Oliver, by far the fastest thinker, stirred and laughed and exclaimed, ‘Cass, my dear, what a splendid suggestion of Joanie’s. Let’s all eat with Mona in the kitchen, as we usually do. Let’s all pick up our plates and napkins and glasses and carry them through to the kitchen.’
He collected together the things laid for him at the head of the table and gestured to the others to follow him. Then, cheerfully mustering his troops, he led the way, head high, through the swing door giving on to the spacious, homely room where, indeed, he and Cassidy familiarly ate with Mona.
The lunch, none the less, was an overall ordeal. No one regretted the Vines’ early departure, cheese uneaten on the side plates and coffee undrunk. Oliver apologised to Mona before the Vines’ Mercedes had cleared the front gates, but Mona, ever quick to pardon, worried about the debacle least of all.
Cassidy Lovelace Ward led a double existence, as performer and wife. At first she had indeed been powerfully sexually attracted by Oliver’s looks, bearing and skill on a horse. She knew, being no novice in life, that it was her own feelings for Oliver that had roused a similar response in him. The media, cynically observing the physical magnetics, should not have been wrong in prophesying rapid boredom and farewells but, to their mutual surprise, horseman and singer slowly became deep and trusting friends.
Cassidy, when they met, had been almost constantly on tour across her homeland, singing the Mississippi River songs of Nashville, Tennessee. She travelled by bus with manager, musicians and backing group. Props, scenery, lights, dresser and wardrobe followed along. The whole enterprise depended on her for genius, energy and pulling power, and indeed she could, like all great performers, light up from inside and take her audience flying.
The process exhausted her. Oliver had almost fallen over her one night as she sat on a wicker chest, a wardrobe skip, outside the great touring bus that would presently take her overnight to the next town, to the next rehearsal, the next hungry, roaring, applauding multitude of fans.
Oliver’s presence had been the result of someone’s bright idea that Cassidy could for that one evening’s performance ride out on stage in Western clothes, cowboy boots, white ten-gallon hat and clinking spurs. The manager, horse-illiterate, had engaged a lively show-jumper for her, not a lethargic nag. Oliver, house-guest of the horse’s owner, had been good-naturedly thrown in with the package and asked to look after the lady. Thanks to his condensed instruction, Cassidy’s debut on horseback had gone well.
‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘We can rent a horse in every town.’
He sat beside her on the wicker skip and said, ‘It’s not my sort of life.’
‘Too honky-tonk, is that it?’
She had finished the tour and gone to live Oliver’s sort of life in England: and when that life hadn’t been enough she’d amalgamated the old ways with the new, and still glittered on stage in crystal fringes and brought crowds breathless to their feet. Music pulsed in her always. She saw life’s dramas in chords. On the afternoon of the appalling lunch party Cassidy played Chopin’s lament for Poland passionately on her piano and promised herself that one day she would get Joanie Vine to value her remarkable mother.
Oliver, passing, understood both the music and Cassidy’s meaning.
He said, however, ‘Why don’t you write a song yourself, especially for Mona? You used to write more.’
‘Audiences like the old songs.’
‘Old songs were new once.’
Cassidy made a face at him and played old songs because she had no inspiration for the new.
Mona comforted Cassidy and Oliver, both of whom were downcast by their blighted hospitality and dumbfounded by Joanie’s brutal contempt for her mother.
Mona resignedly said she’d been used to it ever since Joanie hadn’t asked her to her wedding. Oliver and Cassidy would have throttled Joanie, if she’d still been there.
‘Don’t think about her,’ Mona told them. ‘I expect I couldn’t give her enough when she was little. I hadn’t much money, see. I expect that’s it. And anyway,’ she added, no fool where it mattered, ‘I’m not going to spoil her life now, am I, by walking into those grand balls she puts on and saying I’m her Mam, now am I? I wouldn’t thank you to do that, either. Let her be, if she’s happy, that’s what I say.’
‘You’re a saint, Mona,’ Oliver said.
It took a little while, several weeks in fact, for Oliver, Cassidy and Mona to feel comfortable again about supper in the kitchen, and meanwhile the Bolingbrokes’ quarrels broke out as before with fierce shouting rows and airborne ornaments. Mona, hearing Oliver’s voice heavily finding fault and Cassidy’s screaming defiance, walked sturdily into the kitchen after work one evening and stood there disapprovingly with her hands on her hips.
Her arrival silenced the combatants for about ten seconds, then Oliver growled, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing in here?’
‘Sucking eggs?’ Mona suggested.
‘Oh God,’ Cassidy began to giggle. Oliver strode disgustedly out of the room but presently returned with a grin and three glasses of whisky. Mona made omelettes, and Cassidy told her that the quarrel had been about a long tour she — Cassidy — was about to make in America. She would be away from home for two months and Oliver didn’t like it.
‘Go with her, boy-o,’ Mona said.
With peace and reason they formed a plan. Oliver would fulfil his showing and eventing obligations for the first month and travel with Cassidy for the second month, returning home with her in November. Mona would then move into the living-quarters in the stable, to look after the place, and, for the month he was away, Oliver would engage a secondary groom to help her.
‘It’s all so simple,’ Oliver sighed. ‘Why did we fight?’
While the Bolingbrokes were still engaged on cheese and thinking about Häagen Dazs, their long-time lawyer called in (by forgotten appointment) to secure their signatures on complicated trust fund arrangements.
Oliver went to the front door to welcome him and brought him into the kitchen, where his urbanity, like Oliver’s, at once understood the inner worth, ignoring the outer rustic uncouthness, of the third individual at the table.
Mona, in her heavy Welsh accent, instantly offered to leave. The lawyer, with all of Oliver’s civility, begged her not to. A witness to the signatures was essential. Mona cleared away the supper and wrote her name on dotted lines.
‘And now,’ the lawyer said lightheartedly, ‘now, Mrs Watkins, how about some arrangements for you, too?’
Mona, bewildered, asked about what.
‘A will?’ the lawyer suggested. ‘If you haven’t made a will, let’s do it now.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ urged Oliver, who had wanted to reward Mona for her signature without insulting her. ‘Everyone should make a will.’
‘I did talk about it once,’ Mona said. ‘Peregrine wanted me to leave everything to Joanie.’
The lawyer smoothly brought a printed basic will form from out of his loaded briefcase and smilingly entered on it, to her dictation, Mona’s name and address.
Then ball-point poised, he asked her for her beneficiaries.
‘What?’ Mona asked.
‘The people you want to inherit your individual things after your death.’
‘Like my bicycle,’ Mona nodded. ‘Well...’ She paused. ‘...well, Joanie wouldn’t want my old bike. I’d just ask Cass or Oliver to give my old bike to someone as needs it. What if I just ask them to do as they like with my old bits and pieces?’
The lawyer wrote, ‘Cassidy Lovelace Ward’ in the slot for ‘sole beneficiary’ and he and Oliver accompanied Mona on her bicycle down to the local pub on her way home and got two strangers there to witness Mona’s signature, thanked by pints of beer.