The Sealed Letter (8 page)

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."

"Were you out, earlier?" Harry asks his wife.

She blinks at him like a doll. "Why do you ask?"

"Simply expressing an interest in how you spent the day."

Now Helen rouses herself to be convincing. "I left a sheaf of cards—twenty-nine, I believe," she says with sardonic scrupulousness, "though I'm not sure of the wisdom of letting all our neighbours know, on their return from the country, that we've been unfashionable enough to have had nowhere to go, right through the dog days of the off-season."

He lets out a short sigh.

"But custom decrees," she says, "and I obey. It's very cruel of custom, I've always thought, to make wives deliver their husbands' cards as well as their own, and receive all the tedious calls too."

"Who's custom?" Nell wants to know.

"It's nobody, you nitwit."

"Don't abuse your little sister."

"Sorry, Papa."

"But you're quite right that custom is nobody, Nan," Helen goes on, yawning. "Or everybody, which comes to the same thing."

"Don't you think you're batting rather over their heads?" murmurs her husband.

"No harm, if I am."

"I'm not so sure about that. Custom, girls, is a civilizing force," says Harry, knobbly hands on his knees. "The rules of behaviour are tested and passed down by each generation."

"Who's batting over their heads now?" scoffs Helen. "Besides, if we go back more than a few generations, our ancestors bathed only once a year."

Cries of disgust from Nan and Nell.

Harry purses his chapped lips. "There's generally a great deal of sense behind the rules. Wives must pay and receive the calls, for instance, because husbands must attend to business."

Helen snorts mildly. "Not always."

A beat. "Do you have some particular meaning, my dear?"

When he calls her
my dear,
her hackles always rise. "No," she says, unable to stop herself, "I was only reflecting on the fact that lords are often idle between parliamentary sessions, and lawyers are at a loss between cases, and even quite high-ranking naval officers, say, find themselves stranded on shore for years at a time."

Harry keeps a pleasant expression on his face, but the lines around his eyes have deepened. "As I should have thought you'd appreciate by now, in peacetime the half-pay system allows the Royal Navy to keep a large, qualified force in constant readiness."

"Readiness for what?" she asks. "The last big battle was Trafalgar."

"1805," Nan puts in.

"Very good," Harry tells his daughter automatically.

"Britannia rules the waves," chirps Nell.

Not to be outdone, Nan launches into a shrill rendition of the naval anthem, "Heart of Oak."

Come, cheer up, my lads,
'Tis to glory we steer...

But her father shushes her and turns back to his wife. "You're rather parading your ignorance, I'm afraid. What of Navarino, Acre, Sweaborgs?"

Ah yes, Navarino,
Helen thinks with grim mirth,
as if we're ever to be allowed to forget the skirmish that left a shrapnel hole in Midshipman Harry's tender thigh, or the musket ball embedded in his calf the year before I was born!
"Oh, does Acre count as a battle?" she asks, deadpan. "I should have thought that for British artillery to bombard a Syrian town into dust was like pitting a bear against a mouse."

He huffs out a little laugh. "I don't know why it amuses your mother to spout such gibberish, girls."

"I'm only asking, what does the Navy really
do?
Aren't you less warriors than bobbies on the beat, these days?"

It amuses her that Harry would rather ignore her questions, but the pedant in him makes him answer. "One may as well ask, what do strong walls do?" he says coldly. "Her Majesty's Navy is a floating fortress around her Empire." He turns to the girls, a more sympathetic audience. "When we flex our muscle, slavers and pirates quail!"

The girls pretend to quiver and shrink.

"As do Indian mutineers, land-grabbing Turks, and even the Czar's colossal fleet," adds Harry. "It's a thing universally acknowledged that our patrolling of the world's oceans in unsinkable ironsides is a deterrent to war."

"What's the strongest ship there is?" Nell wants to know. (Nell, Helen would bet ten guineas, has no interest in warships. At such moments, listening to her girls ingratiate themselves with their papa, Helen really couldn't be said to like them.)

"Hm. HMS
Warrior
is probably the most feared, as she has firepower to blow any foreign fleet out of the water. Twenty-six sixty-eight-pounders, and ten 110-pounders..."

Helen allows herself a roll of the eyes. "You're not missing your arithmetic class, at least, girls..."

"But the old wooden vessels are handsomer," Nan objects.

"Well, many share your reservations," says Harry, "but to my own not inexperienced eye,
Warrior's
sleek black lines have a modern sort of beauty. Uncle William tells me in his last that when she docked at Gibraltar, a crowd of six thousand turned out for her."

Tomorrow,
Helen thinks with a fierce restlessness,
I could meet Anderson somewhere tomorrow, why not? The National Gallery? Too dark and dirty; shopgirls make assignations there. Somewhere outside, in a crowd?

"So, to clear up your confusion, my dear—" says Harry, turning his large eyes on Helen again, "power held in reserve is the best weapon, because it involves no unnecessary bloodshed. Surveillance is the best defence."

She's sick of the subject, but can't stand to let him have the last word. She covers a ladylike yawn with her hand. "But surely the problem with deterrence is that it can only be inferred, not proved. It's like having some fat porter outside with a pistol in his greatcoat," she suggests, jerking her head towards Eccleston Square, "who shakes himself awake when you open the door, to assure you that since breakfast his presence has kept a dozen murderers from garrotting the whole family!"

Harry's face is a stone mask. After a moment he remarks to the girls, "Giddy-up! Mama's imagination appears to have run away with her again."

They giggle obediently.

"Silly Mama."

Her tongue feels thick with hatred. "Very well, I can tell the topic's a sensitive one, given your position."

His coal-black bushy eyebrows go up. "My—"

"Your current lack of one, I mean."

"My superiors consider me entitled to a restorative period after seven years of ceaseless application," he says, a muscle standing out on the side of his neck.

"No no, let's drop it. I'll read the paper, and you and the girls can entertain yourselves by practising faints on the rug."

Nan and Nell laugh, with the eyes of nervous fillies.

She reaches for the
Telegraph.

"I haven't finished, as it happens," says Harry, moving it out of her reach and re-erecting it. "Here's an interesting fact for you, girls. Did you know there's a house in Bayswater that's only a false facade, constructed to cover a railway tunnel?"

"Why?" Nell wants to know.

"It looks more harmonious that way, I suppose. Otherwise people walking down that street would suddenly glimpse a train rushing past under their feet."

"That would be sensational!"

"Aunt Fido had a fit of asthma on the Underground Railway, didn't she, Mama?"

Helen's startled that Nell remembers. "That's right, after she and I ran into each other on the street."

"I still don't see what the two of you were thinking, travelling on the Underground, when we can afford to hire cabs," remarks her husband.

"My mistake," says Helen under her breath. "You blew so much steam when I asked about keeping a carriage, I had the impression we were on the brink of bankruptcy." Then she catches sight of the girls' faces, and regrets it. "Mama's joking, my sweets."

"Grown-up jokes aren't very funny," observes Nell.

"Indeed they aren't," says Harry, glaring.

"She gave me a tour of her famous press last week," Helen remarks, testing the waters.

A snort from her husband. "I wasn't aware that you took an interest in industry."