To Hear a Nightingale Read online

  Bedtime always came agonisingly early. So early that the light was of such a brightness that not even the heavy old blinds and the drapes combined could shut out the glow that would seep through from outside.

  Outside was another place. Outside was another country. Outside was the world. As Cassie lay gazing at the ceiling, she could hear other children playing. She could hear the sound of their bicycle bells, of their bats and balls, and the inevitable delighted shouts of all the members of ‘our gang’.

  ‘Our gang’ played together from the moment they came home from school. Cassie would watch them from her window, her hands pressed down on the sill the better to see the other children playing together. Each night was the same. They would bicycle or run excitedly towards each other and then, putting their heads together, arms around each other, they would arrange the evening game. Cassie never dared to pull aside Grandmother’s clean white nets to watch them through just the window glass, and so she always viewed them through a film of white lace which made them seem heavenly and remote from her own sin-filled world.

  Every evening Cassie would wonder what it would be like to be a child who was allowed outside on her own. A child who was allowed a bicycle, a bat and a ball, or a pair of grazed knees. She was never allowed to run anywhere. Walking was allowed, sedately beside Grandmother, but only once she had been washed and dressed and sat for what seemed like hours on a chair in the hall; there she watched the hands on the clock to see if she could spot them moving, for she felt, in some strange childish way, that if she could see them moving it would mean that time would be passing more quickly, and if time passed more quickly then it would become the future and might bring an end to the unhappy present.

  When, rarely, there were visitors Cassie was made to sit in the dining room. The green velvet curtains made the room dark, and there was little to look at in the room except for one large painting: a painting of a fat man with hardly any clothes on holding out a bunch of grapes to an equally fat lady. The two were being viewed from afar by a man peering through trees. Even at the age of four Cassie thought it a strange picture for Grandmother to possess.

  Grandmother never excused the picture but she did make firm references to it having belonged to her late husband’s father. It was a work of art. It was a source of admiration in the art world, she said; Cassie was very lucky to be privileged to sit in front of it. To Cassie it was horrible. She connected it with gathering gloom and the endless boredom of sitting in the dining room, while she could vaguely hear the voices of the people in the drawing room, usually commiserating with Grandmother and her ‘burden’. Or sometimes the guests congratulated Grandmother on treating Cassie so nicely, in spite of Cassie being so different and such a nuisance.

  ‘Being difficult’ was Cassie’s speciality, it seemed. Trouble was, it was easy to be difficult when Grandmother was around. Being difficult was making a mark on one of your white socks. It was speaking when you were spoken to by one of Grandmother’s friends, instead of allowing her to answer for you. It was having a nightmare which woke her. It was being sick. It was being well. It was having a too white skin. It was having hair that was too thick. It was having hair ribbons that fell off. It was not being able to read. It was being able to read. It was going ahead of her on a walk. It was dropping behind her on a walk. It was being like your father. It was being like your mother. Being difficult was simply being alive.

  Cassie was too good at being alive for Grandmother’s peace of mind. No one imagined that she wanted Cassie to die; but when Cassie was ill she refused to look after her and sent Delta, her maid, in to check on her, or just stare at her from the door, so it was not unimaginable to Cassie that Grandmother might indeed be made a great deal happier if she was not there. On the bright days of summer when she lay in her bed listening to the other children playing she thought how it would be if God took her to Himself. He could not, stern as she knew He was, be any sterner than Grandmother, and since her body would undoubtedly be dead, then it followed, quite naturally, that she would at least be a little less irritating to God than she had been to Grandmother. She would not need to be fed by God. God would not need to worry about her hands being clean. God could have endless visitors without the need to find her a room in which to sit. It seemed to Cassie that she could be quite a favourite with God, and Grandmother could stay below and feel pleased that she was at last relieved of her terrible burden. So she used to pray every night to be allowed to die.

