The Sealed Letter Page 12

  They lapse into a fraught silence. Fido, desperate to turn Helen's anger back towards its rightful object, says, "It's the cowardice of it I can't forgive. To think, Anderson fled like a rat to Scotland, and proposed to this cousin, just two days after your last rendezvous!"

  "Two days." Helen speaks so hoarsely Fido can hardly hear her. "After two years."

  Fido stares at her. "I beg your pardon?" she says after a few seconds.

  Helen's watching her own hand scrunch her pink skirt into a thousand creases. "Am I so easy to forget?"

  "What was it you said about two years?"

  Helen finally meets her eyes with a look of irritation. "What?"

  "You said two years. You don't mean to tell me—" Fido pulls in a long breath of stale, hot air, and speaks with as much control as she can muster. "It was my understanding that you and Anderson—that it was only a fortnight ago that matters came to—that consummation—" She silently curses her tied tongue: why is it so difficult, after a genteel education, to put plain words on things? "Two weeks since he took you on my sofa!" That comes out far too loud.

  Helen's looking into her upturned hands, as if to read the lines.

  What's she going to tell me, Fido wonders? That she misspoke, that what she meant was that Anderson's been yearning for her from afar for the past two years, like some medieval troubadour? That until he followed her to England, he never dared speak a word of it, or ask the least favour? But I don't believe that.

  "Two weeks, I meant. Of course I meant two weeks," Helen repeats. "Right now I don't know one word from another."

  "Oh, I think you meant two years," says Fido, her tongue like a stone in her mouth. So that afternoon, in her drawing-room, those terrible sounds behind the door: they weren't the beginning. How stupid Fido can be about the dim world of the relations between men and women. She's the fool who's stumbled late and oblivious into this play, the butt of the joke.

  "Two weeks, two years," mutters Helen, "what's the difference?"

  "Get out," says Fido, leaning across her to grab the handle and thrust open the door.

  Surveillance

  (watch or guard kept over

  a suspected person or prisoner)

  So far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and

  the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved or hostile

  society is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the

  threshold, it ceases to be home; it is then only a part of that

  outer world which you have roofed over and lighted fire in.

  John Ruskin,

  Sesame and Lilies (1865)

  At thirty-five a Captain and the "hero of Trafalgar," now at fifty-seven, and a Rear-Admiral, Sir Edward Codrington was raised to the august position of Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, with his flag on the Asia.

  In his study, Harry straightens in his chair, mulls over the grammar of his sentence, then bends to his pen again. Jane, working interminably on the memoirs of their late father, keeps asking her brother for an account of the naval side of things, and now, at last—to keep his mind from gnawing on itself like a rat—he's writing it. Harry will be fifty-seven himself next year, and a vice-admiral is one rung above a rear, so to an outsider his career may seem to be advancing faster than his father's, but the fact is that Sir Edward Codrington is remembered by a grateful nation, and his younger son is the hero of nothing in particular.

  The front door. That'll be Nan, going to the museum with Mrs. Lawless. Her hair's held back with a sky-blue ribbon today. Nell is still frail and confined to bed; when Harry went up to see her half an hour ago, she was half-asleep over The Thousand and One Nights, her toast-and-water barely touched on its tray. She jolted when her father put his head around the door. He knows his smile has a ghastly, painted quality these days.

  The spy is out there on Eccleston Square. Not that Harry's seen him; the fellow wouldn't be much of a spy if he were visible, after all. (Enquiry agent is the term the Watsons prefer.) He's been posted there for four days now, according to Mrs. Watson. These things take time, Admiral.

  Harry bites the edge of his thumb, then stops himself: it's a filthy, schoolboy habit. He consults his notes, and stabs his pen into the inkwell.

  In order to protect from enslavement the beleaguered inhabitants of the Greek provinces and islands, who were at that point resorting for nourishment to boiled herbage, Sir Edward found it his duty to destroy the Turko-Egyptian Fleet at Navarino on October 20, 1827. This victory over the Ottoman Porte is so justly celebrated, it is sufficient to record here that the Allied Fleet, amounting altogether to eleven sail of the line, nine frigates, and four brigs, suffered a loss of just 172 men killed and 481 wounded, among which the present writer (Sir Edward's third son, a midshipman at the time) counted himself honoured to count himself.

