There are crimes that aren’t punishable by imprisonment or fines. There’s no official offence called Grievous Mental Harm. Malice aforethought can apply to more than murder — but malice can be nonplussed by goodwill.
Song for Mona is a new story about an old old sin.
Joanie Vine accompanied her mother to the races and loathed every minute of it. Joanie Vine was ashamed of the way her mother dressed, spoke and lived; that is to say, she recoiled with averted eyes from the weathered tweed trilby above the tightly-belted raincoat; winced at the loud unreconstructed vowels and grammar of a Welsh woman from the valleys, and couldn’t bring herself to identify to others her mother’s occupation as a groom of horses.
Joanie Vine accompanied her mother to the first day of the Cheltenham Festival — one of the most prestigious jump meetings of the year — solely because it was her mother’s sixtieth birthday, and Joanie Vine aimed to receive admiring plaudits from her friends for her magnanimous thoughtfulness. Even before the first race she’d decided to lose her mother as soon as possible, but meanwhile she couldn’t understand why so many people instinctively smiled at the ill-dressed woman she had automatically relegated to one step behind her heels.
Mona Watkins — Joanie Vine’s mother — bore her daughter dutiful love and wouldn’t admit to herself that what Joanie felt for her was close to physical hatred. Joanie didn’t like Mona touching her and wriggled away from any attempt at a motherly hug. Mona, if she thought about it, though she didn’t often because of the regret it caused her, could blame Joanie’s progression from adolescent rebellion to active dislike on the advent in the local amateur dramatic society of a certain plump self-satisfied thirty-year-old smooth-tongued Peregrine Vine, assistant to auctioneers of antiques and fine arts.
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.
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.
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.
Cassidy supposed the least she could do for Mona was to distribute her ‘old bits and pieces’ as Mona would have liked, but hoped not to have to do it. Oliver came smiling back from the pub and took his wife to bed in splendid humour.
When the time came, Cassidy went on her lengthy tour in America. Oliver, though lonely, won a European Equus Grand Prix and was chosen as Sportstar of the Year. Mona, travelling with Oliver to look after the horses, thought she’d never been happier.
At the end of the first half of Cassidy’s tour, Oliver punctiliously settled Mona into the small apartment in the stables block and checked that the stand-in groom (a time-weathered nagsman even older than Mona) would arrive (on his own bike) every day to help exercise the horses. Mona with confidence sent Oliver off to join Cassidy and began to be seduced during the next few weeks by the refrigerator full of food, by the colour television, and by not having to put coins in a meter to pay for electricity to cook with, or to keep warm. Mona in her independent two-up two-down carefully paid rent for everything. She saved a little each week into a Christmas Club for ‘rainy days’. She had managed all her life on little.
Oliver, talking to Cassidy in America as they relaxed at the end of her sell-out triumphs before starting the long legs home, suggested that they should increase Mona’s wages when they got back.
‘We already pay her over the top for a groom.’
‘She’s worth more,’ Oliver said.
‘OK, then.’ Cassidy yawned. ‘And you need another horse... The brave big grey’s too old now, didn’t you say?’
Mona, half a world away, mucked out the heavy clever grey and sadly knew Oliver would sell him soon. He had reached fifteen and the spring was leaving his hocks.
Mona felt feverish and unwell as she worked on the grey, but paid no attention. Like all healthy people, she didn’t know when she was ill.
Eyeing her flushed face the next morning, the old nagsman said he would do the horses, and she was to go off on her bicycle to see the doctor. Mona felt unwell enough to do as he said, and learned with relief that what was wrong with her was ‘flu’.
‘There’s a lot of it about,’ the overworked doctor said. ‘Go to bed, drink a lot of fluids, you’ll soon feel better. ‘Flu’s a virus. I can’t give you a prescription to cure it, as antibiotics don’t work against a virus. Take aspirin. Keep warm. And drink a lot of water. Let me know if you cough a lot. You’re a healthy woman, Mrs Watkins. Go to bed, rest and drink water and you’ll be fine.’
Mona slowly cycled back to the Bolingbrokes’ yard and reported the diagnosis to her helper.
‘You go on to bed then right now,’ he insisted. ‘Leave the horses to me.’