  But God did not love her much, it seemed. Inching her way painfully through the months from four to five Cassie decided that God might need a little help. She had heard of something that was called ‘pneumonia’ that you caught from being cold, and so during the winter of her fifth year she would stand in front of the windows breathing in the cold night air and trying her hardest to ‘catch pneumonia’. That she failed was something that she never understood, any more than she could understand why Grandmother had ‘taken her in’. Grandmother did not like children. Children were a nuisance. Cassie’s mother had been a nuisance. It was Grandfather who had wanted a child. Cassie felt sorry for Grandmother, and went on faithfully praying for death to come and relieve them both of the intolerable situation that both birth and death – Cassie’s mother’s death – had landed them in together.

  Pneumonia did not come to her rescue, but measles did. She was satisfyingly ill with it. So ill that it seemed to her that even Grandmother thought she must be about to die. She knew this because she heard Delta asking the nurse. The priest came to visit her; and so did the doctor, who was a kind man. He gave her a peppermint. Cassie clung to the memory of his gentle smile all during her illness. All during the darkness, and the blinds being always down, and the tablets, and the spots, and the fever. She clung to it the way she clung to the memory of being given a book about dogs by Mr O’Reilly who lived next door and who kept a spaniel, a spaniel that she was sometimes allowed to pat.

  ‘I like dogs,’ Cassie told him. ‘But my grandmother doesn’t.’

  ‘Here’s a book on dogs, honey,’ Mr O’Reilly said to her one day. ‘You choose which dog you’d really like to own before you go to sleep and who knows, one morning when you wake up you might even have one.’

  Then he patted the top of Cassie’s head just as she patted the top of his spaniel’s head.

  That book became everything to Cassie. The pictures were of dogs standing in fields or by trees, each one beautifully illustrated, delicately painted with watercolours. The pages were thick and the print clear and precise. It was an old book, published many years before the war, when covers were hard and leathery, and tissue paper covered the illustrations to keep them fresh.

  Grandmother was soon on to the book. It never took her very much time to seize an opportunity to spoil someone else’s happiness, and in Cassie’s case it took even less. Sometimes it would be a hair ribbon. Sometimes it would be something that she liked to eat. But once Cassie had betrayed a preference it would not be long before that preference became a good weapon with which to punish her.

  ‘If you had wanted to wear blue ribbons to match your dress,’ she’d say, ‘then you should have made your bed a little better.’

  Or another time she would say ‘Well, we were going to have your favourite baked custard, but since you forgot to clean your teeth I think now we’ll keep it for tomorrow when Mrs Bennett calls.’

  At first Cassie hid the book about the dogs, putting it under her bed, but then, some days having passed without punishment, she was lulled into a false sense of security and Grandmother found her looking at it at bedtime.

  ‘Give me that,’ she demanded, pulling Cassie out of bed. ‘Where did you get this?’

  Cassie remained silent.

  ‘You tell me where you got this and I want none of your lies.’

  ‘Mr O’Reilly gave it to me,’ Cassie told her.

  ‘Oh, Mr O’Reilly gave it to you, did he?’ her grandmother replied, quickly flicking through the book. ‘Mr O’Reilly
gave it to you. An expensive book like this? You don’t expect me to believe a lie like that?’

  ‘I’m not lying, Grandmother,’ Cassie protested. ‘I promise you I’m not.’

  ‘Of course you are. You’re lying, and you will be punished for so doing. You just wait there until I’ve spoken to Mr O’Reilly about this book. Given it you indeed.’

  While her grandmother went next door, Cassie sat on the end of her bed staring at her feet and wondering why God was so cruel, and why He had made her so unloveable.

  Then she heard her grandmother return, and her footfall on the stairs. Soon she was by Cassie’s bedroom door, still holding the book,

  ‘You’ve been a very naughty child,’ she said. ‘You should have told me that Mr O’Reilly gave you the book instead of hiding it from me. Just for that I’m going to lock it away until you’ve earned the right to have it again.’

