The Sealed Letter (32 page)

Witness

(to see with one's own eyes;
to testify against, or for;
to be a mark, token, sign)

What so false as truth is, False to thee?

Robert Browning,
"A Woman's Last Word" (1855)

On the evening of the twenty-second, Fido walks the polished boards of her bedroom. Tomorrow she'll wait till her name is called, then mount the steps to the box. She'll take her oath, hand on the Bible, and then—

What on earth is she going to say?

Each time she passes her mirror, out of the corner of her eye she glimpses her large, moonlike face.
Not reputed to be of any conspicuous beauty.
She doesn't turn to look at herself head-on: no need.
Not in my wildest dreams,
he said in the cab,
not even if delirious or demented.
Fido doesn't care so much about that; it's not as if she's ever wanted men to take that sort of interest in her. She can bear to be plain; she has other shining qualities. What's tormenting her is the sense that she's been a fool.

There was no attempted rape. Oh, Harry has attacked her savagely, with this ghastly, un-spelled-out story of the
sealed letter
—but he never laid a hand on her.

How could she have been taken in by Helen's lurid tale for one second? Leaving aside its intrinsic unlikelihood—the timing rings false. Why, if not to bolster her desperate legal defence by smearing her husband's character, would Helen have brought the thing up, that day in the teashop?
The unspeakable incident. Hidden away in the deepest folds of your memory.
Nonsense! And all that posturing, those delicate qualms:
I'd never ask you to testify, dearest.... If only I could take this cup from your lips. ..
Fido's hands have contracted into fists, now, and she's pacing faster; one board groans every time she puts her weight on it. Looking back, there were so many points when any woman of average intelligence should have smelled a rat. And Fido knows that she's more intelligent than the average woman—that is, when her brains aren't blurred by the proximity of Helen Codrington.
She deceives me over and over, and I let her, I open my arms to gather her lies like blossoms.

Now she's begun admitting the sense of what Harry told her, she can't stop. Stitch by stitch, Fido is unpicking the woman's fraudulence. That pair of missing letters, for instance: the vilified Maltese post. How likely is it, really, that two different letters from the same sender, on two different mail-boats, would go astray in the crossing from Valetta to London?
Slitting open one of yours,
Harry said,
at the breakfast table in Valetta, and casting it aside with a snide remark about spinsters having too much time on their hands.
Yes, Fido canjust imagine Helen in that little scene, a roll of those sapphire eyes. So the truth must be that Helen simply discarded her best friend, as soon as Fido was too far away to be of any immediate use.
After all the years I'd lived in her house, slept in her bed, tried to keep her life from flying into pieces!
Then when Helen ran into Fido again seven years later, on Farringdon Street—

Hold on.
Her mind works slowly, a worm chewing up dirt, but it still does work.

Fido pulls the bell-cord, and waits for her maid to mount the stairs. Her throat is dry. "I'm sorry to trouble you so late, Johnson, but I believe some warm milk may help me sleep."

"No trouble at all."

The expressionless, ageing maid must know that tomorrow's the day her mistress is going to testify. The staff must all be familiar with every detail, from the specific—the colour of the yellow nankin stained dress—to the opaque—the
sealed letter
and what it may say about the relations between their mistress and an adulteress. It occurs to Fido that this is the measure of loyalty: Johnson could have made her nest-egg by now, simply by offering an interview to one of the weekly papers.
The Faithfull Connection: Behind the Scenes in Woman-ist's Bachelor Household.

She forces herself on. "Also—I wonder if I could check your memory, a small point..."

"Certainly, madam."

Fido swallows. "The first time you met Mrs. Codrington—" The name's like a stain on the counterpane. "Do you happen to remember when that was?" The maid's lined face has stiffened.

"Was it towards the beginning of September? The sixth, I believe?" Fido sighs; how can the maid be expected to remember? "She came to tea that day. As did a military gentleman." It's ridiculous; she finds she can't say Anderson's name.

Johnson shakes her head, suddenly decisive.

"Of course, you'd have had no reason to make note of the date," Fido mutters, partly to herself.

"It was before that, madam."

