To Hear a Nightingale Read online

  ‘Thank you for bringing me here,’ Cassie said, looping her arm once more back through Tyrone’s. ‘This is heaven.’

  ‘I brought you here for a purpose, Cassie McGann,’ he replied.

  ‘You rarely do anything without a purpose, Mr Rosse. What have you brought me here for exactly?’

  ‘To make you pregnant.’

  Cassie stopped walking, and pulled Tyrone to a halt by her action. He smiled round at her.

  ‘Listen, Cassie McGann. You’re making us a beautiful home, and I love you even the more for it. But a home isn’t just fancy furniture, fresh paint and nicely arranged flowers. At least not to an Irishman it isn’t. A home is children.’

  ‘Well of course it is, Mr Rosse,’ Cassie agreed. ‘Sure. And we’ve agreed to have lots of them. But we have only been married six months.’

  ‘We’ve been married six months, exactly. And nothing’s happened.’

  ‘People don’t have babies in six months, Tyrone!’

  ‘They get pregnant in six months, Cassie McGann. Maybe you should go and see Doctor Gilbert when we get back.’

  ‘Maybe! I should go and see Doctor Gilbert? Maybe – you should go and see Doctor Gilbert!’

  ‘There’s nothing the matter with me, Cassie,’ Tyrone said rather too smugly, beginning to walk again along the beach.

  ‘And there’s nothing wrong with me either, Tyrone Rosse!’ Cassie yelled after him, above the sound of the sea, and then ran to catch him up.

  ‘You’ve been working too hard, that’s what it is, Cassie. With all that painting and decorating.’

  ‘So have you!’ she retorted. ‘And you’ve been worried about your yard!’

  Tyrone stopped and looked out to sea, and then he turned and started to stride back in the direction of the hotel.

  ‘Right!’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Come on! We’ve a good hour yet before dinner!’

  As a consequence of the way they spent that hour before dinner, they both ate heartily at table. They dined off fresh salmon and lobster, and drank a bottle of the most delicious white wine Cassie had ever tasted. Then Tyrone introduced her to the delights of Irish coffee, before taking her for a stroll in the hotel gardens, where he kissed her in the shade of a palm tree, under a mantle of stars.

  ‘I love you, Cassie McGann,’ he told her, as he kissed her again.

  ‘I love you, Tyrone,’ she gasped, the breath squeezed out of her.

  He then took her by the hand.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, and led her back towards the hotel. ‘The night’s still young.’

  Because the hotel was full they spent the rest of the week in a rented house in the tiny village of Coumeenhoole, on Dingle, the beautiful peninsula opposite Glenbeigh that sweeps right out into the Atlantic. The weather suddenly relented and for that one week in September it could have been high summer, so cloudless were the skies. The plain white house they had rented was simply but very comfortably furnished, with bright-coloured rugs and bedcovers which had been woven locally. It stood high on the hill practically at the end of the peninsula, opposite a set of almost deserted islands called the Blaskets, which lay in the deep blue of the sea like enormous whales. They walked, and fished, and ate, and slept, and Cassie thought it had to be the most heavenly place on the whole of God’s earth.

  One afternoon they hired a boat and went over to the biggest of the islands, Great Blasket. They took a picnic tea and sat staring out across the Atlantic, to the unseen land where Cassie had come from. Then they explored the rest of the island, which was totally deserted except for a herd of sheep. They walked through the ruined old buildings, and the deserted schoolhouse, while Tyrone recounted to Cassie the history of the islands, and how they had once housed a thriving community. Then as the evening drew in, they took shelter in one of the old ruins, reluctant to leave the wonderful and mysterious island.

  As the sun started to sink behind the Atlantic which stretched so calmly now before them, Tyrone took Cassie in his arms and kissed her. Then he held her slightly away from him and looked down at her.

  ‘I don’t know what it is about you, Cassie McGann,’ he said. ‘But one kiss from you and I’m ruined. Other women’s kisses compared to yours are as ordinary as those pebbles down there on the beach.’

  ‘My kisses are no different,’ Cassie replied. ‘What’s different is the love I have for you.’

