‘It’s Dick,’ Cassie said with a smile and a quiet groan. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Dick’s athletic arrival was followed by a couple of healthy bangs on the door and a shout of Mrs Rosse? in answer to which Cassie called the flustered and embarrassed young man into the room where he announced she had a visitor.
‘Another visitor,’ he corrected himself with a look at Joel, his happy smile suddenly replaced by a worried frown as if he had all at once remembered something he’d forgotten. ‘’Tis a Mr Pilkington, Mrs Rosse,’ he said, still frowning at Joel. ‘He says you were expectin’ him to call.’
Before she had time to direct Dick to show her guest into her study so that Joel might be left in peace, Dick stepped to one side and indicated for Theodore, who was standing in the dark of the corridor behind him, to step into the drawing room.
‘Thank you, Dick,’ Cassie said, smiling at Theodore. ‘Theodore – Theodore, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine from England. Joel – this is Theodore Pilkington, Josephine’s surgeon.’
Neither man was pleased to see the other, Joel turning round to stare at the tall, distinguished-looking man standing behind him with a large bouquet of flowers but not bothering to get up, in response to which Theo likewise stood his ground, nodding a greeting to his fellow guest rather than offering him his hand.
‘I don’t see why I have to be your friend from England, Mrs Rosse,’ Joel said, nodding back once at the man he had sensed at once was his rival. ‘I’d far rather simply be your friend full stop.’
‘Be that as it may, Cassie,’ Theodore said with a smile, ‘I have no objection whatsoever to being introduced as your daughter’s surgeon. And these are for you.’ He handed the basket to Cassie with a flourish and an eye to the reaction of Joel who remained sitting poker-faced on the sofa.
‘Joel—’ Cassie began, but suddenly Joel was on his feet.
‘I have some calls to make. If you’ll excuse me.’
‘Theodore is here to discuss Josephine’s state of health,’ Cassie continued as if she had not been interrupted, just the way she used to with her children when they were small and being petulant. ‘We’re all rather worried about what’s going to happen to Josephine now she’s discharged herself early from hospital.’
‘Quite so,’ Joel replied, making his way to the door. ‘All right if I use the phone in the study?’
‘Of course.’
After Joel had wandered out, without even bothering to make his excuses to Theodore, Cassie poured them both some wine and sat her second guest down by the fire. Neither of them referred to Joel throughout the entire conversation, concentrating instead on Theodore’s suggested aftercare for Josephine. By using the information in her case notes he had been able to contact her gynaecologist in London who in turn had promised to prompt their patient into calling him if she had not herself got in touch within twenty-four hours. ‘If she should need it, she will have the best gynaecological care possible,’ Theodore concluded.
‘I just wish I knew why she wanted to go back to her husband,’ Cassie replied. ‘My son says she’s bewitched, although he used a slightly more modern term for it, which I guess she has to be, because if she was simply afraid of her husband all she had to do was stay here. She’d have been perfectly safe, as it really is quite hard to get to anyone here, and after a while I’m sure Mark would have become bored and turned his attentions elsewhere.’
‘As far as love and lust go, Cassie, one thing I have learned is that there are no racing certainties,’ Theodore said, staring into the fire for a second as if revisiting his past. ‘Remove something or somebody from someone else, and it immediately makes them infinitely more desirable. Particularly to those whose own disposition is – shall we say? – somewhat deformed. No, no, having had some experience of this sort of situation before, I would say that this is a case where only the patient can effect a cure.’
‘I’m sure you’re right, Theo,’ Cassie agreed, ‘but as Josephine’s mother—’
‘Forgive me, Cassie, but remember when daughters get married they cross over the church to their husband’s side. It is the husband who stays with his family.’
‘A friend of mine says once you have children you never stop being a mother. Not until the day you die.’
‘But then think of the children too. Most children think that they have to go on being children until their parents die.’
