The Nightingale Sings

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘I just hope you’re not known here, that’s all,’ he said as they drew up in front of a fine seventeenth-century manor. ‘Are you known here?’

  ‘Yes,’ Cassie replied. ‘But it doesn’t matter. The owners aren’t always in evidence, and since I imagined you booked in your name—’

  ‘I think what I really meant,’ Joel interrupted, ‘was did you used to stay here with your husband?’

  ‘No,’ Cassie told him. ‘We never even ate here.’

  ‘OK.’ Joel got out of the car and came round to open Cassie’s door for her. She resisted the temptation to remark on the unusual occurrence as a boy hurried out to take their luggage from the boot. Joel’s reformation did not however extend to allowing her to precede him through the front door of the hotel, which left the boy, struggling with Cassie’s luggage, to hold it open for her with his foot.

  ‘Good,’ Joel said again after they’d been shown up to their rooms, an elegant first-floor suite with a wonderful view of the sea.

  ‘Oh yes, this is charming,’ Cassie said, admiring the hand-embroidered sheets on the bed. ‘These remind me of my convent days. The nuns used to embroider linen like this.’

  ‘Did you see the patchwork murals?’ Joel asked. ‘They’re rather fun.’ He picked up the bottle of champagne which had been waiting for them in an ice bucket. ‘Good,’ Joel said again after he’d poured them both a glass. ‘So what would you like to do now?’

  Cassie almost grinned but to stop herself carefully bit her lip. ‘I don’t know. What would you like to do now?’ she asked in return.

  ‘I’d like to do what I came here for,’ Joel replied. ‘I’d like to go to bed.’

  ‘That’s all right by me,’ Cassie told him, putting her glass down by the bedside. ‘Because that’s exactly what I’d like to do as well.’

  Joel raised his glass. ‘Long live love,’ he wished.

  Cassie looked up into his big dark eyes and smiled. ‘I’ll drink to that,’ she agreed.

  When she woke he was gone.

  ‘Joel?’ she called, sitting up in bed. ‘Joel?’ Her heart sank when she realized she was alone, for how often had she awoken like this, with no-one beside her any more, no-one to talk with or laugh with. To have made love so rapturously with a man and then to awake to find him gone was not what she had expected.

  Pulling on a wrap she got out of bed and knocked on the bathroom door, but the door swung open on an empty room. ‘Oh heck,’ she sighed. ‘Now what?’

  She looked at her watch and found to her astonishment she’d been asleep for nearly two hours. Convinced he had gone for food, but without quite knowing what she was going to do, she had begun to get dressed when she heard a car drawing up below. Doing up her shirt she peered out of the window and saw it was her BMW, driven by Joel.

  As if he knew she would be watching, he looked up at their window after he had got out of the car and waved the bunch of flowers he had in one hand up at her, before going round to the boot and taking out several large shopping bags. Cassie smiled to herself, undid her blouse and got back into bed with a fresh glass of champagne.

  ‘You were asleep so I didn’t wake you,’ Joel said, after he’d come in and put down all his shopping.

  ‘That’s not like me,’ Cassie said. ‘I wake up at the drop of a glove.’

  ‘Not this afternoon you didn’t,’ he assured her, offering her the flowers.

  ‘What have you done?’ Cassie frowned, taking the flowers without comment, being more intrigued by the new-look Joel. ‘That’s a new jacket. And shirt.’

  ‘I needed some clothes.’

  ‘You’ve had your hair cut as well,’ Cassie wondered, widening her eyes. ‘And you’ve shaved.’

  ‘You kept giving me these looks,’ Joel said, sitting on the bed and taking his brand new shoes off. ‘I thought I’d better do something.’

  ‘Joel.’ Cassie sighed and put her arms round him from the back. ‘The looks I keep giving you. They’re nothing to do with the way you look.’

  ‘They’re just part of the tender trap,’ Joel replied.

  ‘When I look at you like that,’ Cassie explained, ‘it’s because I like what I see. It’s nothing to do with how you look as far as how you dress goes.’

  Joel sat quite still while Cassie hugged him then he turned round and kissed her. ‘Everything I do—’ he began.

