The Scold's Bridle [antikvár]

I wonder if I should keep these diaries under lock and key. Jenny Spede has disturbed them a^ain and it's annoyinLf me. She must have opened a volume inadvertently while dustinLf, and reads them now out of some sort of prurient curiosity. What does she make, I wonder, of an old woman, deformed by arthritis, stripping naked for a young man^ A vicarious lust, I am sure, for it begigars belief that anyone other than her brute of a husband has ever regarded her with anything but revulsion. But, no, it can't be Jenny. She's too lazy to clean so thoroughly and too stupid to find anything I say or do either interesting or amusing. The later volumes seem to be attracting the most attention but, at the moment, I can't see why. I am only interested in beginnings for there is so much hope at the beginning. The end has no merit except to demonstrate how badly that hope was misplaced. 'In the dead vast and middle of the night How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.' One Dr Sarah Blakeney stood beside the bath and wondered how death could ever be described as a victory. There was no triumph here, no lingering sense that Mathilda had abandoned her earthly shell for something better, no hint even that she had found peace. The dead, unlike the sleeping, oflFered no hope of a re-awakening. Tou want my honest opinion?' she said slowly, in answer to the policeman's question. 'Then no, Mathilda Gillespie is the last person I'd have expected to kill herself.' They stared at the grotesque figure, stiff and cold in the brackish water. Nettles and Michaelmas daisies sprouted from the awful contraption that caged the bloodless fiice, its rusted metal bit clamping the dead tongue still in the gaping mouth. A scattering of petals, curling and decayed, clvmg to the scraggy shoulders and the sides of the bath, while a brown sludge below the water's surface suggested more petals, waterlogged and sunk. On the floor lay a bloodied Stanley knife, apparentiy dropped by the nerveless fingers that dangled above it. It was reminiscent of Marat in his bath, but so much uglier and so much sadder. Poor Mathilda, thought Sarah, how she would have hated this.