Mona thankfully undressed into her warm nightgown and crawled between her sheets. The cycle ride had made her feel much worse. She remembered she should take aspirin, but she hadn’t any. She dozed and smilingly re-lived the faultless rounds of Oliver’s European Equus Grand Prix.
The old nagsman felt too shy and embarrassed to enter Mona’s little apartment, as her bed — in its bed-sitting room- was barely six feet from the outer door. He opened the door and spoke with her morning and evening though, through a slender crack, and when she seemed no livelier after three days he cycled to see the doctor himself.
‘Mrs Watkins? Flu takes time, you know.’ He turned pages in a meagre file. ‘I see she has a daughter, down here as ‘next of kin’, Mrs Peregrine Vine. Let’s enlist her help.’
Kind man that he was, he phoned Joanie himself to save the old nagsman’s pocket.
‘Flu!’ Joanie exclaimed. ‘I’m sure Mona’s perfectly all right, if you are looking after her.’
The doctor frowned. ‘She could do with some simple nursing. Change her sheets. Make her cups of tea. Give her orange drinks, or even beer. Things like that. It’s very important she drinks a lot. If you can—’
‘I can’t,’ Joanie interrupted. ‘I have committee meetings all day. I can’t put them off.’
‘But your mother—’
‘It’s too inconvenient,’ Joanie said positively. ‘Sorry.’
The doctor, shaking his head over his abruptly disconnected receiver, wrote Joanie’s phone number on one of his business cards and gave it to the nagsman.
On the following day the nagsman telephoned Joanie himself and told her that Mona was neither better nor worse, but needed her daughter’s company, he thought.
‘Why doesn’t Cassidy Bolingbroke look after her?’ Joanie asked. ‘She likes her well enough.’
The nagsman explained that Mrs Bolingbroke was on her way home from America, but wasn’t expected back for two more days.
‘Two days? That’s all right then,’ Joanie said, and put the phone down. She felt, in fact, relieved. The thought of nursing her mother, of having to make physical intimate contact with that old flesh, revolted her to nausea.
Mona, not unhappy, lay like a log in bed without any appetite for food or drink. She supposed vaguely that she would soon be better: meanwhile she’d sleep.
When the Bolingbrokes returned, Cassidy went into Mona’s room, which she found hot, fetid and airless, with Mona herself bloated and drifting in and out of consciousness on the bed. Cassidy did what she could for her, but in great alarm she and Oliver sent for the doctor. Anxiously he came at once and, having spent time with Mona, summoned an ambulance and repeated over and over to Cassidy and Oliver, ‘But I told her, I insisted she should drink fluids. She says she hasn’t drunk anything for a week. She hasn’t had the energy to make a cup of tea.’ There was despair in his voice. ‘I will have to alert Mrs Vine that we have a serious situation here... may I use your phone?’
Joanie, predictably, saw no reason for panic and said she was sure her mother was in good hands. The doctor raised his eyes to heaven and, despite everything that could be done, despite dialysis and drip and Cassidy’s prayers, Mona drifted quietly away altogether and died late that night in hospital from total kidney failure.
The hospital informed Joanie Vine of the death, not the Bolingbrokes. It was the doctor who told Oliver.
‘So unnecessary, poor lady. If only she’d drunk fluids. People don’t understand or realise the danger of dehydration...’
He was excusing himself, Oliver thought, but Mona had undoubtedly ignored his advice.
Oliver and Cassidy sat in the kitchen and grieved for their vital missing friend.
It was when the old nagsman told them about the doctor and himself phoning Joanie without results that the Bolingbrokes’ grief turned to fury.
‘Joanie killed her.’ Cassidy clenched her fists in outrage. ‘She literally killed her.’
Oliver more objectively thought Joanie hadn’t meant to: hadn’t known how her neglect would turn out. No court would convict her, even of involuntary manslaughter, let alone murder. No case would ever be brought.
Oliver, suddenly remembering Mona’s simple will, decided to consult her next door two-up two-down neighbour at once about what to do with Joanie’s ‘bits and pieces’, that she’d bequeathed to Cassidy. If the neighbour would welcome them, they would have found a good home. Leaving Cassidy upset in the house he drove his Range Rover into town and found a van of Peregrine’s firm — ‘Peregrine Vine and Co., Quality Auctioneers’ — parked outside Mona’s little cottage, with over-ailed workmen busily carrying out her pathetic goods and furniture, to load them for removal.
