The Scold's Bridle

by Minette Walters

  ‘Obviously.’

  His eyes narrowed angrily. ‘Don’t start,’ he murmured. ‘I’m not in the mood.’

  She shrugged. ‘Neither am I. I’m going to bed.’

  ‘I’ll work on the jacket tomorrow,’ he promised grudgingly. He made a living of sorts by designing book jackets, but the commissions were few and far between because he rarely met deadlines. The disciplines imposed by the profit motive infuriated him.

  ‘I’m not your mother, Jack,’ she said coolly. ‘What you do tomorrow is your own affair.’

  But he was in the mood for a row, probably, thought Sarah, because Joanna had flattered him. ‘You just can’t leave it alone, can you? No, you’re not my mother, but by God you’re beginning to sound like her.’

  ‘How odd,’ she said with heavy irony, ‘and I always thought you didn’t get on with her because she kept telling you what to do. Now I’m tarred with the same brush, yet I’ve done the exact opposite, left you to work things out for yourself. You’re a child, Jack. You need a woman in your life to blame for every little thing that goes wrong for you.’

  ‘Is this babies again?’ he snarled. ‘Dammit, Sarah, you knew the score before you married me, and it was your choice to go through with it. The career was everything, remember? Nothing’s changed. Not for me, anyway. It’s not my fault if your bloody hormones are screaming that time’s running out. We had a deal. No children.’

  She eyed him curiously. After all, she thought, Joanna must have been less accommodating than he had hoped. Well, well! ‘The deal, Jack, for what it’s worth, was that I would support you until you established yourself. After that, all options were open. What we never considered, and for that I blame myself because I relied on my own artistic judgement, was that you might never establish yourself. In which circumstance, I suspect, the deal is null and void. So far, I have kept you for six years, two years before marriage and four afterwards, and the choice to marry was as much yours as mine. As far as I remember we were celebrating your first major sale. Your only major sale,’ she added. ‘I think that’s fair, don’t you? I can’t recall your selling a canvas since.’

  ‘Spite doesn’t suit you, Sarah.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed, ‘any more than behaving like a spoilt brat suits you. You say nothing’s changed, but you’re wrong, everything’s changed. I used to admire you. Now I despise you. I used to find you amusing. Now you bore me. I used to love you. Now I just feel sorry for you.’ She smiled apologetically. ‘I also used to think you’d make it. Now I don’t. And that’s not because I think any less of your painting, but because I think less of you. You have neither the commitment nor the discipline to be great, Jack, because you always forget that genius is only one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent sheer, bloody graft. I’m a good doctor, not because I have an especial talent for diagnosis, but because I work my fingers to the bone. You’re a rotten artist, not because you lack talent, but because you’re too damn lazy and too damn snobbish to get down on your hands and knees with the rest of us and earn your reputation.’

  The dark face split into a sardonic grin. ‘Hewitt’s doing, I suppose? A cosy little supper with Cock Robin and his wife, and then it’s dump on Jack. Jesus, he’s a greasy little toad. He’d be in your bed quicker than winking if sweet little Mary and the kiddiwinkles weren’t guarding his door.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ she said coldly. ‘It’s your doing entirely. I ceased having any feelings for you whatsoever the day I had to refer Sally Bennedict for an abortion. I draw the line at being asked to approve the murder of your bastards, Jack, particularly by a selfish bitch like Sally Bennedict. She enjoyed the irony of it all, believe me.’

  He stared at her with something like shock, and she saw that for once she had scored a direct hit. He hadn’t known, she thought, which was something in his favour at least. ‘You should have told me,’ he said inadequately.

  She laughed with genuine amusement. ‘Why? You weren’t my patient, Sally was. And, sure as eggs is eggs, she wasn’t going to go to term with your little bundle of joy and lose her chance with the RSC. You can’t play Juliet six months pregnant, Jack, which is what she would have been when the run started. Oh, I did my bit, suggested she talk it through with you, suggested she talk it through with a counsellor, but I might have been pissing in the wind for all the good it did. She’d have preferred cancer, I think, to an unwanted pregnancy.’ Her smile was twisted. ‘And let’s face it, we both knew what your reaction would be. It’s the only time I’ve felt confident that the wretched foetus, were it born, would be rejected by both parties. I passed the buck on to the hospital and they had her in and it out within two weeks.’

