Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [18]
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