Cassidy Lovelace Ward paid a decorator to make attractive the bed-sitting room, bathroom and kitchen that had been fitted into an unused end of the stable block, but Mona, uncomfortable with even minimum luxury, preferred a creaky journey by bicycle morning and evening from her two-down two-up independence. Cassidy without irritation let her do as she liked.
Cassidy herself went routinely by limousine to studios in London where music, not horses, occupied most hours of her week. She rehearsed; she made recordings. She patiently submitted to costume fittings. She accepted without resistance the chauffeur and bodyguard required by her cautious insurance company. She repressed a thousand snappy words.
Oliver drove himself to horse shows in a sturdy dark red four-wheel-drive Range Rover, sending Mona on ahead with the horses. Oliver signed endless autograph books, fretted when he didn’t win and suffered all the angst of a perfectionist.
In spite of their public fame, both Oliver and Cassidy valued private time together, not just, it must be admitted, for endless love, but for the freedom of shouting at each other in bad-tempered rows. They yelled at each other not about money or from any resentment of the other’s fame, but mostly from too much tension in their work. Tiny frustrations would set them off. Doors were slammed. Vases were thrown. Anyone overhearing them would have nodded sagely: the unlikely marriage was over.
But it wasn’t. The sulks evaporated into steam. Oliver stamped about. Cassidy played her piano fortissimo. Eventually they laughed. The roller-coaster screeching emotions, however, had caused their cook to leave, and they’d never replaced her. They ate instead from take-aways. They had nutritionists swooning but Oliver soared clear over double-oxers, and Cassidy outsang the birds.
Mona walked into an especially vicious row one evening to tell Oliver the grey had heat in a tendon. Mona, astounded, stood stock still in surprise with her mouth open, listening to the noise.
‘Don’t just bloody stand there,’ Oliver shouted at her. ‘Make us some bloody supper.’
‘She’s not the sucking cook,’ Cassidy yelled.
‘She can put a couple of sucking eggs together, can’t she?’
So Mona made omelettes. Mona made three omelettes at her employers’ invitation and ate with them at the kitchen table. Oliver at length grinned at her and finally laughed.
No arrangement was actually formalised, but from time to time after that Mona cooked while the other two yawned and unwound and saw less and less to quarrel about. Mona with her wrinkled country face, her uncompromising accent, with the smell of stables that clung about her clothes, all the unpolished components somehow bled away the artificiality of her employers’ lives and gave them a murmuring peace that lasted to bedtime.
Mona thought of them as fractious horses needing her soothing arts. Their fame in the outside world came to mean little to her: they were Oliver and Cassidy, her people. Oliver and Cassidy, on their side, could hardly imagine life without her. The three of them settled contentedly into a routine that suited them all.
Joanie Vine and Peregrine decided not to try for children, and among Joanie’s many and jumbled reasons there was definitely the miserly pleasure that Mona would be deprived of being a grandmother. Never would she — Joanie — have to explain Mona away to inquisitive and talkative offspring.
Peregrine didn’t like babies, toddlers, teenagers, adolescents or any stage in between. Peregrine heard boys being rude to their fathers and delicately shuddered. Peregrine couldn’t understand how people could let themselves in for the worries of medical problems, school fees, drug taking and lying accusations of sexual abuse. Peregrine liked a peaceful house, gracious entertaining and money.
Ever more pompous, Peregrine also succeeded in forgetting for weeks at a time his lovely wife’s true origins. Joanie invented a set of aristocratic forebears and convinced herself they were real.
Each of the five souls, Peregrine, Joanie, Oliver, Cassidy Lovelace and Mona Watkins lived for one long summer in personally satisfactory equilibrium. Each in his or her own way enjoyed success. Oliver collected champion’s rosettes and armfuls of cups. Cassidy’s new album hit platinum again. Mona, glowing with reflected pride in the horses, spent lightheartedly on new tyres for her bicycle. The chestnut, the big grey and the whippy bay did her proud.
Peregrine’s auctions became social events: Sotheby’s and Christie’s paid attention. Joanie, tall and truly arresting in sumptuous (rented) ball-gowns, graced the colour pages of heavy shiny magazines.
Mona, artlessly proud of her daughter, snipped out the multiplying pictures and kept them in a box along with many clippings extolling Cassidy’s silver voice and Oliver’s equine golds.
Mona wrote a shakily literate note to Joanie describing her happy life with the Bolingbrokes, including the cooking sessions in the kitchen. Joanie tore up the letter and didn’t reply.
Because of her undaunted pride, which Joanie didn’t deserve, Mona strapped her box onto her bicycle carrier one day when she rode to work and showed the contents to Cassidy.
‘This is your daughter?’ Cassidy asked, surprised.
‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ Mona beamed.
‘It says here,’ Cassidy read, ‘that she’s related to the Earls of Flint.’
‘That’s just her way,’ Mona explained forgivingly. ‘She was plain Joanie Watkins by birth. Her dad was a stable-lad, same as me. Got killed on the gallops, poor old boy.’
Cassidy told Oliver about the pictures and out of curiosity Oliver wrote to Peregrine — care of Peregrine Vine and Co., Quality Auctioneers — and invited him and his wife to lunch.
Joanie at once told Peregrine she didn’t want to go, but then reconsidered. To have met — to have lunched with Oliver and Cassidy Bolingbroke — would give her splendid name-dropping opportunities. Mona’s existence could safely and totally be ignored.
Mona wished Oliver had consulted her first, but in both men curiosity overcame doubt. On the appointed day, the Vines in their Mercedes drove into the large stable-yard where the Bolingbrokes and Mona awaited them.
Oliver knew at once that he’d made a serious mistake when he heard Joanie superciliously call her mother ‘Mona’, and saw her frostily repel Mona’s attempt at an embrace, but with worldly civility he ignored the awkward moment and swept everyone into the drawing-room for a drink before food. Peregrine, Oliver noted with a wince, ran a practised glance over the furniture, assessing its worth.
Mona, hanging back, was firmly collected by Cassidy linking an arm through hers. Cassidy too realised the occasion to be a disaster. Mona’s reluctance had been right.
Mona, doing her best, wore clean corduroy trousers and a white blouse pinned above the top button by her ultimate in soigné dressing, a small pearl brooch. Cassidy melted with pity for her, and plunged, like Oliver, into regret.
After stilted minutes of conversation between the two men (chiefly about the difference in sales routine of commodes and colts) Cassidy grimly but with surface gaiety moved her guests into the dining-room where places at table in silver and crystal had been laid for five.
Joanie said without thinking, ‘So you’re expecting another guest?’
‘No,’ replied Cassidy puzzled, ‘just us.’
‘But surely,’ Joanie’s eyebrows rose, ‘Mona will be eating in the kitchen, as usual.’
Even Joanie saw, in the sudden frozen immobility of her hosts, that she’d committed the worst sort of social-climbing blunder. She said helplessly, ‘I mean... I mean...’ but her assumption and its expression were plain and couldn’t be undone.
Peregrine nervously cleared his throat, thinking numbly for something — anything — to say.