The Sealed Letter Page 5

  "Did you hear that Dickens put his wife aside, after she'd given him ten children?"

  "My dear, that story must have reached Rangoon the day after it broke," says Helen. "What a dastard, to vilify her in the papers as incapable of maternal love!"

  "It's said that he's entangled himself with an actress," Fido adds, automatically lowering her voice, even though there's no one close enough to hear them on the riverbank.

  "Worse," says Helen with satisfaction. "His sister-in-law."

  "No!"

  "I'm sure it was she I saw buying galoshes on Regent Street last week. Mrs. Dickens, I mean, not her sister. She's let herself go, dreadfully."

  "She lives with the eldest son, and the others rarely visit," says Fido. "I heard she still reads every word her husband publishes. How sad."

  "And how exhausting."

  It's Helen's delivery, as much as what she says, that makes Fido burst out laughing. She brings out a side of Fido, a flippant, frank, almost devil-may-care side, that's been in an enchanted sleep for seven years. "Do you miss Malta?" she asks her now.

  "Well, Harry certainly does," says Helen, her eyes on a pair of haughty swans. "He was top man of the top brass—whereas now he's got nothing to do but go to the odd chamber concert, or a lecture on warship design. So many wives complain they can't lure their husbands home from the club," she adds darkly, "whereas mine mopes around the house all day! I do hope they find him some paper-shuffling job at the Admiralty, or he's going to drive me and the girls to distraction with all his fussing."

  "It was you I asked about," Fido reminds her. "Do you miss it?"

  A little shrug. "Places mean little to me; people are all that matter."

  What does that mean? Fido turns to examine Helen's face.

  It came to her, during a sleepless hour last night, that if they're to take up their friendship again, it must be on new terms. In the old days at Eccleston Square, Fido was very much the junior, the subordinate—a sort of female Horatio; she can see that now. She often suspected Helen of exaggerating, obscuring her real feelings behind a lot of hyperbolic verbiage. And at the time, Fido accepted it as just Helen's way; she was too dazzled by Helen's charm to challenge her. But now Fido's a grown-up, worldly and busy. This time the two women must meet eye to eye, heart to heart, if they're to call themselves by the sacred name of friend. So she asks the question that's been on her mind. "Lucky timing, wasn't it, that Colonel Anderson's leave coincided with your family's return?" She says it as lightly as she can, but it still sounds like a knife thrust.

  Helen's eyes flick to hers, then away across the river. "He expects to be recalled to Valetta shortly."

  "Which is his regiment?"

  "He commands the second battalion of the Twenty-Second Cheshire. One of the old school, like Harry—iron discipline, and all that."

  Fido's surprised. "He seems such an agreeable fellow."

  "Oh, he's pukka. Very agreeable," adds Helen. Then, in a flat voice, eyes fixed on the opaque surface of the water, "Dangerously so."

  Fido's pulse is getting louder. You began this, she reminds herself.

  "Do you understand me?" asks Helen, turning to squint at her slightly in the afternoon sun.

  Her breath escapes as if from a balloon. "I rather hope not."

  "But you do," says Helen with a half-laugh.

  You were fishing, Fido rebukes herself; so don't complain if you've hooked something.

  Helen rolls her head to one side, and rubs her neck as if it aches. "The man's desperately in love with me."

  Fido's face contracts as if she's bitten into something rotten. "

  What, I mustn't put plain words on the thing, even where there's nobody but waterfowl to hear us? Very well, let's be ever so English and say Anderson's confused, then," snaps Helen, walking faster, so Fido has to hurry to keep up. "Let's not admit that it's possible for a single man to conceive a burning attachment to a superior officer's wife. That the mother of two half-grown girls could still excite passion, at thirty-six!"

  Fido opens her mouth to tell her that she's no less beautiful than she ever was, then shuts it. Helen's always needed male attention—in the old days, Fido thought of this as a minor weakness, like a craving for sweets—but there's a new, unnerving fierceness in her voice today. "Oh, Madre," she says, "you have got yourself in a scrape!"

  No reply.

  Out of breath, she seizes Helen by the elbow. "Slow down, and tell me all. You sound almost proud of making this fellow unhappy," she says sharply.

