The Sealed Letter Page 6

  My seelin-freund, my soul's mate,

  I've brooded over everything you said by the Serpentine. You're a dark mirror but an accurate one. I see now that I've somehow stumbled into a dreadful story'the oldest kind. I haven't been able to find my way out of the maze by myself, but now you, my Ariadne, have offered me the thread.

  Somehow it reminds me of what you were telling me the other day, that one should never buy silk flowers because (if I've recalled it aright?) the vapour rots the mouths of the girls who make them. You added something that struck me very much: "Knowledge brings responsibility." Well, you've opened my eyes, dearest Fido, and now I'll let myself delay no further in cutting the thing off at the root, at no matter what cost to my feelings or those of others.

  You know what a wandering nature I've always had, and what a rebellious heart. I've been so alone, these past years, without a single real confidante to keep me steady . . . But now I have you back, and I mean to mend. To be "true to myself," as you put it. If I can always have you near, for the rest of my life, I believe I'll grow a little better every day.

  May I come to you this afternoon?

  Your

  Helen

  ***

  Fido's eyes rest on the framed photographs of her sisters and brothers and their infinite progeny, and they remind her of something; she jumps up to look in her writing desk. "Oh, I must give you my latest picture," she tells Helen, "in return for your lovely carte de visite."

  Helen scrutinizes it. "It captures your majestic forehead, but it makes you look older than you are."

  "Do you think?"

  "Next time, some side lighting, perhaps."

  A pause. Fido can't think of any subject of conversation except one.

  "It must make such a difference," Helen remarks suddenly, "having an establishment of one's own."

  Following Helen's gaze, Fido surveys the narrow drawing-room. Establishment seems a grand word for her skinny house on Taviton Street. The decor strikes her as shabbily old-fashioned, compared with Eccleston Square; how bare the little tables, how few bibelots for her visitor's eyes to rest on. "Such a difference?" she repeats, confused.

  "To how one feels. You've such an independent spirit."

  "If I do, you think I owe it to these four walls?" asks Fido, amused.

  A graceful shrug. "Don't discount bricks and mortar. You can't imagine what it's like to live out one's days encompassed by a gloomy, ageing husband, my dear. I live between his four walls, wearing clothes he must pay for, obeying his minutest orders..."

  "From what I recall, you ignore quite a few of Harry's orders," Fido can't resist saying.

  Helen purses her coral lips. "Whether or no—they have a suffocating effect. I signed myself away at twenty-one," she adds, "as carelessly as a girl fills in her dance card at a ball!"

  "Your letter—" Fido feels it's time to address the subject on both their minds, "it moved me very much."

  Helen's smile irradiates her cheekbones, like a candle in a lantern. "Is Anderson—" His name comes out rather gruff.

  "He took the train to Scotland for a couple of nights; he's only just come back," Helen tells her.

  "It's really not fair to leave any doubt in his mind—"

  "That was my thought exactly; that's why I've invited him here."

  Fido stares at her. "Here?"

  But in comes Johnson, her narrow shoulders hunched over the tray that bears the steaming urn, pot, caddies and all. (More than once, over the years, Fido has had a quiet word with her maid about posture and health, but it does no good.) It takes several minutes for Johnson to unload everything.

  When they're alone, Fido brews the tea. "You might have asked me before making free with my house," she says under her breath.

  "But I knew you'd say yes." Helen grins at her, rather wanly. "I can hardly speak to him at Eccleston Square, can I?"

  Something occurs to Fido. "I thought you told me your husband didn't mind Anderson's squiring you all over town."

  "I don't think I said that."

  Fido tries to remember; perhaps she'd just assumed that the admiral, toiling away in his study, had no objections. "Don't tell me he ... suspects the colonel of having feelings for you?"

  "Feelings? I doubt it. Since Harry hasn't found me desirable in years, he can't imagine anyone else would," Helen says acidly. "But you see, I'd rather he didn't know that Anderson's back. It may seem rather coincidence, I mean," she says, rising to look out the window, "that the colonel's home leave should happen to overlap with the very month of our return."

