The Sealed Letter

He wakes in his rooms at the Rag Club, his head throbbing like a wound. It reminds him of something. Harry hasn't had too much to drink since he was a very young man, but he still recalls that sensation of his veins being clogged with poison. Not that he took anything last night except half a glass of claret with some arid chops. His brother William tried to drag him off to the Haymarket for Orpheus in the Underworld-"take your mind off things for a few hours"-but Harry went to bed instead.

On the bedside table sits a red leather case containing his medals. Apart from clothing, this was all he thought to put in his valise when he left Eccleston Square. Harry opens the case now and examines their worn sheen: the Cross of St. Vladimir, the Legion d'Honneur, the Order of the Redeemer of Greece. And it occurs to him, with a surge of pain in his jaw, that the Allied sovereigns didn't really mean to decorate Midshipman Codrington for his gallantry against the Turks, or for the injuries he suffered at Navarino three days after his nineteenth birthday, but merely as a compliment to Sir Edward. So the most glorious laurels of Harry's career are nothing but his father's leavings.

Perhaps I'll never get another posting.

Enough of that. He snaps the case shut and gets out of bed. In the mirror he considers his beard-shrouded face. Perhaps a trim today, so he won't frighten the girls. But was alarmed by the resistance of the said Miss Faithfull. Just one of many phrases from Helen's so-called counterclaim that keep ringing in his head, making him stiff with outrage.

The last eight days have rained down on him like blows from a club. Mrs. Watson's turning up at Eccleston Square, eyes glittering, to present Crocker. The spy's meticulous account of following Helen and the male party to the Grosvenor Hotel. The prizing open of Helen's cherry-wood desk; oddly enough, that's the part that still fills Harry with shame to remember, despite all the evidence that spilled from the shattered marquetry: the drafted letter to Anderson, the appointment book. His brief, mortified interview with the girls; their eyes, as stunned as those of rabbits the moment the gun goes off. (Mama isn't well, that's the only euphemism that came to mind. You remember dear Mrs. Watson, he kept repeating inanely; you'll be quite comfortable at her house until matters are settled.) How rapidly he'd packed his case, scuttling out of the house like a cockroach before Helen came home from shopping; he was almost afraid to face the woman who's blighted his life. Then the endless interviews with Bird; the debating of strategy (like some obscure Mediterranean war). Visits to the girls every few days, to play Spillikins or the Ball of Wool. (They've stopped asking whether Mama is better yet.) The shock of reading Helen's counterclaim: neglect, cruelty, attempted to have connection with the said Miss Faithfull.

A rap at his door. "Nothing just now, thank you," says Harry.

But it opens anyway and his brother puts his face in. William's salt-and-pepper beard is glossy white now; Harry still isn't used to it. "Aren't you dressed yet?"

"Give me ten minutes." He's grateful, of course, he's immensely grateful to William for dropping his duties in Gibraltar the moment he got the telegram to catch a fast packet and stand shoulder to shoulder with Harry through this ghastly business, as William keeps calling it-but he finds his brother's company exhausting all the same.

"Thought we'd take the girls to the zoo, what do you say?"

William has the boundless energy of a tourist. They've already brought Nan and Nell to the Museum of Practical Geology and the East India Company Museum (where the Hindu idols in silver and gold reminded Harry of Helen, somehow) and they heard the thousand-strong choir of the Foundling Hospital.

All Harry manages now is a shrug. Each day must be passed, somehow, until the trial finally comes to court. It's not as if any of his former pursuits have the least appeal: reading, taking notes on innovations in warship design, attending lectures on military hygiene, going for long tramps on Hampstead Heath… These days Harry watches busy people with dyspeptic envy. The silliest bride leaving cards all over town has a momentum to her hours for which he'd pay any money.

An hour later, he's staring into the infinitely weary eyes of a lion. He wishes they hadn't come; the zoo is entirely too public a stage, and he's convinced that every second passerby is giving him a look of sharp recognition. Those poor mites. What could their father be thinking of, dragging himself and his family through the dirt? Harry can guess these thoughts, because he would have had them himself, a month ago.

"Papa," says Nell, tugging at his sleeve, "I wish you'd bring us to the zoo every week."

Something in the child's tone pricks him; the show of happiness, the insistence on what a delightful father he is. Do she and Nan fear that they might lose him too, at a moment's notice, as they have their mother, without so much as a farewell kiss? They haven't asked whether she's dead, it occurs to him now.

"That's slang," Nan corrects her little sister. "It's the Zoological Gardens."

Harry read once-where?-that nymphomania is a congenital trait. These girls seem wholesome in every pore, and yet he watches the pair of coppery heads closely, alert to every vocal echo, every charming turn of the chin that reminds him of their mother.

A chill breeze blows across Regent's Park. William sniffs, makes a face, and suggests moving on to somewhere less odoriferous. Nell is delighted by this new word.

An elephant comes lumbering across the grass towards them, beside its keeper; William buys the girls some bags of buns to feed it. They scream with pleasure as the creature nuzzles their palms with its trunk. It's a bizarre limb, up close, Harry thinks; it has the rude look of a hairy snake.

