‘No, neither do I, Tomas,’ Cassie replied, still checking everything was right with the mare.
‘You seem to know how to do it all well enough.’
‘I had the very best of teachers.’
‘I could have stayed in me bed, readin’ me book. Still. You’re a long time dead.’
He lit another cigarette, and started to cough. Cassie looked round at him anxiously. For one brief moment she saw the young Tomas crouched on his haunches, leaning against the wall, just as he had when they were waiting for old Gracie to give birth. And then she saw her dear old friend grown suddenly old. And tired.
‘You’ll have trouble with that boyo,’ he said to her, when he’d recovered his breath. ‘He’ll be all leg for the first two years.’
Tomas’ first-sight judgements were usually infallible. Off-hand, Cassie couldn’t remember one of his early prophecies which hadn’t come true.
‘He’s nice and straight even so,’ she said, appraising the newly born colt. ‘And he’s got a very bright eye.’
‘You and your eyes,’ Tomas sighed. ‘What good’s a pair of bright eyes if the rest of the bloody thing’s all leg? Savin’ your presence.’
Cassie laughed, and helped Tomas to his feet.
‘We’ll take our time with him, Tomas,’ she said. ‘Like we do with them all. Patience, right? And yards and yards of it. Now come on, let’s go and wet the baby’s head.’
It was the last foal they were to welcome into the world together, and the last bottle they’d crack in celebration.
‘To Celebration,’ Tomas had said, raising his glass. ‘In celebration.’
And they had drunk together to the funny old mare with the club foot that Cassie had bought as an impulse buy, and to her first-born foal who had reshaped both their fortunes.
The next morning when Cassie arrived at the yard to supervise work, Tomas was absent.
‘He’s been took to the hospital, Guv’nor,’ Liam the deputy head lad told her. ‘He was very bad in the night, and Mrs Muldoon called an ambulance.
Why the hell hadn’t she called her? Cassie wondered as she deputised Liam to lead out the string and conduct the morning’s work, leaving Cassie to drive at top speed to the hospital. The thing Tomas dreaded most was the hospital, particularly the local one, which he had christened Scutari, after one of Florence Nightingale’s most infamous infirmaries.
She found him there in a bed already in the cancer ward, surrounded by the terminally ill, with Mrs Muldoon seated by his bed, her head lying on the covers, buried in both of her hands.
Tomas looked at Cassie beseechingly.
‘Get me out of here, Guv’nor,’ he whispered. ‘This is no place for a man to meet his God.’
They had him back home by teatime. At his request, Mrs Muldoon and Cassie carried his bed into the living room of the new bungalow he had built on the site of his old cottage with some of the money from the horse feeds, and remade it in front of the french windows so that he could lie looking out at the garden and the sweep of the fields up to Claremore. He seemed to rally once he was back home, and Cassie and Mrs Muldoon hoped and prayed that the terrible suffocating attack he had suffered in the night was the result of too much whisky and too many cigarettes after the birth of the foal, and not anything more serious.
Then Doctor Ryan arrived two days later when Cassie was between visits, and apparently told Tomas that he had a terminal dose of what he called ‘the smoker’s disease’.
Cassie was furious when she discovered what he had done, and called the doctor from Claremore when she got home that evening.
‘What in hell was the point in that, Doctor Ryan?’ she demanded. ‘Tomas Muldoon’s no fool, you know. He understands that he’s dying, but it has done incalculable harm telling him so!’
‘Mrs Rosse,’ Dr Ryan replied nervously, ‘it’s only fair that a patient nowadays should know his prognosis—’
‘Nowadays?’ Cassie interrupted. ‘What makes us so much better nowadays that we can come to terms with our mortality at the drop of a hat? I’d really like to hear your thinking. When I left Tomas Muldoon yesterday, he was at peace with himself. He was absorbing what he knew and was coming to terms with it. Your matter-of-factness has removed his last shred of dignity, his chance to rationalise what’s happening to him. He didn’t need to hear all that, you know. He didn’t need you to lay on the guilt about his smoking. OK – so he’s got lung cancer.’