  ‘You got me,’ Cassie confessed. ‘You’ll have to finish the quote.’

  ‘I do it just for you.’ Then he kissed her again while Cassie began to take off his brand new clothes.

  ‘I’ve just spent a small fortune to look good for you,’ Joel said, propping himself up on his pillows and pointing to his new purchases which lay in a heap on the carpet. ‘And now tonight I’m going to look just like I always look. As if I slept in my clothes.’

  ‘Oh, but the Joel Benson look is it, didn’t you know? The crumpled look is the look of the moment,’ Cassie laughed.

  ‘My mother used to rearrange me even as a baby,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it is with me and clothes. We don’t seem to be compatible.’

  ‘I love the way you look,’ Cassie said as Joel finally climbed out of bed and began to pick up his discarded clothing. ‘Don’t ever change, really. Not ever.’

  ‘Not ever?’ Joel looked up at her, quizzically.

  ‘I mean it,’ Cassie said. ‘I really love the way you look.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what, Mr Benson?’

  ‘And do you love anything else about me?’

  ‘The way you brush your hair,’ Cassie replied evasively. ‘The way you sing in key.’

  Joel looked at her for a moment longer, then continued to pick up his clothes, folding them as neatly as he could before putting them on a chair. ‘I’m going to have a bath,’ he said, standing up and making his way across the room.

  ‘I’d quite like a bath too,’ Cassie said, sensing a mood swing.

  ‘I’ll leave it in for you,’ Joel replied before disappearing into the bathroom.

  ‘Joel?’ Cassie called. ‘Joel?’

  Joel put his head back round the door and stared at her blankly. ‘Mrs Rosse?’

  ‘What’s the matter, Joel? Have I said something?’

  ‘No, Mrs Rosse, that’s just the problem. You didn’t say anything.’ Then he shut the door, locking himself in.

  While Joel soaked in his bath Cassie slid down her side of the bed and took stock.

  We are incompatible, she told herself. It’s not just that he says tornano and I say tomayto, it goes deeper than that. We are utterly and completely incompatible. He infuriates me, and I infuriate him. Well no, no I don’t actually infuriate him because he doesn’t get infuriated, which is one of the nice things about him. I annoy him. I annoy him because I stand up to him and don’t let him get his way and when that happens he starts behaving like a child. He’s the same age as I am, damn it, but when he doesn’t get what he wants – boy. Talk about little-boy-lost. It’s amazing. To look at him and to listen to him you’d think he had the whole thing well under control but not a bit of it. Say sorry no deal and the wheels come off. I couldn’t live with that. Not after Tyrone. I mean, what initially attracted me to him was that he seemed so – I don’t know. He seemed so absolute. So unconditional. It was either take it or leave it and I liked that. He might look a mess but underneath all that hair and stubble and those odd-looking clothes he seemed to be so resolute.

  Cassie found herself suddenly smiling at the picture in her mind’s eye of Joel when she first saw him and at once mentally pinched herself. That won’t do, she said in her head. You’re trying to make sense of your life so there’s no room here for any self-indulgence. This man is a crazy and I really don’t have the room in my life to take a crazy on. I don’t have the time nor do I have the patience. I can’t have someone who keeps turning up in my life and expecting me just to jump to whatever tune he feels like playing. Or singing. Once again she found herself smiling as she rememb
ered their car journey down from Dingle, with Joel half leaning out of the open car singing it seemed to the whole of the beautiful Kerry countryside. You make me feel so young, he had sung as they drove past the famous lakes of Killarney, you make me feel as though spring has sprung – just as he had sung ‘Night and Day’ as they had crossed the great Kenmare river with the October sun high above their heads. No, she reminded herself sharply. It’s no good. We’re chalk and cheese. We simply are not suited.

