To Hear a Nightingale

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘It’s real silver,’ said Gina.

  ‘I know,’ said Cassie, turning the medal round and looking at the marks.

  ‘It was very expensive,’ Maria added.

  ‘I’ll bet,’ Cassie agreed.

  Gina picked up Cassie’s veil and headpiece of flowers and tried it on. Cassie and Maria stared at her mirrored image in awful silence. Gina was beautiful. But under a crown of tiny white roses and behind a pure white veil she looked like an angel.

  ‘What did your grandmother give you?’ Gina asked idly. ‘Nothing, I bet.’

  ‘No, she did give me something,’ Cassie replied. ‘She gave me a holy picture.’

  Both the sisters turned and looked at her curiously.

  ‘A proper holy picture?’ Gina asked. ‘In a frame? A painting?’

  ‘No,’ said Cassie, looking at the floor. ‘Just a holy picture. You know.’

  Gina and Maria looked at each other wide eyed, then giggled.

  ‘Just a holy picture?’ Gina repeated. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘I don’t think she has very much money,’ Cassie shrugged, all the same wondering why she felt the need to defend her grandmother.

  ‘Sure,’ Gina said, turning back to look at herself in the mirror. ‘But she’s always going to the beauty parlour. Least that’s what our grandma says.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cassie agreed. ‘But she has to go to the beauty parlour because it gets her out of the house.’

  ‘I’d just say,’ Gina said, with a look at her sister, ‘that she has to go to the beauty parlour.’

  Maria and Gina then collapsed in another fit of giggles, while Cassie, to cover her embarrassment, picked up her headpiece of roses and carefully readjusted the tiny flowers. She knew that it would soon be all round the school that her grandmother had only given her a paper holy picture on her Day of Days, and that all the girls would either laugh about it, or worse, feel sorry for her. Cassie just hated people feeling sorry for her.

  ‘She’s probably going to give me something else,’ she added without much conviction. ‘I think.’

  And then she lay back and worried in case that was a sin, and if so would it cancel out any of her hard-earned silver stars, or leave a mark on the clear bright yellow of her crayoned soul?

  Soon it was time to return to school, and the girls got ready to leave in Mrs Roebuck’s car. When they came downstairs, Cassie’s grandmother was still there, half asleep in an armchair, while the other women were clearing up around her. Cassie tiptoed past her, and hoped she wouldn’t wake. No such luck. Just as Cassie reached the door she heard her grandmother call out behind her.

  ‘Going without saying goodbye, child?’ she asked.

  ‘No, Grandmother,’ Cassie dutifully replied. ‘Goodbye, Grandmother.’

  She stood looking back at her grandmother from the door.

  ‘Haven’t you forgotten something else?’ Grandmother enquired.

  Cassie frowned very hard.

  ‘I don’t think so, Grandmother,’ she answered.

  ‘You haven’t said thank you for your present,’ Grandmother informed her.

  ‘Yes, I have,’ Cassie protested.

  ‘Not so as I can remember,’ Grandmother persisted. ‘Well?’

  ‘Thank you for my present, Grandmother.’

  ‘I should think so too, child. I don’t know what children are coming to.’

  Then she folded her arms again, settled back in the armchair and closed her eyes. Mrs Roebuck looked at her hopelessly and then took Cassie by the hand.

  ‘Did anyone tell you how pretty you looked today, young lady?’ she whispered to her as she bent down to re-do the sash on Cassie’s dress. ‘You looked a picture.’

  Cassie sat in the middle of the back seat between Gina and Maria and all the way back to the convent they sang a song Gina and Maria had learned from the radio. Mrs Roebuck laughed and tapped her hands in time on the steering wheel, then made them sing it over and over again until she too had learned the song.

  Cassie sang and sang until she was nearly hoarse. And while she sang she had her hand in the pocket of her dress. In her hand was her grandmother’s gift of a holy picture; and as they turned into the drive of the convent, Cassie screwed the picture up as tightly as she could and, without anyone noticing, stuffed it down the back of the seat. It had been the happiest day of her life by far. Despite Grandmother.

  Chapter Three

  1949

  Cassie and Mary-Jo were always the first in their house at the convent to be ready for bed. There was a good reason for this. Being first into bed meant you were also first into the bathroom, which meant you could use it when it was all freshly polished and shining and clean.