‘He’s got considerably more than lung cancer, Mrs Rosse,’ the doctor replied.
‘I guess you found it necesary to tell him that as well?’
‘Patients have every right to know exactly what’s wrong with them.’
‘Did Tomas ask you?’
Doctor Ryan hesitated.
‘Not perhaps in so many words, no.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said – he said is it bronchitis? I wouldn’t have been doing my job if I’d lied.’
‘Maybe not, but you’d have sure as hell have been a Christian. What else did you tell him?’
‘He asked should he see the priest.’
‘Yes?’
‘And I said great heavens no. No no. No, I told him he’d got at least four or five weeks.’
Cassie replaced the receiver disbelievingly and went and sat by the fire. Her new dog, a large Bearded Collie called Bunbury, came and laid his head on her knee, which he did whenever he felt his mistress was sad.
‘Everybody’s going, Bunbury,’ Cassie said, stroking his head. ‘They’re all going or gone. Sometimes it does seem an awful short journey, doesn’t it? And all for what? What do we become? If we’re lucky, a fond memory maybe.’
Cassie visited Tomas every day, twice a day. She sat by him, and read to him for the first few days, but as he grew more weary, she took a small piece of tapestry she was making and sewed by his bedside. Mrs Muldoon made endless tea which neither of them drank, and ushered in a seemingly non-stop stream of Tomas’ friends from the village and vicinity who had come to bid their old friend farewell. All came bravely smiling, and none with the word goodbye. Instead they recalled a moment shared, a good time had, a laugh remembered. Tomas smiled at them all, and nodded, now barely able to speak although still fully conscious. Cassie made sure there was a private nurse to help Mrs Muldoon take the best and the most proper care of him, and see that he was kept shaved and washed, for Tomas was the most fastidious of men, and could never bear to be seen untidy.
He slept most of the time now, occasionally waking and staring for a moment to see who was near him. Doctor Ryan had seen to it that his last days were as pain-free as possible, but in such a short span of time Tomas had grown painfully thin, and could find little comfort, even once they propped him up with air cushions.
‘I feel like one of our old horses,’ Tomas had whispered to Cassie one day as she and the nurse turned him. ‘Though one man I’d give anything to see walk in here would be old Niall Brogan with his gun.’
Then one morning when Cassie went to visit, she found Tomas sitting out in his favourite chair, wrapped in several sweaters, a dressing gown, and thick white woollen bedsocks. He smiled as best he could as Cassie came in, and Mrs Muldoon drew her aside.
‘He’s asked to see Erin,’ she said. ‘He asked especially. And he wanted you here, too.’
Erin came in, and stood awkwardly by the door.
‘Go over to your father, child,’ her mother ordered. ‘He can hardly speak to you from there.’
‘Erin went to her father’s side, and after a moment, with great difficulty, Tomas turned his head to her and signalled slowly with a finger for her to bend down. As her face reached his, he took her hand in his frail grasp, and whispered to her for several minutes. Cassie watched and saw the tears fall unchecked from Erin’s eyes, down on to her and her father’s clasped hands. Then Tomas kissed her on her cheek, and raised his other hand slowly to her hair.
Mrs Muldoon clicked her tongue and shook her head, but when Ca
ssie glanced round at her, she saw the old woman’s eyes were quite blinded with tears.
Tomas pointed slowly at Cassie, and beckoned her over. ‘Let’s have a drink, Guv’nor,’ he whispered barely audibly in her ear as she bent over. ‘A drop of the creature.’
Cassie poured them all a whisky.
‘He likes his with a drop o’ sugar in it now, Mrs Rosse,’ Mrs Muldoon said. ‘And a little bit of water.’
They put his drink carefully in his hand, and Tomas looked down at his glass for some time, before raising his eyes and looking at the three women standing before him. Then he lifted his glass as high as he could and held it out to them all.
‘God bless you,’ he said.
