To Hear a Nightingale

by Charlotte Bingham

  When she woke up eventually, Frank had gone. Cassie hadn’t even heard the car leave for the airport. She sat up in bed, clutching the sheets round her naked body, while the tears ran silently down her face. Everyone she knew was going. It was as if the world about her was changing its blood.

  The good thing about that summer had been the renaissance of Dexter Bryant. He had ridden his first winner two weeks after his initial ride at Naas, and since then had slowly and steadily increased his tally for the season to a respectable fifteen. Two of these had been for Willie Moore, who, on Cassie’s prompting, and on the evidence of his own eyes, had offered Dex the odd but good spare ride.

  There had only been one worrying moment. Dexter had been put up on what the racing papers liked to call one of Claremore’s ‘hotshots’, a three-year-old filly called Scarlet Ribbon who had run promisingly enough in the Irish 1,000 Guineas to indicate she would be one to follow in the immediate future. Cassie placed her well in a stakes race at the Curragh, and the punters went for the horse as if she couldn’t be beaten. But the ground had come up very hard and the filly, quite unable to act on it, trailed in last, at 1/3 on.

  From the stands of course it looked as though Dexter had left his effort far too late, and when he found he couldn’t get the filly into the race, had simply dropped her out. So by the time the jockey was walking the horse back to be unsaddled, the crowd were in an ugly mood. Dexter was given ‘the bird’, and as well as the verbal abuse he was subjected to a barrage of beer cans, lighted cigarettes and saliva. Clearly very shaken, he left the racecourse immediately he had changed and failed to return to Claremore that evening.

  By eleven o’clock, as Cassie was preparing to go to sleep, someone telephoned anonymously and said Dexter had been seen drinking in Dublin. Cassie told him to mind his own business, read some more of her book, then turned off her light and went to sleep.

  When she arrived at the stables in the morning, the first person she saw was Dexter, mucking out one of his horses. Cassie said nothing to him about his disappearance until after the horses had all been exercised, when she summoned him to her private office in the new block.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Cassie asked him as she poured them both some coffee.

  ‘There’s nothing to talk about, Guv’nor,’ Dex replied.

  ‘You were seen drinking in Dublin.’

  Dexter looked up in surprise. ‘Who told you?’

  ‘The caller didn’t give his name. But it sounded suspiciously like your arch-rival Terry Doyle.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised, Guv’nor. He’s backed Scarlet Ribbon, and pretty dam’ heavily, too.’

  ‘I can’t trust you with my best horses, Dex, if you drink. You know that.’

  ‘Sure I know that,’ Dexter replied easily, with a smile. ‘And the day I take a drink, that’s the day I walk away from here.’

  ‘Nobody would have blamed you after yesterday.’

  ‘I would have. I’d never have forgiven myself if I’d weakened because of a few lousy punters talking through their pockets. I sure wanted a drink. In fact I can’t remember the last time I wanted a drink so badly. But I got over it.’

  ‘How, Dex?’ Cassie asked.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he replied, grinning. ‘I went to a bar.’

  ‘And that’s how you got over it?’

  ‘You spend all evening in a bar, by yourself, Guv’nor, without drinking. My therapist in New York used to make me do it all the time. It’s a very salutary experience. Watching people losing their minds.’

  Cassie finished her coffee, and got up, ready to return to work. ‘As soon as the ground comes right, we’ll run Scarlet Ribbon,’ she said, before letting Dex go. ‘And you’ll ride her.’

  ‘No I won’t,’ Dexter replied. ‘I’ll win on her.’

  They waited nearly two months before they ran the filly again, rather than risk another dismal performance on the wrong going. Finally the ground came right for a good race at Leopardstown, and Scarlet Ribbon duly ‘obliged’, winning as she liked from a high-class field, with Dexter easing her up as they passed the post. The punters had gone for her again, returning her the even money favourite. But this time as the filly was led back in to be unsaddled her jockey was given a hero’s ovation.

  ‘If you can treat those two imposters just the same, right?’ Dexter said with a grin to Cassie en route to weighing in.