Now they were on their second glass of wine Cassie slipped up a gear and worked successfully on Theodore to persuade him to stay for dinner, a move which proved far from popular with Joel who now rejoined them, having finished making his calls. Once they were sat at table he addressed not one question to Cassie’s distinguished guest throughout the entire meal, preferring instead to eat and drink in silence. Since it seemed he would rather not converse even with Cassie, answering anything she said to him with either a yes or a no, Cassie chose to ignore him just as Theodore had done, both of them carrying on their conversations as if he no longer existed, behaving as they would had they been forced to sit down to dinner with a petulant child.
‘I think you might have made a little bit more of an effort,’ Cassie said to Joel after Theodore had gone, and Joel was helping himself to another glass of whisky.
‘You can think what you like, Mrs Rosse. And I may think what I like.’
‘Such as?’
‘That your boyfriend is just a trifle pompous. I hate men who sip their wine the way he does, holding the base of the glass. It’s so affected.’
Inwardly Cassie sighed deeply, and then began again. ‘Look, Joel. I do have some idea of what you’re going through—’
‘No you don’t. You don’t have a clue.’
‘Yes I do,’ Cassie replied, this time with much less sympathy in her voice. ‘Of course I do. I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to lose somebody. That’s something you never forget.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake—’
‘No you just listen to me, Joel Benson,’ Cassie came in sharply, so sharply that Joel was forced to reopen his eyes at once, to look at her in surprise. ‘I didn’t say I know just what you’re going through because I don’t. I don’t know what it’s like to lose a father because I didn’t know my father. I didn’t know my mother either, not until it was too late. Not until she was dead, so I don’t actually know what it’s like to lose a parent. But I do know what it’s like to lose someone you love, and even though time is meant to heal those scars and in fact does so, you don’t ever forget that actual moment, the moment when someone you love dies. But your father was old—’
‘That has nothing to do with it, Mrs Rosse,’ Joel cut in, throwing his head back again to stare up at the ceiling.
‘It has everything to do with it, Joel. It’s nothing to do with appointed time or anything like that, but your father was nearly eighty-four and you can’t mean to tell me that you hadn’t started to prepare yourself for this moment. He would have done, so why not you? You knew he was seriously ill. You said so yourself.’
‘You don’t know what you are talking about, Mrs Rosse.’
‘Joel, will you for God’s sake start acting your age?’
Again he looked at her, more slowly this time, dropping his chin back down onto his chest then slowly blowing the deep breath he had taken out through pursed lips.
‘I mean it,’ Cassie continued. ‘I’m not trying to minimize your loss, I’m simply trying to mitigate it. You said you came over here because – because you wanted to see me, and I guess that – well, that part of the reason you wanted to see me was maybe to see if I could help you get through this. I hope it was, because maybe I can. But I can’t and I won’t, I promise you, if you insist on behaving like a child – and not only a child, Joel, but a hopelessly spoilt one at that. Now do you understand?’
‘If you say so, Mrs Rosse,’ Joel replied, lifting his chin from his chest to nod slowly.
‘And for God’s sake stop calling me that. You know how it irritates me.’
Cassie stared at him and then got up. ‘I’m going to bed,’ she announced. ‘And if you want some advice, you should go to bed as well. You’ve drunk far too much.’ She walked past him and he caught her hand.
‘Please don’t go. You’re absolutely right, I mean it. But please don’t go.’
‘What’s there to stay up for?’ Cassie asked. ‘You stopped making any sense hours ago.’
‘Fine,’ Joel said evenly. ‘In that case, go to hell.’
Cassie didn’t even look at him. She just pulled her hand away from him and walked towards the door, surprised to find she was feeling more hurt than she could remember feeling for years. Even so, she didn’t falter, not at least until she was halfway out through the door when the sudden crash of breaking glass stopped her in her tracks.
She turned round quickly to see that Joel had obviously thrown his glass into the hearth, for the unbroken base of the heavy Waterford tumbler was lying out on the hearth where it must have bounced back off the wall of the fireplace.