  Fido finds herself breathless. "Oh Helen! You mean to say that Anderson took leave in order to pursue you to London, and Harry believes him still in

  Malta, all this time?"

  "I knew nothing of it myself till the man's letter turned up on my tray," mutters Helen, eyes on the glaring street.

  "But—"

  "Don't fuss and fret," she says mildly, "I'm going to set it all to rights. But now you see that I can't invite him into my own house, and I can hardly begin such a speech on the street, or in a carriage: what if he were to make a scene?"

  Fido frowns. "Surely he's too much of a gentleman—"

  "Yes, but he's a desperate man too." Helen turns, speaking in a thrilled murmur. "The things he's said, in the past few weeks—threats against his own life..."

  Fido clamps her teeth together. Vulgar, vulgar. "Very well, let it be here: if it were done when 'tis done, 'twere well it were done quickly," she quotes. "On what day am I to expect the colonel?"

  Helen glances at the clock on the mantel. "He should be here any minute."

  Fido recoils.

  "Four, I said in my note."

  "I don't want to be a party to such a scene!"

  "Dearest, I wouldn't ask that of you," Helen assures her, coming over to press Fido's hands between her own surprisingly cool ones. "Simply make some excuse and leave the room for half an hour."

  "But—"

  The doorbell chimes below. A pause, then Fido hears Johnson's heavy footsteps cross the hall. "You're a force of chaos," she growls. "My life has been infinitely calmer without you in it."

  Helen's eyes are glittering. "Don't be hard on me just now; I don't believe I can bear it. I'll need all my courage for this interview."

  "Bless you, then," says Fido, giving her a crushing hug, and a kiss on her bright hair.

  "Won't you go to the top of the stairs to receive the poor man?" asks Helen. "He thinks such a great deal of you."

  That's humbug, Fido knows: the officer's only met her twice. But yes, she does pity Anderson, despite her squeamishness; pities his state of enthralled fascination; pities his puppyish look as he hurries up the stairs, unaware of the coming blow. Falling in love with Helen has probably been the great drama of his life; it'll all be humdrum regimental routine from this point on. He should have kept his mouth shut, Fido decides; should have adored his beloved in manly silence, or consigned his feelings to bad verse and locked them up in his desk. But that kind of gallantry's dead and gone. And can Fido really blame him for speaking his love, when Helen—in her loneliness and, yes, vanity—has clearly been all too ready to hear it? (A prim old adage of her mother's runs through Fido's head as she's walking towards the stairs: A gentleman is always a gentleman unless a lady forgets to be a lady. )

  So she greets the colonel kindly, and brews fresh coffee, as he doesn't care for tea; she even offers him a little chasse-café from the brandy decanter, to cushion his spirits. She remarks on the delicious cooling of the weather; she speaks highly of Mr. Gladstone's speech on the secret ballot. "Perhaps its time has come. After all, they've adopted it in France and Italy already."

  "Exactly," says Anderson with a snort. "It's a Papist notion. A Briton casts his vote openly and without shame, in the sight of his neighbours."

  "A man of independent means, may, certainly," Fido concedes, "but too many voters are under the influence of their squires, or employers, or rich customers, so come Elect
ion Day they act as so many timid sheep. Wouldn't the secret ballot give them protection from reprisal—and the courage of their convictions?"

  Anderson makes a face. "To my mind there's something sneaking and unmanly about it."

  "But that's the paradox, isn't it, Colonel? In the case of democracy, it may take secrecy to bring about sincerity. Behind the veil, the truth will out!"

  His eyes are sliding away from her again, towards Helen, on the other sofa, pale as a marble.

  It's time. Fido stands and says quietly, "I've promised Mrs. Codrington to allow her to speak to you tête-à-tête, because I know she has something very important to say."

  Anderson blinks, jumps to his feet.

  There, Fido thinks, giving Helen a look over her shoulder, that should screw her courage to the sticking-place.