  After they’d been to the bathroom, they would lie in their beds and talk about the one subject that had drawn them together into an increasingly deep friendship. Horses.

  ‘Tell me about your foal again,’ Cassie would ask Mary-Jo every night. ‘Please.’

  ‘I told you,’ Mary-Jo would reply. ‘He’s brown. And he’s got big black patches round his eyes.’

  And then after lights out, Cassie would stare into the darkness and try to imagine what it must be like to own a horse, let alone a foal. Let alone a brown foal with black patches round its eyes.

  One day a photograph of the recently born foal arrived from Mary-Jo’s mother, together with a request for Mary-Jo to think up a name. Cassie and Mary-Jo in their every free moment pored over the photograph and racked their brains for exactly the right name. But it just wouldn’t come to them.

  Until one night, long after when they should have been asleep, Mary-Jo leant across to Cassie’s bed.

  ‘Prince,’ she whispered.

  ‘Really?’ asked Cassie, leaning up on one elbow.

  ‘Yes,’ Mary-Jo answered. ‘You’re right. It is the best name for him. And we’ve wasted all this time thinking up all those others. So I’m going to call him Prince.’

  Cassie sighed and pulled her quilt up under her chin as she lay back. Prince. Mary-Jo was going to call her foal Prince, and she, Cassie, had thought of it. It made her feel in some way that part of the foal was now hers.

  Then one Sunday Mary-Jo returned from a day at home and Cassie noticed that evening that Mary-Jo did everything one-handed. She washed her face one-handed, pulled on her nightdress one-handed, and even got into her bed one-handed. Cassie watched her curiously.

  ‘Have you hurt yourself, Mary-Jo?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course not, silly,’ Mary-Jo replied, holding up one hand. ‘I’m just not going to wash this hand again ever.’

  ‘Why not?’ Cassie asked, half guessing the answer.

  ‘Because Prince licked it,’ Mary-Jo told her. ‘He licked it all over, and then I rubbed my hand up and down his neck for you. So that you could smell him.’

  Mary-Jo held out her hand in the dark, and Cassie reverently smelt it.

  ‘Yes. I can smell him all right,’ she frowned. ‘At least I’m pretty sure I can.’

  Mary-Jo took back her hand and held it close to her own nose, inhaling deeply and sighing.

  ‘He’s just gorgeous, Cassie,’ she said. ‘He’s heavenly.’

  ‘I’d give anything to see him,’ Cassie sighed. ‘Really anything.’

  ‘Well, you probably won’t have to,’ Mary-Jo whispered, ‘because Mamma says you can come and stay any time you like.’

  Cassie lay in complete silence, not sure she’d heard right.

  ‘Did you hear what I said, silly?’ Mary-Jo hissed.

  ‘I think so,’ Cassie whispered back. ‘But I just can’t believe it.’

  ‘Well it’s true, so there!’ Mary-Jo giggled. ‘Mamma’s going to write to your grandmother and tell her so.’

  ‘Your Mamma must be an angel,’ Cassie whispered.

  ‘She is,’ Mary-Jo replied simply. ‘Goodnight.’

  Then she turned on her side and placing her unwashed hand as close to her face as possible, fell into a deep untroubled sleep. Whil
e Cassie lay awake staring into the darkness and thinking of the adventure that might lie ahead.

  She also lay thinking of how she could get her grandmother’s permission to go and stay with Mary-Jo. She had never been away from Grandmother’s, except for the magical night she slept at Mrs Roebuck’s. But she wasn’t going to be bested this time by her grandmother. She’d find a way of staying with Mary-Jo, even if it meant running away from home. There was no way Cassie was going to spend the long summer vacation shut up in Grandmother’s stuffy house, with no one to see or to play with. Gina and Maria would probably be visiting Mrs Roebuck some of the time, but for most of the summer they were bound to be with their parents, like most normal children. Normal children. Why didn’t she have parents? Why had Cassie been left in this world to be brought up by Grandmother? What had she done to make God so angry with her that He should punish her so?