  Irritated when he spots the repetition, he scores it out.

  ... judged himself honoured to be counted.

  Automatically Harry's fingers move to a hand-span above his right knee: through the cloth he can find the ragged scar. (Nan and Nell used to clamour to do this, like little Doubting Thomases.) Just as well he'd got blooded at nineteen. Heaven knows, Harry has enough gumption in him to shed any amount of blood for his Queen—if only an occasion for bloodshed would present itself. But in these peaceful times he's been obliged to loiter in private life (as the euphemism has it) for four years in his twenties, another five in his thirties, another five in his forties. Now he waits for another posting, or even a pen-pusher's job at the Admiralty, to fill a few years. At the ready, at all times, he waits.

  His wife's upstairs in her boudoir (newly papered with birds of paradise, at inordinate expense), trimming an old bonnet, or at least that's what she announced at lunchtime that she'd be doing. Harry realizes now that he has no idea what trimming involves. To readjust the bonnet for use somehow, as in trimming a sail? To make it smaller, as one trims a beard? And does Helen really have the skill to do any of these things, given that she needs the maid to undo her buttons at the end of the day? Helen's a sort of engine of idleness: all she does is consume. Like the unseen spy outside, Harry's been keeping his wife in his sights: covertly focusing on her an intense observation that reminds him, strangely, of the days of their courtship. (The sight of Helen Smith's young wrist emerging from her glove once distracted him so much from his task of defending Florence from hypothetical mobs, it's a wonder the Grand Duchy didn't fall.)

  What happens if the spy finds something to report? It's still unreal to Harry. His wife is upstairs doing something to a bonnet. How could she be having carnal relations with a stranger? And what stranger? Harry quite agrees with Mrs. Watson that it's imperative he should know the truth—but they haven't yet spoken of what he'll do with that knowledge. What if the spy manages to come up with proof, hard and indisputable proof, that Helen has ... Harry's mind reels from the various phrases. Dishonoured him?Betrayed him? That she's fallen, ruined, lost?

  Or, of course, the spy may discover nothing at all. Perhaps his wife really did linger over syllabub with the Reverend and Mrs. Faithfull, five nights ago: perhaps she's a slapdash mother, nothing worse. Will Harry be relieved to have her guiltlessness proved, even if he's had to hire a spy to do it? (How very modern, he thinks scathingly; what a model of a husband, in the mode of 1864.) What then? Will he be able to meet his own eyes in the mirror every morning?

  He stares at the page under his hand, and forces out another sentence.

  Although loaded with laurels in immediate consequence by his own Sovereign and those of France and Russia, the gallant Commander was afterwards recalled by the Admiralty as a result of political machinations to which, it is generally agreed, he was made a scapegoat.

  A loud knock makes Harry jump. It suddenly strikes him as absurd that one keeps a servant to open the front door in order to save one from interruption, and yet one's work is in fact interrupted, since one always sits motionless, listening to deduce who's at the
door; it would be almost simpler to stamp down the hall (in defiance of custom) and open it oneself.

  The housekeeper, Mrs. Nichols, brings in the telegram herself. Heart thumping, Harry finds he's assuming the worst: critical illness in one or other branch of the family, the death of his elderly father-in-law in Florence ... Or could it possibly be from top brass? But no word of a posting would be urgent enough for a telegram. He slices the envelope with his knife.

  Messrs GABRIEL, dentists, Harleystreet, Cavendish-Square. Messrs Gabriel's professional attendance at 27, Harley-street, will be 10 till 5 daily.

  Harry blinks at it. Why, it's nothing but an attempt to drum up business. The nerve of these fellows, clogging up the telegraph wires and wasting the time of important men with unsolicited messages! As if Harry would dream of having his teeth drilled by such upstarts as Messrs Gabriel. Why, he has a good mind to write to the Telegraph.