  Downstairs in her study, she can't settle to anything. She leafs through the September number of the English Woman's Journal, making a few desultory notes about what could be done to liven it up. (For years now she's been aware of the paradox that although all the members of the Reform Firm have a raging passion for the Cause, their Journal has the earnest, mildly querulous tone of the newsletter of some minor craft guild.) She finds a squashed piece of layout, and hisses with irritation: she's always reminding her typos at the press of the importance of maintaining the spaces between things. To pass a little more time, she brings her account book up to date, and replies to a short but affectionate note from her mother. We've received permission from the University of Cambridge to put forward a few really superior candidates in the local examinations, she writes, an experiment which we do hope will contribute in some small way to raising standards in the proper education of girls, something that I know has always been dear to your heart, Mama.

  When Fido checks her watch, only sixteen minutes have passed. But really, how long can it take to tell a man to abandon hope?

  She fiddles with the chain of her watch, which has developed a kink in it; she uses a paperweight of the Crystal Palace to press the two links back into line. Her father bought Fido this glass globe as a souvenir of their visit to the Great Exhibition when she was fifteen. (Out of the multitude of objects on display, for some reason the one she remembers is the gigantic pocket knife with eighty blades.) That was the same year she spent a month's pocket money on Longfellow's Golden Legend, and her brother George—too devout, even before he was ordained, to approve of poetry—burned it. She wept, and complained to her mother, but didn't dare buy another copy. These days Fido's so much her own person that she finds it hard to remember being that girl. How far she's come from the safe, enclosed world of the Rectory, where words were as solid as bricks: brother, family, role, duty.

  Nineteen minutes. Almost twenty. Such claptrap, Fido thinks suddenly, I'm not to be barred from my own drawing-room. Besides, Anderson probably rushed off the moment Helen broke it to him; why would he stay for further humiliation? But then, Fido hasn't heard the front door shut, so he can't have left. Is the man distraught, barging back and forth across the carpet? Issuing denunciations? Threats? She imagines his hands (with their light pelt of golden hair) clenched on Helen's smooth arm.

  It only takes Fido a moment to rush upstairs. She waits outside the door of the drawing-room, listening for any sounds of distress. If the two are talking quietly, she'll give them five more minutes; eavesdropping would be detestable. Dust motes dance in the shaft of afternoon light coming across the landing from a gap in the curtains. Oddly enough, Fido can't hear any voices at all, just a little sharp sound: a high-pitched rasping. A sob? Could Anderson have walked out of the house quietly, left Helen crying at the tea table? Or have the two of them reduced each other to speechless misery?

  Suddenly, across the back of Fido's eyes, the image of a kiss: Helen's coral mouth, the officer's straw moustache. She feels something like rage. She's about to fling the door open when she registers that the little sound's getting louder and faster. It's not a sound she's ever heard before, which is perhaps why it takes her several more seconds to admit what she's hearing. It's not a gasp of grief or muffled protest, no, it's mechanical: the frantic squeak of the sofa springs as they're forced up and down, up and down.

  Fido can't go into the drawing-room, not now, but she finds she can't drag herself away either. She sinks to her knees on the landing, and her brown skirt spreads around her like a puddle.

  Feme Covert

  (in law, a wife under the cover,

  i.e., protection and authority, of her husband)

  When we come home, we lay aside our mask and

  drop our tools, and are no longer lawyers, sailors,

  soldiers, statesmen, clergymen, but only men.

  J. A. Froude,

  The Nemesis of Faith (1848)

  Almost time for the children's hour. Vice-Admiral Henry Codrington's reading the Telegraph in his lounging chair. His wife, playing solitaire at an occasional table, stares at the back of his greying, rectangular head. Even his hair seems tightly fastened on. White collar and shirt, black cravat, black waistcoat, black jacket: each fitted layer is buttoned up, despite the heat (which has come back in full force, after the first week of this dead month of September, when so many West End houses are shut up—their fortunate owners off fishing or shooting—that the sky's chronic haze has begun to clear). No sign of his balding, at least, Helen notes, without gratitude.

  She watches her own short pink fingers lift a solitaire ball, then drop it back in its niche. She stands up and stretches her arms out to the sides, as much as her sleeves will let her. Sometimes Helen feels like a puppet, with no knowledge of who or what's pulling her strings.