  Cassie tossed and turned in her bed, unable to sleep. Mary-Jo’s invitation to go and stay with her had if anything made Cassie even more aware of her miserable existence, as she was frightened that her grandmother might refuse to allow her to go. In which case she would spend yet another endless vacation in the house that she had grown so much to hate. Grandmother would sleep a great deal, and Cassie would spend her day not playing in the sun but fetching and carrying, sweeping and tidying; then she would be sent to bed at a far earlier hour than she now went to bed at the convent, and she would have to lie there in her bed, night after night, with nothing to read, while the evening breeze blew at her dark blinds and carried the sounds of the gang of children playing below her in the street up into her lonely bedroom. In spite of all the joy the chance of seeing Prince and staying with Mary-Jo brought, that night Cassie cried herself to sleep.

  Mrs Roebuck picked Cassie up from the convent at the end of term, together with her grandchildren. It appeared that Cassie’s grandmother had gone to play bridge in Rochester, and wouldn’t be back until the evening. So she had delegated her neighbour to collect Cassie from school. Most children would be sad if their own relative didn’t pick them up at the end of term. Not so Cassie; she could hardly keep the smile off her face. Neither, for that matter, could Mrs Roebuck.

  ‘You’re to stay here with us,’ she told Cassie, ‘until your grandmother’s back. And I’ve made you all a special walnut cake.’

  The three girls yelled and hugged Mrs Roebuck, then, tearing all their clothes off, rushed out into the yard, free from the constraints of the convent. Within minutes the hose was running, and the yard was echoing with the happy unbridled laughter of the three children. They played all afternoon, dousing each other with the hose, climbing the big tree and tipping each other out of the hammocks, until it was time for tea and the walnut cake, then a massive collapse with jugs of homemade lemonade and the radio.

  Then Grandmother returned, just as they were all having a bath, and as Mrs Roebuck was making up the spare bed for Cassie. She took Cassie home with her at once. There was absolutely no question of her staying the night again. Not on the first day of the vacation.

  The next day at breakfast, Grandmother addressed herself to Cassie, having slowly and silently read Cassie’s end of term report.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ she said, rolling up her napkin. ‘The nuns seem to find no fault with you.’

  She looked down the long table at the small solemn-faced child seated at the other end.

  ‘I find that quite extraordinary,’ she continued. ‘Don’t you?’

  Cassie sat quite still and said nothing. She was sitting stiller than she had sat since last she was home, and she was keeping equally silent. At the convent they were allowed to talk and giggle within reason at breakfast, to push their chairs moderately noisily, and to run outside into the gardens and fields where there was always somebody to play with. But here, in Grandmother’s house, you had to sit quite still, and silent, and push your chair in noiselessly, and there was never anyone to play with.

  ‘If you can be patently this good at school, child,’ her grandmother asked her in exasperation, ‘then why are you such a trial at home?’

  ‘I don’t know, Grandmother,’ Cassie answered. ‘Can I get down please?’

  ‘No you may not,’ her grandmother replied. ‘Not until I say so.’

  And so they both sat there in silence for another quarter of an hour, while Grandmother re-read Cassie’s report, sighing every so often as if it was the very worst document she had ever laid her eyes upon.

  Later, up in her room, Cassie sat on the floor by her bed and read a book about horses Mary-Jo had lent her. It was the most beautiful book Cassie had ever read, even more beautiful than the book about dogs that Mr O’Reilly had given her. She had just reached an exciting moment when the door swung open and Grandmother came in.

  ‘So here you are,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you hear me calling you?’

  ‘I was reading,’ Cassie explained.

  ‘What?’ her grandmother demanded. ‘What nonsense are you reading now?

  Cassie put the book down and tried to slide it under the bed.

  ‘It’s not nonsense,’ she said. ‘It’s a book someone at school lent me.’

  ‘If it’s a book one of those girls at school lent you,’ said her grandmother, ‘then I want to see it at once please. Show me the book.’

  Cassie pulled the book back out from under the bed, and handed it dutifully to her grandmother. Her grandmother stared at the picture on the cover as if it was something shocking, then she flicked through the pages.

  ‘I suppose it makes a change from that ridiculous book all about dogs,’ she said.

  ‘It wasn’t a ridiculous book,’ Cassie said defensively.