Mona’s neighbour, wearing curlers in her hair, bedroom slippers on her feet and a floral apron over her dress, stood shivering out in the November street, futile protest obvious in every muscle.
Oliver stopped the exodus and talked to the neighbour.
‘Mona had not been dead six hours,’ she said indignantly, ‘when Joanie herself came to pick through her mother’s things. It’s my belief she didn’t find what she came for. She was slamming things about and she drove off furious. That’s why they’re clearing out the house so fast now. Like hyenas, they are. Mona left her rent book with me, see, and the rent money for when she’s been away at your place. You don’t think that’s what they want, do you? It’s not very much. What shall I do about the rent?’
Oliver said he would see to the rent, and everything else. On his ultra light mobile phone, he reached Peregrine and explained to him the existence and provisions of Mona’s will. ‘So please instruct your men, my dear fellow,’ he said with courteous but inflexible authority, ‘to unload the van.’
Peregrine thought it over briefly and did as Oliver asked. He had sent the van at Joanie’s insistence, but she hadn’t explained the need for speed: it wasn’t as if Mona’s things were valuable, far from it. Joan (confided Peregrine to Oliver, man to man) sometimes got the bit between her teeth. She would be livid though, he privately realised, when she learned Mona had bequeathed her tatty old rubbish to someone else.
‘About Mona’s funeral,’ Oliver said, ‘Cassidy and I would like to attend. We were very fond of her, as you know.’
Peregrine asked which day would suit them.
‘Any day except this coming Wednesday,’ Oliver replied. ‘Cassidy is flying to Scotland for a concert on that day and I have a lunch-time speaking engagement which I cannot shift.’
‘It was Mona’s own fault she died,’ Peregrine said, suddenly defensive. ‘Joan offered to go and look after her, you know, but Mona didn’t want her. She phoned several times and told Joan to stay away. Very hurtful, Joan says.’
Oliver said thoughtfully, ‘There isn’t a telephone in that room where Mona was ill. It was very cold outside in the stable-yard, I believe, and it’s quite a step to any door into our house, which was unheated while we were away.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Where did Mona phone from?’
Peregrine’s silence lasted long enough for him to change the subject to photos of Joan in childhood. If Oliver found any...
‘I’m certain,’ Oliver assured him smoothly, ‘that Cassidy will give Joanie everything Mona would have liked her to have.’
‘Funeral any day but Wednesday,’ Peregrine confirmed, sounding almost friendly. ‘I’ll let you know.’
When Oliver reached home Cassidy was no longer hunched over the kitchen table but had moved to the drawing-room where she could let out her feelings on her piano.
Oliver sat quietly on the broad staircase from where he could listen to her without being seen. Cassidy sang a new song, a raw song, a song without many words, a song of sorrow in flats and minor intervals.
All good songs, she’d told Oliver once, were of love or longing or loss. Cassidy’s new song vibrated with all three.
She stopped playing abruptly and, finding Oliver on the stairs, sat down beside him.
‘What did you think?’ she asked.
‘Brilliant.’
‘It hasn’t a name yet...’
‘But you wrote it for Mona,’ Oliver completed.
‘Yes.’
With Oliver beside her, Cassidy took her half-defined melody next day to the musicians in her studio in London, where her often gloomy lyrics writer, captivated, gave it words of universal sadness and universal hope. Cassidy sang it heartbreakingly softly, under her breath. Everyone in the studio heard platinum in her throat.
Cassidy, always bone-weary after creative sessions, slept in the limousine going home with her head on Oliver’s shoulder. Oliver spent the time making tentative plans that he supposed Mona might not have approved of. When, once the limousine had departed and Cassidy had yawned off to rest, the old nagsman (no longer quite so temporary) told Oliver that he’d heard Mona was to be cremated in two days’ time, on Wednesday, Oliver’s intentions firmed to rock.
‘Wednesday!’ he exclaimed. ‘Are you sure?’
‘They said so, down the pub.’
Oliver called three undertakers before finding the one dealing with Mona.