  Cassie lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling. Darkness would not come. Her book, the source of her one moment of joy in the day when she could stare at those glorious creatures called dogs and imagine what it would be like to own one, was to be denied her. A tear fell down her cheeks, paused, and then slid on down her neck. She whispered the names she had made up for the dogs in the books, and then in her imagination she put her arms round their warm necks and buried her face in their fur. Trusted friends all of them, eyes liquid with love, looking at her the way Mr O’Reilly’s spaniel looked at him.

  ‘We’ll come back to you, little mistress,’ they told her. ‘In your dreams we’ll come back to you.’

  But they didn’t. Instead her dreams were all the kind that when she awoke in the night made her want to scream. But she caught her pillow in time and pressed it against her mouth so she could make a silent sound, which if it hadn’t been silent would have been a sound something between a cry and a sob.

  Weeks of running up and down the stairs for Grandmother’s eye glasses and her book, and offering to help Delta didn’t result in the return of the book – only in Grandmother becoming bored. Grandmother got very bored if you were too good because it gave her nothing for which to punish you. If Cassie’s socks never had a mark on them, if she exiled herself to the dining room without being asked, if she ate up everything that was put in front of her no matter how much she hated it, if she was not sick, if she didn’t speak unless spoken to, if she knelt for many minutes to say her prayers at night and at morning, if she played so quietly that not even a mouse could hear her, it was boring for Grandmother. It made her tired to be bored and she would fall asleep, even in the mornings sometimes, because she found Cassie so tedious.

  ‘You’re such a bore, child, go away,’ she would tell her. ‘You’re such a boring child.’

  Grandmother’s friends agreed with her. Most of them had not her burden, but they pitied her, which was at least something. There was only one exception and that was Mrs Roebuck.

  Mrs Roebuck lived across the way, and sometimes when Cassie was walking with Grandmother she would know without looking up that they were passing Mrs Roebuck’s house because of the delicious smells that assailed her nostrils long before they passed her front garden. Mrs Roebuck’s garden had all different kinds of flowers planted outside, with herbs growing down the sides and cats curled up on the front-door steps waiting for that magical moment when Mrs Roebuck would open the front door and allow them in to sit around the warm, wood-burning stove that was the centre of Mrs Roebuck’s home. Like a priest called away from his church, Mrs Roebuck was never away from her stove for longer than need be. And if she was, it seemed to Cassie it was only in order that she could open the front door to friends and relatives and invite them in to sample the results of her efforts at the sacred stove.

  ‘I have no idea why she should want to keep that old stove,’ Grandmother would often say. ‘She must have brought it with her from the mountains of South Carolina when she got married.’

  Then she would sniff disparagingly about Mrs Roebuck as she always did, but Cassie would only sniff the smell of the home-baked bread and imagine what it must be like to be asked in to taste it. If they met Mrs Roebuck she would always have a basket full of something to eat: perhaps a bag of cherries, or a tin of cookies that she would announce loudly were going to accompany an ice cream that she was making. As soon as she saw Cassie she would peer shortsightedly into her basket and, seizing a cherry, polish it on her sleeve and pop it in to Cassie’s mouth before Grandmother could utter.

  ‘Cassie is not allowed to eat—’ Grandmother would begin.

  But Mrs Roebuck would ignore Grandmother, as she ignored everyone unless they were sitting quietly waiting for her to feed them.

  ‘You’re too pale,’ she’d tell Cassie. ‘Not getting enough fresh air. Tell your grandmother to send you over to play at my house.’

  Grandmother would pretend not to look mortally offended by this remark and end up looking just plain sour.

  ‘Cassie has to attend to her reading and writing,’ she’d say to Mrs Roebuck, in an attempt to keep Cassie at home. ‘She’s a very slow child, very slow. She needs to be slippered just to learn her alphabet.’

  ‘You’re too strict with that child,’ Mrs Roebuck would retort, not afraid to let her feelings known, and all the more determined to invite Cassie over. She got her chance one day as they passed in the main street.

  ‘I’ve got my grandchildren coming round next Thursday,’ she said to Cassie. ‘You’ll come over and play, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Cassie quickly, and before Grandmother could open her mouth to say ‘best not’ Mrs Roebuck had smiled delightedly.