  Helen spins around; two scarlet spots on her cheeks make her look even prettier. "On the contrary. It's all a disastrous accident."

  She's like a child who's smashed a trayful of china.

  "You don't know how it's been, these past years," Helen wails. "Harry's such a blank, as a husband—such a stick-in-the-mud. He doesn't want my company. In Malta, he wouldn't stay more than an hour at parties, so I was obliged to dance with other officers and have them escort me home."

  Fido's mind is whirling.

  "So can I help it if I've made one of my husband's friends my own, in a sincere and ingenuous spirit, and the man's persuaded himself that more is meant by it?"

  "Helen," she begins sternly, "you should have cut Anderson off at the first sign of infatuation."

  A shrug, very Tuscan. "What's the first sign? By the time one notices the thing, it's grown like a mushroom in the dark."

  "All the more reason to root it up at once."

  "I don't give him any encouragement."

  "You do, I've seen it with my own eyes! What do you call running round town a deux?"

  "Hardly running," Helen protests. "A little shopping, a harmless visit to a printing press..."

  Fido feels a little dizzy. Could the colonel have asked for a tour of the Victoria Press as a respectable cover for a morning with Helen?

  All of a sudden, Helen stops in her tracks. "Oh Fido, I can't hide anything from you. The excitement of having a handsome, sparkling fellow hang on one's every word—you can't imagine!"

  Actually, Fido would rate the admiral's black-bearded, tall good looks over Anderson's golden spanielish ones, but she supposes any scowling man is less appealing than a smiling one. Fido can understand the appeal of the other sex in the abstract, but there's something missing in her; the part of a woman's heart that, in the presence of the right man, melts and runs like a vein of ore from the rock.

  "Really," says Helen, grabbing her wrist, "can you blame me if I've taken his devoted gaze, like a cordial, to refresh my spirits at gloomy moments?"

  "For shame! You must have known this could only cause pain to both of you in the end," Fido snaps, pulling her hand away. "As a wife and mother—"

  "Now for the lecture," Helen says under her breath.

  And indeed, Fido's still enough of a Faithfull to have the whole speech by rote, every principle and duty in its place...

  "Don't," says Helen, pressing one finger hard against Fido's lips.

  "Don't what?" But she knows.

  "Don't throw stones. Don't disappoint me with what every lady in Belgravia would offer, the usual pieties and pruderies! My friend, you've made something entirely new of yourself, these past years, and it awes me to see it; you've got quite out of the rut of convention," says Helen in marvelling tones. "What you were saying about marriage the other day at my house—that a wife's whole identity is swallowed up—"

  Fido tries to remember what bold statements she might have made. "Oh but my dear ... I'm not being pious, nor a prude. It's a matter of..." She struggles for words. "Self-respect. Being true to oneself. You did take a vow."

  "I didn't know what it meant," cries Helen, "how long a married life can be! And what other choice had a girl like me?"

  "Carina." She's trying to marshal her arguments, but compassion confuses her. "I do feel for you."

  Helen's eyes glitter like sand. She throws herself on Fido.

  Fido registers the hot weight of Helen's face against her col
larbone, through the cotton, and smells some kind of floral water in her hair. Two ladies standing pressed against each other, skirt to billowing skirt, on the banks of the Serpentine at three in the afternoon: an incongruous sight perhaps, but Fido refuses to care. "Little One," she whispers.

  "The relief of letting it out, you can't imagine," sobs Helen, muffled.

  I'm the only one in the world she's told, Fido thinks, with a kind of vertigo. We didn't exchange a word for seven years, but still, four days after meeting again, I'm the one she trusts. This secret's weighing heavy on her already, but she's proud to bear it.

  ***

  As Fido lets herself into 19 Langham Place, a middle-aged lady hurries up the steps behind her. "Please excuse me—is this the office of the Female Employment Register?"

  "That's correct."

  "Can you help me?"

  Looking at the strained forehead, the soft white hands, Fido doubts it. "Do take a seat in our reading room," she says, showing her in.

  The lady grasps Fido's sleeve. "I'm—I don't know you, madam, but I must tell you I'm in most urgent need of remunerative employment. My daughters and I—my husband's a physician," she goes on disjointedly.