  It was twilight now, as Tyrone gathered her again in his arms, while the waves below them gently feathered the shore with their ruffles of white. By the time they had finished making love, darkness had completely enveloped them.

  Cassie started to feel sick on the drive back to Claremore. She knew it wasn’t car sickness, and she wasn’t at all surprised, because she knew she was pregnant when she had finally fallen into her warm bed, the night of the picnic on Great Blasket. There was something different about the way they had made love, something indefinable, but something that was just very, very different. Tyrone had been so serious, and Cassie so passionate. Afterwards she had smiled and asked him why he had been frowning so deeply, and why he had kept his eyes closed for much of the time.

  ‘Because a friend of mine once told me that if you want to have a beautiful baby,’ Tyrone had replied, ‘while you are making love, you must think beautiful things.’

  Cassie had teased him and said he was probably thinking of winning the Derby, to which Tyrone took great exception, saying that when he had her in his arms, and was making love to her, all he ever thought about was her.

  Which was why his daughter was going to be beautiful.

  Cassie was astounded at that, since she had always understood that men wanted only sons. After all, that’s what the ‘hedgehogs’ back in New York had told her, when they were pinning up her wedding gown. If the firstborn isn’t a boy the husband isn’t a man.

  ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ Tyrone replied to that. ‘Old Italian wives’ tales. I want my first child to be a girl.’

  ‘Any particular reason?’ Cassie asked, already half anticipating his answer.

  ‘Of course,’ Tyrone said. ‘Girls look better on horses.’

  Cassie had laughed and said she’d known it. It was just as Erin had told her. Nothing made sense to an Irishman unless it had a tail at one end and a mane on its neck.

  She wasn’t laughing now, as Tyrone’s second-hand Ford which he’d bought to replace his beautiful Jaguar bumped its way up the long drive to Claremore.

  ‘No one ever told me I’d feel this bad,’ she groaned. ‘And I can’t be more than five days pregnant, if I’m pregnant at all. Why should something so normal make you feel so ill?’

  ‘You’ll feel better soon,’ Tyrone told her, affecting to feel sorry for her, but secretly triumphant. ‘Perhaps Doctor Gilbert can give you something to stop the nausea.’

  ‘No – there’s nothing I can give you,’ Doctor Gilbert told her, as she sat on the hard wooden chair on the oppositeside of his desk from him. ‘Nothing in the world whatsoever.’

  Cassie swore that he was saying it with relish, gloating on the fact that in order to have children women had to suffer. Erin was right. He was a ‘terrible auld stick of a man’. Once an obviously tall man, he was now permanently stooped, hunched in his back, with a dry skin, and a dry mouth clamped tightly over the end of a hand-rolled cigarette.

  ‘The main thing is, Doctor,’ Cassie repeated patiently, ‘am I pregnant?’

  ‘If you say you are, then that’s enough for me,’ the doctor replied. ‘I always believe the woman in these cases, because as far as I’m concerned, in cases like these, she knows best.’

  Doctor Gilbert sighed, and with the sigh blew a cloud of ash all down the front of his old tweed suit. He didn’t bother to brush it away. He just looked up at Cassie over the top of his broken glasses.

  ‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘if you go on feeling sick, and unwell, and start putting on a lot of weight, you’ll not be needing me to tell you what’s afoot.’

  ‘What a
bout a blood test?’ Cassie asked, feeling bewildered but also feeling something more should be done.

  ‘Blood tests indeed,’ said Doctor Gilbert, relighting his cigarette, and saying nothing more.

  Cassie rose, noticing how yellow-stained with nicotine even the lamp-shades in the surgery were.

  ‘When would you like to see me again?’ she enquired by the door.

  The doctor looked surprised by the question.

  ‘When there’s something the matter with you, Mrs Rosse. When and if there’s something the matter with you.’

  Cassie walked the three miles back to Claremore quite happily, as she had decided from the moment she thought she was pregnant to walk and exercise at every available opportunity. As she walked she considered Doctor Gilbert’s matter-of-fact manner. And by the time she was halfway home, she thought he was probably very sensible not to fuss over her and make her out to be a special case. After all, she was now living in a country where four or five children was an average-sized family, and ten was certainly not unusual.

