Peregrine, Joanie had informed her mother, came from a ‘good family’. Peregrine, who spoke upper-class English with no lilt or inflection of Wales, soon had Joanie copying him. Joan (he never called or referred to her as Joanie) had grown tall and big bosomed and beautiful, and Peregrine, although his parents had hoped for an heiress, willingly agreed to Joanie’s terms of marriage before sex. He saw the ultimatum as morality, not leverage.
Joanie, by then living away from home and queening it in a flower shop, told Peregrine and his parents that her mother was ‘eccentric’ and a ‘recluse’, and didn’t want to meet them. Peregrine and his parents resentfully believed her.
Joanie didn’t invite her mother to the wedding. Joanie not only didn’t ask her but didn’t even tell her that her only child would be heading up the aisle in full bridal fig. Joanie deliberately denied her mother her big day of maternal pride and happiness. She sent her a postcard view from Venice: ‘Married Peregrine last Saturday, Joanie.’
Mona stoically propped the Doge’s Palace on her mantleshelf and toasted the match in beer.
It wasn’t until months later that Peregrine met Joanie’s earthy mother, and experienced at first hand the clothes, the voice and the occupation: the lot. He was, as Joanie had known he would be, horrified. His instinct, like Joanie’s own, was to keep the embarrassment hidden. They moved to the next town. Peregrine advanced in his career and Joanie joined a showy tennis club. Their social aspirations soared.
Mona, living as always in the two-up two-down terraced cottage that had once been Joanie’s home, continued to ride her creaky old bicycle morning and evening to work in a children’s riding school, where she looked after a row of hard-worked ponies. One evening she cycled into the stable-yard to find the riding school owner dead on the ground of a heart attack, several children screaming and the stables on fire.
Mona coped: saved the ponies, quietened the children, called the fire brigade, covered the frightening body with her old raincoat and became a bit of a heroine on television and in the press.
‘Mona Watkins, mother of Mrs Joan Vine, well-known wife of prestigious auctioneer, Peregrine.’
Mona, standing in her cottage doorway, cheerfully announced on screen in her broad Welsh accent that she was ‘ever so proud of my daughter Joanie, look you.’
Horrors. Cringe.
It was in an attempt to prove publicly that Joanie valued her mother that she had announced grandiloquently that she would take her to the races to celebrate her sixtieth birthday.
One morning after her day at the races Mona Watkins hummed tunelessly to herself as she groomed the chestnut champion show-jumper now in her care.
She hummed with the flutter of the lips that prevented most of the dust from the chestnut’s shiny coat going down into her lungs. She hummed in the old way of centuries of ostlers and, like them, from time to time, she spat.
She very much liked her new employers who had actively sought her out in consequence of the publicity given to the riding school fire. Out of work for three weeks since the ponies had been dispersed and sold, she had opened her cottage door one day to a summons on the knocker and had found on the pavement outside a man and a woman whom she recognised with incredulity as the Olympic Gold-Medal rider Oliver Bolingbroke and his platinum-album-selling Country and Western singer wife, American and friendly Cassidy Lovelace Ward.
Once, the month-long courtship and impulsive marriage of these two had been cynically categorised by the media as mere attention-seeking. Four years of steady devotion later, the world found it hard to think of one without the other.
The luminous pair had come in a black stretch limousine that had magnetically drawn many of the drab street’s inhabitants out of their front doors; and they were carefully accompanied by a black uniformed chauffeur and a wary bodyguard whose watchful gaze swung around like a radar beam searching for a blip.
‘Mrs Mona Watkins?’ Oliver Bolingbroke enquired.
Mona speechlessly opened her mouth and nodded.
‘Can we come in?’
Mona backed into her tiny front room and her visitors followed. They saw a way of life utterly alien to their own carefree prosperity but were also instantly aware of order, cleanliness and pride. Mona gestured them to her two fireside chairs and numbly closed her door.
Oliver Bolingbroke, tall, lean and wealthily civilised, made a slow visual traverse of the pink rose-bud wallpaper, the linoleum on the floor, the peacock blue satin cushions on the rusty-brown chairs, the unlined floral curtains at the window. No money and no taste, he thought, but that didn’t mean no heart. He was good at estimating worth. He had also checked on Mona’s reputation as a groom and had heard nothing but praise. She was uncouth, he’d been warned. One would go to her in trouble, but not for advice on manners.
‘My husband has show-jumpers,’ the singer straightforwardly said. Dressed in ordinary jeans with a topping of a huge cream hand-knitted sweater, Cassidy Lovelace Ward, with tousled blonde curls and soft pink lipstick, looked both informal and purposefully glamorous, a combination that Mona, in her forthright way, had no trouble at all feeling at home with. Mona took to Cassidy on a level far below surface gloss. Cassidy, sensing it, was, to her surprise, flattered. What both women saw unconsciously in the other was goodness.
Oliver Bolingbroke and his wife explained that they had recently bought a house with stables for three of his best horses a few miles out of town. Mona, who had seen the item in the local newspaper, nodded. The Bolingbrokes travelled a good deal, they said. Mrs Bolingbroke made tours and gave concerts. While they were away, they required a groom to live in quarters they were building in the stables. When Oliver Bolingbroke took his horses to distant or foreign competitions, he would require their familiar groom to travel with them.
Mona, they said, though not young, would suit them well.
‘I want to keep my little house,’ Mona said at once, meaning, ‘I want to keep my independence.’
‘Of course,’ Oliver agreed. ‘When can you start?’
So Mona hummed as she groomed the champion chestnut show-jumper (and the solidly muscled grey and the agile ten-year-old star of them all, the Olympic Gold-winning bay) and she talked to her charges in the homey way she’d used on the ponies — and on many a horse before them — but somehow these three, as she had sadly had to acknowledge to herself, tended to look at her down their medal-winning noses, as if she were their servant, not their friend.
Mona, instinctively wise, forgave them as sorrowfully as she bore no malice towards Joanie and Peregrine Vine.
Those two, finding (despite the Cheltenham races ploy) that their sanctimonious status was being irretrievably damaged by sneers and sniggers within their chosen precious circle, moved away yet again to another town and rose again in caste without having to mention at all that Joan’s mother worked knee-deep in horse manure. (Horse shit, Mona called it.) Peregrine became a chief auctioneer and patronised his clients. Joanie joined a charity committee of local ladies and helped to organise plushy fund-raising balls.
As weeks and months passed, Mona grew increasingly devoted to her employers while remaining merely dutiful to their horses. Oliver Bolingbroke found no fault or lack in the fitness of his three mounts as he schooled them patiently hour by hour: on the contrary, he felt inspired and reassured by their innate arrogance. Never before, he thought gratefully, had he employed as groom anyone who would preserve his mounts’ essential bloody-mindedness. No other groom had ever sent his horses out to competitions with such a determination to win.
Oliver Bolingbroke retained his reputation as one of the best horsemen in the country and kept quiet about Mona’s excellence for fear a competitor would entice her away.