‘Mrs Watkins? Yes, Wednesday.’
Oliver asked questions. The answers were ‘a basic cheap package funeral’, and ‘Yes, most any other day would have been possible as the short form of committal took little time, but the next of kin had specifically wanted Wednesday.’
Oliver’s slow burning plan caught inner fire.
Joanie was depriving her dead mother of one last dignity, the honour of having the celebrities she’d worked for attend her coffin.
Oliver and Cassidy sent a big wreath of lilies. Mona’s next door neighbour told them later that Joanie had left it to one side, ignored. Joanie had announced to the few mourners present that the Bolingbrokes simply hadn’t bothered to come.
Mona’s ashes had been scattered on a rose-bed in the crematorium gardens, with no memorial plaque. Joanie, privately exulting in liberation, could now re-invent her awkward parent and bestow posthumous respectability on ‘a charming horsewoman of the old school’, as Peregrine unctuously put it.
Although Oliver and Cassidy might choose to live a mostly private life, both of them were of course aware that to the public they were stars. Both had indeed worked hard to reach star status and each intended to keep it as long as possible. Oliver, after Mona’s parsimonious funeral, decided to use his formidable power to the limit, whether Mona would have wanted him to, or not.
With Cassidy’s agreement, Oliver went to see the committee organising the great annual horse spectacular, the five-day Christmas Show at Olympia, with five performances in the afternoon and five more in the evening.
Aside from the top jumping contests, in which he would anyway be taking part, he, Oliver Bolingbroke, as European Equus Grand Prix winner and Sportstar of the Year, would also be leading the finale of each of the ten performances in the prestigious Ride of Champions. The parade indeed could barely take place satisfactorily without him. Oliver Bolingbroke, in short, was a force to whom the committee was bound to listen. He proposed an extra dimension to the end of all ten performances.
They listened.
Their eyes widened. Eventually they nodded.
Oliver shook their hands. Then he went home and patiently taught his intelligent old grey a whole load of new tricks.
Cassidy’s manager wrote contracts by the dozen. Her musicians distilled sparkling sounds. Factories pressed hot tracks. Cassidy’s new song of love and loss and longing slid into the recognition cortex of the nation.
Oliver invited Joanie Vine to take part in a televised tribute to her mother. Joanie’s hysterics nearly choked her. Peregrine tried for an injunction to stop Oliver’s project but could offer no credible grounds. ‘The Life of Mona’ filled the glossy magazine that reprinted Joanie’s ball-gowns and put them alongside views of the dingy two-up two-down. Peregrine suffered sniggers, albeit hidden behind hands.
Every seat of the great Olympia stadium was filled for the first of the five afternoon performances. People sat illegally in the aisles. News had got around. All ten shows were sold out.
Oliver’s voice in silent darkness announced that this performance, given free, was dedicated to the memory of his top-flight groom, Mona Watkins, a homespun Welshwoman from the valleys. Her care and understanding of what it took to prepare a European-class horse had been without equal.
‘I owe her,’ he said, ‘so ladies and gentlemen, here, in her memory is her friend, my wife Cassidy Lovelace Ward, with a Song for Mona.’
The darkness suddenly vibrated with music from vast speakers pouring out a huge wattage of sound from high up round the arena, delivering the sweet clear theme carefully taught in advance so that the song was known, recognised, hummable.
A single spotlight flashed on, slicing through the tingling air, lighting with throbbing dramatic impact the big grey horse standing motionless in the entrance to the ring. Astride the horse’s back sat Cassidy, dressed in silver leather, Western style, with glittering fringes, silver gauntleted gloves and a white ten-gallon hat. The rig that had galvanised the Mississippi brought spontaneous cheering to London.
Cassidy and the grey horse circled the ring with banks of rainbow lights making stained-glass window colours on the silver and white, with prisms flashing on the sparkling fringes. Every few paces the grey circled fast on his hocks, standing tall with Cassidy clinging, clearly enjoying himself, the old show-jumper in a starring role; and the crowd, who knew who he was from a page-long introduction in the programme, laughed and cheered him until, back at the start, Cassidy swept off her outsized hat and shook free her silver-blonde curls.