When he turns his head, he sees his brother regarding him curiously. "D'you suppose you'll miss her, at all, when it's over?" William asks under his breath.

He manages a huff of laughter. "You can still ask that, after all you've learned in Bird's office? The gondola, the pier, the hotels…"

"Well, the details were exotic," concedes William.

"The details?" Harry stares at his brother. "You mean to say you'd guessed the main point?"

"What, that the woman's… that she doesn't play by the rules?" murmurs William, his eyes on his nieces as they pat the elephant. "It's been known in the family for years, my dear fellow."

This idea staggers Harry. "So my humiliation's been the stuff of sneers and gossip?"

"Steady on. No one's broached the subject; that's not our way. It's just an atmosphere I'm describing, and I could be wrong," says William unconvincingly. "But there's always been something in our sisters' tone, when they use her name."

"You knew it yourself. However did-"

A slight shrug. "Always easier to spot these things from a distance. The way Helen carries herself, perhaps. The way she treats you."

Harry wouldn't have thought it was possible to feel even more of an idiot, but he does. "Why, may I ask, did no one say a word to me?"

"Speaking for myself-I had no facts," says William gruffly, "only a general impression. I dare say I assumed you didn't want to hear it. That you two had come to some sort of terms."

Nan, letting the elephant pluck a bun from her palm, casts an anxious glance over her shoulder at her father, who manages a wave and a rictus of cheer. When she's turned back to the animal, he lets his jaw drop into his hand. The edges the barber shaved two days ago are as rough as limestone. "Is it possible that I knew, without knowing I knew?"

"Now you're splitting hairs, old boy," says William.

"A moment ago," says Harry, puzzling it out-"why did you ask me if I'll miss her?"

An odd little smile. "I fear I might, if I were you."

The governor's wife, social sovereign of Gibraltar, is a plump, serene matron who's never given William a moment's worry. Harry speaks bleakly. "The best of Helen-her youthfulness, her merriment-was lost to me a long time ago. Living with her in recent years has been a penitential exercise. What's there to miss?"

A slight shrug. "I dare say you'll find out."

Pacing down the Bird Walk ten minutes later, looking for parrots in the trees, Harry asks the girls, "Are you enjoying yourselves at Mrs. Watson's?" Then instantly regrets it.

His daughters look at each other like mute conspirators.

"I know, of course, that things must feel rather up in the air…"

Nan waits for him to trail off before she speaks. "She is a kind lady."

"I still don't see why they aren't with Jane," mutters his brother by his side. "Surely these things are best kept within the family?"

Harry waves that away. It was all done in such a hurry, after the smashed desk gave up its secrets; he can barely remember his reasoning, and it would only upset the girls to change their lodging at this point, besides.

"We were wondering…" starts Nell.

Nan's eyes fix on hers. "Might we come home? When…"

"When the divorce is over," finishes Nell.

Harry stares at her. "Where did you pick up that word?"

"Steady on, old boy," says William.

"Is it a bad word?" Nan gnaws her lip.

He struggles to find an answer.

"Is it slang?"

"It's the sort of grown-up trouble that little heads don't need to fuss about," their uncle tells them.

Harry sets his teeth together, hard.

"It was on a sign," Nell confesses. "A newsboy's sign. It said Codrington Divorce, Four Full Pages."

"It was the Telegraph, she wanted to buy a copy," says Nan, looking at her patent shoes.

"To look at those funny little messages Mama used to read aloud. I thought she might have written us a message," Nell admits, "but Nan said I was a nincompoop."

He can tell she's on the brink of tears. There's that brute Codrington making his children cry in the park! Neglect. Cruelty. Attempted violation of a… "Oh my sweet girlies," he says, squatting down and crushing them both to his chest. "You're cold. Are you cold? Hail a cab, won't you?" he asks William, "the girls are freezing."

On impulse, he stops the cab at a toy shop on Marylebone High Street. The first few things his daughters pick out are so cheap they irritate him: a cardboard castle, a tiny jointed doll. "That's childish," Nan scolds Nell.

"What's this splendid instrument?" says William like some showman, laying his hand on a brass machine that calls itself, in elaborate script, The Zoetrope, Wheel of Life.

"The very latest thing, General," the clerk tells him, rushing to wind up the handle. "No home without a zoetrope!"

"What, you're claiming every house in England has one?" asks William.

The clerk falters. "It's just a slogan, sir."

As Harry peers through the slot, a red devil somersaults through a hoop. Unnerved, Harry jerks away, then puts his face back to the cold brass eyepiece. A series of images on a rotating drum, that's all, but how it tricks the eye. Persistence of vision, that's the scientific phrase. "Look, girls," he orders. "Watch the fellow jump."

They bend, taking turns; they are enthusiastic, but not quite as much as he would have hoped. Always something forced about the girls' smiles, these days. "We'll take it," he proclaims.

"Really, Papa?"

"It's for us?"

"Yes indeed. You can wrap up half a dozen of those image drums-" he tells the clerk.

"Lucky, lucky girls," says the fellow fawningly.

But they seem loath to choose. William suggests a couple waltzing round a dance floor and a waiter falling downstairs. Harry picks a stork beating its wings, a tree shaking in the wind, monkeys exchanging top hats in an endless loop.

