by Dick Francis
‘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 was essential. Mona cleared away the supper and wrote her name on dotted lines.
‘And now,’ the lawyer said lightheartedly, ‘now, Mrs Watkins, how about some arrangements for you, too?’
Mona, bewildered, asked about what.
‘A will?’ the lawyer suggested. ‘If you haven’t made a will, let’s do it now.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ urged Oliver, who had wanted to reward Mona for her signature without insulting her. ‘Everyone should make a will.’
‘I did talk about it once,’ Mona said. ‘Peregrine wanted me to leave everything to Joanie.’
The lawyer smoothly brought a printed basic will form from out of his loaded briefcase and smilingly entered on it, to her dictation, Mona’s name and address.
Then ball-point poised, he asked her for her beneficiaries.
‘What?’ Mona asked.
‘The people you want to inherit your individual things after your death.’
‘Like my bicycle,’ Mona nodded. ‘Well…’ She paused. ‘… well, Joanie wouldn’t want my old bike. I’d just ask Cass or Oliver to give my old bike to someone as needs it. What if I just ask them to do as they like with my old bits and pieces?’
The lawyer wrote, ‘Cassidy Lovelace Ward’ in the slot for ‘sole beneficiary’ and he and Oliver accompanied Mona on her bicycle down to the local pub on her way home and got two strangers there to witness Mona’s signature, thanked by pints of beer.
Cassidy supposed the least she could do for Mona was to distribute her ‘old bits and pieces’ as Mona would have liked, but hoped not to have to do it. Oliver came smiling back from the pub and took his wife to bed in splendid humour.
When the time came, Cassidy went on her lengthy tour in America. Oliver, though lonely, won a European Equus Grand Prix and was chosen as Sportstar of the Year. Mona, travelling with Oliver to look after the horses, thought she’d never been happier.
At the end of the first half of Cassidy’s tour, Oliver punctiliously settled Mona into the small apartment in the stables block and checked that the stand-in groom (a time-weathered nagsman even older than Mona) would arrive (on his own bike) every day to help exercise the horses. Mona with confidence sent Oliver off to join Cassidy and began to be seduced during the next few weeks by the refrigerator full of food, by the colour television, and by not having to put coins in a meter to pay for electricity to cook with, or to keep warm. Mona in her independent two-up two-down carefully paid rent for everything. She saved a little each week into a Christmas Club for ‘rainy days’. She had managed all her life on little.
Oliver, talking to Cassidy in America as they relaxed at the end of her sell-out triumphs before starting the long legs home, suggested that they should increase Mona’s wages when they got back.
‘We already pay her over the top for a groom.’
‘She’s worth more,’ Oliver said.
‘OK, then.’ Cassidy yawned. ‘And you need another horse…. The brave big grey’s too old now, didn’t you say?’
Mona, half a world away, mucked out the heavy clever grey and sadly knew Oliver would sell him soon. He had reached fifteen and the spring was leaving his hocks.
Mona felt feverish and unwell as she worked on the grey, but paid no attention. Like all healthy people, she didn’t know when she was ill.
Eyeing her flushed face the next morning, the old nagsman said he would do the horses, and she was to go off on her bicycle to see the doctor. Mona felt unwell enough to do as he said, and learned with relief that what was wrong with her was ‘flu’.
‘There’s a lot of it about,’ the overworked doctor said. ‘Go to bed, drink a lot of fluids, you’ll soon feel better. ‘Flu’s a virus. I can’t give you a prescription to cure it, as antibiotics don’t work against a virus. Take aspirin. Keep warm. And drink a lot of water. Let me know if you cough a lot. You’re a healthy woman, Mrs Watkins. Go to bed, rest and drink water and you’ll be fine.’
Mona slowly cycled back to the Bolingbrokes’ yard and reported the diagnosis to her helper.
‘You go on to bed then right now,’ he insisted. ‘Leave the horses to me.’
Mona thankfully undressed into her warm nightgown and crawled between her sheets. The cycle ride had made her feel much worse. She remembered she should take aspirin, but she hadn’t any. She dozed and smilingly re-lived the faultless rounds of Oliver’s European Equus Grand Prix.
The old nagsman felt too shy and embarrassed to enter Mona’s little apartment, as her bed – in its bed-sitting room- was barely six feet from the outer door. He opened the door and spoke with her morning and evening though, through a slender crack, and when she seemed no livelier after three days he cycled to see the doctor himself.
‘Mrs Watkins? Flu takes time, you know.’ He turned pages in a meagre file. ‘I see she has a daughter, down here as ‘next of kin’, Mrs Peregrine Vine. Let’s enlist her help.’
Kind man that he was, he phoned Joanie himself to save the old nagsman’s pocket.
‘Flu!’ Joanie exclaimed. ‘I’m sure Mona’s perfectly all right, if you are looking after her.’
