The Sealed Letter

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."

"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?

Hour after hour, she waits for a reply. The time for calls is almost over. Her husband, who's spent the day down at Deptford ogling some new armour-plated sloop or screw (Helen's always refused to learn these distinctions), comes in for a speechless cup of tea. He studies a report on naval reform; Helen reads the latest installment of Our Mutual Friend, but she keeps forgetting who's who. It feels as he and she are in a honeycomb; walls of wax keep them apart.

The bell, at last. The maid pops her head in to announce Miss Faithfull, and relief floods through Helen's veins like sugar.

Harry's face is neutral. "Show her up."

He's holding out his cup; she registers that he'd like more tea. Why won't the man make himself scarce?

Fido comes in looking tired. Helen's ribs feel bruised. She gives Fido an apologetic grimace, to say if only we were alone!-but Fido stares back like a stranger.

Harry stands up to greet the visitor, all unbending six foot five of him. Glimpsing him through Fido's eyes, Helen finds his height almost freakish. Not an aristocratic Norman, no, some older race: he rears up like some implacable, axe-wielding Hun.

They all sit down and pass round the rolled-up bread and butter. Harry asks after one of Fido's brothers, who's recently been promoted to the rank of captain. Soon they've moved on to her precious Cause. "But you see, Admiral, already a full fifty per cent of British women work for their bread," Fido is telling Harry, "and often at gruelling, repetitive tasks such as chain-making or mining at the pit brow."

"Ah, poor men's wives and daughters, that's quite another thing," says Harry. "But when it comes to women of the middling or upper orders-"

She interrupts him. "At our Employment Register, I'm constantly meeting the pathetic dependents of gentlemen whose fortunes have dwindled in the stocks, or who've otherwise failed to make provision."

"Girls like Nan and Nell?" asks Helen. She can see her husband's shoulders rise, and she almost giggles.

"Of course your daughters are charmingly accomplished," Fido says hastily. Then, after a moment, she goes on: "But to what profession could they turn their untrained hands if by any chance that dark day came? I suggest that it's no natural incapacity, but only custom and law that would prevent them from working in shops or offices, administering institutions or estates…"

Harry lets out a huff of breath. "I don't think I'll have much trouble finding my girls husbands."

My girls, says he, Helen thinks, fuming, as if they sprang from his thigh!

"Forty-three per cent of Englishwomen over the age of twenty are single," Fido announces.

The statistic makes him stare.

"I declare, Fido, you're a regular Blue Book," murmurs Helen.

"Ah," says Harry, holding up one massive finger, "but if you and your fellow Utopians were to train up well born girls, to render them independent of my sex-if you succeeded in turning single life into a pleasant highway, and marriage just one thorny path opening off it-then why would they marry at all?"

A pause. Fido chews her lip. "Matrimony is the special and honourable calling of most women, Admiral, but from lack of personal experience, I can hardly discourse on its allure."

Harry holds her gaze for a moment, then lets out a laugh.

Helen's been forgetting how much these two liked each other, in the old days. He's always respected her mind more than mine, she thinks, a little rueful.

"It's been a pleasure, Miss Faithfull. After all this time. Now I'm afraid I have letters to write," he says, rising.

As soon as the two women are alone, the silence clots like blood. Helen makes herself set down her cup and begin her speech. "The other day at your house, my dearest, in a moment of frailty for which I've been excoriating myself-"

"It was a long moment."

Helen's cheeks are flaming; she's lost control of this scene already.

"Your conscience is your own affair, I suppose." Fido speaks with a rigid throat. "But I'd have expected more of your manners."

Manners? Is this what it comes down to-an offence against English etiquette? Then she looks hard at Fido-the averted eyes, the compressed lips-and understands. The offence is against friendship. She's hurt that I didn't tell her everything before, she realizes; she can't bear the fact that it was her sofa. On impulse, she falls to her knees.

"Whatever are you doing?" Fido barks.

For a second, Helen doubts her strategy-and then decides that too much is better than too little. "Begging your pardon most humbly and sorrowfully," she answers, very low. Like some scolded dog, she lays her head on Fido's navy-blue skirt. "You do right to cast coals," she whispers. "But let me just say that the thing was not… premeditated."

A pause. "Really?"

Aha, thinks Helen: she wants nothing more than to forgive me. She's been longing to let herself take me back! She sits on her heels, wipes one dry eye.

"Get up, Little One. Come sit by me. I blame myself, in some ways," says Fido into her handkerchief.

Helen stares: whatever can she mean?