  Fido waits uncomfortably.

  "His practice failed," says the stranger in her strangulated voice. "He has abandoned us. That was four months ago, and we have no other resources."

  "My sympathies. I'll make sure someone upstairs will come and write down your details for our register," Fido tells her, gently taking back her sleeve.

  As she goes up the stairs, she's remembering the first few such petitioners she met, when she came to work here six years ago, with her carpetbag full of essays and her boundless confidence. (Our heartiest young worker, she'd heard Bessie Parkes call her once, to a stranger.) How spring-like the atmosphere at Langham Place was back in '58: change like ripe fruit dangling almost within their gasp, fruit for which former, more fearful generations had never dared to reach.

  Today Bessie Parkes, Jessie Boucherett, Isa Craig, and Sarah Lewin (their secretary) are poring over a portfolio of drawings at the big office table. "Hello, Fido," beams Isa Craig.

  "We missed you yesterday," remarks Bessie Parkes.

  "Yes, I am sorry. My lungs have been playing up," says Fido, startled by the lie even as she produces it; why couldn't she have simply said she was otherwise engaged? She turns to Miss Lewin to tell her about the doctor's wife downstairs.

  "Quite unemployable," sighs the secretary, pushing back her chair.

  "Every other day, these reduced gentlewomen turn up at my press," Fido remarks, "and I always redirect them here, to the Employment Register—"

  "But their mistake's a natural one, as the Victoria Press is so much better known," says Isa Craig warmly.

  "What do you believe becomes of these tragic cases, when we turn them away?" Fido wonders.

  "Is this person ... handsome?" asks Jessie Boucherett.

  "Not unpleasant to the eye."

  "Then she'll probably put herself under some man's protection, in the end, rather than starve," says Jessie Boucherett.

  Protection, thinks Fido, disgusted by the customary euphemism.

  "Which of us could throw the first stone?" asks Bessie Parkes. "The Magdalene was forgiven, we're told, because she loved much. Remember Adelaide's masterpiece, 'A Legend of Provence'?"

  Fido doesn't meet any of her comrades' eyes, but she can tell what they're all thinking. They've noticed, without Bessie Parkes ever having announced it, that she no longer works on Sundays; they know she's on the brink of converting from the Unitarian Church to Adelaide Procter's: Rome.

  Isa Craig has turned away to wipe her eyes.

  "Isa, my dear, you mustn't keep dissolving into tears at the mention of the beloved name." Bessie Parkes speaks in exalted tones. "Adelaide doesn't want us to mourn. Wasn't I with her at the last, and didn't I tell you how she went willingly, radiantly, to her beloved Jesus?"

  This strikes Fido as sanctimonious cant, but she says nothing.

  "After retching up blood for two years," mutters Jessie Boucherett.

  Religion is one of those topics on which the women of the Reform Firm will never agree, which is why they have a policy of keeping it out of the English Woman's Journal.

  Bessie bites her lip. "The poem of Adelaide's I mentioned, for any of you who may not recall its details, is about a nun who nurses a handsome knight; he seduces her to run away with him. Years later, a broken beggar, she comes back to the convent, and finds that the Virgin has been impersonating her there all this time, keeping her place."

  "That's right," says Isa Craig, nodding. "The twist is that the nun can take up her old life again without fear of the holy sisters' judgement, because none of them ever knew she was gone."

  Fido's lost in thoughts of Helen. She fears she may have been too hard on her yesterday. Who is Fido, who's never married a man nor been tempted by one, to stand in judgement on a platonic affaire, an unhappy wife's slim consolation? After all, these things die away on their own, like mayflies: the Channel and the Mediterranean will divide Helen from Anderson again in a matter of weeks.

  "The infinite sympathy of the divine, the limitless mercy," marvels Bessie Parkes. She quotes from the poem: "No star is ever lost we once have seen, We always may be what we might have been."

  At that moment Fido realizes something with a sickening sensation in her chest, like a tendon snapping: I'm jealous. That's what lay behind all her stern words yesterday: not ethics, so much as hurt. With his spaniel curls and his flippancy, Anderson hardly seems worthy of Helen's burning attention. (But then, what man would?) Something glorious happened on the last day of August on Farringdon Street, a friendship that seemed extinct flared up red and phoenix-like—and what business has a blond puppy to be blundering into such a story?