  He pauses, then screws up the paper and tosses it in the basket. Letters to the Telegraph may be exactly what Messrs Gabriel are counting on. That's the devil of publicity: an airing of any kind only feeds the flame.

  Harry rereads the few stiff paragraphs he's produced about his father. This is much like hanging about for a wind, at sea, when the canvas is limp; one begins to imagine malign forces conspiring to stop anything from happening. One prays for wind, as if the Lord has no more important business on His mind. The weather must break by Sunday, surely, one remarks—when of course nothing is sure, and any day can be still as easily as windy. There's a malady peculiar to becalmed crews, called calenture: in the end the sun turns the men delirious and they imagine the sea is land and step out onto it...

  The door, again. Harry listens hard. Only the maid's feet in the hall. Who could it be, this time? On impulse, to stretch his long legs, he goes to the front of the house, and looks out the drawing-room window. The winter curtains—red velvet, heavily swagged—have been hung up; Harry stands behind them, peering through a narrow gap. He sees a rough-looking man going back to a hansom cab and climbing up into the seat on the dickey. Then more footsteps in the house: what sounds like someone hurrying downstairs. His wife? Harry's left his spectacles in his study; he rubs his eyes, strains to make out the details of the scene outside. The driver's whip doesn't stir; the reins lie in his lap. From this high angle, the interior of the cab is in darkness. Here comes Helen out of the house, now, in flamingo pink, her bright head bare. (Every other adult female in England has learned to cover her head when she steps outdoors, but not his wife.) She leans over the cab's folding door, talking to the unseen occupant.

  Rage blooms inside Harry's eyeballs. Is the man in there, in the shadowy recesses? (What man?) Would they dare, in broad daylight?

  Helen turns and glances up at the house; Henry shrinks into the shadow of the curtain. Is she sensitive enough to feel his gaze?

  Then the door of the cab folds back and he braces himself to see the face of the passenger. But instead Helen climbs in, lifting her brilliant skirts out of the September mud. Harry stands in the window like some pillar of salt. A strange lightness clouds inside his chest. All he can see is a piece of his wife's sleeve. He watches the silent conversation, his face against the glass, which smells of something vinegary.

  Suddenly Helen bends at the waist, doubles over. What the devil can be happening in there?

  She sits up again. She's turned away from him, in intense conversation with the other passenger. Her hands move in sharp, mysterious gesticulations.

  Harry could rush downstairs right now, catch the pair red-handed. But what if the fellow shoots off in the cab, leaving Harry on the curb? Yes, he feels suddenly sure that Helen's about to go off with this stranger, whoever he is. That would be like her: to drive off, after fifteen years, without so much as a bonnet or a handbag. Go, then, Harry barks in his head. He's paralyzed: all he can do is watch and wait.

  But the cab isn't moving. The driver picks at something on the back of his hand. Then he leans down, opens the little hatch, and seems to exchange a few words with his passengers before he closes it.

  A minute later, the cab door swings open so suddenly, Harry recoils. Helen climbs out, stumbles on the step. Her face is as unreadable as some Egyptian mummy's as she walks towards the house.

  Harry thinks his skull is going to explode. He lurches out of the room.

  ***

  The public house is almost empty, at noon. While Crocker licks his finger and flicks through his notebook, Harry looks him up and down. About thirty, Harry reckons, with the bad skin characteristic of his class, and an uncomfortable way of clearing his throat.

  The fellow begins to read in a monotone. "I began my observations of Mrs. Codrington's home in Eccleston Square on September the eighteenth, 1864.''

  "Could you keep your voice down a little, if you please?"

  "Certainly."

  Harry glances round at the scattered drinkers. "And perhaps ... there's no need to use names, is there?"

  "Whatever you like, sir." Crocker is about to resume his report when the barman arrives with his tray: beer for the enquiry agent, brandy for the admiral. Harry likes beer himself, but it seems an occasion for marking the distinctions.

  "On the eighteenth inst.," Crocker goes on in a low voice, "I did not see any movements from the house in question except those of servants, and that of Admiral Cod—pardon me, sir, the husband of the party in question—who left at twelve and returned at ten past five."