  She walks over to the mantelpiece and pretends to be examining a landscape Nan and Nell made out of dried leaves. All the time, she's reckoning yesterday's errors. It's like a blade lodged in her stomach: not guilt, only a dark astonishment at her own recklessness. On Fido's sofa, for God's sake, at four in the afternoon: whatever was she thinking? Really, Helen hasn't the self-preservation of a blind kitten. Damn the man and his impetuosity; her legs tighten with excitement at the memory of Anderson seizing her, on the bony brown sofa, as soon as their hostess left the room. Helen knew it was a mistake the minute it was over, as she sat smoothing down her skirts, cooling her cheeks with eau de toilette. Even before Fido's gnarled-looking maid came in with an unconvincing apology about her mistress being called away on sudden business.

  But how did her old friend discover what she and Anderson were up to, Helen wonders now. Fido promised she'd give them half an hour, and Helen kept an eye on the grandfather clock all the time. Was it a flash of intuition that made Fido come upstairs early? Could she have listened at the door, flushed face pressed to the oak?

  Then the sneak deserved a shock!

  Helen bites her thumb hard. Why torment herself with speculations? She's already sent two notes this morning, the first cheery (a routine query about Fido's health), the second a little anxious: Even though you're busy, my dear, surely you can find a moment to write. No word back yet. She must be patient; it's only been a matter of hours. Fido's probably at her press, or Langham Place. Perhaps she knows nothing of the sofa business; perhaps she really was called away. She'll answer Helen's notes this afternoon, of course she will.

  Helen walks to the piano and leafs through a passage of Mendelssohn, but doesn't lift the lid. Without turning her head, she knows her husband has lifted his eyes from the paper. In the early years, Harry used to ask her to play for him. They sang duets, she recalls as if from a distance of centuries. She can't remember now whether she stopped saying yes, or he stopped asking. What does it matter now? An ornately framed photograph on the embroidered piano-cloth shows the whole clan, assembled on the estate that General William Codrington—now governor of Gibraltar—inherited from Sir Edward, the hero of Trafalgar. Their dearest Papa, the more famous admiral, Helen comments spitefully in her head. His sons, Harry and William, sit like bristling bookends beside their long-faced sisters, who'
re stuck all about with sons and daughters. (The glacial Lady Bourchier is Harry's favourite; Helen can't abide the woman.) There's Helen in the back row, with the baby girls like two basset hounds propped up in her lap; she's looking sideways at something out of the frame, and her hair's drawn back smooth with a middle parting. (Ten years on, her hair is just as red, Helen decides, though her face is thinner, and she relies on discreet aids: face powders, eye drops, pink-tinted lip balm.) Her older sisters-in-law wear bonnets with big bows under their multiple chins. At what age will Helen be expected to adopt that dire costume?

  The girls rush into the drawing-room, and the silence breaks like a biscuit.

  "Whatever have you been doing to make yourselves so scarlet?" their father asks, folding up his paper.

  "They've been running around in the square," supplies Helen.

  "In this heat!"

  "We couldn't keep on with geography, the crayons melted all over our hands," says Nell, arranging her gingham skirts as she perches on the padded arm of Harry's chair.

  "So we persuaded Mrs. Lawless to let us release our animal spirits," says Nan, clearly proud of the phrase.

  "Were the Atkins girls in the square?" Helen asks. Both girls shake their heads. "Too hot for them."

  "They'd faint."

  "Like this," says Nell, dropping on the Brussels carpet.

  Out of the corner of her eye Helen sees her husband's long nose turn her way; he's clearly waiting for her to make some show of maternal authority.

  "Get up at once," he says at last.

  "I was only demonstrating, Papa," says Nell, coming to life.

  "Lucy Atkins faints on the least pretence," adds Nan in her sister's defence.

  "Pretext," Harry corrects her gently. "You might have knocked your head on the fender, Nell."

  "Then my brains would have spilled out and stained the hearth!"

  Helen's mouth quivers with amusement.

  "Where do you get your notions, child?" asks Harry.

  "She read that bit about the hearth on a newsboy's sign," says Nan, older and wiser. "It was about a Horrible Murder in Islington."