  "On a more practical note," says Sarah Lewin, breaking the silence with her throaty whisper, "I must announce that subscriptions to the Journal are down this month."

  "Heavens!"

  "Not again!"

  "Mm, I'm afraid they've slipped below six hundred."

  Bessie Parkes lets out a long sigh. "Would you be so good as to look into it?" she asks their secretary. "Sound out a few subscribers who've decided not to renew..."

  "I hear from many sides that our serial novel's popular," puts in Isa Craig.

  "Ah, but what has the novel to do with the advancement of women?" asks Bessie Parkes.

  Fido shrugs, her mind still wandering. "Every pill needs a little sugar."

  It's just at this point that Emily Davies glides in and takes her seat at the table. "I do apologize for my lateness, but I bring rather extraordinary news," she announces in her usual brisk staccato. The Journal's editor is looking particularly doll-like today, Fido notices: bands of mouse-coloured hair framing her diminutive features. She slides a paper out of her thick pocketbook. "This morning I received a letter—they call it a memorial, in their stiff way—from the University of Cambridge..."

  The members of the Reform Firm are all agog.

  "...approving, on a strictly once-off basis, our request to have girls admitted to its local examinations."

  "After all this time," Fido whoops, seizing the document.

  "Oh Miss Davies, felicitations. Laurels to the conqueress," cries Bessie Parkes, shaking her hand.

  "Nonsense, it was teamwork," says Emily Davies. "Those breakfasts you hosted for influential men, Fido: I believe they were crucial. But the fact is, I'd almost given up on the dons."

  Not that anyone in the room takes this literally, since in the short time since the vicar's daughter from Newcastle has come south to work among them, she's shown no signs of dropping any fight. Emily Davies is like a terrier who won't let go of the stick, Fido thinks, only calmer.

  "Our long struggle is at flood tide," says Bessie Parkes in the thrilling voice with which she gives readings from her poetry. "Soon we sail into port!"

  As always, Emily Davies ignores such out
bursts. "The local exams will at least nudge open the door to university admission. I intend that our daughters—I speak metaphorically," she tells the group, very dry, "will be able to enroll in a women's college at Cambridge."

  Fido is thinking back to her boarding school in Kensington, mornings memorizing a dozen pages at a stretch out of Woodhouselee's Universal History while four out-of-tune pianos banged away overhead. If as a tomboyish bookworm Fido had glimpsed the possibility of attending university, how different everything might have been. She'd never have wasted two seasons as a debutante, no matter how much her mother doted on the idea. Nor ever met Helen Codrington, perhaps: now there's a strange thought.

  "Some of us may have literal daughters yet," remarks Bessie Parkes in a low voice.

  Fido exchanges a covert grin with Isa Craig. The rest of them are spinsters by vocation, but not Bessie Parkes: she's spent seventeen years fretting over whether to accept her older, debt-ridden suitor. Jessie Boucherett claims that Bessie will say yes before her dreaded fortieth birthday; Fido argues that she'd have done it by now if she meant to at all.

  Emily Davies is tapping the page. "Look at the date: the gracious dons have given us only a matter of weeks to prepare our candidates. What kept me late this morning was that I've set about hiring a hall, finding examiners, accommodation ... In a postscript, you notice, we're urged to make all necessary arrangements for dealing with any candidate's faints and hysterics."

  Laughter all around.

  ***

  The note Johnson the maid brings into the study bears Fido's name in a familiar, sprawling hand. It has a green wax seal that Fido recognizes at once. Semper Fidelis, the motto of the Smiths, Helen's family: always faithful. The two of them used to joke that it should have been Fido's instead, given her surname. And when the letters never came from Malta, in those miserable months after the Codringtons' departure in '57, Fido had come to think of it as a hollow phrase. But Helen, for all her eccentricities, has turned out to be loyal after all. Fido cracks the verdigris wax between finger and thumb and reads the letter through in one rush.

  Eccleston Square

  September 6, 186