  Harry's seeing his life through the wrong end of the telescope. Well, he supposes one can't set a watch on one's wife without being oneself the object of surveillance. "I know my own comings and goings," he says in a tone that aims for lightness, "so you may leave them out. How do you ... do you crouch behind a cart, Crocker, or something of that sort?"

  The man looks mildly offended. "I've made an arrangement with your neighbour Mrs. Hartley across the street, to pose as a painter."

  "What, you paint the same railings over and over?"

  "Exactly, sir, the regulation green: then I clean them off." Crocker returns to his notes. "On the night of the eighteenth I watched the house until just after eleven when, as the agreed signal that the family were all accounted for, the husband of the party turned out all the lamps downstairs."

  Harry finds himself wondering how the fellow manages about food, or the calls of nature.

  Crocker's finger inches down the page. "On the nineteenth of September at ten in the morning I observed Mrs.—the party in question—leaving the house. I knew her from a photograph given me. She had with her two children, both female, I knew she was their mother from one of them calling her Mama."

  "How is this germane? I'm well aware that my daughters are the children of my wife."

  "Correct, sir, but Mrs. Watson says I'm always to note down why I believe something to be a fact. Assume nothing, you see."

  Harry makes himself nod.

  "On that day, the nineteenth inst., I followed her to the following establishments: Gambel's, Doughty's, Lock's. I saw her purchase two children's mackintoshes, some goldfish food, and a decanter for spirits. Also she was measured for a pair of shoes."

  "You can leave out her purchases too."

  "Very good, sir." A hint of sullenness this time. "Though it's hard to give a full account if all these things are cut out—"

  Harry drums on the table beside his untouched brandy, and wonders whether the Watsons couldn't have found him a more competent, or at least laconic, spy. They're being terribly kind, but perhaps they've exceeded their expertise. (He says they, because Mrs. Watson says we, but of course it's a linguistic fiction: the Reverend Watson is a man of straw.) "Have you done much of this sort of thing before, Crocker?"

  "What, watching? Oh no, sir. I have four horses, I'm a cabman," he says, and it's the first time his face has shown any enthusiasm. "I'm just doing Mrs. Watson a favour on account of my mother being in service in her family. On the twentieth of September," he goes on, sober again, "no movements observed
all morning."

  What an impeccable blank this domestic record is: like a strip of paper dolls. It occurs to Harry that perhaps Mrs. Watson should have sent a maid instead, to worm her way into Helen's trust, but he supposes that would take too long. Time was, in Malta, Mrs. Watson herself had been Helen's confidante, her—what's the phrase women like?—bosom friend. Such strange reversals, everywhere Harry turns.

  "On the twenty-first, after lunch, one of the female children was seen—"

  "Yes, yes, Nan went to the British Museum with Mrs. Lawless yesterday. Get on to the cab," Harry says eagerly. "Yesterday afternoon I happened to see my wife go outside and get into a hansom."

  Crocker looks peeved: the client's overstepping his bounds. "That's correct, sir. The party remained in the vehicle for approximately ten minutes, then went back into the house."

  "She seemed agitated, when she got down. Didn't you think?"

  Crocker purses his lips.

  "From where I was standing at the window, at least," says Harry, "I conceived the impression..."

  "Impressions are one thing, sir. Facts quite another."

  "Yes," says Harry, abashed. Then something occurs to him. "If you were watching from the other side of the street—you must have seen his face?"

  "Whose face would that be?"

  "The passenger's!"

  "The person in the cab was a female," Crocker explains. "A lady, I should say."

  Harry stares at him. "What kind of lady?"

  "Somewhat stout. Hair cut above the shoulders."

  "Oh. Never mind her, she's a friend of my wife's," says Harry.

  And then dark thoughts swarm across his mind like clouds staining the sun. If it was only Fido—why didn't she come into the house? Whatever could have been the subject of such an intense conversation?

  She knows, he thinks, shutting his eyes. Women tell each other everything.