The Scold's Bridle (8 page)

The atmosphere in Mathilda's drawing-room was icy. Joanna stood by the french windows, staring out over the garden, her back to both Sarah and her daughter. Ruth smoked continuously, darting malicious glances between the rigid back of the one woman and the obvious discomfort of the other. No one spoke. To Sarah, who had always loved this room with its mish-mash of beautiful antiques: Georgian corner cabinets, old and faded chintz covers on the Victorian sofa and chairs, nineteenth-century Dutch watercolours and the Louis XVI Lyre clock on the mantelpiece, this unwelcome and unwelcomed return was depressing.

The sound of car tyres on the gravel outside broke the tension. "I'll go," said Ruth, jumping up.

"I can't even remember what he said his name was," declared Joanna, turning back into the room. "Dougall, Douglas?"

"Duggan," said Sarah.

Joanna frowned. "You know him, then."

"No. I wrote his name down when he phoned last night." She fished a piece of paper from her pocket. "Paul Duggan of Duggan, Smith and Drew, Hills Road, Poole."

Joanna listened to her daughter greeting someone at the door. "My mother seems to have had considerable faith in you, Dr. Blakeney. Why was that, do you suppose? You can only have known her what?-a year?" Her face was impassive-schooled that way, thought Sarah, to preserve her youthfulness-but her eyes were deeply suspicious.

Sarah smiled without hostility. She had been placed in a very invidious position, and she wasn't enjoying the experience. She had considerable sympathy for Joanna, one way and another, and she was becoming increasingly troubled by Mathilda's memory. Their relationship, a light-hearted one at best, was turning oppressive in retrospect, and she resented the old woman's assumption that she could manipulate her doctor after her death and without prior permission. It was neither Sarah's business nor her wish to act as mediator in an acrimonious legal battle between Joanna and her daughter. "I'm as much in.the dark as you are, Mrs. Lascelles, and probably just as annoyed," she said frankly. "I've a week's shopping to do, a house to clean and a garden to take care of. I'm only here because Mr. Duggan said if I didn't come then he would have to postpone this meeting until I could. I thought that would be even more upsetting for you and Ruth"-she shrugged-"so I agreed to it."

Joanna was on the point of answering when the door swung open and Ruth walked in, followed by a smiling middle-aged man carrying a video recorder with a briefcase balanced on top of it. "Mr. Duggan," she said curtly, flopping into her chair again. "He wants to use the television. Would you believe, Granny's made a frigging video-will?"

"Not strictly true, Miss Lascelles," said the man, bending down to place the recorder on the floor beside the television. He straightened and held out a hand to Joanna, guessing correctly that she was Mathilda's daughter. "How do you do, Mrs. Lascelles." He moved across to Sarah, who had stood up, and shook her hand also. "Dr. Blakeney." He gestured to the chairs. "Please sit down. I'm very aware that all our time is precious, so I don't intend to take up more of it than I need to. I am here as one of the joint executors of the last written will and testament of Mrs. Mathilda Beryl Gillespie, copies of which I will give you in a few minutes, and from which you may satisfy yourselves that it does in fact supersede any previous will or wills made by Mrs. Gillespie. The other joint executor is Mr. John Hapgood, currently manager of Barclays Bank, Hills Road, Poole. In both instances, of course, we hold our responsibilities as executors on behalf of our firms so should either of us cease employment with the said firms, then another executor will be appointed in our place." He paused briefly. "Is all that quite clear?" He glanced from one to the other. "Good. Now, if you'll bear with me for a moment, I'll just connect the video to the television." He produced a coil of coaxial cable like a magician from his pocket and plugged one end into the television and the other into the video recorder. "And now a power socket," he murmured, unrolling a wire and a plug from the back of the video. "If I remember correctly, it's above the skirting board to the right of the fireplace. Ah, yes, here we are. Splendid. And just in case you're wondering how I knew, then let me explain that Mrs. Gillespie invited me here to make an inventory of all her possessions." He beamed at them. "Purely to avoid acrimonious arguments between the relative parties after the will has been read."

Sarah was aware that her mouth had been hanging open since he entered the room. She shut it with a conscious effort and watched him deftly tune the television to receive the signal from the recorder, then open his briefcase and remove a video cassette which he inserted into the recorder before standing back to let Mathilda speak for herself. You could have heard a pin drop, she thought, as Mathilda's face materialized on the screen. Even Ruth sat as if carved in stone, her cigarette temporarily forgotten between her fingers.

