The Sealed Letter

by Emma Donoghue

  She shakes her head.

  "Helen!"

  "It flew out of my mind."

  "I thought that was the very purpose of this meeting."

  "Yours, perhaps," she says through a swollen throat. "Mine was to make you look me in the eye and tell me you no longer feel anything for me."

  Anderson lets out a grunt, and then, as she tilts up her face, he seizes it and kisses her, as she knew he would.

  Helen presses herself against him. This is her moment: power like sugar on her tongue. After a few minutes she breaks away an inch or two, enough to say, "Can we go inside?"

  Anderson shakes his head. "My landlady."

  Her stomach sinks.

  But he rears up to slide the trapdoor, and calls to the cabman. "The Grosvenor Hotel, if you please."

  She flushes to think of how that sounds. Why is it, she wonders, that we care what faceless strangers think of us?

  The growler gets held up in a jam at Hyde Park Corner, behind a horse who's collapsed in his traces. The two passengers don't speak; Helen bites her tongue so she won't say anything to make Anderson change his mind. Come on, quickly...

  At the hotel, he registers in the names of Lieutenant and Mrs. Smith. The clerk gives them a dubious tilt of the eyebrow, but it is Helen's maiden name, after all, and she stares right through him.

  "No luggage, Lieutenant?"

  "I only require accommodation for my wife to rest before an evening engagement," says Anderson frostily.

  The room is strikingly ugly. Helen was right, all those times, to refuse this; better a seized embrace in the dim woods of the Cremorne Gardens. In the glass, in her lilac bodice, she looks raddled; there are harsh lines around the corners of her mouth. How far she's come from Miss Helen Webb Smith of Florence.

  Anderson makes no move to lead her to the bed. He paces. This is how it could end, thinks Helen, with silence in a nasty rented room. "You may smoke," she tells him. "These curtains aren't worth saving."

  "You don't mind?"

  She almost laughs. "How considerate you are of my feelings!"

  Anderson lights his cigarette before he answers. "Darling girl, I couldn't be sorrier."

  Oh, but you could, you will. "The best thing you can do is forget me."

  She breathes in the spicy scent of tobacco. "That's the advice an executioner gives his victim: don't flinch, don't swerve, so the axe will make a clean stroke."

  "Oh, Helen."

  "Was it all a chimera? People are always telling me I have an overactive imagination," she says in a voice that comes out high and uneven. "Was our whole story one of my imaginings?"

  Anderson shakes his heavy lion's head. "Fact is, there comes a time in every fellow's life when he begins to think of settling down."

  "What for?"

  "A home," he offers uneasily, "an heir. My cousin Gwen's a splendid girl—"

  She holds up her hand. "I didn't come to this establishment, at considerable risk, to hear you sing the praises of your brand-new fiancee." She pronounces the word like a curl of sulphurous fumes.

  "All I wanted to say was, I don't deceive myself that she'll ever be to me what you've been."

  A small pleasure, a wild strawberry swallowed as the cliff crumbles under her. Helen makes her mind up: she's not here to punish this man—satisfying though that would be—but to keep hold of him. "Marry her, then, but save your secret heart for me." She meant to say it in a seductive whisper, but it comes out like a command.

  He looks away, and it strikes her like a brick to the head that she's lost the game.

  "You and I," says Anderson, "—it started to go awry the day you left

  Malta."

  What, if you can't have me twice a week, in a comfortable gondola, is it too much bother? But she keeps her mouth clamped shut.

  "You know we'd have been found out sooner or later. People notice things. Even your numbskull husband couldn't have kept his head in the sand forever."

  This is an argument that won't be won with words, it strikes Helen. But she has other weapons.

  "Give me a cigarette," stretching out her hand. "Have I shocked you?" she asks, when he doesn't move. "Do you think me fast?"

  The absurdity strikes him too, and they both smile. He lights a cigarette and she draws on it without coughing; the smoke leaves a bitter scrape in her throat.

  "I've never seen a woman do that before."

  "Really? Fido smokes like a longshoreman."

  He blinks. "Your friend Fido?"

  "Oh, I'm not sure she'd answer to that name," says Helen, as flippantly as she can. "She's cast me off for the egregious falsehoods I told her for your sake. No, I've not a friend in the world anymore."