  Like Tyrone, she discovered that she too wanted it to be a little girl, not because she’d look better on a horse, but because she wanted to make everything so different for her own daughter, so different to how it had been for her. She wanted to give her all the love and affection she could give, and buy her toys and dolls, and make sure she had a bicycle like all the other kids, and of course, being Ireland, a pony. And maybe even a foal called Prince. And when she was a growing kid, she wanted her to have masses of her friends to stay, all sleeping in bunks, and eating their meals round a big wooden table in one of the barns. And Cassie would buy herself an old car, a station wagon, so that her daughter and her pals could climb in and out of its windows when they went shopping, or to meet someone at the station, and it wouldn’t matter a darn.

  She neared the house and looked ahead up at it, standing silhouetted against its backdrop of mountains. Smoke curled from the tall chimneys, and she could see Tyrone and Brian running up the front steps two at a time as they went into the house for lunch. This was where her first child would be born. A big house. A grand house. Where everyone would love her, and there would never be a hand raised in anger against her.

  They sat down to lunch, with Tyrone as solicitous towards her as if she was about to give birth that minute. Since her return from the doctor’s, they had done nothing but discuss their unborn baby, even though Doctor Gilbert hadn’t even bothered to examine her.

  Then halfway through the pudding, Tyrone suddenly remembered something.

  ‘Somebody telephoned for you,’ he said. ‘And you’ll not guess who it was, so I’ll tell you. Leonora Von Wagner.

  He pronounced the name with a Teutonic relish, but for once his buffoonery failed to amuse Cassie.

  ‘What on earth did she want?’ Cassie asked, her heart filled with dread.

  ‘She didn’t say,’ Tyrone replied. ‘She just left her number. Apparently she’s moved over here. She’s living in Ireland.’

  As Tomas drove her up the long tree-lined drive to Derry Na Loch, Leonora’s newly purchased home, Cassie wondered for the tenth time in as many minutes what in heaven’s name had inspired her to say yes to Leonora’s invitation to lunch. Tyrone had said curiosity, and Cassie had been furious with him, probably because she knew it was true. She was curious. Curious as to what had brought Leonora to Ireland; curious as to why she wanted to see Cassie; curious as to what she’d be like now.

  But she still felt nothing but contempt for herself for accepting the invitation. If the cat hadn’t been curious, it wouldn’t have got killed, she thought. Yet here she was, saying yes when she really meant no.

  And she felt sick. She was little more than three weeks pregnant, and she had felt sick and nauseous every morning. God knows, she thought to herself, clinging to the handle on the inside of the car door. God only knows how I’m going to manage the nine months feeling like this.

  The house was very grand, an enormous white Georgian mansion with a porticoed entrance. A butler in a black coat and striped pants opened the door to her, his hooded eyes flickering just once with quite visible contempt as Tomas drove off again in the old Ford, back-firing its way down the drive. The butler then showed Cassie into the drawing room, where there was just Leonora.

  She looked more stunning than Cassie had ever seen her. She’d lost the little bit of teenage fat she’d still had about her when they saw each other last in New York, and now had the figure of a model, perfect breasts, tiny waist and slim hips. Her blonde hair had been cut much shorter and expertly layered, so that however Leonora moved her head, her hair fell immaculately back into place. She was dressed in what Cassie guessed was a Chanel day dress, in white and blue, with a small matching jacket and dark blue shoes. Cassie came into the room, feeling very much the country mouse, even though she had put on her favourite red jersey dress.

  Leonora sat for a moment, smoking a cigarette, which she then threw into the fire half-finished and got up to greet Cassie as if they were the very best of friends.

  ‘Cassie darling,’ she said, kissing her on the cheek, ‘isn’t this great?’

  The butler poured them champagne, while Leonora took Cassie by the arm and sat her down beside her on the sofa, like one would a favourite child.

  ‘Did you know I’d got married?’ Leonora asked her.

  ‘No,’ said Cassie. ‘I hadn’t the faintest notion.’

  ‘It was in all the papers.’

  ‘I only ever get to read Sporting Life.’

  Leonora grinned and lit another American cigarette.

  ‘Pity Tyrone couldn’t be here,’ she said, glancing sideways at Cassie. ‘He’s gorgeous.’

