The Sealed Letter

Sunday, September 23

It has taken me two days to compose this letter.

Surely, before you formed an engagement you were bound in all honour to tell me of the changed state of your heart. What, in heaven's name, could have led you to take such a sudden and terrible step? I cannot believe that in a matter of days the tender recollection of the past two years can be obliterated so utterly, leading you to spurn one who up to that time (you'e claimed) has been constantly in your thoughts day and night. But I will say no more of my own pain; there are certain crushing sorrows wherein the heart alone knows its own bitterness.

Believe me, I am writing today not in reproachful or jealous wrath, but out of the most tender concern for your welfare. You gave our friend no explanation for your extraordinary decision except your cousin's affection for you. Let me beg of you solemnly, think well before you bind yourself for life. Self-sacri. ce may be all very well under certain circumstances, but not when the happiness of two souls (say rather, three) is at stake. Unless you can feel for this cousin what a husband ought to feel, it were far better that you should give her the immediate pain of breaking off, than that you should leave her to. nd it out after the wedding. As I know all too well, it takes a profound devotion to stand the wear and tear of married life.

I wish to see you once more; there are certain documents and mementos that I must return to you with my own hands. I believe you were intending to return to London yesterday; if this note reaches you at your lodgings this morning (Sunday), I ask that you come to me at home at eleven. (H. never returns from church before noon.) Don't dread the meeting; rest assured that if it truly must be, I will let the past be forever past and never more think of what we have been to each other. You who know me well can tell what it costs me to beg this last favour.

I need hardly remind you to burn this.

Ever yours

faithfully-

Ten past eleven, already, by the ormolu clock in Helen's drawing-room. Almost a quarter past. Her ears strain for the sound of the doorbell. This morning Helen put on her loveliest dress, the emerald and magenta satin, then ripped it off again in case Harry asked what the occasion was. She's in plain lilac now; she regrets its insipidity. Her eyes in the mirror over the mantelpiece are red-rimmed, and the skin beneath is faintly brown. Discarded, she mouths in the glass. Cast-off.

"What has an eye but can't see?" asks Nan.

"That's easy. A needle," croaks Nell, still wrapped up in flannel on the sofa.

"A face, but no mouth?"

"Ask Mama."

"What's that?" says Helen.

"It's a riddle, Mama," says Nan. "What has a face but no mouth?"

Helen grimaces. "What monstrous images you conjure up."

Almost a quarter past. Her ears crave the bell. There's a risk, of course, that one of the servants might mention Anderson's visit to their master-but Helen's beyond such petty calculations. She can't think of anywhere else to ask him to meet her on a Sunday morning, now that Taviton Street is out of bounds. (Fido, having almost pushed Helen out of the cab Friday afternoon, is evidently still in a fury. She won't even answer Helen's notes, let alone be of any practical assistance.)

"Guess, do."

"Guess, Mama," Nell orders in her ragged voice.

When the maid comes to announce Anderson, should Helen let the girls stay for a few minutes, to greet their old playmate from Malta? That might fill him with nostalgia for summer days on the hills above Valetta. Or, of course, remind him that his Mrs. C. is a mother and a wife, past her prime. (My marriage didn't stand in our way, she argues in her head, why should yours? Husbands take mistresses every day.) But then the girls are sure to mention Anderson to their papa. Besides, there's not enough time; he must at all costs be gone by the time Harry gets home from church. "A face but no mouth," mutters Helen. "A mouthless face. Sewn shut?"

"It's a clock, of course," crows Nan, and Nell giggles. "Another?"

"Really, I-"

"Another for Mama!"

Twenty past. If Anderson comes now, they'll barely have half an hour. Was there a line in her letter that scared him off? Helen made it as high-minded and persuasive as she possibly could; she tried to write it in the voice of another kind of woman altogether. Damn him, he owes her a meeting; he owes her one more chance.

Fido would no doubt advise Helen not to lower herself any further. She'd urge self-respect. But she's not here, is she? So much for loyalty. So much for the friendship of women.

"What has hands, but no fingers?"

Helen makes a small exasperated sound. "Are all your riddles on the theme of mutilation?"

"You're prevaricating," sings Nan, proud of the new word.

The man's not coming at all. Behind that shining, bluff face, what cruelty.

"Guess! Guess!"

"You'd never treat your father like this," says Helen. "Let me see, no fingers. Has it thumbs?"

