassie, he asked her to bring over some papers with her, or an account book, or some missing share certificates. On this occasion, he just wanted to see Cassie.

  Mr Harris met Cassie at the door of his office personally and pulled up the very best chair for her. Cassie was wearing a new jacket and skirt; dark blue, with a white piqué collar to the jacket, it had seemed a suitable outfit for someone so recently in mourning. Mr Harris complimented Cassie on her appearance, and she thanked him, noting that as always Joe’s father was himself impeccably dressed in an expensive and beautifully cut suit. He was a very handsome man, tall like his son, with a shock of white hair. Cassie wondered whether Joe’s hair would go that colour early, and smiled to herself as she removed her gloves.

  ‘I’ll come to the point, Cassie dear,’ Mr Harris said, ‘because it’s not good news.’

  Cassie looked up but she was not surprised. Nothing to do with her grandmother had ever been good news.

  ‘Your grandmother died leaving you no money,’ he told her, sitting at his desk and cutting the end of an expensive cigar.

  ‘I didn’t expect she would,’ Cassie replied very calmly. ‘She didn’t like me.’

  ‘I know, Cassie,’ said Mr Harris. ‘I realise that, but even so. Even so. It’s not as if she seems to have had any other family.’

  ‘There’s the house,’ Cassie volunteered.

  Mr Harris looked down at the end of his cigar before replying. Then he looked at her across his desk.

  ‘Your grandmother left the house to Delta.’

  That was a shock, a great shock. But Cassie refused to let it show. It wasn’t what the house was worth that bothered her. It was the slap in the face from beyond the grave.

  ‘She changed her will apparently,’ Mr Harris explained, ‘without me knowing anything about it. It was with those papers I had collected the other day. If I’d known about it, I’d have advised her against it, of course—’

  ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference, Mr Harris.’

  ‘I’m sure, Cassie. But you never know. You never know.’

  There was a silence while Joe’s father swung his chair round and stared out of the window, carefully blowing out a slow stream of cigar smoke.

  ‘There are also quite sizeable debts, I’m afraid,’ he then continued, ‘which will have to be paid out of her estate. When the jewellery, furniture and paintings have been sold, there’s not going to be very much left.’

  ‘I wasn’t counting on a penny,’ Cassie answered.

  ‘Did you know your father left you a lot of money?’ Mr Harris suddenly asked her, swinging his chair back so that he could face her.

  Cassie hadn’t known.

  ‘It was to cover your schooling, which it did, and then there was meant to be a lump sum for you when you come of age. But I’m afraid your grandmother spent all that. All the extra. She was a very profligate woman it seems.’

  ‘What did she spend it on?’ Cassie asked curiously. ‘She didn’t seem to have very many expenses, besides her weekly trip to the beauty parlour. I mean, she never took vacations, and it’s not as if we had a motor car.’

  ‘I really couldn’t say, Cassie,’ Mr Harris replied. ‘I’ve only just started trying to make sense of her accounts. All I can tell you is that she made a habit every month of drawing out a large sum of money in cash. Four hundred dollars to be precise.’

  Cassie frowned and looked past Joe’s father, through his window and out on to the street But she barely noticed the traffic passing by. What could her grandmother possibly have spent all that money on? And every month? Yet every time Cassie had asked her for something, like a new skirt, or a pair of shoes, which wasn’t very often, her grandmother had refused, saying that, thanks to Cassie’s school fees and keep, she hadn’t any money.

  ‘I’m
sorry to have been the harbinger of such depressing news, Cassie,’ Mr Harris said, rising in conclusion of the interview.

  ‘Not at all, Mr Harris,’ Cassie answered, pulling on her new gloves. ‘It was very kind of you to take the time to tell me personally.’

  ‘That was my pleasure, Cassie,’ Mr Harris said, escorting her to the door. ‘You mean a great deal to our family.’

  Cassie smiled at him, and then shook his hand.

  ‘Thank you all the same,’ she said, and left.

  She left with a spring in her step and with the lightest heart she had had since the day Joe had walked into her life. It wasn’t bad news. On the contrary, it was great news. It meant that Cassie hadn’t been wrong all her young years. Her grandmother had hated her, and so she had been right to close her heart to her in return. The only thing missing from the puzzle was why her grandmother had hated her. Cassie suddenly started to hurry on home. Perhaps the truth lay there, and had always lain hidden there, locked away in the rosewood bureau.

  When she opened the front door and let herself in, the phone was ringing. It was Joe, anxious to come round and take her out to dinner. But Cassie pleaded a headache, and made a date for the following evening. Then she hurried upstairs to find her grandmother’s purse, and in it, the key to the bureau.

  By midnight it seemed that Cassie had got no further in solving the mystery. She sat on the floor surrounded by letters, every one of which she had read and sorted. But none of them told her anything beyond the fact that her grandmother had always moaned and complained about Cassie as a child to whomsoever she had written, since the answers to her letters reflected the constant dissatisfaction her grandmother had obviously felt with having to bring up a young child. It seemed from the correspondence that Cassie had ruined what life she might have had, and that she would never forgive Cassie for that.

  But that still didn’t seem to explain the depth of her grandmother’s loathing for her. Other people she knew had been forced to bring up children that weren’t their own, particularly, she had been told, after the war. And they hadn’t hated those children just because of the fact they had been introduced by force of circumstance into their lives. She remembered the nuns telling her stories of families who loved their adopted children as much as their own. So why should a grandmother of all people take such a violent dislike to her own grandchild? Particularly to a child who had come to her as a baby, and not as a delinquent with ready-made problems.