Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [17]
At ten o’clock that evening, while the cold North Sea still swirled in eddies through the settling wreck, Gypsy Joe left his house and made his quiet normal rounds of his stableful of dozing horses; as he would safely do the next night, and the next night, and the next.
The stars were bright.
Not knowing why, Gypsy Joe felt at peace.
SONG FOR MONA
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