This is what she dreads to hear. "You first laid eyes on Mrs. Codrington
before
the day she came to tea?"

The maid's nodding. "At least a week before that—the end of August, it must have been—though I didn't know who she was then, of course. She came by in a cab with the same gentleman," says the maid with pointed hostility, "and asked for you."

Fido's pulse is painful in her chest. "You're quite sure?"

"Yes, madam, it stuck in my mind because they didn't leave their names, though I asked of course," says the maid. "She—Mrs. Codrington—she wanted to know was this the correct address for Miss Faithfull. I said you were at your steam printing office on Farringdon Street, and would she like to leave a card? But she didn't. She just drove off in a hurry. The two of them did, I mean."

Fido's hand is over her mouth.

"So I'll bring up the milk now?"

"Never mind that," she manages to say, turning away. Waiting for the door to shut.

It was a conspiracy from the beginning, then. Helen, learning from the maid that Fido was in the City that afternoon, hovered outside her office with Colonel Anderson so they could pretend to bump into her, quite by chance. How beautifully it all worked out—Fido's asthma attack on the Underground, their visit to the press, the whole flurry of newfound intimacy ... And Fido, in her sparking soap-bubble of self-delusion, attributed the whole thing to providence!

Perhaps there is no providence, no fate, no grand plan, she thinks now. Perhaps we dig our own traps and lie down in them.

Her cheeks are encased in her cold fingers.
Oh Helen, what wrong did I ever do you? Haven't I loved you with all my being, tried to save you, suffered untold humiliations for you?

But no, it occurs to her that she's looking at it from the wrong angle. The mortifying truth is that Fido's irrelevant: a convenient messenger, go-between, mouthpiece.
Some handkerchief or umbrella.
In Helen's tangled melodrama, Fido's is only a walk-on part. That's what leaves her sick and dizzy now; that's why this little lie about Farringdon Street hurts more than all the other, graver ones. The joke is that Helen is probably not guilty of any malice towards Fido. She's dealt her a mortal blow, but carelessly, as one might drop a book.

Does that make it better? No, worse.
I'd rather count,
Fido decides, lifting her face.

She heaves a long breath, and squares her shoulders. She pads over to the dresser. In the jewellery box she finds the velvet choker, and she holds it taut in her fingers and marvels that she was ever charmed by such trash. With her thumbnails, she starts stripping off every dull bead, every last fragment of shell.

Knowledge like honey in her mouth:
I can destroy her. I can do it tomorrow.

***

Fido, hovering at the back of the court, looks around the packed rows. Will she have to stand for hours? She's not sure she has the strength, after a sleepless night. But just then a gentleman stands to offer her his small portion of the bench, and she accepts with a grateful nod.

She's wearing her usual business costume of long-sleeved bodice and ankle-length skirt. (At first light, she put on her best dress—plum velvet, over a stiffened petticoat—then told herself it was rank hypocrisy and took it off again.) Nobody casts her a glance; her name may be somewhat famous, but her face, not at all. That will be different by the end of the day: everyone in this crammed courtroom will have memorized her features. (Please, no photograph in the papers!)

The tallest of the barristers rises. "I rejoice, gentlemen," he tells the jury, "that the moment has finally come to argue the case of my much persecuted client."

Hawkins, for the respondent:
that's how the papers describe him, Fido remembers.

"I regret that the adjournment was necessary. But I have the fullest confidence that despite all the arguments prejudicial to Helen Codrington you heard two weeks ago, you will have held your judgement in righteous suspense, remembering that your verdict is one of moral life or death for the lady. This is a tragic story," Hawkins goes on sonorously, "of an ill-matched couple who, by British law, I trust you will find, must remain married for the rest of their days and make the best of it. Such a verdict will teach a valuable lesson to husbands, that if they choose to live more or less apart from their wives, they cannot, at some future period of their own convenience, shake off the yoke they have come to find heavy."

Fido's eyes seek out Harry, sitting beside his lawyers. In profile, he's a wooden figurehead, weathered by storms.