  Anderson kisses her, more roughly this time, with his tongue. "Do you like the taste?" she asks, when she can catch a breath.

  "Hm. Rather like kissing a longshoreman."

  She laughs.

  Anderson's eyes widen, and he plunges his face into the curve of her bodice, his arms thrashing about in her layers of diaphanous silk. Some women find this animal quality in men off-putting, Helen reflects as she slides down the slippery upholstered sofa. But we're all beasts of the field, after all.

  Oh, how could she have ever learned to do without the hot weight of this man, his strong movements on her, inside her? She finds herself thinking of her husband, his long white limbs, their torpor; Harry never seized her this way, even on their wedding night; never looked into her eyes with such desperation. She feels a choking rage, now, at the admiral in Eccleston Square, newspaper erect like a shield, swallowing his heartburn as he waits for her to come home.

  But no, she mustn't spoil this moment by letting herself think of dried-out cutlets and old arguments. Helen banishes everything else from her head, brings herself back to this squeaking sofa, this glorious, writhing conjunction. It will be all right, she tells herself, shouting into the void, everything will be well now, because this man wants me, will always want me: no marriage can put a stop to this. Not mine, not his. Bone and scalding flesh, the grapple of muscle, every thrust a pledge, signed and sealed.

  Desertion

  (abandonment; withdrawing support

  or help despite allegiance or responsibility)

  If a lady be pressed by her friend to remove her shawl and bonnet, it can be done if it will not interfere with subsequent arrangements ... During these visits, the manners should be easy and cheerful, and the subjects of conversation such as may be readily terminated.

  Isabella Beeton,

  Household Management (i86i)

  It's an animal that eats up gold," groans Emily Davies, sitting in Fido's office at the Victoria Press the next day. "I so long to be done with it, I'd be happy to pay the costs of winding it up myself."

  "Miss Parkes is always complaining the Journal's destroyed her health," says Fido, "yet she won't surrender the reins to anyone with fresh ideas. Surely Madame Bodichon won't be willing to supply the gold forever?"

  "I doubt it," says Emily Davies. "In her last, she tells me that Miss Parkes has always had an exaggerated view of the Journals influence. But you know their long friendship..."

  There is a pause, now, which stretches into awkwardness. It's up to Fido to speak. "I asked you to call on me this afternoon, Miss Davies, because—well, perhaps you've guessed." She finds this woman's small face unreadable. "The other day at the meeting, when I spoke of a first-class magazine which would combine the progress of women with other vital topics of the day, you seemed ... interested. Was I mistaken?"

  "You weren't." Emily Davies's eyes narrow. "But if it's not to be a new format for the English Woman's Journal, wouldn't such a magazine constitute a rival publication?"

  "No," Fido insists, her voice shaking with excitement, "because it would appeal to quite a different, broader audience. What I'm thinking of is an entertaining monthly, on the Fraser's or Macmillan's model, which will inoculate readers—without their feeling so much as a prick!—with advanced ideas on the relation
s between the sexes." (She's spent the weekend mulling over this plan, in an attempt—only partly successful—to keep her mind off Helen.)

  "Would you be the publisher?"

  "Indeed I would. I have some capital, and a good chance of securing an investment partner, a Mr. Gunning; you must meet him. You'd be the sole editor—unencumbered by a committee," she adds wryly, remembering how Emily Davies once painstakingly cut down a rambling article of Arnold's from thirty pages to twenty, before Bessie Parkes could inform her of the Journals policy of never editing the prose of a distinguished man. "How do you like the sound of the Victoria Magazine?"

  "Very much indeed," says Emily Davies, with a precise, doll-like smile.

  For a quarter of an hour they throw themselves into the details: topics, writers, artists, rates per page. They'll save money on an office by using the premises of the Victoria Press. "What ought our motto to be?" asks Emily Davies.

  "Liberty! Let every woman do that which is right in her own eyes," Fido improvises.

  "I must insist on a contract; there's too much slapdash informality in the Woman Movement."

  "What would you say to one hundred pounds per annum?"

  "Payment in addition for any articles I write?"

  "Five shillings a page," offers Fido.

