The darkness suddenly vibrated with music from vast speakers pouring out a huge wattage of sound from high up round the arena, delivering the sweet clear theme carefully taught in advance so that the song was known, recognised, hummable.
A single spotlight flashed on, slicing through the tingling air, lighting with throbbing dramatic impact the big grey horse standing motionless in the entrance to the ring. Astride the horse’s back sat Cassidy, dressed in silver leather, Western style, with glittering fringes, silver gauntleted gloves and a white ten-gallon hat. The rig that had galvanised the Mississippi brought spontaneous cheering to London.
Cassidy and the grey horse circled the ring with banks of rainbow lights making stained-glass window colours on the silver and white, with prisms flashing on the sparkling fringes. Every few paces the grey circled fast on his hocks, standing tall with Cassidy clinging, clearly enjoying himself, the old show-jumper in a starring role; and the crowd, who knew who he was from a page-long introduction in the programme, laughed and cheered him until, back at the start, Cassidy swept off her outsized hat and shook free her silver-blonde curls.
Oliver had worried slightly that the glitz that had triumphed in Tennessee might strike too brassy a note for a horse-show audience in England, but he needn’t have feared. Cassidy’s people were expert professionals — musicians, lighting crew, electricians, all, and they’d promised — and were delivering — an unforgettable excitement.
At the end of the multicoloured circuit Cassidy rode to the centre of the ring and slid off the horse’s back, handing the reins to Oliver, who waited there in the dark. Then in one of the transformations that regularly brought gasps and a stamping of feet, Cassidy shed her riding gear in a shimmering heap and, revealed in a white, full-skirted, crystal-embroidered evening dress, climbed shallow steps to a platform where a microphone waited.
Cassidy took the microphone and sang the Song for Mona with Mona in her mind, a song of a woman who longed for the love she remembered but had lost. Cassidy sang not of Mona by name, but of all lonely people searching for a warm new heart. Cassidy sang the song twice: once quietly, murmuring, plaintive, and then with full voice, glorious, flooding all Olympia, beseeching and arousing the Fates, calling on hope.
She sustained the last long true soaring note until it seemed her lungs must burst, then from one second to the next the barrage of super-sound from the speakers fell silent. The white spotlights folded their beams, as Cassidy, shedding the glittering dress in the lights’ dying rays, left just a heap of glimmer while she slipped out of the ring in black.
She returned briefly to wild applause in a black cloak with a sparkling lining. She waved in thanks with raised arms, and was gone. The old magic that had worked so well in Nashville had spread its wings and flown free at Olympia.
Sentimental, some critics complained; but sentimental songs reached the hearts of millions, and so it was with Cassidy’s Song for Mona. By the end of the ten live performances at Olympia, the long-lasting melody was spilling from CDs and radios everywhere on its way to classic status.
Joanie and Peregrine, with gritted teeth, watched the cheering show the evening it was televised. Such a pity, the studio announcer deplored with regret, that top auctioneer Peregrine Vine and his socialite wife Joan, who was Mona Watkins’ only daughter, had been unable to attend any of the performances.
Joanie fell speechless with bitter chagrin. Peregrine wondered if it were possible to start again in yet another town: but the Song for Mona was sung everywhere, from concerts to karaoke. Peregrine looked at his beautiful selfish wife and wondered if she were worth it.
A while after the glories of Olympia, Oliver and Cassidy cooked in their kitchen and ate without quarrelling. Although they were used to Mona’s absence, her spirit hovered around, it seemed to them, telling them to break eggs, not plates.
Probate completed, Cassidy had duly given all Mona’s ‘bits and pieces’ (including the pearl brooch and the bicycle) to the hair-curlered neighbour who lovingly took them in, and it was only occasionally that either of the Bolingbrokes wondered what Joanie had so urgently sought on the morning her mother died.
‘You know,’ Cassidy said over the mushroom omelettes, ‘that old box Mona brought with pictures of Joanie in her ball-gowns... there were pictures of us in it, too.’
Oliver lifted down the neglected box from a high shelf on a dresser and emptied it onto the table.
Under the clippings of Joanie and themselves they found two folded pages of a Welsh country town newspaper, now extinct; old, fragile and brown round the edges.
Oliver cautiously unfolded them, careful not to tear them, and both of the Bolingbrokes learned what Joanie Vine had been frantic to conceal.
Centre front page on the first sheet was a picture of a group of three people: a younger Mona, a child recognisably Joanie, and a short unsmiling man. Alongside, a headline read: ‘Local man pleads guilty to child rape, sentenced to ten years.’
Idris Watkins, stable-lad, husband of Mona, and father of Joan, confessed to the crime and has been sentenced without trial.
The second brown-edged fragile page ran a story but no pictures:
‘Stable-lad killed in a fall on gallops.
Idris Watkins, recently freed after serving six years of a ten-year sentence for child rape, died of a fractured skull, Thursday. He leaves a widow, Mona, and a daughter, Joan, 13.’
After a silence, Oliver said ‘It explains a lot, I suppose.’
He made photocopies of the old pages and sent the copies to Joanie.
Cassidy, nodding, said, ‘Let her worry that we’ll publish her secret and ruin her social-climbing life.’
They didn’t publish, though.
Mona wouldn’t have liked it.
Bright White Star
A country magazine, Cheshire Life, sent me a letter.
‘Write us a story,’ they said.
I asked, ‘What about?’
‘About three thousand words,’ they replied.
It was winter at the time, and by car I drove frequently up and down a hill where a tramp had once lived in a hollow. So I wrote about a tramp in winter.
This story describes how to steal a horse from an auction.
Don’t do it!
The tramp was cold to his bones.
The air and the ground stood at freezing point, and a heavy layer of yellowish snow-cloud hung like a threat over the afternoon. Black boughs of stark trees creaked in the wind, and the rutted fields lay bare and dark, waiting.
Shambling down a narrow road the tramp was cold and hungry and filled with an intense unfocused resentment. By this stage of the winter he liked to be deep in a nest, sheltered in a hollow in the ground in the lee of a wooded hill, roofed by a lavish thatch of criss-crossed branches and thick brown cardboard, lying on a warm comfortable bed of dry dead leaves and polythene sheeting and sacks. He liked to have his wood-fire burning all day near his threshold, with the ashes glowing red all night. He liked to live snug through the frost and the snows and the driving rains, and kick the whole thing to pieces when he moved on in the spring.
What he did not like was having someone else kick his nest in as they had done on that morning. Three of them — the man who owned the land where he had settled, and two people from the local council, a hard-eyed middle-aged man and a prim bossy woman with a clip-board. Their loud voices, their stupid remarks, echoed and fed the anger in his mind.