The doctor frowned. ‘She could do with some simple nursing. Change her sheets. Make her cups of tea. Give her orange drinks, or even beer. Things like that. It’s very important she drinks a lot. If you can –’
‘I can’t,’ Joanie interrupted. ‘I have committee meetings all day. I can’t put them off.’
‘But your mother –’
‘It’s too inconvenient,’ Joanie said positively. ‘Sorry.’
The do
ctor, shaking his head over his abruptly disconnected receiver, wrote Joanie’s phone number on one of his business cards and gave it to the nagsman.
On the following day the nagsman telephoned Joanie himself and told her that Mona was neither better nor worse, but needed her daughter’s company, he thought.
‘Why doesn’t Cassidy Bolingbroke look after her?’ Joanie asked. ‘She likes her well enough.’
The nagsman explained that Mrs Bolingbroke was on her way home from America, but wasn’t expected back for two more days.
‘Two days? That’s all right then,’ Joanie said, and put the phone down. She felt, in fact, relieved. The thought of nursing her mother, of having to make physical intimate contact with that old flesh, revolted her to nausea.
Mona, not unhappy, lay like a log in bed without any appetite for food or drink. She supposed vaguely that she would soon be better: meanwhile she’d sleep.
When the Bolingbrokes returned, Cassidy went into Mona’s room, which she found hot, fetid and airless, with Mona herself bloated and drifting in and out of consciousness on the bed. Cassidy did what she could for her, but in great alarm she and Oliver sent for the doctor. Anxiously he came at once and, having spent time with Mona, summoned an ambulance and repeated over and over to Cassidy and Oliver, ‘But I told her, I insisted she should drink fluids. She says she hasn’t drunk anything for a week. She hasn’t had the energy to make a cup of tea.’ There was despair in his voice. ‘I will have to alert Mrs Vine that we have a serious situation here… may I use your phone?’
Joanie, predictably, saw no reason for panic and said she was sure her mother was in good hands. The doctor raised his eyes to heaven and, despite everything that could be done, despite dialysis and drip and Cassidy’s prayers, Mona drifted quietly away altogether and died late that night in hospital from total kidney failure.
The hospital informed Joanie Vine of the death, not the Bolingbrokes. It was the doctor who told Oliver.
‘So unnecessary, poor lady. If only she’d drunk fluids. People don’t understand or realise the danger of dehydration…’
He was excusing himself, Oliver thought, but Mona had undoubtedly ignored his advice.
Oliver and Cassidy sat in the kitchen and grieved for their vital missing friend.
It was when the old nagsman told them about the doctor and himself phoning Joanie without results that the Bolingbrokes’ grief turned to fury.
‘Joanie killed her.’ Cassidy clenched her fists in outrage. ‘She literally killed her.’
Oliver more objectively thought Joanie hadn’t meant to: hadn’t known how her neglect would turn out. No court would convict her, even of involuntary manslaughter, let alone murder. No case would ever be brought.
Oliver, suddenly remembering Mona’s simple will, decided to consult her next door two-up two-down neighbour at once about what to do with Joanie’s ‘bits and pieces’, that she’d bequeathed to Cassidy. If the neighbour would welcome them, they would have found a good home. Leaving Cassidy upset in the house he drove his Range Rover into town and found a van of Peregrine’s firm – ‘Peregrine Vine and Co., Quality Auctioneers’ – parked outside Mona’s little cottage, with over-ailed workmen busily carrying out her pathetic goods and furniture, to load them for removal.
Mona’s neighbour, wearing curlers in her hair, bedroom slippers on her feet and a floral apron over her dress, stood shivering out in the November street, futile protest obvious in every muscle.
Oliver stopped the exodus and talked to the neighbour.
‘Mona had not been dead six hours,’ she said indignantly, ‘when Joanie herself came to pick through her mother’s things. It’s my belief she didn’t find what she came for. She was slamming things about and she drove off furious. That’s why they’re clearing out the house so fast now. Like hyenas, they are. Mona left her rent book with me, see, and the rent money for when she’s been away at your place. You don’t think that’s what they want, do you? It’s not very much. What shall I do about the rent?’
Oliver said he would see to the rent, and everything else. On his ultra light mobile phone, he reached Peregrine and explained to him the existence and provisions of Mona’s will. ‘So please instruct your men, my dear fellow,’ he said with courteous but inflexible authority, ‘to unload the van.’
Peregrine thought it over briefly and did as Oliver asked. He had sent the van at Joanie’s insistence, but she hadn’t explained the need for speed: it wasn’t as if Mona’s things were valuable, far from it. Joan (confided Peregrine to Oliver, man to man) sometimes got the bit between her teeth. She would be livid though, he privately realised, when she learned Mona had bequeathed her tatty old rubbish to someone else.