The well-remembered voice, with its strident upper-class vowels, spoke confidently from the amplifier.

"Well, my dears," Mathilda's lips thinned scornfully, "I'm sure you're wondering why I insisted on bringing you together like this. Joanna, I have no doubt, is cursing me quietly under her breath, Ruth is nursing yet another grievance and Sarah, I suspect, is beginning to wish she had never met me." The old woman gave a dry laugh. "I am, by now, impervious to your curses, Joanna, so if there is awareness after death, which I doubt, they won't be troubling me. And, Ruth, your grievances have become so tiresome recently that, frankly, I'm bored with them. They won't be troubling me either." Her voice softened a little. "The irritation, however, that I am sure Sarah is feeling at my unilateral decision to involve her in my family's affairs
does
concern me. All I can say is that I have valued your friendship and your strength of character, Sarah, during the time I've known you, and I cannot think of anyone else who could even begin to support the burden that I am about to place on your shoulders."

There was a brief pause while she consulted some notes on her lap. To Sarah, whose uncritical affection now appeared naive in the face of the universal dislike which Mathilda had inspired in those who knew her, the old woman's eyes were uncharacteristically cruel. Where, she wondered, had her humour gone?

"I wish to make it absolutely clear that Joanna is not James Gillespie's daughter, but the daughter of my uncle, Gerald Cavendish. He was my father's elder brother and..." she sought for the right words to express herself, "the liaison between us began some four years after he invited me and my father to live with him in Cedar House following the death of my mother. My father had no money of his own because the estate had been settled on the elder son, Gerald. My mother's money reverted to her family when she died, apart from a small inheritance which was left in trust for me. Without Gerald's invitation to live with him in Cedar House, my father and I would have been homeless. To that extent I was grateful. In every other respect I despised and loathed the man." She smiled coldly. "I was a child of thirteen when he first raped me."

Sarah was shocked-not just by what Mathilda was saying, but by the way she was saying it. This was not a Mathilda
she
recognized. Why was she being so brutal, so coldly calculating?

"He was a drunken monster, like my father, and I hated them both. Between them, they destroyed any chance I might ever have had of forming a lasting and successful relationship. I have never known if my father knew what Gerald was doing but, even if he did, I am in no doubt whatsoever that he would have let it continue for fear of Gerald evicting us from Cedar House. My father was an intensely lazy man who scrounged off his wife's family until she died, and then scrounged off his brother. The only time I ever knew him to work was later, when he stood for election to the House of Commons, and then only because he saw membership as an easy route to a knighthood. Once elected, of course, he reverted to what he truly was-a contemptible man." She paused again, her mouth turned down in bitter remembrance.

"Gerald's abuse of me continued on and off for twelve years when in desperation, I told my father about it. I cannot adequately explain why it took me so long, except to say that I lived in constant terror of both of them. I was a prisoner, financially and socially, and I was brought up to believe, as many of my generation were, that men held natural authority within a family. I thank God those times are passing because I see now that natural authority belongs only to those who earn the respect to exercise it, be they male or female." She paused for a moment. "My father, of course, blamed me for what had happened, calling me a disgusting slut, and was disinclined to do anything. He preferred, as I knew he would, to maintain the status quo at my expense. But he was vulnerable. He was now a Member of Parliament, and in desperation I threatened to write to the Conservative Party and the newspapers in order to expose what sort of family the Cavendishes really were. As a result of this, a compromise was reached. I was allowed to marry James Gillespie who had declared an interest in me, and in return I agreed to say nothing. Under these conditions, we made some attempt to resume our lives although my father, fearing perhaps that I would go back on my word, insisted that my marriage to James take place immediately. He secured James a position at the Treasury, and packed us off to a flat in London."