When they’d drunk their whiskies, Mrs Muldoon took Tomas’s still-full glass, and sat with his hand in hers. Cassie leaned over and kissed Tomas’ smooth brow, but he was barely conscious. As she left, she just caught sight through the french windows of the nurse and Mrs Muldoon lifting his painfully thin body back into his bed, before Erin drew the curtains.
The telephone rang by Cassie’s bed at half past two. It was the nurse to say that Tomas was dying.
Cassie dressed as quickly as she could and drove to the bungalow. Father Patrick was administering the Last Rites while Erin and Mrs Muldoon knelt silently by the bed. Cassie dropped to her knees beside them.
By four o’clock Tomas had gone. His breathing had become slower and slower, and more and more shallow, until suddenly he opened his eyes once, almost as if in surprise, and then with what sounded like a deep, deep sigh, he died.
Cassie sat in the kitchen staring at her clenched hands, while Mrs Muldoon and the nurse laid Tomas out. Erin was opposite Cassie across the table, sitting rocking backwards and forwards slowly, and keening. There were no tears now on her face, or in her eyes. She just rocked herself and gently moaned.
Dawn was breaking when Cassie left the bungalow. She walked back to the house, choosing to leave the car behind her, as she needed the air, and the space and time to think. There seemed to be no one now, with Tyrone long dead, and her children away growing up abroad. Now Tomas was gone, she had no real company. Together, once Tyrone had been killed, Tomas and she had nursed their crumbling empire and rebuilt their fortunes.
And now there was no one with whom Cassie could ‘shout ’em home’.
He wouldn’t be there in the yard later that morning, nor on any coming morning, measuring out the feeds and checking the welfare of all the horses with her. He’d just be a space where someone used to be, a gap in a life that went on. There’d be no wise man beside her in the Land Rover as they bounced their way along the gallops, alternately cursing and praising the lads as they galloped their horses up and past them. No one beside her in the grandstand any more, putting his race glasses down three furlongs out and telling her they were done; or not even bothering to watch the race at all, so supremely confident was he that ‘they’d take all the beatin’’. No one to lead the horse in with her afterwards, and pull at its ears, and run a thankful hand down its neck before skilfully throwing the sweat sheet over the sweating animal and telling Liam to lead him away. No one to drink with in the bar, in victory and in defeat. No one with such a hope in his heart and such a love of life that he had to disguise it all behind a constant stream of pessimism. No one called Tomas in her life any more, except as a memory. No one called Tomas Muldoon.
She stopped halfway to the house and looked up above her at the grey early morning sky. More than ever she knew what she had to do, and above all, she knew now that she would do it, because she could do it. She made a fist of one of her hands, and holding it high above her head as she walked on to the house, hoped and prayed that Tyrone and Tomas were both watching.
Chapter Twenty-Three
By the middle of April, Dexter Bryant was in residence at Claremore and back riding work. Cassie had done her best to ensure that his return to Ireland was as discreet as possible, but somehow the story was leaked, and the more popular press ran some pretty lurid ‘Riches to Rags and Back Again to Riches?’ stories. But the staff kept the reporters out of Claremore and well away from the subject of their present attentions, and pretty soon Dexter Bryant’s return was yesterday’s news.
So far, Dex was as good as his word. He hadn’t touched a drink since he entered the New York clinic, and he was three quarters of the way to being match fit. The most remarkable and the most touching part of his return was that he refused any of the special treatment which was initially offered him, preferring instead to work in the yard alongside the rest of the lads, and to sleep in their hostel rather than alternative accommodation more in keeping with his previous standing.
‘Look,’ he explained to Cassie. ‘These guys I’m working with – they’re not at the bottom of the heap. They don’t know what life’s like down there. I do. I’ve actually come to and found myself lying on the sidewalk with my face in the gutter. You don’t get a lot lower, you know. So if I’m going to get back on top, I’m not asking any favours. More than anything, it wouldn’t be fair on the rest of the guys.’