  ‘What do you mean, it “wasn’t”?’ asked her grandmother sharply. ‘It wasn’t? You haven’t lost it or given it away, have you?’

  Cassie looked her grandmother in the eye.

  ‘Yes I have,’ she answered. ‘I gave it to the nuns to sell for the black babies.’

  There was a terrible silence as Grandmother closed Mary-Jo’s horse book and threw it on to the bed.

  ‘I trust I didn’t hear you right, child,’ her grandmother said ominously. ‘You gave away a book that Mr O’Reilly gave you? And not only that, you gave it away to help black children?’

  ‘Yes,’ Cassie said, not dropping her eyes. ‘Yes I did.’

  ‘That beautiful book poor Mr O’Reilly gave you. Which he could ill afford to do,’ Grandmother continued, walking to the window. ‘Why, that has to be one of the very worst things I ever heard in my life. You wait till Mr O’Reilly hears about you giving his book away.’

  ‘It was my book, Grandmother,’ Cassie argued. ‘Mr O’Reilly gave it to me. And the nuns told us –’

  ‘I don’t care what the nuns told you, child!’ said her grandmother, interrupting her sharply. ‘It isn’t your business to go around giving things away! Particularly things that mightn’t properly belong to you!’

  Cassie frowned in bewilderment.

  ‘It was mine to give away!’ she said.

  ‘No it wasn’t!’ her grandmother retorted. ‘And don’t you dare to raise your voice at me! Now you’re to stay here in your room while I go and see Mr O’Reilly! Who’s to say that some day he wouldn’t have wanted that beautiful dog book back?’

  And with that Grandmother swept out, slamming and locking Cassie’s bedrom door behind her. Cassie went to the window and saw her grandmother marching determinedly over to Mr O’Reilly who was standing contentedly watering his flowers. She watched for a while from behind the net curtains as Grandmother started talking to him, then as Mr O’Reilly looked up at Cassie’s window, Cassie shrank back and went and hid by the side of her bed.

  Perhaps Grandmother was right. Perhaps Mr O’Reilly had only lent it to her after all. Try as she might, Cassie couldn’t actually remember him saying she was to keep the book. Here, this is for you, Cassie, he had said. But he hadn’t said, as far as Cassie could recall, here – this is for you to keep, Cassie
. But he had told her it was a very precious book, and that he had had it since he was a boy. And that it meant an awful lot to him. So perhaps he would some day have wanted it back. And now he knew that she had given it away, he’d think it had meant nothing to her, and he’d never be her friend again.

  Why had she given it away? She had so few books of her own, and none which came anywhere near Mr O’Reilly’s dog book. She gave it away because she had no money to give to Sister Joseph’s charity. She had got up, after Sister Joseph had made the appeal, to help the poor black children, and walked quite spontaneously to the front of the class where there was a large box to collect the children’s donations, and she had calmly placed the book at the bottom of the box. She was the first girl to go forward, and hers was the first donation. And Sister Joseph had praised her.

  Perhaps that was why she gave away the book. Because she wanted Sister Joseph’s approval. Because she craved Sister Joseph’s special smile which she bestowed on you when she wanted you to know that she understood how you felt. But now it didn’t seem worth it. Not if it was going to cost her Mr O’Reilly’s friendship. Not if it was going to hurt Mr O’Reilly.

  After what seemed like ages, Grandmother returned, Cassie heard her climbing the stairs and turning the key in the lock. She came into the room half-smiling, as she always did when she knew she had an extra chance to cause Cassie pain.

  ‘Well,’ she announced. ‘Mr O’Reilly is very hurt. Very hurt indeed. So there you are. You’re to be congratulated.’

  ‘How hurt is he, Grandmother,’ Cassie asked. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He didn’t say anything, child,’ Grandmother replied. ‘But I could see well enough from his eyes. You’ve rarely seen such a look of pain in a man’s eyes.’

  Cassie sat quite still on the carpet, trying to make herself as small as she could by the bed.

  ‘Stand up,’ her grandmother suddenly commanded. ‘Stand up at once and tell me the truth. Tell me why you gave away Mr O’Reilly’s lovely book. And I want the truth, understand? I don’t want any of your lies! Or your fancy stories! Tell me why you gave that book away!’