  They're grinning at each other like children when the boy knocks to say Mrs. Codrington is asking for the proprietor.

  Fido's throat locks. Without a word she stands and goes to the door of her office.

  "If you have another visitor—"

  "No no, do excuse me, if you please, Miss Davies, I'll only be a—"

  Helen's rushing across the workroom to seize her by both wrists. "Fido!"

  Flora Parsons, for one, is smirking over her composing desk.

  Abstractions and judgements fall to dust: this is Helen. "My dear," whispers Fido, trying to steer her away from the office where Emily Davies sits, "this is neither the time nor the place..."

  Helen won't move a step. There's something askew about her jacket. "He—" she chokes. The tears are coursing in sheets down her face, into her lace collar.

  Fido hisses in her ear. "Whatever the colonel might have—"

  "Not him," Helen wails.

  Before Fido can stop her, she's swept through the door marked Proprietor. Fido hurries after. Emily Davies is on her feet, sliding her notes into her pocketbook. Fido makes a rapid calculation of status; Helen, for all her dishevelment, comes out ahead by a nose. "Mrs. Codrington—may I present Miss Davies?"

  "Delighted," says Emily Davies, holding out her hand, but Helen stands like Niobe, her face eroded with tears.

  Wildly, Fido says, "My colleague and I were just discussing the possibility of a collaborative venture."

  Helen tries to speak, makes a dreadful gulping.

  "Another time," Emily Davies murmurs, edging towards the door.

  "He's taken Nan and Nell," Helen bursts out. "And my desk, he's smashed open my writing desk."

  The visitor's tiny eyebrows shoot up.

  Fido sucks in her lips, gives Emily Davies a shake of the head. "Ladies, good day." And Emily Davies is gone, shutting the door quietly behind her, thinking God knows what about the kind of lunatics Fido Faithfull harbours among her intimates.

  But through her fog of mortification, Fido has registered something. "Anderson's abducted the girls?"

  A violent shake of the head. "Their father has. I came home, I was shopping," she sobs, "when I walked in the door the house was empty. He's sent all the servants away too."

  "Where's he taken them? Not the servants: Nan and Nell," she clarifies. "If I knew, do you think I'd be here?" shrieks Helen. "I'd crawl to China on my knees for my babies."

  "Sh," hisses Fido, casting a desperate glance at the door that separates them from her typos. "Sit down, won't you? A glass of water—"

  "I'll never sit down again!"

  Exasperation, like a wave engulfing Fido. This kind of behaviour is why no one wants to employ women, she finds herself thinking nastily. "What was that about your desk?" she asks after a moment.

  "It's broken open, it's in splinters. Everything's gone."

  "Everything, what everything?" She waits. "Don't tell me there were letters."

  "I—"

  "Helen!"

  "Nothing from Anderson, I burn them all as soon as I read them, or nearly," Helen assures her. "What then? Not a diary?"

  The beautiful cheeks are sunken. "Just an appointment book."

  Fido clenches her fists.

  "And there might have been ... scribbles. A few drafts of letters."

  "This is dreadful."

  "Do you think I need you to tell me that?"

  Fido tries to gather her thoughts. "So all the staff are gone?"

  "Except for Mrs. Nichols. She claims to know nothing," says Helen, scrabbling in her bag, "but this wasn't sealed, so I'd lay money she's read it." She slaps down a piece of paper.

  Fido picks it up warily. "Eau de toilette," she reads aloud, "gateleg table, chintz samples, nerve tonic..."

  Helen snatches it back from her and digs in her bag again. "Here."

  The note is unsigned; the admiral must know his wife will recognize his hand. Dated today, Tuesday the twenty-fifth. A single line: You will be hearing from a Mr. Bird, my solicitor, with respect to a petition for divorce. Fido covers her mouth.

  ***

  At Tavtton Square, after some laudanum, Helen's a little calmer. She lies stretched out on Fido's bed, staring at the gaudy sunset that fills the window. "To think," she marvels, "all these years, ever since I made that rash request for a private separation, he's been plotting to punish me."

  "You can't be sure of that," says Fido. "It could be a sudden impulse on Harry's part."