So Dexter stood in line. And because he did, the other lads, most of whom had resented his return as it would lessen their own chances of getting any free stable rides, accepted him with good grace. He was given three horses to ‘do’, and was expected to ride whatever his name was against on the following day’s exercise board. In fact his life was the same as any of the other lads in the hostel, the only difference being that when their day was done, and they wandered off into the village to drink and gossip in O’Leary’s, Dex would stay behind, and spend all his free time reading up form, so that if and when he rode again in public he would know precisely what he was racing against.
He was made no exception. At first, Cassie kept a watchful eye on him, just in case he suddenly found himself out of his depth now that he was in strange waters. But she soon relaxed her vigilance when it became perfectly apparent that the jockey was as determined as ever he had been to get back out on the track and start bringing home the winners.
By the end of May, Dexter was back riding the two-year-olds in their gallops. One morning Cassie put him up on a notoriously difficult and strong-minded colt belonging to Peter Sankey, the property magnate. She herself was riding a three-year-old winner belonging to the same owner, and elected to school the younger horse alongside hers.
As soon as Dex vaulted lightly up on the two-year-old, the horse changed its manners. Where only a minute earlier he had been plunging and rearing round the yard as one of the lads tried to hold him ready for Dex, he now walked round calmly and sweetly as if he was ten years old, not two. Dex stroked the young horse’s neck with one hand, and gave a pull at one of his ears.
‘How shall we go, Guv’nor?’ he asked Cassie, as they left the yard in twos.
‘He’s a puller,’ Cassie told him, ‘and he’ll have your arms out of their sockets if you give him the chance. So I want you to get him to settle. If you can, which I kind of doubt, get him to tuck in behind me for the first couple of furlongs, and for the last two pull him out but don’t let him go on.’
‘You got it!’ Dex called back with a grin, as his horse decided to try and take off before he was told.
But Dex had the measure of him, and rode him precisely to Cassie’s instructions. Cassie had quite deliberately set him what was an almost impossible task, since the horse he was riding had carted everybody on the gallops, and would almost certainly take hold once they were cantering and pull his way past Cassie.
But it had to be done, if Dexter was going to make it back properly to the big time. There would be no point putting him up on the more temperamental of Claremore’s good horses if there was any doubt about Dexter’s nerve. As they started trotting their horses out, Cassie could see that behind Dex’s natural good humour and apparent confidence, there was tension in his eyes and round his mouth, as he felt the strength and determination of the young horse under him. By the time they reached the point where they
were to start work in earnest, all the banter had stopped.
Cassie deliberately let the other horses go off in pairs first, as she knew this would be a further test of horse and jockey. Her own mount was pawing the ground and trying to turn in circles, in an attempt to unsettle Cassie so that she might lose her contact with him, allowing him to take hold and bolt off after his stable mates.
Dexter’s fiery two-year-old, on the other hand, was standing like a mounted policeman’s horse on point duty. Cassie eyed horse and jockey surreptitiously, and swore to herself that if Dexter dropped the reins the youngster was so relaxed he’d just probably put his head down and start grazing.
‘OK!’ Cassie suddenly called. ‘I’m going to kick on, Dexter! And you follow after a count of five!’
She set her horse off, and for one awful moment Cassie thought the horse had taken hold, which would ruin the whole experiment. Then she got him back, and cantering nicely, just as she heard the dull thunder of Dexter’s horse who was now following on behind her. Cassie sat as still as she could for two furlongs, then took a look over her shoulder. Dex’s horse was tucked in half a length adrift and going as sweet as you could wish.
‘We’ll go on now!’ Cassie shouted back to Dexter. ‘Three quarter speed! But don’t let him go whatever you do!’
Cassie kicked on and immediately her horse started galloping just below racing clip. She heard Dex’s horse quickening as well, and as he loomed alongside her the horse looked sure to run off, so fast was he travelling. But Dexter had him, and the moment they were racing neck and neck, he just dropped the horse so that the animal relaxed and was perfectly content to remain in company, rather than head at full speed for the wilds of Carlow.
Dexter didn’t look anywhere except ahead through the horse’s ears. Neither did Cassie, but she could sense and feel the unity of the two galloping horses.
‘Well?’ she asked Dexter, after they’d pulled the horses up carefully, and had turned them to walk home.
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