Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [20]
‘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