‘What in hell do you think you’re doing?’ she cried, hurrying to pick up the glass.
‘I am giving up drinking, that is what, Mrs Rosse!’ Joel replied, holding on to the mantel above the fire. ‘If that is what you want, then that is what you shall have!’
‘I don’t really care what you do, Joel!’ Cassie returned. ‘But I do mind you throwing my best glasses into the fire, OK?’
‘I will get you another glass – OK?’ Joel said. ‘Tomorrow I will go out and get you another bloody glass.’
‘You won’t be able to replace this one,’ Cassie said, straightening up and holding the unbroken base, the only bit of the tumbler which had remained intact. ‘I had this one specially commissioned for Tyrone after he’d won his first Group One race. After he’d won the Irish Guineas.’
Joel looked at her, appalled. ‘Then what the hell were you doing letting me drink from it?’
‘Trying to see for myself whether or not you were right,’ she said. ‘Trying to see whether or not it still mattered.’
‘Yes? And?’
‘And yes. You’ve just proved to me that it does. OK?’ She dropped the useless remnant of heavy glass into the waste basket and walked away from him, leaving him where he was, still hanging on to the mantel to try to stop himself from swaying.
This time Cassie was through the doorway and halfway across the hall before she heard the second crash, but this time it wasn’t broken glass. What it sounded like was the crash of a body hitting the floor.
Fortunately for Joel the sofa had broken his fall, the crash having been made to sound worse than it in fact was by his knocking a large lamp off a side table on his way down. Having failed to rouse him from his stupor, Cassie called both Erin and Dick to come to her aid and the three of them carried Joel upstairs, half undressed him and put him to sleep under his covers.
‘I said he was in trouble the moment he walked through the door, so I did,’ Erin said with some satisfaction as they made their way out of the bedroom. ‘I said to Dick here there’s a poor unhappy soul if ever there was one, and now wasn’t I right?’
It was a very different Joel who finally made it downstairs late the following morning. He had been left to sleep it off while the household went about its usual business, not showing his face until Cassie had ridden out with three strings, met with Liam to discuss The Nightingale’s progress, supervised the loading of the horses due to run that afternoon at Punchestown and sorted out an exhausted Mattie who she discovered had not returned home until it was time to exercise the first string.
She was still trying to avoid arguing with Mattie when Joel made his belated appearance. Mattie was explaining in an affectedly overweary tone that he had been at a party in Dublin and thought it better not to drive home until he had sobered up while Cassie reminded him that while he was working for her his responsibilities lay with the horses and that returning home sleepless and with an obvious hangover left him in no fit and proper state to ride out.
‘In which case maybe you’d rather I wasn’t working for you,’ Mattie began, only to stop as soon as he saw Joel slowly making his way in through the kitchen door and picking up his copy of the Sporting Life.
‘What exactly do you mean by that?’ Cassie asked, unaware of Joel’s intrusion since she was sitting with her back to the door.
‘We’ll talk about it later,’ Mattie said. ‘Your house guest’s up.’ Without another word he brushed past Joel and hurried away down the corridor, leaving Cassie to stare after him and then at the tall bleary-eyed man making his way to the table where Erin had just placed a fresh pot of coffee. ‘Welcome to the land of the living,’ she said, pouring herself a fresh cup. ‘I imagine this is what you need.’ She pushed the pot of coffee across the table to him and opened her day’s copy of the Racing Post.
‘I imagine I owe an apology for last night,’ Joel said. ‘To whoever I insulted and for whatever I might have said, I’m sorry.’
‘I can’t accept any proxy apologies, I’m afraid,’ Cassie said, turning a page of her paper over. ‘You’ll have to say sorry to Theodore to his face.’
‘Theodore.’ Joel breathed in deeply and rubbed the palm of one hand across his red-rimmed eyes. ‘I imagine you mean the bloke who was here last night.’
‘You imagine right. You didn’t address one word to him all evening.’
‘I must have been very drunk.’