  He swirled his brush aimlessly around the colours on his palette. ‘Was that the reason for the sudden move down here?’

  ‘Partly. I had a nasty feeling Sally would be the first of many.’

  ‘And the other part?’

  ‘I didn’t think the wilds of Dorset would appeal to you. I hoped you’d stay in London.’

  ‘You should have told me,’ he said again. ‘I never was very good at taking hints.’

  ‘No.’

  He put the palette and the brush on a stool and started to wipe his hands with a kitchen towel dipped in turpentine. ‘So how come the year’s grace? Charity? Or malice? Did you think it would be more fun to cast me adrift down here than in London where I’d be assured of a bed?’

  ‘Neither,’ she said. ‘Hope. Misplaced, as usual.’ She glanced at the canvas.

  He followed her gaze. ‘I had tea with her. Nothing more.’

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘Why so angry then? I’m not making a scene because you had supper with Robin.’

  ‘I’m not angry, Jack. I’m bored. Bored with being the necessary audience that your ridiculous ego requires. I sometimes think that was the real reason you married me, not for security but because you needed somebody else’s emotion to stimulate your creativity.’ She gave a hollow laugh. ‘In that case you should never have married a doctor. We see too much of it at work to play it all out again at home.’

  He studied her closely. ‘That’s it then, is it? My marching orders? Pack your bags, Jack, and never darken my door again.’

  She smiled the Mona Lisa smile that had first bewitched him. He thought he could predict exactly what she was going to say. It’s your life, make your own decisions. For Sarah’s strength and her weakness was her belief that everyone was as confident and single-minded as she was.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s it. I made up my mind that if you ever went near Sally again I’d call it quits. I want a divorce.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘If this was about Sally, you’d have given me an ultimatum two weeks ago. I made no secret of where I was going.’

  ‘I know,’ she said wearily, staring at the painting again. ‘Even your betrayals demand an audience now.’

  He was gone when she came downstairs the next morning. There was a note on the kitchen table:

  Send the divorce papers c/o Keith Smollett. You can find yourself another solicitor. I’ll be going for a fifty-fifty split so don’t get too attached to the house. I’ll clear the studio as soon as I’ve found somewhere else. If you don’t want to see me, then don’t change the locks. I’ll leave my key behind when I’ve retrieved my stuff.

  Sarah read it through twice then dropped it in the rubbish bin.

  Jane Marriott, the receptionist at the Fontwell surgery, looked up as Sarah pushed open the door of the empty waiting-room. Sarah covered Fontwell on Monday afternoons and Friday mornings and, because she was more sympathetic than her male colleagues, her sessions were usually busy ones. ‘There’s a couple of messages for you, dear,’ said Jane. ‘I’ve left them on your desk.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She paused by the desk. ‘Who’s first?’

  ‘Mr Drew at eight forty-five and then it’s hectic until eleven thirty. After that, two home visits, I’m afraid, but I’ve told them not to expect you befo
re midday.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Jane, a retired teacher in her sixties, eyed Sarah with motherly concern. ‘No breakfast again, I suppose?’

  Sarah smiled. ‘I haven’t eaten breakfast since I left school.’

  ‘Hm, well, you look washed out. You work too hard, dear. Doctoring’s like any other job. You should learn to pace yourself better.’

  Sarah put her elbows on the desk and propped her chin on her hands. ‘Tell me something, Jane. If heaven exists, where exactly is it?’ She looked for all the world like one of the eight-year-olds Jane had once taught, puzzled, a little hesitant, but confident that Mrs Marriott would know the answer.

  ‘Goodness! No one’s asked me a question like that since I stopped teaching.’ She plugged in the kettle and spooned coffee into two cups. ‘I always told the children it was in the hearts you left behind. The more people there were who loved you, the more hearts would hold your memory. It was a devious way of encouraging them to be nice to each other.’ She chuckled. ‘But I thought you were a nonbeliever, Sarah. Why the sudden interest in the afterlife?’