  ‘That’s settled then,’ she said, ‘Cassie can come and stay with us over Thursday and you can have a nice rest, Gloria – just what you’re always saying you’re so in need of.’

  ‘I’m not sure Thursday’s a good day,’ said Grandmother.

  ‘I am,’ Mrs Roebuck answered, and turned away, but not before she had given Cassie a little friendly chuck under her chin. Grandmother stared after Mrs Roebuck’s ample posterior wending its way back to her house and the beloved stove. She would have liked to have told Mirabelle Ann a firm ‘no’ there and then, but Mirabelle Ann was the head of the Women’s Committee for War Veterans. She was the lead singer in the Church choir, sometimes even still doing solos when called upon. It was difficult to forbid Cassie to go over to Mirabelle Ann’s for the night, seeing that the whole town held her in such respect; and there wasn’t a man, woman, or child living there who hadn’t at some time or another been privileged to sample her strawberry shortcake, and having done so would declare themselves prepared to service her old stove, brush her cats, or even listen to her singing, in exchange for just one more mouthful.

  Thursday came, and Cassie, who had been waiting all week for Thursday to come, awoke so early that by the time Grandmother called to her that it was all right to get up, it seemed that half the day had gone already. Cassie leapt out of bed and going to her cupboard she chose her favourite blue dress and matching hair ribbons. Just the outfit for a hot summer’s day.

  But Grandmother had other ideas. She took the blue dress from Cassie and put it away, and instead she took a heavy brown wool dress with a lace collar from the closet. Cassie’s heart sank. She hated the brown dress, even in winter. The brown dress would itch. Grandmother then chose some dull brown ribbons and a brown wool jacket.

  ‘Must have you looking smart for Mrs Roebuck,’ she said, smiling.

  Cassie stared at the clothes in horror, but knew that to even try to refuse would mean that she would not go at all. And so she dressed in silence, and Grandmother watched her with visible satisfaction, nodding her head a few times as Cassie struggled with the back buttons and did up the buckles on her shoes.

  By midday when her daily lessons with Grandmother had duly been completed – even though all the other children in the town were still on vacation – Cassie’s face was bright red: two bright red patches burned on either cheek, and she felt he
r pulse racing.

  ‘Why, child, look at you,’ Grandmother said. ‘The colour of you! We’ll have to put you straight to bed.’

  ‘I haven’t a fever, Grandmother,’ Cassie replied. ‘I’m just far too hot in these clothes.’

  ‘Nonsense, child. I know a fever when I see it,’ her grandmother insisted. ‘Now off with you to bed, and I’ll call Mirabelle Ann to say that you won’t be going over this afternoon.’

  Cassie walked slowly up the stairs. The lump in her throat would not be swallowed away, any more than the tears that were welling up behind her eyelids. She pulled off the brown wool jacket, the brown wool dress, and then the heavy socks, and put her shoes neatly together under her chair with the fronts sticking outwards the way that Grandmother liked them to be.

  Mrs Roebuck and her house now seemed as far away as Europe seemed when she looked at Grandmother’s book of maps. She put on her night clothes and crept into bed. She lay feeling more miserable than she had ever felt before. To play with someone else, to stay the night in someone else’s house, had seemed like a dream, like part of a life that other children had. Like the members of the gang who daily played out there in the street beyond the lace curtains that guarded the room in which she was imprisoned.

  But Grandmother reckoned without Mrs Roebuck, when she went to make her excuses for Cassie.

  ‘My goodness, Gloria, I just can’t believe what you’re telling me,’ Mrs Roebuck exclaimed. ‘Why, I saw that grandchild of yours playing outside on the stoop only this morning. I’d better come right on over and see for myself.’

  Before Grandmother could find a reason for her not to, Mrs Roebuck was not only in her house, but on her way up the stairs to Cassie’s room. Cassie sat up quickly as she heard someone approaching, and wiped away her tears, afraid that it was Grandmother. When she saw it was Mrs Roebuck, she tried to smile.