"The respondent is of a lively and artless disposition," admits Hawkins, "given to speaking in superlatives, and kicking against the chains of custom. Unwise, perhaps, in agreeing in her carefree girlhood to become the helpmeet of a sober naval officer in his middle years—unwise, I grant you, but never criminal."

A few snickers from the audience.

Hawkins looks graver. "Raised in the relaxed atmospheres of India and Italy, my client has foreign habits, such as letting gentlemen escort her at night, or conversing with them while sitting up in bed. These habits may arouse your English distaste, but it would be most unfair to judge them by English rules of propriety."

Does anyone believe a word this man is saying? Fido wonders.

"A web of malicious, salacious innuendo has been all my learned friend has offered to prove Mrs. Codrington's misconduct," remarks Hawkins. "For a couple to live separate lives, even with each other's full sanction, is dangerous, especially for the wife. A husband's frequent visits to another woman—in this case, Mrs. Watson," he adds darkly, "are generally assumed to be harmless, whereas a wife's friendship with another man is vulnerable to the most sordid suspicions."

Well, that much is true, Fido admits; there's nothing symmetrical in marriage. If Fido didn't know the truth—if Helen were any other woman in the world—she'd probably give her the benefit of the doubt.

"But the petitioner was fully aware of his wife's friendships," Hawkins points out, "and did nothing to curtail them. Regarding Lieutenant Mildmay: may I—need I—point out that my client would hardly have asked for him to be examined if she were conscious of the least guilt in her relations with him? Mildmay's declining to be interviewed may be due to a natural dread of publicity, or perhaps some lower motive: it is not impossible that he may feel some enmity towards her for refusing him her favours..."

Fido almost admires the light way the man drops in these outrageous suggestions.

"We have been told of wild conversations, private trysts and assignations," Hawkins sweeps on, "but all this testimony has been circumstantial and contradictory. We have heard inferences, not facts, from a shabby line-up of witnesses, including an embittered housekeeper, a footman discharged for a brutish attack on a fellow servant, and the most patently hostile of former friends, Emily Watson," says the barrister with a handsomely curled lip. "Much of this so-called evidence is obscene fantasy. My learned friend has asked you to believe, for instance, that a lady and gentleman would commit adultery in an upright position on a quay under full dazzling moonlight! Or on a cabin bench of no more than twelve inches in width, on a journey by gondola of no more than ten minutes!"

"Three would do," shouts someone from the gallery, which provokes roars of mirth.

Fido goes hot. Unspeakable things can all be spoken in this packed, stifling room: it's a little hell at the heart of the metropolis where a sort of alchemy turns everything to dirt.

After a brief hiatus as Judge Wilde orders the offender found and ejected from the court, he gives Hawkins a warning.

"The court must pardon my explicitness, my Lord," says Hawkins magnificently, "since it is the tool required to hack through the thickets of innuendo that threaten to ensnare my client."

Now he calls his witnesses one by one: another boatman who denies that the gondola got particularly out of trim on the nights when Mrs. Codrington was in it with either of her escorts; another former servant who insists that on Malta Mrs. Codrington usually had a maid sleeping in her room. Fido's not really listening, she's distracted by a kind of stage fright: when will she be called?

Turning to the London evidence, Hawkins admits that his client's meetings with Colonel Anderson—by sheer coincidence, on home leave this summer—did become covert, "but only because the petitioner began to display an unaccountable hostility to his wife continuing in England the independent life she'd formed in Malta," he says. "As for the so-called assignation at the Grosvenor Hotel, no witness from the hotel has been produced, nor any evidence that Colonel Anderson took a bed-chamber. He and Mrs. Codrington can hardly have committed the act in question in the coffee-room! My learned friend has performed a similar sleight of hand on the letter found in the respondent's desk," Hawkins rushes on. "There is no proof that she ever sent it; it might have been merely a private soliloquy—an outpouring of emotion. Its language, in either case, is not that of hardened adulteress to paramour, but that of a troubled lady to a platonic friend, on the eve of his rash marriage. As a missive from a married woman, I do not deny it is imprudent, but it contains in its sorrowful tone and high-minded wishes for the co-respondent's welfare much that is creditable, and nothing
—nothing
—to prove that she broke her marriage vows with him."