  ‘I went to Mrs Gillespie’s funeral yesterday. It was depressing. I keep wondering what the point of it all is.’

  ‘Oh dear. Eternal truths at eight thirty in the morning.’ She put a cup of steaming black coffee in front of Sarah. ‘The point to Mathilda Gillespie’s life might not emerge for another five generations. She’s part of a line. Who’s to say how important that line might be in years to come?’

  ‘That’s even more depressing,’ said Sarah gloomily. ‘That means you have to have children to give meaning to your life.’

  ‘Nonsense. I haven’t any children but I don’t feel it makes me any less valuable. Our lives are what we make them.’ She didn’t look at Sarah as she spoke, and Sarah had the feeling that the words were just words, without meaning. ‘Sadly,’ Jane went on, ‘Mathilda made very little of hers. She never got over her husband running out on her and it made her bitter. I think she thought people were laughing at her behind her back. Which, of course, a lot of us were,’ she admitted honestly.

  ‘I thought she was a widow.’ How little she really knew about the woman.

  Jane shook her head. ‘Assuming he’s still alive, then James is her widower. As far as I know they never bothered with a divorce.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He went out to Hong Kong to work in a bank.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Paul and I took a holiday in the Far East about ten years after he and Mathilda separated, and we bumped into him by accident in a hotel in Hong Kong. We’d known him very well in the early days because he and Paul went through the war together.’ She gave a quirky little smile. ‘He was happy as Larry, living amongst the other expatriates, and quite unconcerned about his wife and daughter back home.’

  ‘Who was supporting them?’

  ‘Mathilda was. Her father left her very well provided for, which was a shame, I sometimes thought. She’d have been a different woman if she’d had to use that brain of hers to keep the wolf from the door.’ She tut-tutted. ‘It’s bad for the character to have everything handed to you on a platter.’

  Well, that was certainly true, thought Sarah, if Jack was anything to go by. Fifty-bloody-fifty, she thought wrathfully. She’d see him in hell first. ‘So when did he leave her? Recently?’

  ‘Good heavens, no. It was about eighteen months after they married. Well over thirty years ago, anyway. For a year or two we had letters from him, then we lost touch. To be honest, we found him rather tiresome. When we met in Hong Kong he’d taken to the bottle in a big way and he became very aggressive when he got drunk. We were both rather relieved when the letters dried up. We’ve never heard from him again.’

  ‘Did Mathilda know he’d written to you?’ Sarah asked curiously.

  ‘I really couldn’t say. We’d moved to Southampton by then and had very little to do with her. Mutual friends mentioned her from time to time, but other than that we lost touch completely. We only came back here five years ago when my poor old chap’s health broke down and I took a decision that fresh Dorset air had to be better for him than the polluted city rubbish in Southampton.’

  Paul Marriott suffered from chronic emphysema and his wretched wife agonized over his condition. ‘It was the best thing you could have done,’ said Sarah firmly. ‘He tells me he’s been much better since he came home to his roots.’ She knew from past experience that Jane wouldn’t be able to let the subject drop once she’d embarked upon it and contrived to steer her off it. ‘Did you know Mathilda well?’

  Jane thought about that. ‘We grew up together – my father was the doctor here for many years and Paul was her father’s political agent for a time – Sir William was the local MP – but I honestly don’t think I knew Mathilda at all. The trouble was I never liked her.’ She looked apologetic. ‘It’s awful to say that about someone who’s dead but I refuse to be hypocritical about it. She was quite the nastiest woman I’ve ever met. I never blamed James for deserting her. The only mystery was why he married her in the first place.’

  ‘Money,’ said Sarah with feeling.

  ‘Yes, I think it must have been,’ Jane agreed. ‘He was very much poor gentry, heir to nothing but a name, and Mathilda was beautiful, of course, just like Joanna. The whole thing was a disaster. James learnt PDQ that there were some things worse than poverty. And being dictated to by a virago who held the purse strings was one of them. He hated her.’