"No fingers, no thumbs, only hands," says Nell, holding up clenched fists.

"May I have a clue?"

Her daughters exchange serious looks. "You've already had one," says Nan.

"Hands with no fingers or thumbs…"

"She'll never get it. The clock, again," squeals Nell, and Helen, horrified, looks where her daughter's pointing. "A clock has hands, just as it has a face."

"You're rather stupid today, Mama," observes Nan.

"Yes, I am," says Helen, and her voice comes out tragic.

"Mama, I didn't mean it!"

"It's just that we've had more practice at riddles than you," Nell assures her. "Let's try a different game."

"I'm tired of riddles, anyway," says Nan. She picks up a pack of cards. "Shall we play All Fall Down?"

"I rather think I'm still too shaky," says Nell, holding out her hand and watching it tremble.

"Oh, I'll build the house," says Nan, already forming cards into precarious triangles on the table. "You and Mama may shout when it falls."

Speechless, Helen's turned her face to the window. The streets are quiet on Sundays. No sound for several minutes but the faint contact of card on card. Then a flutter, and Nell yelps, "All Fall Down!"

But Helen's heard the scrape of the front door opening, and she whirls around. "I believe we may have a visitor," she cries, too excited. "Whoever could it be? Come, let's tidy these games away."

Nan shakes her head at her. "Nobody rang or knocked, silly Mama. That means it's only Papa, home from church."

"Let's play Old Maid," suggests Nell.

"Happy Families," Nan countermands.

When Harry comes into the drawing-room, Helen's sitting quite still, beside her daughters, like some tableau of domesticity. "You're early," she murmurs without looking up. "Nell, I'm looking for… Mrs. Bones the butcher's wife."

"Not at home!"

"Who's winning?" he asks.

"I am," crows Nan. "Mama keeps forgetting the rules."

The following day, late in the afternoon, Helen walks out the door of her house, to a waiting cab.

Rattling along, she takes out one of the large buff cards that say Mrs. Henry J. Codrington. She stares at the four corners-Felicitation, Visite, Condolence, Conge-but none of them seems appropriate to fold down, and she can't think of anything to write on it. Blank will have to do.

She's never been to Anderson's lodgings before; she's never let herself risk it. Today she gets the driver to stop outside Number 28 Pall Mall-as a measure of discretion-but asks him to take her card in to Number 24.

"Twenty-four, you said?" He glances up at the house number.

"That's right," she says coldly.

It's nearly six; her stomach rumbles. If she's not there for dinner at seven, will Harry have a fit? Heartburn, at least. At best, a choking, fatal apoplexy on the hearthrug.

After a few endless minutes, Anderson comes out the front door, and looks where the driver's pointing, to the cab parked outside Number 28. Helen takes a long breath.

He's unsmiling. He gets into the cab and pulls the door shut; he sits beside her, rather than opposite.

That means he wants to be near me. Or, of course, that he can't look me in the eye.

"I did call at Eccleston Square yesterday morning," he starts abruptly, "but of all the confounded luck, I ran into Harry on the doorstep."

"I knew something must have happened!" No response from Anderson. "Yes, he left church early; he wasn't well. Was he-did he seem surprised to learn that you were in London?"

Anderson shrugs.

"Was he… unfriendly?"

"No. We exchanged photographs."

Photographs? Men are bizarre creatures. Helen examines her small pink nails. Don't go on the attack, she reminds herself. "Have you nothing more to say to me," she asks quietly, "after I poured out my very soul in that letter?"

Anderson clears his throat. "You shouldn't have come here." A silence grows between them; she waits. "You look very lovely today," he adds glumly.

Her mouth twists. Does he think she's a girl, to be fobbed off with compliments? And yet it does gladden her to hear.

"I know I've wounded you," he says.

"Do you, though?"

Anderson takes a small packet out of his pocket, and sets it in her lap.

"What's this?" she asks.

"Some remembrances."

She doesn't need to open it to know what's there. A fob chain she worked herself, rather amateurishly, the Christmas before last; also, cufflinks in the form of stars; also, a coppery coil of her hair.

"The letters are burned already."

"Then burn these too." She shifts her leg, letting the packet drop to the floor of the cab. She thinks of the smell of singed hair.

Anderson bends to pick it up as if humouring a child. "Did you bring the items you wanted to return to me?"

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.