  ‘You got it,’ Cassie replied.

  The Nightingale wasn’t broken in until November, which was much later than Cassie normally liked to break her horses, but because he was still so ungainly and awkward, she left the first part of the young horse’s training till what she considered to be the last minute.

  Sheila Meath did the breaking, as she always did with Claremore’s best and most promising yearlings. Both she and Cassie were surprised at how easily Nightie, as he was known in the yard, accepted someone on his back. He showed no resistance or resentment; in fact he seemed visibly to enjoy the procedure.

  ‘Then he’s always been a bit of a bright fellah, this one,’ Cassie remarked to Sheila, watching Liam quietly riding the young horse at a walk round the indoor school. ‘You said yourself he’s a thinker.’

  ‘If you can do with this chap what you did to that other heavy-topped youngster you had,’ Sheila replied, ‘he could make up into something quite extraordinary.’

  ‘If he takes to training,’ Cassie concluded thoughtfully, ‘I won’t race him till late summer. That other big horse, he was much better furnished altogether by his first Christmas. Nightie looks as though he’s going to take a lot longer to grow into that damn great frame of his.’

  And so Cassie took it slowly and patiently with the big dark horse, allowing him the first four months of the following year to develop in his own good time. While her other two-year-olds were learning how to canter, she was still working Nightie on the lunge, building up his sides, quarters and neck. Then she walked him out herself on the roads, nothing but roads and hills, for another four weeks before he was allowed near the gallops.

  Dex was given the job of introducing the horse to the canter, so that Cassie and Sheila could watch him from the ground. They were both sadly disappointed.

  ‘That’s the scratchiest action I’ve seen in a long time,’ Cassie said as they watched the horse pull up. ‘He’s not using himself at all.’

  Dexter confirmed their suspicions, saying that the horse had worked like a pony.

  ‘We’ll just have to wait and see what he’s like when he gallops,’ Cassie said. ‘If he gets to use those quarters of his properly, we could still be in business.’

  The good thing about the horse was that he was not growing so fast upwards any more, and had begun to grow sideways. In fact, by the end of May he was an altogether better shape; so much so that although at the canter he was still as unimpressive as ever, it was decided to give him his first serious piece of work, to see if there was any noticeable difference at the gallop.

  Again Dexter rode him, alongside the best of Claremore’s two-year-olds, a horse called Sixth Heaven, who had come to hand early and won his first race on the bridle. Cassie was by herself that morning, as Sheila was down with a heavy cold, so she hacked up the gallops on Bouncer, and sat waiting for the horses to come towards her.

  It was a warm morning, and there was a haze hanging over the grass as the first two horses came shimmering into view. They were Sixth Heaven and The Nightingale. Cassie held her lightweight miniature race glasses up one-handed and watched them approach. At once she felt a surge of excitement as she saw how the big dark bay was working. At the gallop he was a totally different animal, stretching out in front to cover the ground while tucking his hind legs well under him to give him full impulsion. Dexter was sitting quite still, not asking the horse to do anything except work half-speed. But the horse was merely idling beside Sixth Heaven, who was almost at full stretch just to keep pace with the newcomer. By the last furlong, Dexter was fi
ghting a losing battle to keep his horse from striding away up the hill.

  ‘You didn’t take him on, Dex, did you?’ Cassie asked as the jockeys brought the horses back past her for their debriefing.

  ‘No way, Guv’nor,’ Dex grinned. ‘I tell you, this horse is something other. That was only second gear.’

  The decision then had to be made when to race the horse. Cassie was in the extraordinary and enviable position of owning the horse as well as training it, so she had only herself to listen to as to when it should run. Herself and Sheila Meath, of course.

  ‘You’re on a hiding to nothing, Cassie,’ Sheila told her. ‘If the horse isn’t quite ready, if he needs a race, you’ll only have yourself to argue with. To my old eye, provided there are no setbacks, he looks as if he’ll be plenty ready for the Renvyle Stakes in July.’

