Scold's Bridle

The girl was about seventeen or eighteen, as dark as her mother was fair, and she looked anything but grateful. Sarah had only an impression of intense and bitter grief. 'Do you know why Granny killed herself?' she asked softly. 'Nobody else seems to.' Her face was set in a scowl.

'Ruth, please,' sighed her mother. 'Aren't things difficult enough already?' It was a conversation they had clearly had before.

Joanna must be approaching forty, thought Sarah, if the daughter was anything to go by, but against the black of her coat, she looked only very young and very vulnerable. Beside her, Sarah felt Jack's interest quicken and she had an angry impulse to turn on him and berate him publicly once and for all. How far did he think her patience would stretch? How long did he expect her to tolerate his contemptuous and contemptible indifference to her beleaguered pride? She quelled the impulse, of course. She was too trammelled by her upbringing and the behavioural demands of her profession to do anything else. But, oh God, one day... she promised herself. Instead she turned to the girl. 'I wish I could give you an answer, Ruth, but I can't. The last time I saw your grandmother she was fine. In some pain from her arthritis, of course, but nothing she wasn't used to or couldn't cope with.'

The girl cast a spiteful glance at her mother. 'Then something must have happened to upset her. People don't kill themselves for no reason.'

'Was she easily upset?' asked Sarah. 'She never gave me that impression.' She smiled slightly. 'She was tough as old boots, your grandmother. I admired her for it.'

'Then why did she kill herself?'

'Because she wasn't afraid of death perhaps. Suicide isn't always a negative, you know. In some cases it's a positive statement of choice. I will die now and in this manner. 'To be or not to be.' For Mathilda 'not to be' would have been a considered decision.'

Ruth's eyes filled. 'Hamlet was her favourite play.' She was tall like her mother but her face, pinched with cold and distress, lacked the other's startling looks. Ruth's tears made her ugly where her mother's, a mere glistening of the lashes, enhanced a fragile beauty.

Joanna stirred herself, glancing from Sarah to Jack. 'Will you come back to the house for tea? There'll be so few of us.'

Sarah excused herself. 'I'm afraid I can't. I have a surgery in Mapleton at four thirty.'

Jack did not. 'Thank you, that's very kind.'

There was a small silence. 'How will you get home?' asked Sarah, fishing in her pocket for her car keys.

'I'll beg a lift,' he said. 'Someone's bound to be going my way.'

One of Sarah's colleagues dropped in as evening surgery was finishing. There were three partners in a practice serving several square miles of Dorset coast and countryside, including sizeable villages, scattered hamlets and farmhouses. Most of the villages had small self-contained surgeries, either attached to the doctors' houses or leased from patients and, between them, the partners covered the whole area, boxing and coxing in neat rotation. Mapleton was Robin Hewitt's home village but, like Sarah, he spent as much time out of it as he did in. They had so far resisted the logic of pooling their resources in one modern clinic in the most central of the villages, but it was doubtful if they could resist for much longer. The argument, a true one, that most of their patients were elderly or lacked transport, was far outweighed by the commercial pressures now existing inside the health service.

'You look tired,' said Robin, folding himself into the armchair beside her desk.

'I am.'

'Trouble?'

'Only the usual.'

'Domestic, eh? Get rid of him.'

She laughed. 'And supposing I told you, as casually, to get rid of Mary?'

'There's a small difference, my darling. Mary is an angel and Jack is not.' But the idea was not without a certain appeal. After eighteen years, Mary's complacent self-assurance was so much less attractive than Sarah's troubled seeking after truths.

'I can't argue with that.' She finished writing some notes and pushed them wearily to one side.

'What's he done this time?'

'Nothing, as far as I know.'

Which sounded about right, thought Robin. Jack Blakeney made a virtue of doing nothing while his wife made a virtue of supporting him in idleness. Their continuing marriage was a complete mystery to him. There were no children, no ties, nothing binding them, Sarah was an independent woman with independent means, and she paid the mortgage on their house. It only required the services of a locksmith to shut the bastard out forever.

She studied him with amusement. 'Why are you smiling like that?'

He switched neatly away from his mild fantasy of Sarah alone in her house. 'I saw Bob Hughes today. He was very put out to find me on duty and not you.' He fell into a fair imitation of the old man's Dorset burr. ' 'Where's the pretty one?' he said. 'I want the pretty one to do it.' '

'Do what?'

Robin grinned. 'Examine the boil on his bum. Dirty old brute. If it had been you, he'd have come up with another one, presumably, lurking under his scrotum and you'd have had the fun of probing for it and he'd have had the thrills while you did it.'

Her eyes danced. 'And it's completely free, don't forget. Relief massage comes expensive.'

'That's revolting. You're not telling me he's tried it on before.'

She chuckled. 'No, of course not. He only comes in for a chat. I expect he felt he had to show you something. Poor old soul. I bet you sent him away with a flea in his ear.'

'I did. You're far too amenable.'