‘But you know she’s the mother,’ Sheila argued.
‘Sure I do,’ Cassie replied. ‘And she knows who was the father.’
There was no difficulty at all in locating Antoinette Brookes, now Mrs Bill Canford-Percy, the wife of a gentleman farmer and Master of Fox Hounds in south-west England.
‘She’ll be only too pleased to see old friends,’ her rather deaf mother had told Cassie on the telephone. ‘She needs all the visitors she can get these days.’
Cassie set off to visit her, assuming from her mother’s remarks that Antoinette was probably suffering from the usual loneliness which afflicted certain women when they were uprooted to live in the deepest parts of the countryside. Cassie’s theory was given more credibility when on arrival Cassie discovered the remoteness of the Canford-Percys’ residence. It was a huge, bleak Victorian mansion, set at the end of a long unmade road five miles from the nearest village in a little known part of Somerset.
Her mother opened the door. Inside, the house was just like Claremore had been when Cassie first moved in.
‘Bill’s sorry to have missed you,’ Mrs Brookes said as she led Cassie along a dark corridor towards a small room at the end. ‘But he’s off shooting somewhere.’
‘I don’t know your son-in-law,’ Cassie explained. ‘I only know your daughter, and that’s from over twenty years ago.’
Mrs Brookes stopped and stared up at Cassie in the gloom.
‘Twenty years ago, did you say?’
‘That’s right, Mrs Brookes.’
‘Humphrey and I were in Baden-Baden, I think, twenty years ago.’
Mrs Brookes stared at Cassie once more, as if she was going to add something more, then deciding against it, opened the door of a small, over-heated sitting room.
By the fireplace, in a wheelchair, sat the quite unrecognisable figure of Mattie’s mother.
‘Someone to see you, Piglet,’ her mother said. ‘A friend from the old days.’
Then she turned and put a hand on Cassie’s arm.
‘I’ll go and make us all some tea,’ she said, and went, closing the door behind her.
The woman in the wheelchair didn’t move. Looking at her, Cassie doubted that even had she wished to do so, she would not have been able. Her head was bent at right angles to her chest, so that her chin rested on the top of her sternum, and even through her thick cardigan and the shawl round her shoulders, Cassie could see the very visible deformation of her spinal column. Her legs were covered with a blanket and her hands lay uselessly crippled in her lap.
‘Antoinette?’ Cassie asked quietly as she sat down opposite her. ‘Antoinette? Can you hear me?’
Antoinette didn’t move. Cassie got out of her chair and knelt down directly in her eye line.
‘Can you see me?’ she asked.
The eyes were the only part of the woman that moved in reply. They moved up and down in their sockets.
‘Can you hear me?’
Again the eyes moved up and down.
‘Do you recognise me?’
This time the eyes moved from side to side. Cassie then sat on the floor, where Antoinette could clearly see her and explained who she was, and from where they had known each other. When she finished, she asked Antoinette if she understood and remembered. But the eyes didn’t move.
Cassie explained again. More slowly, and in even simpler terms. But the eyes still didn’t move.
‘You don’t remember who I am?’ Cassie asked once more.
The pale green eyes stared back at her, almost as if they knew her well, then moved slowly once, from side to side.
The mother came back into the room with a tray of tea, just as Cassie was picking herself up off the floor and sitting back in her chair.
‘That’s it,’ Mrs Brookes said, putting the tea tray down. ‘Having a good talk about the old days.’
Refusing the rather dubious-looking scones, but accepting a cup of greyish tea, Cassie asked Antoinette’s mother how much her daughter remembered. She had to ask twice and raise her voice considerably to get an answer.
‘How much does she remember?’ Mrs Brookes replied. ‘Everything. Absolutely everything.’
‘She doesn’t remember who I am,’ Cassie ventured.
‘She remembers everything from yesterday like it was today,’ the old lady continued, not in direct response. ‘I’ll ask her what we heard on the radio, I’ll say was it “Woman’s Hour”? Yes, she’ll say. And it will have been.’
‘She can talk then?’
