The Sealed Letter (9 page)

"Well, one must pass the days somehow; town will be quite moribund till January."

Today's cold silence from Taviton Street suggests that Helen's strayed across a line. If Fido was willing to counsel her friend through a thwarted romance with the handsome colonel, it appears she feels quite otherwise about a consummated one.
Hypocrite,
Helen snaps at Fido in her head. Sex looms so large in the pinched minds of spinsters. Do some snatched pleasures on a sofa really make all the difference between right and wrong?

"You could always spend time with the girls, improve their French and music," Harry remarks, crossing his long legs.

"Isn't that exactly what we pay Mrs. Lawless for?"

He quietly corrects the pronoun. "I hired her to teach them for certain hours of the day, yes, but surely it's their mother who should be preparing them for their future role in life."

"I do, as it happens," says Helen. "I take them out looking for wallpaper, let them sit in the cab when I'm paying calls..."

"I was thinking more of domestic duties."

"What, boiling a leg of mutton?"

"Now you're being silly again. Supervisory duties, I meant."

"Mrs. Nichols and her underlings boil mutton perfectly well, and wouldn't care for the three of us standing round the kitchen and goggling at them."

"My point is that there's no substitute, morally, for maternal care."

"If you mean to talk cant, I really must insist on reading the paper..." Helen holds out her hand for it.

"Don't, Mama," says Nan, hanging on her arm. "This press of Fido's, tell us why it's famous."

So young, and already expert in the feminine art of distraction. "For employing girls to set the type," Helen tells her.

What if Fido doesn't write back, not today, not next week?
The buried friendship, which Helen's gone to considerable trouble to dig up and dust off, might have slipped through her fingers already.

Harry's smile is small. "Bourgeois female employment is a pure novelty, I'm afraid, as much as the stereoscope. These printers and nurses and telegraphists and bookkeepers, they'll die away like birds in winter."

"I'll be sure to pass on your encouragement the next time I see her."
I won't let her drop me,
Helen decides with a sudden fury.
I can fix this; I can make her remember how much she cares about me.

"Speaking of our stereoscope, Papa, we've had all our views a very long time," Nell puts in.

"Meaning, a month," says Helen, sardonic.

"There's a set of photographs of Japan on tissue paper. That would be educational," Nan adds.

"Well, you may show me the catalogue," says their father.

"You encourage their addiction," Helen murmurs.

"May we come see Fido's press next time, Mama?"

"You may not," the parents chime simultaneously.

"You might get caught in a machine," says Harry, "and rolled out as flat as paper."

Nan mimes this, and she and her sister fall into ecstasies.

***

Helen meets her lover at the zoo, at the north end of Regent's Park.

"Mm, I dare say we were rather rash the other day, at Taviton Street. I did like your virago," he says regretfully.

"Oh!" Helen pokes him hard in the ribs.

He seizes her cotton-gloved fingers. "Well, your strong-minded friend, then. She looks like a farmhand, but she seems a good soul, for all her radical notions. The thing is, how exactly is she going to be helpful to us now, if she's in high dudgeon?"

"Leave it to me," Helen tells him.

"You said she understood," he complains.

"She does, more than most women would." Besides, whom else can Helen rely on in this stiff-faced city?

"I still don't understand why you fed her that rigmarole about intending to give me the brush-off—"

"Men understand nothing about female friendship. These things take time; don't forget, she's a vicar's daughter. In a little while," says Helen, "I'm sure I can get her to pass on our letters, perhaps let us meet at her house again..."

"Time is just what we're short of," mutters Anderson.

Helen can't bear to ask whether he knows the date of his recall. Will her hold on her lover survive the distance? It strikes her that there are other lively, discontented wives in Valetta. The air carries a waft of reeking straw from the Carnivora Terrace, and she feels as if she might choke; she pulls her veil down. "You're a grumpy bear today." Entwining her gloved hand with his bare one.

"Am I?" asks Anderson, scratching one of his floppy side whiskers. "It's deuced hard on a fellow, all this hanging about for the post three times a day. Never knowing when he'll get a glimpse of his
inamorata,
not even allowed to write to her in case her husband sees the letter..."