"May we bring it home?" asks Nell in a small voice, as they stand waiting for another cab.

Harry realizes he never did answer the original question. "Best to keep it at the Watsons' for now, darling. But very soon we'll be back at Eccleston Square."

"Yes, but… will it be like before?" asks Nan.

William looks away. "No," Harry tells her as gently as he can, "not like before. You'll understand when you're older." But he doubts that.

It happens the moment Harry stops the cab on Pall Mall. He's alone, at least, having dropped the girls at Mrs. Watson's and William at his tailor's on Jermyn Street: that's a small mercy. He's distracted, fumbling for a third shilling. When she comes running at the cab he doesn't recognize her at first.

His wife, in black like a widow; like some chalk-faced, brass-headed simulacrum of the girl he fell in love with all those years ago in the Tuscan spring. "Drive on," he calls to the cabman, but his voice comes out as faint as a mouse's. Helen seizes the door handle. He holds it shut from the inside, averting his eyes. "Drive on, I say!" That's better, louder, but Helen's clinging to the door, pressing her face to the window: her sea-glass eyes, her pointed nose and distorted lips. Making a public spectacle, he thinks with a surge of loathing so pure it reminds him of desire.

He lets go of the handle, so the door swings open taking Helen with it; she staggers backwards, her skirt flapping like some great bloated raven.

When Harry steps out she speaks, one word, but it comes out so strangely he doesn't understand her. "I beg your pardon?" Then the politeness strikes him as absurd. He has nothing to say to this stranger, this lurid character from a spy's reports. He veers away from her, towards the pillars of the Rag Club.

"Mercy." That's what she's saying, mumbling it over and over.

"Oi! My fare," roars the driver, from the cab roof.

Harry turns back, hot-faced with confusion, rooting in his pocket.

"Ask anything of me," demands Helen, grabbing his arm.

"Well, I like that trick," broadcasts the driver. "Scarpering into his club, with his lady-friend!"

"Anything I can do, anything I can say-" she sobs.

He knows there's a third shilling somewhere in the handful of coins, but his eyes can't pick it out, and his fingers are trembling. His wife hangs on his elbow like a terrier; he tries to shake her off.

"Don't let on you don't have it," calls the driver, rolling his eyes for the benefit of the gathering audience.

Harry grabs the first gold coin he can find-a half-sovereign-and hurls it in the man's direction. But it hits the shiny paintwork of the cab and bounces into the gutter.

"All I beg of you is, let me see my babies!"

"Hold your tongue for one moment," he barks in her face. He stoops, claws the half-sovereign out of the mud and holds it up for the driver. She's still clinging to his other arm.

The driver beams at him. "Well, now, that's what I call handsome…"

Harry turns away, towards the club's entrance, then-changing his mind-in the opposite direction. He walks a few steps, Helen a leaden shackle on his arm. What must they look like-a military lecher and his cast-off? "What can you possibly hope to gain by this, this exhibition?" he asks her, very low.

"They wouldn't let me into your club. They say you won't receive my letters. I'm at the brink of utter distraction!"

Something in her tone rings false to Harry. Is it just that he can no longer believe a word she says, since so much of what she's said to him over fifteen years of marriage has turned out to be claptrap?

"I'll take back everything my solicitor's said of you, all the, what are they called, countercharges," she promises with a gulp so violent it sounds as if she's retching up a stone. "I'll bow to your will in everything, Harry-if only you and the girls will come home."

He stares at her.

"What's done is done, but let's put it behind us, and try to be content in the years that remain to us. Come home, my love!" And she stretches up, on tiptoe, and twines her arms around his neck, and moves to kiss him. On Pall Mall, at ten past noon.

Harry's about to hurl her from him. He can feel it in his hands already, the satisfaction it will give him to rip Helen's arms (like coils of strangling ivy) away from his neck, to shove her away and see her drop into the gutter, revealed for all to see as the broken whore she is.

But something freezes his hands. The not-quite-convincing delivery of her lines? Something guarded, even calculating, in the back of her wide blue eyes? Whatever the hint is, it's enough to make him stand very still-hold hard, old boy, hold hard-while Helen hangs around his neck, planting desperate, muffled kisses on his beard. Everything my solicitor's said of you: he repeats her words to himself. All the, what are they called, countercharges. (As if she wouldn't recall the term!) Cruelty, yes. Husbandly brutality. That must be what she's hoping to provoke with her coarse effusions, with her humid lips: one public act of violence from Harry that just may be enough to sway a jury.

So he stands very still, instead, and takes a long breath. It doesn't matter who's gawking at this strange pair, on Pall Mall; what is vital is for Harry to stay out of this woman's trap. With the infinite delicacy of a policeman dismantling a bomb, he reaches behind his neck to unknot Helen's hands. "I know your game," he whispers in her ear, "and I'm not playing."

She looks back at him, eyes burning, unblinking.

It takes him considerable effort to undo her plump pink fingers, but he does it so carefully, with such apparent tenderness, that it strikes him that passersby must take them for lovers oblivious to the world.