  There were no setbacks. The horse improved so much with every bit of work Cassie got into him, that the word was already out about him. He looked a picture in the paddock before the race, and by the time he was going down to the start, he was contesting favouritism. But obviously the punters weren’t so impressed with his unimpressive action as he cantered past the stands, and by the time they were under orders, The Nightingale could be backed all over the ring at 5/2, and in some places at 3/1.

  He won, as Dex afterwards described it, doing handstands. The race, run over six furlongs, was over the minute the jockey asked the horse his first serious question, two furlongs out. Dex picked the horse up and asked him to go, and that was that. He won so easily that he was headlines on every racing page the following day.

  ‘Cassie’s Private Jet Streaks Home’ was one of the more popular headlines.

  The Irish Times put it somewhat more decorously. ‘Claremore reveals potential Classic Hope’, it stated. ‘Home-bred horse looks ideal Guineas type.’

  What pleased Cassie most of all was that she knew there was still lots of room for improvement in the big-framed horse, and that if she planned his career correctly, and if the horse was as brilliant as he appeared, there was indeed every chance that he could shape up into the Classic hope she had always dreamed about and prayed for.

  Dex was in no two minds about The Nightingale.

  ‘This is the best horse I’ve ever sat on,’ he told Cassie when they reran the race over and over again on the video.

  ‘See the way he quickens? He’s devastating. Those other horses, the ones all struggling behind him like selling platers. Those are all everyone else’s Classic dreams.’

  After he’d won his next race in much the same manner, strolling away from a very high-class field, Cassie received a telephone call from one of the top international bloodstock agents, who informed her he’d been instructed to offer her half a million pounds for the horse.

  ‘Sorry, John,’ said Cassie. ‘He’s not for sale.’

  The phone rang again shortly before midnight.

  ‘Three quarters of a million, and a twentieth of the syndication at stud.’

  ‘I love you, Johnnie, but goodnight,’ Cassie told him, and hung up, switching the telephone on to automatic answer.

  Cassie ran him once more successfully in the Dalkey Stakes before sending him over to Newmarket for the most prestigious two-year-old race at the end of the season, the Dewhurst. She sent him over not only to win, but to get his first taste of air travel, of being away from home, and to get his first sight of the track where the 2,000 Guineas was run. She knew it was one thing to pick up races at home, but quite another to pick them up on a raid. Particularly at Newmarket.

  The Dewhurst is invariably a high-class race, and a hotly contested one. This year’s was no exception, with seven of the eight contenders all being talked of as Guineas contenders. Between them, the eight starters had won seventeen races, and over one and a half million pounds in prize money.

  Of the eight runners, five were owned by Arabs, one by the Englishman Peter Sankey, and one by the Aga Khan.

  The money paid for seven of the eight runners lumped together came to over five million pounds.

  The horse which had cost his owner-breeder nothing except for his food and lodging, won by six lengths.

  Immediately after the race the big four bookmakers all made The Nightingale even-money favourite for the first of the next season’s Classics, the 2,000 Guineas, and when the Free Handicap was published, The Nightingale not unsurprisingly was top-rated.

  The second-rated horse, a grandson of Mill Reef called Millstone Grit, was a non-starter in the Dewhurst, due to a twisted hock. Owned by a Mr Charles C. Lovett Andrew, he was also unbeaten in three races.

  The Nightingale was retired for the season, roughed off and sent to winter in north-east Italy.

  Josephine, on the other hand, came home for Christmas from Italy, where she had been filming the location work for a television movie, due for transmission in the spring. Every time Cassie saw her, she just couldn’t believe how she had managed to give birth to such a beautiful girl.

  ‘Everyone says I’m the spit of you,’ Josephine would tell her, whenever her mother complimented her on her looks.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Cassie would reply. ‘If anything, you’ve your father’s good looks.’

  She was slightly taller than Cassie, but with her mother’s perfect figure. Her long hair was now dyed pure blonde, which Cassie privately disapproved of in principle, although with Josephine’s perfect peaches-and-cream complexion, Cassie had to admit that the total effect was quite stunning.

