Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [22]
‘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