  "He must have guessed the whole story, on Sunday when he bumped into Anderson on Eccleston Square. Funny," says Helen, her voice cracking, "the price of a single carelessness. I only asked Anderson to come to me at home because you'd barred the door to yours."

  Fido feels a stab. "I was acting in accordance with my conscience," she says in a small voice.

  "Oh, I know," wails Helen. "I've no right to come here after all the tarradiddles I told you. Why didn't I trust you with the whole truth from the start? I've no right to ask you to have a woman's heart towards me—and yet I do."

  Fido puts her finger against Helen's lips to hush her.

  "Divorce would rob me of everything. Reputation, name, my daily bread..." Helen lists them bleakly.

  The girls, thinks Fido, but doesn't dare say so. "I'm only glad you didn't run to Anderson," she says softly. "So often, I believe, a woman in this kind of débâcle sees no other way out. She throws herself on the man's mercy—and what once was romance slips into squalor, as he learns to rate her on the world's polluted terms."

  Helen's smile is a distorted one. "I saw him yesterday evening, at a hotel." Fido stiffens. "I don't want to hear anything said or done in any hotel." For the first time, it hits her that a divorce may mean a trial, in open court, with witnesses saying appalling things out loud.

  "He gave me the impression that his feelings for me were quite ... unquenched," says Helen. "But then, it seems I'm the worst judge of men's hearts. This morning he sent a little note to say he was returning to Scotland and we wouldn't be meeting again."

  "Oh, my darling girl!"

  "Regrets, it said. Regrets, D.A."

  Fido doesn't say anything for a moment, because if she tries she'll be in tears, and one of the two women must be strong. One of them must remember the way through this nightmarish maze. Finally she speaks, decisive. "You must put this scoundrel out of your mind, Helen. You've wasted quite enough of your time and spirit on him."

  Helen shuts her eyes. Her hair, half out of its chignon, looks like blood spilled across the pillow.

  "You were right to come to me." Fido's voice vibrates very low, like a cello. "You must have known you'd find safe haven here."

  Eyes flicker open, almost
turquoise in this strange evening light. "I couldn't be sure. After the way you flew into a rage in the cab—"

  "That's all in the past. There must be no more evasions between us, no more falsehoods," she says, seizing one of Helen's hands.

  Helen squeezes back. "I've nothing left to hide from you. My heart's split open as if on the vivisector's table!"

  Fido winces at the image. She bends over Helen. "Lean on me, my own one. I'll stand by you."

  "Through everything?"

  "Everything!"

  "I can stay?"

  "For as long as you need." Forever, Fido's thinking, though she doesn't dare say it, not yet.

  "Oh Fido, how did I ever manage without you, all those lonely years!"

  Her mind is leaping into the future. Why not? Women do live together, sometimes, if they have the means and are free from other obligations. It's eccentric, but not improper. She's known several examples in the Reform movement: Miss Power Cobbe and her "partner" Miss Lloyd, for instance. It can be done. It would be a change of life for Helen—but hasn't her life been utterly changed, without her consent, already? Can't the caterpillar shrug off its cramped case and emerge with tremulous wings?

  As if reading Fido's mind, Helen clings to her hand like a drowning woman. "If you cast me off or betray me like these men have, I'll perish."

  "I never will." There'll be some discomfort, some embarrassment consequent on setting up house with a divorcee, but nothing Fido can't weather for her friend's sake.

  "Swear."

  "There's no need—"

  "Swear it!"

  "I swear, then." In the ragged silence, Fido plants a hot kiss on that smooth face.

  Later that night, when darkness has drawn a merciful cloak over the lurid sky, Helen's fast asleep, on her front, as still as a baby. Beside her, Fido, propped up on four pillows, strains for breath and represses a nagging cough. Emotion always goes to her lungs.

  How long does a divorce take? she wonders. The thing is rare in English fiction. In East Lynne, she recalls with effort, the husband seems to obtain one without much trouble—but by then, the deluded Lady Isabel has already eloped to France, which makes the case clearer. Abandoned by her seducer, unrecognizably scarred, Lady Isabel comes home and takes a position as governess to her own children. Doesn't one of them then die in her arms? Wake up. This is real life, Fido reminds herself sternly.