There was a longer silence this time while she turned to another page of her notes, adjusting her glasses as she did so. "Unfortunately, I was already pregnant, and when Joanna was born less than five months after our marriage, even James, by no means the brightest of men, realized the baby couldn't possibly be his. Life became very difficult after that. Not unreasonably, he resented us both, and this led to bouts of violence whenever he had too much to drink. We continued in this unhappy vein for another eighteen months until, mercifully, James announced that he had secured a job abroad and would be sailing the next day without us. I have never regretted his departure or cared one iota what happened to him. He was a very unpleasant piece of work." The old eyes stared straight out of the screen, arrogant and disdainful, but for Sarah at least there was a sense of something withheld. Mathilda, she thought, was not being quite honest.

"It is tedious now to recall the difficulties of those months after his departure. Suffice it to say that money was short. Joanna experienced similar problems herself when Steven died. The difference was that my father refused to help me-he had by now received his knighthood and enough water had passed under the bridge to mitigate my threats of exposure-while
I
did help
you
, Joanna, although you have never thanked me for it. In the end, when it was clear that eviction was becoming a real possibility, I wrote in desperation to Gerald and asked him to support his daughter. This, I gather, was the first he knew of Joanna's existence," she smiled cynically, "and my letter prompted him into the one honourable act of his life. He killed himself with an overdose of barbiturates. The pity is he didn't have the decency to do it sooner." Her voice was brittle with dislike. "A verdict of accidental death was recorded, but I cannot believe the two things were unrelated, particularly in view of the letter he sent to his solicitor, making Joanna heir to all his property."

She turned to what was obviously the last page of her notes. "I now come to what has prompted me to make this film. Joanna first. You threatened me with exposure if I refused to leave Cedar House immediately and make the property over to you. I have no idea who suggested you look for your father's letter, although," she smiled grimly, "I have my suspicions. But you were very misinformed about your rights. Gerald's absurd will could not break the trust whereby his father granted him a life interest in the property after which it passed to the nearest male relative, namely my father. By dying, Gerald merely conferred on his brother and his brother's heirs a permanent interest in the Cavendish wealth. He knew it, too. Please don't imagine that his pathetic codicil was anything more than a weak man's atonement for sins of commission and omission. Perhaps he was naive enough to believe that my father would honour the obligation, perhaps he just thought that God would be less harsh if he showed willing to make amends. Either way he was a fool. He did, however, have the sense to send me a copy of the codicil and, by threatening to go to court with it in order to challenge the trust, I was able to use it to influence my father. He agreed to finance you and me in London while he remained alive and to make the property over to me on his death which he was entitled to do. As you know, he was dead within two years, and you and I moved back to Cedar House." Her eyes, staring fixedly into the lens, picked out her daughter. "You should never have threatened me, Joanna. You had no reason to, whereas I had every reason to threaten my father. I have made some very handsome settlements on you, one way and another, and feel that I have discharged all my obligations towards you. If you haven't already taken me to court when you see this, then I urge you not to waste your money after I'm gone. Believe me, I have given you more than the law ever entitled you to.

"Now, Ruth." She cleared her throat. "Your behaviour since your seventeenth birthday has appalled me. I can find no way to account for it or excuse it. I have always told you that the property would be yours when I died. I was referring to Cedar House but you assumed, without any prompting from me, that the contents and the money would be yours, too. That was a false assumption. My intention was always to leave the more valuable contents and the money to Joanna, and the house to you. Joanna, I assumed, would not wish to move from London, and you would have had the choice either to sell up or stay but you would have sold, I'm sure, because the house would have lost its charms once the estate was approved. What little remained to the property would never have satisfied you because you're as greedy as your mother. In conclusion, I can only repeat what I said to Joanna: I have made some very handsome settlements on you and feel that I have more than discharged my obligations to you. It may be the fault of inbreeding, of course, but I have come to realize that neither of you is capable of a decent or a generous thought." Her eyes narrowed behind her glasses. "I therefore intend to leave everything I own to Dr. Sarah Blakeney of Mill House, Long Upton, Dorset, who will, I am confident, use her windfall wisely. In so far as I have ever been capable of feeling fondness for anyone I have felt it for her." She gave a sudden chuckle. "Don't be angry with me, Sarah. I must have died without changing my mind, or you wouldn't be watching this. So remember me for our friendship and not for this burden I have laid on you. Joanna and Ruth will hate you, as they have hated me, and they will accuse you of all manner of beastliness, just as they have accused me. But 'what's done cannot be undone,' so take it all with my blessing and use it to promote something worthwhile in my memory. Goodbye, my dear."