‘About Mona’s funeral,’ Oliver said, ‘Cassidy and I would like to attend. We were very fond of her, as you know.’
Peregrine asked which day would suit them.
‘Any day except this coming Wednesday,’ Oliver replied. ‘Cassidy is flying to Scotland for a concert on that day and I have a lunch-time speaking engagement which I cannot shift.’
‘It was Mona’s own fault she died,’ Peregrine said, suddenly defensive. ‘Joan offered to go and look after her, you know, but Mona didn’t want her. She phoned several times and told Joan to stay away. Very hurtful, Joan says.’
Oliver said thoughtfully, ‘There isn’t a telephone in that room where Mona was ill. It was very cold outside in the stable-yard, I believe, and it’s quite a step to any door into our house, which was unheated while we were away.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Where did Mona phone from?’
Peregrine’s silence lasted long enough for him to change the subject to photos of Joan in childhood. If Oliver found any…
‘I’m certain,’ Oliver assured him smoothly, ‘that Cassidy will give Joanie everything Mona would have liked her to have.’
‘Funeral any day but Wednesday,’ Peregrine confirmed, sounding almost friendly. ‘I’ll let you know.’
When Oliver reached home Cassidy was no longer hunched over the kitchen table but had moved to the drawing-room where she could let out her feelings on her piano.
Oliver sat quietly on the broad staircase from where he could listen to her without being seen. Cassidy sang a new song, a raw song, a song without many words, a song of sorrow in flats and minor intervals.
All good songs, she’d told Oliver once, were of love or longing or loss. Cassidy’s new song vibrated with all three.
She stopped playing abruptly and, finding Oliver on the stairs, sat down beside him.
‘What did you think?’ she asked.
‘Brilliant.’
‘It hasn’t a name yet…’
‘But you wrote it for Mona,’ Oliver completed.
‘Yes.’
With Oliver beside her, Cassidy took her half-defined melody next day to the musicians in her studio in London, where her often gloomy lyrics writer, captivated, gave it words of universal sadness and universal hope. Cassidy sang it heartbreakingly softly, under her breath. Everyone in the studio heard platinum in her throat.
Cassidy, always bone-weary after creative sessions, slept in the limousine going home with her head on Oliver’s shoulder. Oliver spent the time making tentative plans that he supposed Mona might not have approved of. When, once the limousine had departed and Cassidy had yawned off to rest, the old nagsman (no longer quite so temporary) told Oliver that he’d heard Mona was to be cremated in two days’ time, on Wednesday, Oliver’s intentions firmed to rock.
‘Wednesday!’ he exclaimed. ‘Are you sure?’
‘They said so, down the pub.’
Oliver called three undertakers before finding the one dealing with Mona.
‘Mrs Watkins? Yes, Wednesday.’
Oliver asked questions. The answers were ‘a basic cheap package funeral’, and ‘Yes, most any other day would have been possible as the short form of committal took little time, but the next of kin had specifically wanted Wednesday
.’
Oliver’s slow burning plan caught inner fire.
Joanie was depriving her dead mother of one last dignity, the honour of having the celebrities she’d worked for attend her coffin.
Oliver and Cassidy sent a big wreath of lilies. Mona’s next door neighbour told them later that Joanie had left it to one side, ignored. Joanie had announced to the few mourners present that the Bolingbrokes simply hadn’t bothered to come.
Mona’s ashes had been scattered on a rose-bed in the crematorium gardens, with no memorial plaque. Joanie, privately exulting in liberation, could now re-invent her awkward parent and bestow posthumous respectability on ‘a charming horsewoman of the old school’, as Peregrine unctuously put it.
*
Although Oliver and Cassidy might choose to live a mostly private life, both of them were of course aware that to the public they were stars. Both had indeed worked hard to reach star status and each intended to keep it as long as possible. Oliver, after Mona’s parsimonious funeral, decided to use his formidable power to the limit, whether Mona would have wanted him to, or not.
With Cassidy’s agreement, Oliver went to see the committee organising the great annual horse spectacular, the five-day Christmas Show at Olympia, with five performances in the afternoon and five more in the evening.
Aside from the top jumping contests, in which he would anyway be taking part, he, Oliver Bolingbroke, as European Equus Grand Prix winner and Sportstar of the Year, would also be leading the finale of each of the ten performances in the prestigious Ride of Champions. The parade indeed could barely take place satisfactorily without him. Oliver Bolingbroke, in short, was a force to whom the committee was bound to listen. He proposed an extra dimension to the end of all ten performances.
They listened.
Their eyes widened. Eventually they nodded.
Oliver shook their hands. Then he went home and patiently taught his intelligent old grey a whole load of new tricks.
Cassidy’s manager wrote contracts by the dozen. Her musicians distilled sparkling sounds. Factories pressed hot tracks. Cassidy’s new song of love and loss and longing slid into the recognition cortex of the nation.