She smiles silkily to hide her irritation: "Well, we're together now." They pace. "Remember what you whispered in my ear on the docks?"

A blank look.

"When I was about to get on the ship, in Valetta," she reminds him caressingly. "You told me that until you joined me in London, I'd be held in your thoughts like a jewel, all day and all night..."

His smile is boyish. "But now I'm here, thoughts aren't enough; I need to hold you in my arms."

She wants to snap,
it's only been four days since you got a lot more than that on Fido's sofa.
"Oh, for the balmy skies of our dear island," she sighs, instead.

In her mind, steel cogs are turning. She knows she holds this man by the thinnest of threads. In Malta, military society allowed a certain leeway, and Harry practically lived in his office; if there was gossip about his pretty wife and her constant escort, it never reached the pitch of accusation—that she knows of. But in England, Harry has too much time on his hands, which makes her nervous. He's beginning to poke his nose in: just think of his suggesting she instruct the girls in the supervision of servants! Here in the home country, Helen's never felt less safe, less at home.

Anderson, arms crossed, is considering the languid lions. "Apparently these poor beasts used to last only a year or two in their cages, but when the terrace was added, their life expectancy increased greatly."

"I sense a moral to this story."

"Well, yes: a little freedom does wonders." He grabs her hand, raises it to his hot mouth.

Helen snatches it back. "Don't."

"You think we'll be seen by someone who matters, in a herd of two thousand visitors?"

"The girls' governess sometimes brings them here."

"Your maternal side charms me," says Anderson. "It flashes out on occasion, like a comet."

Helen glares. "My daughters are everything to me."

"Sorry. You've teased me out of my manners," he tells her, turning his broad back to the odorous breeze to light one of his clove-scented cigarettes.

The Crimean left its thumbprint on the gentlemen of England, Helen thinks; they all went off smooth-cheeked, and came back grimly bearded and stinking of tobacco. "The least one can do, as a parent, is lie to one's children," she remarks. "I mean to protect mine from the truth till they marry, and discover it for themselves."

"Lucky girls," says Anderson wryly. "Would you care to see the rattlesnakes now?"

The last time she brought the girls here, they saw a boa constrictor seize a duck; Nell had nightmares for a week. "I believe you just want to get me in a dark room," she says, making herself loosen into a smile.

"Well, to bring me where every species can nuzzle or mount, and I mayn't so much as steal a kiss, seems peculiarly cruel."

Helen laughs.

His sigh is guttural. "Before my trip to Scotland, if we could only find somewhere to be at peace for an hour—"

"I'm perfectly at peace," she lies. He's going back to Scotland for his grandmother's hundredth birthday, when he could be staying in London to be near Helen.

"You witch! I can imagine you visiting convicts, tantalizing them, leaving a trace of perfume on the dungeon air..."

She smiles, peering into a cage where a large black cat appears to be sleeping.

"Couldn't I find a hansom and tell the man to go round and round the park?"

"London cabbies are notorious tattletales."

"I miss the admiralty gondola. Those moonlit nights, the sway of the waves..."

"You shocking man," she says pleasurably.

"My landlady's such a busybody," Anderson complains, "but I do happen to know a very nice, quiet hotel..."

Helen gives him a chilly look. "The notion has something soiled about it."

"Don't get your dander up."

Anderson sounds so crushed, she puts her mouth close up against his blond, rumpled head. "Patience," she breathes. "You know I'd risk my life for you and thank heaven for the chance."

"Darling brave girl," he groans. "Beautiful Helen, whose face launched the thousand ships..."

She moves away again, before he can kiss her. "When will your leave be up?" she asks, then wishes she hadn't.

His face flattens. "I expect to hear from my superiors any day now."

"You could always try to exchange into a home unit, couldn't you?" Oh, she shouldn't have started this; she's dashing across quicksand. "Officers do that, very often, I believe, if their regiments are sent to perform garrison duty in Canada, or the West Indies—"

"I rather like Malta, as you know."

She turns her head so he won't see the tears in her eyes.

"Officers often sell out, too," he points out. "Is that what you want of me?"