‘You were a great deal drunker than I thought you were.’
Erin, who had gone to collect her coat and hat, reappeared back in the doorway to announce she was going down to the village for some shopping and ask if anyone needed anything. Cassie scribbled a few items down on a note which she handed to her waiting housekeeper.
‘I didn’t say anything at all to whatever-his-name-was, did you say?’ Joel wondered after Erin clattered out of the kitchen.
‘Not a word.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘You tell me.’ Cassie turned over another page in her paper, deliberately studying form so that Joel would have plenty of time to suffer the full torments of his alcoholic remorse.
‘Oh, God,’ he groaned after a while. ‘I don’t have an idea why I should have been rude to the poor man. Why do you think I was rude to him, Cassie?’
‘The fact that he brought me a basket of red roses could have had something to do with it,’ Cassie said without looking up.
‘Red roses,’ Joel said slowly. ‘Yes, I remember the red roses. But even so – I mean – Jesus.’
Cassie offered him no succour whatsoever. She was still as angry with him for the way he had behaved as she was for the way he had simply arrived back in her life at the moment when he needed a shoulder to cry on.
‘Did we quarrel?’ Joel wondered after another long silence. ‘That is, did you and I – was I rude to you as well?’
‘You were at your very worst.’
‘What did I say? You’d better tell me.’
Cassie told him. Joel said nothing, merely staring in front of him in total silence while Cassie was speaking, as indeed he did for a long time after she had finished.
‘Mind if I help myself to some of that?’ he asked, nodding at an opened bottle of red wine on the dresser.
‘Yes I do,’ Cassie replied shortly. ‘Last night you said you were giving up drinking.’
‘That was last night.’
‘Joel, if you want a drink go right ahead and have one. But if you do, you leave my house for good. You go back on your word and you don’t see me again.’
‘I just need one drink, Mrs Rosse, that’s all. To get me over my hangover. Then that’s it. Promise.’
‘You don’t need a drink, Joel. What you need is help.’
Joel looked at her, half closing his eyes and furrowing his already deeply furrowed frown. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Never more so.’
‘I just need one drink, that’s all. OK?’
‘Have it. And I promise we never see ea
ch other again.’ Cassie got up, fetched the bottle of wine and a glass and placed them both in front of Joel. Then she sat down again opposite him. ‘Your move,’ she said.
She had no real idea of how long they both sat there without saying or doing anything. It could have been five minutes, it could have been fifty. Whatever, time vanished as they both stared into the future. Finally Joel reached for the bottle and with a badly shaking hand poured himself a drink, filling the wine glass right up to the rim. Then he pushed the cork back into the bottle and slid the glass until it sat on the table right under his nose.
Cassie waited another lifetime until at last Joel picked up the glass as if to drink from it, whereupon she got up at once and walked as quickly as she could to the door. As she got there once more she heard the crash of breaking glass behind her.
‘That’s two frigging glasses I owe you!’ Joel shouted. ‘Now come back here and tell me what the hell I’m going to do!’
Seventeen
Cassie had little idea what to do in such circumstances. Like everyone, she found it all too easy to tell someone they must do something, while giving the right advice was actually a very different matter. What she did was the only thing she knew she could do and that was to get Joel to talk about his problem so that she might at least be able to give it some dimension. They were still talking when Erin arrived back from the village, so Cassie and Joel moved to the library where they sat talking for another hour while lunch was prepared.
Neither of them ate much of what Erin put before them. Seeing the trouble Joel was in, Cassie had cancelled her plans to go racing, sending Mattie off by himself to saddle up their runners despite his protests.
‘My being there is not going to make them run any better or any worse, Mattie,’ she had told him when he expressed his dissastisfaction, a dismay Cassie thought born from jealousy over the fact that she had chosen to remain behind with Joel.
‘What about your owners?’ Mattie had demanded. ‘There’ll be some long faces pulled if you don’t show up. You know that.’
The Nightingale Sings Page 28