  So what’s suited? she wondered as she turned on her front and lay as she always used to lie on her bed when she was small, with her chin propped up on her fists and her legs bent up back behind her. He made love wonderfully. He had been so gentle and sweet at first, as if he had been anxious not to hurt her, and then he had been so strong and dominant. For all his apparent bad habits he was physically in very good shape, broad shouldered and trim waisted and really very much stronger than he appeared to be from the way he ambled around. As far as making love went they were most certainly not chalk and cheese, which had made her so happy that afterwards she had not known what to say, which was why she had said nothing. There was nothing to say. Anything she had said she knew would have sounded facile, so she had just lain in the crook of his arm with her head on his shoulder and stayed silent. Nor had she fallen asleep until he had fallen asleep, which he finally had, after holding her so tightly in both his arms she had thought he might squeeze the life from her body.

  So fine – we can make it in bed, but then as soon as we get up it starts all over again. But why? What is it I do that annoys him so much? I stand up to him. No I don’t, I annoy him because I’m stubborn. Tyrone used to say I was stubborn, and he was right. I am. He used to say that like all stubborn people I’d do more for my obstinacy than I would for my religion or my country. But then if I wasn’t so damn stubborn I wouldn’t still be here. I’d have fallen by the wayside a long time ago. But that’s what gets Joel. He thinks I’m intractable, and maybe he doesn’t find it all that attractive. So maybe he’s right. Maybe I should ease back on the stubbornness from now on. After all on that side of things, at least as far as how I feel about him goes, maybe there’s no real reason for it any more. Maybe it’s time I started to do what Mattie’s always telling me to do. To let it happen, to go with the flow.

  OK, she decided as she now rolled over on to her back to lie staring up at the ceiling. So now I know what it is about me that irritates Joel, but what is it about Joel which infuriates me? What precisely is it?

  She lay there for an age before she allowed herself to answer the question because she already knew the answer but just didn’t want to have to face up to it. Finally she groaned out loud as she realized the thought was not going to leave her head and put both her hands over her eyes in despair.

  All right! she admitted to herself, sitting bolt upright. OK – he drives me mad because he’s always damn’ well right! And the reason he’s always damn’ well right is because he usually is! It is time I stopped living in shadowland and started to live my life properly again! And why not? Because that’s what I want! She looked across at her image in the dressing table mirror. ‘That is what I want,’ she said again slowly but this time out aloud. ‘I do not want to go on doing all of this all alone. And there is no-one I would rather be not alone with, if that makes sense, than the man at present in the bathroom, the man with whom I would be more than happy to share the rest of my life.’

  At that moment the bathroom door opened and Joel came out dressed only in a towel. Cassie watched him for a moment, and then leaned forward in the bed, clasping her hands around her knees. ‘Joel—’ she began.

  ‘It’s OK, you don’t have to say anything, it’s all right,’ Joel interrupted, beginning to pull on his clothes. ‘I’ve run a fresh bath for you so you’d better get out of bed in case it overflows.’

  ‘Seriously, Joel—’ Cassie tried again as she turned back the covers.

  ‘I said it’s OK, Cassie. Now don’t be too long. I’ll see you down in the bar.’

  When Cassie looked back into the bedroom once the bath was run, Joel had gone.

  Twelve

  He was sitting in the corner of the bar reading a newspaper, with the barman setting a fresh glass of whisky in front of him, when Cassie came in, bathed and changed into a dark blue jacket and trousers with a collarless piqué shirt which she always kept in her house at Coomenhoule in case the occasion demanded something more formal than sweater and jeans.

  ‘Champagne?’ he asked her.

  ‘If they sell it by the glass,’ she said with a smile.

  After he had ordered her drink, Joel pointed out an item in the paper which he had placed on the table in front of her.

  The item was headed OPEN VERDICT IN INQUEST ON ASCOT GATE MAN.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said, lighting up a cigarette, which earned him a quick glance from Cassie.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said, seeing his face. ‘I like you smoking.’

  ‘It seems Mr Waldron deceased liked a flutter,’ Joel said, putting his lighter away.

  ‘Occupational hazard,’ Cassie said as she read the item. ‘The lads give the men on the course tips. Next best thing to the horse’s mouth. Hard to resist when you know a stable’s backing their fancy.’

  ‘Got to the bit about his credit? Seems he got a little behind with his payments to his turf accountant and then all of a sudden he was in the black.’

  ‘So he got lucky.’

