The Sealed Letter

by Emma Donoghue

  "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."

  "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?