‘Or was it “The World At One”, perhaps. Or “Morning Concert”. You can’t catch her out.’
‘But can she talk?’ Cassie said, raising her voice once more, almost in desperation.
Mrs Brookes looked at Cassie over her teacup, which she then put carefully down on a table.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘No not really. Not in so many words.’
Antoinette remembered nothing except the events of the day before. Locked in that once beautiful head, now bowed permanently over her chest, was the truth Cassie sought, but which Antoinette could never reveal to her. Cassie moved her chair nearer and put her hands on Antoinette’s.
‘She probably won’t be able to feel that,’ her mother said. ‘But she can see it all right. She says everything with her eyes. Tell her all about the times you had together. She’d like that. She does love her visitors.’
She could hardly talk about the times they’d had together in front of a mother who had known nothing of her daughter’s child. So Cassie started to tell her all about Claremore instead.
But Antoinette’s mother must have sensed something, because Cassie had hardly begun to talk, when the old lady put a hand on Cassie’s arm.
‘Nothing about horses, mind,’ she said. ‘You do know that, of course. Being an old friend.’
So it had been the result of a riding accident, Cassie concluded, as she sat talking about nothing in particular, to someone who had no idea at all who she was. And the more she talked, the more she became aware of the irony that the creatures to whom she had dedicated her existence, were responsible for the death of her husband, and by some frightful accident now prevented her from finding out the truth about her son’s paternity.
She stayed with Antoinette until well into the evening, spending the last hour listening to a play on the radio, because she could feel the woman’s unspoken need for Cassie to delay her departure. Finally, when Antoinette fell asleep, her mother rose and nodded to Cassie.
‘That was very kind of you,’ she said as they walked to the front door. ‘Most people find ten minutes quite long enough. And it will give us both so much to talk about tomorrow.’
‘Was it a hunting accident?’ Cassie enquired, observing all the sporting prints and the fox heads on the walls.
‘It was a hunting accident,’ Mrs Brookes replied. ‘The second year of their marriage. She jumped a hedge blind, which dropped eight foot on to a main road. Jumped right into the path of an oil tanker. Never really liked hunting, you know. But of course, Bill . . . His father had been MFH, and his father before him. Terrible business altogether. Saddest of all, poor girl lost the baby she was carrying as well. I often think, if only they could have saved her baby.’
The old lady looked up at Cassie and smiled at her so sweetly that Cassie wanted to gather her in her arms and tell her that there was a baby of her daughter’s, that he had been a beautiful baby, an angelic child, and that now he was a full-grown and handsome young man.
Instead she returned the smile, shook Mrs Brookes by the hand, and walked away back to her car in the pouring rain.
Sheila had been right. Nothing had been gained from it. Cassie knew this the moment she crossed back over the threshold of Claremore and embraced her children.
‘Oh my God,’ Mattie groaned. ‘You’d think she’d been away for years. Instead of a few days.’
But the children were well used to Cassie’s absences, as much as they were to her emotional reconciliations.
‘What were you doing anyway?’ Mattie asked. ‘Buying?’
‘No,’ said Cassie. ‘Looking.’
‘And did you find what you were looking for?’
‘No, Mattie. I didn’t. But then that’s not always such a bad thing.’
But if Cassie was doing her best to put the troublesome matter out of her mind, someone else was not.
Leonora called one morning early in the New Year.
‘Sorry you couldn’t make it to my party,’ she said down the telephone.
‘It wasn’t a question of couldn’t, Leonora,’ Cassie replied. ‘More one of wouldn’t.’
Leonora ignored the put-down.
‘There were lots of interesting people there,’ she continued blithely. ‘Not ones who can only talk pasterns and fetlocks, and who’s out of what by whom. I mean really interesting people.’
‘Sure,’ Cassie replied. ‘The sort of people who talk about who’s having who, and with whom.’
‘Gracious me,’ Leonora laughed mockingly. ‘Don’t tell me at last you’re developing a dirty mind. I’ll tell you who was at the party. A guy who was in Thailand with Gerry Secker.’
