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."
"But they're so lonely, some of them. We live in a terrible world, Robin. No one has time to listen any more." She toyed with her pen. "I went to Mathilda Gillespie's funeral today and her granddaughter asked me why she killed herself. I said I didn't know, and I've been thinking about that ever since. I should know. She was one of my patients. If I'd taken a little more trouble with her, I would know." She flicked him a sideways glance. "Wouldn't I?"
He shook his head. "Don't start down that route, Sarah. It's a dead end. Look, you were one person among many whom she knew and talked to, me included. The responsibility for that old woman wasn't yours alone. I'd argue that it wasn't yours at all, except in a strict medical sense, and nothing you prescribed for her contributed to her death. She died of blood loss."
"But where do you draw the line between profession and friendship? We laughed a lot. I think I was one of the few people who appreciated her sense of humour, probably because it was so like Jack's. Bitchy, often cruel, but witty. She was a latterday Dorothy Parker."
"You're being ridiculously sentimental. Mathilda Gillespie was a bitch of the first water, and don't imagine she viewed you as an equal. For years, until she sold off Wing Cottage to raise money, doctors, lawyers and accountants were required to enter by the tradesman's entrance. It used to drive Hugh Hendry mad. He said she was the rudest woman he'd ever met. He couldn't stand her."
Sarah gave a snort of laughter. "Probably because she called him Doctor Dolittle. To his face, too. I asked her once if it was by way of a job description and she said: Not entirely. He had a closer affinity with animals than he had with people. He was an ass."
Robin grinned. "Hugh was the laziest and the least able doctor I've ever met. I suggested once that we check his medical qualifications because I didn't think he had any, but it's a bit difficult when the bloke in question is the senior partner. We just had to bite the bullet and hang on for his retirement." He cocked his head on one side. "So what did she call you, if she called him Dr. Dolittle?"
She held the pen to her lips for a moment and stared past him. There was a haunting disquiet in her dark eyes. "She was obsessed with that wretched scold's bridle. It was rather unhealthy really, thinking about it. She wanted me to try it on once to see what it felt like."
"And did you?"
"No." She fell silent for a moment, then seemed to make up her mind to something. "She called her arthritis her 'Resident Scold' because it caused her so much nagging pain"-she tapped the pen against her teeth-"and in order to take her mind off it, she used to don the bridle as a sort of counter-irritant. That's what I mean about her unhealthy obsession with it. She wore it as a sort of penance, like a hair shirt. Anyway, when I took her off that rubbish Hendry had been prescribing and got the pain under some sort of manageable control, she took to calling me her little scold's bridle by way of a joke." She saw his incomprehension. "Because I'd succeeded in harnessing the Resident Scold," she explained.