Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [19]
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,