Cassie waited a moment before replying.
‘Why should I want to know that?’ Cassie asked evenly.
‘Oh because I heard tell you were looking for Gerry.’
‘Who told you?’
‘You won’t find him,’ Leonora replied. ‘He’s dead.’
She put the telephone down before Cassie could ask any further questions. For one moment, Cassie was tempted to pick up the telephone and call Leonora back at once, to demand an explanation. Then she realised that would be playing right into Leonora’s hands, so instead she called Bunbury and took him out for a long walk up the hills.
As she walked, with the dog running ahead of her up the track, barking joyfully with the sheer exhilaration of being alive, Cassie decided to put any further thoughts as to Mattie’s parentage from her mind. She knew that Leonora was out to worry her, and although she had no idea at all as to why, she determined to let the question of whether or not Tyrone had fathered Mattie remain unanswered. In one way she saw it would be better if he had, because at least Cassie would know what sort of person her adopted son’s father had been. He would have been the man she loved, and not a rather unpleasant, selfish and wayward young blood; Mattie at least would have the blood of Tyrone coursing through his veins. And if that indeed was the fact of the matter, Cassie knew it was one with which she could learn to live, and eventually for which she most probably would grow thankful.
But could she learn to live with the fact that Tyrone had lied to her? That was something with which, however long and far she walked her beloved dog, Cassie could not yet come to terms.
Towards the end of February, The Nightingale returned from his Italian winter holiday. He had wintered well, and when Cassie supervised the horse’s unloading, she was once more grateful that Tyrone had gone to school on the wisdom of the great Vincent O’Brien, who had first pointed out the efficacy of sending top horses away for the worst of the winter. He’d gone on record as saying that the Italians had been sending their horses to Pisa for generations, and because of the mild Mediterranean climate, with none of the debilitating cold winds suffered by Ireland and England, horses did tremendously well out there.
And The Nightingale, once they got his rugs off, proved no exception.
‘He looks as if he’ll be ready to race by April,’ Mattie said, running his hand along the horse’s neck and quarters. ‘And I’ll tell you something else, Ma. This is quite some horse.’
Josephine had returned to England to publicise the launch of her television series, and Mattie was now officially the assistant trainer at Claremore. It had been agreed between mother and son that Mattie should stay on to gain the necessary first-hand experience of training in Ireland before setting himself up on his own.
Over dinner that night, both delighted with Nightie’s well-being, the plan for the big campaign was discussed. If the horse came easily to hand, then it was agreed he should have just the one run before going to Newmarket for the 2,000 Guineas.
‘If you take in the English rather than the Irish 2,000,’ Mattie said, ‘you do know that means a head-to-head with Millstone Grit?’
‘We’re going to have to take him on sometime, Mattie,’ Cassie replied.
‘We’d win our own 2,000 with the horse in gumboots.’
‘If Nightie’s as good as I think, then I want him to do it the traditional way. The English 2,000, the Epsom Derby, the King George and Queen Elizabeth, and then either the Leger, or the Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe.’
‘Anything else you’d like for Christmas?’ laughed Mattie.
‘This isn’t for me, Mattie,’ Cassie answered. ‘You know who this is for.’
And as she looked across the kitchen table at her son, she found herself looking into her late husband’s eyes.
March for once was mild and warm, so spring was early, and all the horses that had wintered abroad came to hand early as hoped. By the end of the second week. of the month, Dexter, who had now moved out into a cottage on the edge of the village, arrived to start riding The Nightingale at work. He was more impressed than ever with the big horse.
‘OK, so we’re really in business, Guv’nor,’ he told Cassie with a cheerful grin, as he vaulted lightly off the horse on the gallops, to allow the youngster a pick of fresh grass.
‘Did you ever doubt it for a moment?’ Cassie asked, walking round the horse, checking his legs.
‘Some of the horses,’ Dex replied, shaking his head, ‘they’re one-year wonders. You know that as well as I do. Brilliant two-year-olds, and they just don’t train on. But this fellah – boy. I’m just dying to press the go button.’