  ‘Who did you marry?’ Cassie asked.

  Leonora hooted with laughter before replying and nearly choked on her cigarette smoke.

  ‘Christ I forgot how serious you could be!’ she spluttered. ‘So wait till you hear who I married! I married my faggy prince!’

  This sent Leonora off into more gales of laughter, while Cassie looked round uncomfortably unless Leonora’s husband should suddenly come in.

  ‘It’s OK, Cassie,’ Leonora told her. ‘He’s not here. He had to go to Rome to see Mamma.’

  ‘Are you happy?’

  Leonora stared at Cassie as if she was crazy, then went off into more peals of laughter.

  ‘I didn’t get married to get happy!’ Leonora hooted. ‘Don’t tell me you did?’

  ‘What did you get married for then?’ Cassie asked.

  ‘Christ, because I was so bored!’

  Leonora threw her cigarette away and dragged Cassie up off the sofa before she was halfway through her champagne.

  ‘Let’s go and eat,’ she said. ‘I’m starved.’

  The dining room was even more magnificent than the drawing room. Or perhaps it seemed that way because at least Cassie got a chance to have a decent look at it, while Leonora wolfed an enormous lunch of thick homemade soup, beef in pastry and apple pie. The room was furnished with superb antiques, old paintings, chandeliers, Persian rugs, horse sculptures and a large collection of family miniatures which hung above the fireplace. It all looked so ‘right’ and yet Leonora had only been in residence for just over two weeks. It was amazing, Cassie thought, what money could buy.

  Leonora said nothing at all while she ate, like she had always done. Cassie, still feeling slightly nauseated, toyed with her own lunch, and was amazed that Leonora managed to keep herself so slim if that was the way she was eating. Cassie chatted lightly about this and that, while trying to keep the amazement out of her eyes when she saw how much food was being stuffed into that thin frame which was Leonora, who was now eating a second helping of apple pie and cream.

  As soon as she had finished it, she told Cassie she’d be back in a moment and left the room. A few minutes later she was back again, looking a little pale, Cassie thought but as bright in herself as she had been before she left the table.

  ‘So how’s this fa
bulous husband of yours?’ she asked Cassie, helping herself to some fruit. ‘What’s he like in the sack?’

  ‘That’s none of your damn business, Leonora,’ Cassie replied.

  ‘Quite right, it isn’t. I guess I’m just jealous because mine’s so useless. He really is a fag, I swear.’

  Leonora looked down the long table at Cassie, while the maid and the butler, privy to all their conversation, carefully cleared away. Cassie waited until they had gone.

  ‘So why did you get married, Leonora?’

  ‘I told you, darling. Because I was so bloody bored.’

  Leonora finished her second apple and lit a cigarette. She blew the smoke up at the ceiling, then grinned at Cassie.

  ‘And because although he may be a fag, he’s also a prince.’

  ‘Right,’ Cassie replied. ‘And there was I, forgetting to curtsey.’

  ‘Come on,’ Leonora said, yawning, ‘I’ll show you round the house.’

  As they went round the house, which was impeccable in every detail, Leonora told Cassie about her sudden decision to say yes to her prince, shortly after Cassie had married Tyrone as it happened, and that the reason she had chosen to come and live in Ireland was because every one was ‘so bloody bored with France’.

  ‘You shouldn’t have married a prince,’ Cassie told her. ‘You should have married into the Marines.’

  ‘Oh Christ!’ laughed Leonora. ‘And you should be running a convent!’

  Then she took her arm and led her into her own small sitting room for coffee.

  ‘Why did you want to see me, Leonora?’ Cassie asked. ‘You can’t be bored and lonely here already, surely?’

  ‘Listen, Cassie. I’m never lonely, right? Not any more. If I think I’m going to get lonely, I pick up that telephone. Bored? Christ, you bet I get bored. Don’t you ever get bored in this rain-sodden country?’

  ‘You’ve only been here a few weeks.’

  ‘I can be bored in minutes.’

  Leonora stubbed out yet another of her endless cigarettes, and poured herself more coffee. For a moment her face looked as black as thunder. Then when she looked up at Cassie, she was suddenly all smiles again.