  ‘Very lucky when you read what the police found in the house. Five thousand quid in the famous used notes.’

  Cassie glanced up and then returned to finishing reading the news item.

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Joel mused, after taking a drink. ‘If he was back in the dibs, why top himself?’

  ‘You think they – someone – paid off his debts and then some, in return for him turning a blind eye on the gate in case he saw anything?’

  ‘If we run with the theory that whoever did it had a runner that day that’s what he’d have been asked to do, certainly. But then once the deed was done, and he was paid off, he kills himself, apparently.’

  ‘He could simply have had an attack of conscience,’ Cassie said carefully as the waiter set down her champagne. ‘Once he realized what he’d been asked to do had led not to the stopping of a favourite but the theft of the most popular horse since – I don’t know, since Arkle – well, you can imagine. Maybe thinking they were going to kill the horse he killed himself.’

  ‘Yes,’ Joel nodded thoughtfully. ‘That is a possibility.’

  They sat in silence for a while, Cassie drinking her champagne while Joel smoked his cigarette as if he hadn’t smoked one for a decade.

  ‘I imagine that tastes good,’ Cassie said wryly. ‘After such a long abstinence.’

  ‘Giving up smoking is easy,’ Joel replied. ‘I should know. I’ve done it enough.’

  Cassie put down her glass, touching one of his hands with a finger. ‘And by the way, about what I said – or didn’t say, rather—’ she began.

  ‘What about it?’ Joel cut in, looking at her quickly.

  ‘Have you seen – I don’t know – let’s say The Night Watch. By Rembrandt.’

  Joel nodded. ‘Of course I have. What about it?’

  ‘What did you say? When you first saw it? When you first stood in front of it?’

  Joel frowned. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘OK.’ Cassie smiled and got up from her chair. ‘So now shall we go and eat?’

  They dined well in the famous green dining room, eating excellent home-made tomato soup and fillets of freshly caught brill off fine Limoges china.

  ‘I like this place,’ Cassie remarked as they waited for their second course. ‘It was a good choice.’

  ‘Used to be somebody or other’s shooting lodge, apparently,’ Joel said, looking round at some of the fine paintings which adorned the lovely house. ‘Place was all but burned to the ground not so long ago.’

  ‘How awful,
’ Cassie said. ‘I absolutely dread fire.’

  ‘So if Claremore was burning down, what one thing would you save from it?’ he asked, unwrapping his forgotten napkin and now spreading it on his knee. ‘One thing. Not person. And the truth, mind.’

  Cassie thought for a long time before she answered. While he was waiting, Joel carefully arranged his setting so that once more his pudding spoon and fork were laid at the top of his place mat and not by the side.

  ‘The portrait of Tyrone on Old Flurry,’ Cassie answered at last.

  ‘Of course,’ Joel agreed.

  ‘You said the truth.’

  ‘I know what I said.’ Joel frowned deeply at his fish as if he was trying to make up his mind whether to tell Cassie something or not.

  ‘This probably doesn’t mean a thing,’ he said, when he was about halfway through his main course. ‘But there were two men in the bar. It was their paper I was reading. They left it behind. Before you came down they were talking about your horse – because of what was in the paper, I suppose. One of them had a theory.’

  ‘Everyone has a theory. The wonder is to find someone who hasn’t a theory.’

  ‘One of them said he thought whoever had done it – did it to get back at your husband.’

  Cassie looked at him in surprise, gave it some thought and then shook her head. ‘Tyrone didn’t have that sort of life,’ she said. ‘When he had rows with people – which like everyone he often did – that was it. There weren’t any grudges borne on either side. That just wasn’t his style. Anyway, he was—’ Cassie stopped. ‘He wasn’t alive when Nightie was foaled.’

  ‘Yes,’ Joel agreed. ‘But the fact that he was dead mightn’t have anything to do with the taking of your horse.’

  ‘How can you get back at someone who’s dead, Joel? They’re not there to say ouch.’

  ‘Much loved wife is.’

  Cassie stared at him expecting more, but Joel just nodded back at her, once. ‘You’re saying that someone has waited this long to get back at someone who’s been dead for years? That’s ridiculous.’