‘I don’t want you to do that yet, Dex,’ Cassie told him. ‘We’re going for the Gladness, not the Ascot Guineas Trial, and if he’s the horse we think, I don’t want to see it. I want him to win cleverly.’
‘You don’t want to show your hand,’ Dexter nodded. ‘OK.’
‘No,’ Cassie finished. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to show my hand. It’s an early April race, and I don’t want you raiding the locker. I want the horse to have an easy race, so that he thinks, great, racing’s still a nice experience. I’ve seen a lot of really good three-year-olds lose interest just like that, because of one tough race that came that bit too early.’
Just over two weeks later, Cassie began to get the measure of the opposition. Millstone Grit started firm favourite for the Ascot 2,000 Guineas, and galloped home in record time, slaughtering four other English-bred Guineas hopes. Excuses were made by the beaten horses’ connections that their animals were still backward, but as Cassie, Dex and Mattie could see from the videotape of the afternoon’s racing, the only reason all the other horses lost was because they were beaten by an exceptional animal.
‘Just when it was looking so goddam easy,’ Dex sighed, watching the slow-motion replay. ‘He galloped them stupid.’
Cassie looked at her stopwatch and the notes she’d made.
‘His split timings are pretty interesting,’ she told them. ‘They bear out exactly what you say about galloping them dead. He does all his best work early on in the race, and in fact his last furlong is one of his slowest. But by then he’s got ’em all ringing the undertaker. He could come home turning somersaults.’
‘Ssshhh,’ said Mattie. ‘They’re just going to talk to the trainer.’
The interviewer introduced Jonathan Keating, a tall and very debonair man, who affected an ultra-laid-back image, but in fact was one of the turf’s few real geniuses.
‘Well, Jonathan,’ the interviewer started, ‘it looks as though you’ve got a really good one here.’
‘Yes, it does, doesn’t it?’ Keating answered, with a smile.
‘How good?’
‘How long’s a piece of string, Julian?’
The interviewer grinned, but was well use
d to Keating’s apparently flippant approach.
‘He looks good enough to win a Guineas to me,’ Julian Wilson replied.
‘Then perhaps you should take out a training licence,’ Keating told him, poker-faced.
‘Seriously.’
‘He was a very good two-year-old, and now he looks as if he’ll make a very good three-year-old. He’ll certainly have a go for the Guineas.’
‘With The Nightingale as his most serious rival, I suppose.’
‘The Nightingale and the French horse, Pastiche. And you can’t rule out Never Mind. If ever a horse was purpose-bred to win a Guineas, it’s him.’
‘What about the Derby?’
‘Let’s get Newmarket out of the way first, shall we?’
Julian Wilson thanked Millstone Grit’s trainer and turned back to the camera.
‘If Jonathan Keating gets any more laid back,’ Mattie said, ‘he won’t be able to get up in the morning.’
‘Who does own Millstone Grit?’ Cassie asked, looking for the newspaper. ‘I guess I’ve become a typical trainer. I never look to see who the owner is.’
‘A fellow American,’ said Dex, flicking open another Diet Coke. ‘Whatsisname.’
‘If you both stop talking,’ Mattie complained, ‘we might actually get to hear.’
‘. . . who’s here today to see her horse win, without her husband,’ Julian Wilson concluded his introduction to the winning owner, ‘who’s abroad in the Middle East on business.’
‘Jesus,’ Mattie hissed, forcing Cassie to look up as the camera cut to a beautiful woman standing by the interviewer. ‘Jesus God – look! It’s Leobloodynora!’
The tape stopped there, as Cassie had left it timed only for the big race. Mattie wound the tape back a little way until he found the single of Leonora smiling as she was introduced. Then he froze the frame to a still, and leaning forward covered Leonora’s smile with one hand.
Over his hand, Leonora’s grey-blue eyes stared at them coldly without one iota of warmth.
‘I’d say the eyes have it,’ Mattie said, turning to his mother with a grin. ‘Wouldn’t you, Guv’nor?’
To Hear a Nightingale Page 68