The Sealed Letter (13 page)

Little cries of relief and gratitude go round the circle. Fido, teeth set, tries to look pleased.

"As she's the major shareholder of the
Journal,
you understand that I'd prefer not to make any dramatic changes until I've had a chance to consult her."

No one can do anything but agree with Bessie Parkes.

First among equals,
thinks Fido bitterly, on her way down the stairs.
We are divided.
The machine rolls on but squeals, the little screws are starting to loosen and pop out.

***

The blue wax seal is unfamiliar to Fido, when she cracks it at her desk at Taviton Street, but she's guessed from the Scottish postmark that the letter's from Colonel David Anderson. She's bristling already. Let him make his own assignations: she won't play gullible hostess and go-between any more. Two lines into the note, she starts to wheeze.

Dear Miss F.,

You can imagine, I believe, with what difficulty I write today to inform you that I am engaged to be married.

She gasps for breath.
Oh Helen.
The scoundrel, the blackguard, the brute! Not content with destroying one woman's peace of mind, he takes a whim, a mere fortnight later, to marry another.

Let me begin by assuring you that at your house on the sixteenth, where youwere kind enough to allow me to meet our friend for a private discussion, this was not yet the case. As your correspondents rightly informed you, a cousin of mine, who cares for me with a devotion that I cannot claim to deserve, has had reason to believe that I would make her an offer, but I did not in fact commit myself until I reached Scotland on the eighteenth, when I was lucky enough to be accepted by that young lady.

I am aware that my recent behaviour towards our mutual friend has been in certain respects unbecoming to a gentleman as well as to an officer of Her Majesty's armed forces. All I can say to mitigate if not excuse my offence is that the situation has become intolerable and seems to offer no prospect of ease on either side. As I know you disapprove in the sternest terms of the connection, and rightly so, I hope it will be with some measure of relief admixed with concern for the lady that you will hear now that it is at an end.

It's true: behind her outrage, Fido's aware of a surge of gladness. This will be a blade to hack through the coils in which Helen's tangled, as perhaps nothing else could. But how dare Anderson offer that as an excuse! For him not to give the woman who's compromised herself for him as much as a moment's warning of this cataclysm—

Despite the short period of our acquaintance, Miss F., my respect for your intellectual as well as sympathetic capacities has grown to the point that in my current state of discomfort I can see no better—less cruel, rather—way to break the news to our friend than by asking you to do it as my proxy. At such times man is but a blunt instrument, and I feel sure that you will be better able than I to offer comfort and counsel to a lady of whose unhappiness I confess I took advantage, and whose future life can only be improved by the voluntary though sorrowful departure from it of

D. A.

(I will count it as the last of your many kindnesses to me if you'll destroy this letter and any other record of an episode that should never have been begun.)

Fido folds it up with shaking fingers. The blue wax is breaking into fragments: cheap stuff.

***

The next day, as soon as she can get away from the press (and a tiresome mix-up about the reprinting of a miscellany celebrating last year's marriage of the Prince of Wales to Princess Alexandra), Fido hails a cab to Eccleston Square. But instead of going in, she sends the driver to ask if Mrs. Codrington would be so good as to come down for a few minutes. It's occurred to her that this news should be broken where none of the family or servants could possibly overhear a word of it.

"Fido! What's all this hugger-mugger?" Helen, leaning in the cab window, is looking very stylish in flamingo silk.

"Climb in, won't you? I've something very particular to say."

She waits till her friend is sitting down beside her, and then she tells her. Helen's eyes shut and her head sags back against the greasy upholstery. Fido takes her by the shoulders and pushes her face down onto her skirt. Helen, doubled up, lets out a moan. Fido uncorks a small bottle of salts and holds it close to the sharp little nose; the pungency makes Helen rear up. "Oh you poor creature," cries Fido, "if I could have thought of any kinder means—"

Helen blinks at her like some small, stunned animal.

Fido hesitates. "But his letter does contain one truth, and in time I hope you'll come to see it: this awful blow is for the best."

Helen pulls back so hard, she bangs her shoulder against the window frame. "How dare you!"

Fido presses on. "Anderson's been a brute, yes, but perhaps ... a rational one. Whatever could you have hoped for, what future could there have been, in your connection with this man?"

She speaks through closed teeth. "It's been keeping me alive."

"But tainting your relation to your husband, your children, your own heart," says Fido pleadingly. "This way it's over with one sharp cut, and you're saved."

"Saved?" Helen's eyes narrow.

Fido starts to stammer. "It's my, I wouldn't speak this way if I didn't feel it to be my duty—"

"Damn your duty," says Helen in a voice that comes out as deep as a man's. "Are you my vicar or my friend? I can't bear preaching, today of all days."

"My dearest, I'm only fearful for your welfare. For your—"

"My what? My soul, or my reputation?" asks Helen, sardonic.

"All of you!"

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?"