"Of course not," she says hoarsely. "I'd miss your scarlet regimentals."

Anderson manages a chuckle. After a short silence, he flicks open his watch. "The eagles are due to be fed, shall we watch?"

"I really had better be going," says Helen, to punish him.

***

In the next morning's note to Fido, Helen drops her pretence that nothing's wrong between them. After all, her old friend—with her radical notions and almost Bohemian way of life—is not like other women. The usual techniques of flattery, euphemism, and circumlocution won't work here. Helen's decided it's best to fling herself at Fido's feet.

I have no other ally in the world,
she improvises,

and so in fear and trembling I beg you to hear the whole narrative from my own lips before you pass irrevocable judgement. Did you not tell me only the other day that sister-souls must stand by each other through all trials?

Hour after hour, she waits for a reply. The time for calls is almost over. Her husband, who's spent the day down at Deptford ogling some new armour-plated sloop or screw (Helen's always refused to learn these distinctions), comes in for a speechless cup of tea. He studies a report on naval reform; Helen reads the latest installment of
Our Mutual Friend,
but she keeps forgetting who's who. It feels as he and she are in a honeycomb; walls of wax keep them apart.

The bell, at last. The maid pops her head in to announce Miss Faithfull, and relief floods through Helen's veins like sugar.

Harry's face is neutral. "Show her up."

He's holding out his cup; she registers that he'd like more tea. Why won't the man make himself scarce?

Fido comes in looking tired. Helen's ribs feel bruised. She gives Fido an apologetic grimace, to say
if only we were alone!
—but Fido stares back like a stranger.

Harry stands up to greet the visitor, all unbending six foot five of him. Glimpsing him through Fido's eyes, Helen finds his height almost freakish. Not an aristocratic Norman, no, some older race: he rears up like some implacable, axe-wielding Hun.

They all sit down and pass round the rolled-up bread and butter. Harry asks after one of Fido's brothers, who's recently been promoted to the rank of captain. Soon they've moved on to her precious Cause. "But you see, Admiral, already a full fifty per cent of British women work for their bread," Fido is telling Harry, "and often at gruelling, repetitive tasks such as chain-making or mining at the pit brow."

"Ah, poor men's wives and daughters, that's quite another thing," says Harry. "But when it comes to women of the middling or upper orders—"

She interrupts him. "At our Employment Register, I'm constantly meeting the pathetic dependents of gentlemen whose fortunes have dwindled in the stocks, or who've otherwise failed to make provision."

"Girls like Nan and Nell?" asks Helen. She can see her husband's shoulders rise, and she almost giggles.

"Of course your daughters are charmingly accomplished," Fido says hastily. Then, after a moment, she goes on: "But to what profession could they turn their untrained hands if by any chance that dark day came? I suggest that it's no natural incapacity, but only custom and law that would prevent them from working in shops or offices, administering institutions or estates..."

Harry lets out a huff of breath. "I don't think I'll have much trouble finding my girls husbands."

My girls, says he,
Helen thinks, fuming,
as if they sprang from his thigh!

"Forty-three per cent of Englishwomen over the age of twenty are single," Fido announces.

The statistic makes him stare.

"I declare, Fido, you're a regular Blue Book," murmurs Helen.

"Ah," says Harry, holding up one massive finger, "but if you and your fellow Utopians were to train up well born girls, to render them independent of my sex—if you succeeded in turning single life into a pleasant highway, and marriage just one thorny path opening off it—then why would they marry at all?"

A pause. Fido chews her lip. "Matrimony is the special and honourable calling of most women, Admiral, but from lack of personal experience, I can hardly discourse on its allure."

Harry holds her gaze for a moment, then lets out a laugh.

Helen's been forgetting how much these two liked each other, in the old days.
He's always respected her mind more than mine,
she thinks, a little rueful.

"It's been a pleasure, Miss Faithfull. After all this time. Now I'm afraid I have letters to write," he says, rising.

As soon as the two women are alone, the silence clots like blood. Helen makes herself set down her cup and begin her speech. "The other day at your house, my dearest, in a moment of frailty for which I've been excoriating myself—"