  ‘Anyone else coming to stay for Christmas this year?’ Josephine enquired on the drive back from the airport.

  ‘Just family,’ Cassie replied.

  Her daughter looked round at her sharply. ‘Family?’

  ‘Sure. I thought we’d have Christmas by ourselves for a change,’ Cassie continued.

  ‘OK,’ Josephine replied, ‘I’d like that. Just the two of us.’

  ‘Just the two of us,’ Cassie agreed, ‘and Mattie.’

  Her adopted son was due home five days before Christmas. According to the very occasional letter from Australia, it seemed that the experiment of sending him to the other side of the world was paying off. Mattie was working hard, learning a lot and enjoying himself.

  It had been a difficult decision for Cassie to make, because of Mattie’s asthma, which had suddenly returned with a vengeance during his adolescence, despite the ministrations of Dr FitzStanton. Cassie had been told by the homeopath that this was a fairly normal development with asthmatics, and that it was also really make or break time.

  ‘It’s now partly a mental battle, you see,’ he had explained with his usual care and patience. ‘Mattie has to make a conscious decision as to whether or not he’s going to beat the disease. And if we all engage in a very positive approach, and treat him as if he’s a quite normal chap, rather than one requiring kid-glove treatment, the chances are we can persuade him that he’s going to be able to lead a perfectly normal life, provided that he takes proper care of himself.’

  So Cassie followed this advice through, sending Mattie to a normal school and allowing him to engage in whatever activities he wished to. And like so many other asthmatics, such was his determination to overcome his disability that he became a very good all-round sportsman, excelling particularly and surprisingly at athletics. Cassie and Josephine were always delighted with his successes, particularly when they remembered how as a little boy he could barely run across the nursery without an attack of ‘the wheezles’.

  He was, however, no scholar, and although the thing he wanted to be more than anything else in the world was a vet, he failed to achieve the necessary academic qualifications.

  It was Sheila Meath who suggested the trip to Australia.

  ‘His passion is for animals, that we know,’ she’d told Cassie. ‘Particularly horses, and that you didn’t know.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ Cassie had agreed, somewhat surprised. ‘I knew how he’d set his heart on becoming a vet, but he’s always adopted a rather take-
it-or-leave-it attitude as far as horses in particular are concerned.’

  ‘Yes, but for goodness sake that’s only a smoke screen, Cassie,’ Sheila had continued. ‘When they were growing up, it was always Josephine who was going to be the horsey one, winning the Grand National, or jumping for Ireland in the Olympics. Mattie deliberately took a back seat there, because of his health. And now of course he won’t tell you what he really wants to do, because it just looks as though he’s jumping on the band wagon.’

  ‘You’re telling me he wants to train?’

  ‘More than anything. But more than anything, he wants to train independently.’

  And so it was arranged that Mattie should go and learn the ropes with one of Sheila Meath’s many relatives who were dotted all around the globe. This particular nephew was one of Australia’s most successful trainers, but such was Sheila’s persistence that he was soon persuaded to take Mattie on as a trainee assistant, with the proviso that there’d be no favours, and Mattie would have to start where everyone else did: at the bottom.

  Mattie had found it hard at first, which was really the whole idea of the exercise. He rang home constantly during the first three months, and although he never said so in as many words, it was perfectly obvious that if Cassie had weakened, or hinted that if it was too much for him he could bale out and come home, Mattie would have been on the next plane. But Cassie held on. Even though it broke her heart to hear how brave her son was being while obviously so lonely, prompted by Sheila she just pretended that all was for the best, and fed him bromide after bromide over the phone about distances and absences and character-building.

  ‘I don’t know how I’d have handled it without you,’ Cassie told Sheila. ‘Not having had parents in the accepted sense, I guess I find it harder than most trying to do the best thing.’

  After six months the telephone stopped ringing, and it was as much as Cassie could do to get a letter back from him. Sheila, however, got the odd ‘confidential’ report from her nephew, and although never a man to squander praise, it was perfectly apparent that young Mattie was earning his stripes.