  *

  One of the messages on Sarah’s desk was from Ruth Lascelles, a short note, presumably put through the surgery door the previous evening. She had surprisingly childish writing for a girl of seventeen or eighteen. ‘Dear Dr Blakeney, Please can you come and see me at Granny’s house tomorrow (Friday). I’m not ill but I’d like to talk to you. I have to be back at school by Sunday night. Thanking you in anticipation. Yours sincerely, Ruth Lascelles.’

  The other was a telephoned message from Detective Sergeant Cooper. ‘Dr Blakeney’s call drawn to DS Cooper’s attention this morning. He will contact her later in the day.’

  It was nearly three o’clock before Sarah found time to call in at Cedar House. She drove up the short gravel drive and parked in front of the dining-room windows which faced out towards the road on the left-hand side of the house. It was a Georgian building in yellowy-grey stone, with deep windows and high-ceilinged rooms. Far too big for Mathilda, Sarah had always thought, and very inconvenient for a woman who, on bad days, was little better than an invalid. Her one concession to poor health had been the introduction of a stair-lift which had allowed her continued access to the upper floor. Sarah had once suggested that she sell up and move into a bungalow, to which Mathilda had replied that she wouldn’t dream of any such thing. ‘My dear Sarah, only the lower classes live in bungalows which is why they are always called Mon Repos or Dunroamin. Whatever else you do in life, never drop your standards.’

  Ruth came out as she was opening her car door. ‘Let’s talk in the summer-house,’ she said jerkily. She didn’t wait for an answer but set off round the corner of the house, her thin body, dressed only in tee-shirt and leggings, hunched against the biting north wind that was swirling the autumn leaves across the path.

  Sarah, older and more susceptible to the cold, retrieved her Barbour from the back seat and followed. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of Joanna watching her from the dark depths of the dining-room. Had Ruth told her mother she’d asked Sarah to call, Sarah wondered, as she tramped across the lawn in the girl’s wake. And why so much secrecy? The summer-house was a good two hundred yards from Joanna’s listening ears.

  Ruth was lighting a cigarette when Sarah joined her amongst the litter of art deco cane chairs and tables, relics from an earlier – happier? – age. ‘I suppose you’re going to lecture me,’ she said with a scowl, pulling the doors to and flopping on to a chair.

  ‘What about?’ Sarah took another chair and fo
lded the Barbour across her chest. It was bitterly cold, even with the doors closed.

  ‘Smoking.’

  Sarah shrugged. ‘I’m not in the habit of lecturing.’

  Ruth stared at her with moody eyes. ‘Your husband said Granny called you her scold’s bridle. Why would she do that if you didn’t tick her off for nagging?’

  Sarah looked out of the windows to where the huge cedar of Lebanon, after which the house was named, cast a long shadow on the grass. As she watched, the blustery wind drove a cloud across the sun and wiped the shadow away. ‘We didn’t have that sort of relationship,’ she said, turning back to the girl. ‘I enjoyed your grandmother’s company. I don’t recall any occasion when a ticking-off would have been appropriate.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have liked being called a scold’s bridle.’

  Sarah smiled. ‘I found it rather flattering. I believe she meant it as a compliment.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said the girl bluntly. ‘I suppose you know she used the bridle on my mother when my mother was a child?’ She smoked the cigarette nervously, taking short, rapid drags and expelling the smoke through her nose. She saw Sarah’s disbelief. ‘It’s true. Granny told me about it once. She hated people crying, so whenever Mum cried she used to lock her in a cupboard with that thing strapped to her head. Granny’s father did it to her. That’s why she thought it was all right.’

  Sarah waited but she didn’t go on. ‘That was cruel,’ she murmured.

  ‘Yes. But Granny was tougher than Mum and, anyway, it didn’t matter much what you did to children when Granny was young, so being punished by wearing a bridle was probably no different from being thrashed with a belt. But it was awful for my mother.’ She crushed the cigarette under her foot. ‘There was no one to stand up for her and take her side. Granny could do what she liked whenever she liked.’

  Sarah wondered what the girl was trying to tell her. ‘It’s an increasingly common problem, I’m afraid. Men, under stress, take their problems out on their wives. Women, under stress, take theirs out on their children, and there’s nothing more stressful for a woman than to be left holding the baby.’