Oliver had worried slightly that the glitz that had triumphed in Tennessee might strike too brassy a note for a horse-show audience in England, but he needn’t have feared. Cassidy’s people were expert professionals — musicians, lighting crew, electricians, all, and they’d promised — and were delivering — an unforgettable excitement.
At the end of the multicoloured circuit Cassidy rode to the centre of the ring and slid off the horse’s back, handing the reins to Oliver, who waited there in the dark. Then in one of the transformations that regularly brought gasps and a stamping of feet, Cassidy shed her riding gear in a shimmering heap and, revealed in a white, full-skirted, crystal-embroidered evening dress, climbed shallow steps to a platform where a microphone waited.
Cassidy took the microphone and sang the Song for Mona with Mona in her mind, a song of a woman who longed for the love she remembered but had lost. Cassidy sang not of Mona by name, but of all lonely people searching for a warm new heart. Cassidy sang the song twice: once quietly, murmuring, plaintive, and then with full voice, glorious, flooding all Olympia, beseeching and arousing the Fates, calling on hope.
She sustained the last long true soaring note until it seemed her lungs must burst, then from one second to the next the barrage of super-sound from the speakers fell silent. The white spotlights folded their beams, as Cassidy, shedding the glittering dress in the lights’ dying rays, left just a heap of glimmer while she slipped out of the ring in black.
She returned briefly to wild applause in a black cloak with a sparkling lining. She waved in thanks with raised arms, and was gone. The old magic that had worked so well in Nashville had spread its wings and flown free at Olympia.
Sentimental, some critics complained; but sentimental songs reached the hearts of millions, and so it was with Cassidy’s Song for Mona. By the end of the ten live performances at Olympia, the long-lasting melody was spilling from CDs and radios everywhere on its way to classic status.
Joanie and Peregrine, with gritted teeth, watched the cheering show the evening it was televised. Such a pity, the studio announcer deplored with regret, that top auctioneer Peregrine Vine and his socialite wife Joan, who was Mona Watkins’ only daughter, had been unable to attend any of the performances.
Joanie fell speechless with bitter chagrin. Peregrine wondered if it were possible to start again in yet another town: but the Song for Mona was sung everywhere, from concerts to karaoke. Peregrine looked at his beautiful selfish wife and wondered if she were worth it.
A while after the glories of Olympia, Oliver and Cassidy cooked in their kitchen and ate without quarrelling. Although they were used to Mona’s absence, her spirit hovered around, it seemed to them, telling them to break eggs, not plates.
Probate completed, Cassidy had duly given all Mona’s ‘bits and pieces’ (including the pearl brooch and the bicycle) to the hair-curlered neighbour who lovingly took them in, and it was only occasionally that either of the Bolingbrokes wondered what Joanie had so urgently sought on the morning her mother died.
‘You know,’ Cassidy said over the mushroom omelettes, ‘that old box Mona brought with pictures of Joanie in her ball-gowns... there were pictures of us in it, too.’
Oliver lifted down the neglected box from a high shelf on a dresser and emptied it onto the table.
Under the clippings of Joanie and themselves they found two folded pages of a Welsh country town newspaper, now extinct; old, fragile and brown round the edges.
Oliver cautiously unfolded them, careful not to tear them, and both of the Bolingbrokes learned what Joanie Vine had been frantic to conceal.
Centre front page on the first sheet was a picture of a group of three people: a younger Mona, a child recognisably Joanie, and a short unsmiling man. Alongside, a headline read: ‘Local man pleads guilty to child rape, sentenced to ten years.’
Idris Watkins, stable-lad, husband of Mona, and father of Joan, confessed to the crime and has been sentenced without trial.
The second brown-edged fragile page ran a story but no pictures:
‘Stable-lad killed in a fall on gallops.
Idris Watkins, recently freed after serving six years of a ten-year sentence for child rape, died of a fractured skull, Thursday. He leaves a widow, Mona, and a daughter, Joan, 13.’
After a silence, Oliver said ‘It explains a lot, I suppose.’
He made photocopies of the old pages and sent the copies to Joanie.
Cassidy, nodding, said, ‘Let her worry that we’ll publish her secret and ruin her social-climbing life.’
They didn’t publish, though.
Mona wouldn’t have liked it.