"After all, it was I who urged you to make the decisive break," says Fido in a low whisper. "Perhaps I was naive; perhaps my ignorance of the other sex blinded me to the dangers. When a battle-hardened veteran sees all he longs for about to be snatched away-"

She thinks it was all Anderson. She's as gullible as a child, on certain subjects, Helen marvels. She starts nodding. "He was very fierce…"

Fido seizes her by the wrist. "And I was stupid enough to leave you alone with him, in my own drawing-room. My darling-did he hurt you?"

"No, no." Helen's gone too far. What, does Fido know so little of men that she thinks them all savages? Helen looks into her satin lap. How much can she risk admitting? "Perhaps it's not the male heart that's your blind spot, Fido, but the female." A pause. "When I said I meant to put a stop to this passion: it was not just his passion I meant."

A terrible silence. Her friend's plump cheeks cave in. Has Helen blundered? "I've always needed you to protect me from my weaker self," she pleads, "but never more than now."

"Oh my poor girl." Fido wraps her in a hard embrace.

Helen's head is crushed against her friend's ribs; she smells ink. She feels weirdly at peace.

"If you've surrendered your heart to this man… then I won't bother with stern platitudes, after the fact. But you must see that you've lost your way," says Fido, pulling back and fixing Helen with her doggish brown eyes. "It's not a question of conventional morality, so much as truth. Authenticity. Self-respect, as I've said before."

Helen isn't listening; she's preparing her next line. "Sometimes I fear my feelings for him will master me," she says in a tiny voice. "That he'll drag me from my husband, my children, even…"

"Don't say it! Don't even speak those terrible words. My love is as strong as his," says Fido, "and I mean to save you."

The woman looks magnificent, Helen observes curiously; those plain features are transfigured. "Oh Fido, you're all that stands between me and the pit!" The two are silent, for a few moments, and their hands knot together like the roots of trees.

Fido clears her throat. "On a horridly practical note… what if there were to be an accident?"

Thinking of crashed cabs or falls from balconies, Helen is bewildered, but then she understands her friend's awkward tone. She almost giggles. "Ah, no, set your mind at rest," she murmurs. How revolted Fido would be to learn of my sponges and douches!

"Well, at any rate, you mustn't see him again; don't you feel that?" asks Fido fondly. "I imagine it's like giving up opium; they say 'cold turkey' is best."

Helen sits bolt upright. This isn't how the conversation is meant to go; her elaborations have led her astray. "On the contrary," she improvises, "if I were to cut Anderson off now-that would be the most dangerous thing I could do. Why, it could make him desperate enough to tell my husband."

"He wouldn't dare!"

"Can I risk it?"

Fido writhes. "You could deny everything, if it came to that."

Oho, thinks Helen with silent mirth, what price truth now?

"What proof could Anderson-"

"Letters," Helen interrupts, squirming, "gifts: a locket of my hair." Her friend covers her mouth. "Worse and worse."

"No, I must teach him how to give me up, step by step, little by little," insists Helen.

"But delay is so dangerous…"

"You mean we might be discovered?"

"Spiritually dangerous," snaps Fido. "Corroding your very self, day by day."

Helen resists the impulse to roll her eyes. "You must help me," she says. "Help us both."

"Both?" cries Fido, disgustedly.

"Anderson means me no harm."

"How can you say that? The blackguard's already treated you like a…" She doesn't say the word. "In my drawing-room!"

"Half the fault was mine," Helen reminds her. "You must be our friend now."

"Yours, only yours."

"His too, if you would be mine. Our confessor. Our saviour."

Fido's face twists like a sail in the wind. Helen, watching, can see the moment of surrender. "Anything I can do which is consistent with-"

"Bless you, bless you," Helen interrupts, pressing her mouth to Fido's fiery cheek.

September 15

Destroy after opening

Little One,

As promised I have forwarded yours of yesterday to the person in question, and enclose one in reply. You'll see I'm not using my own seal on the envelope, for discretion's sake.

I loathe these sneaking measures, but having weighed them in my heart I believe they can be justified for the sake of a greater good, i.e., preserving you-and your whole family-from disaster. For all / I've said in critique of marriage, the fact remains that when you accepted your husband fifteen years ago, you set sail in this particular vessel, and your whole future depends on averting a shipwreck.

It still seems to me that further encounters with the person in question will only lead him to maintain false hopes, but I give way: the breach is yours to accomplish, the safest way you can manage (and after all, what do I know of the opaque workings of the male heart?). His imminent departure from these shores will I trust ring down the curtain on this dangerous drama, and tho' I realize you will suffer, when he is gone, I can promise you all the consolation stored up in my heart.

I have not slept at all well since you entrusted your awful story to me, but sleep, my dearest, is the least I'd sacrifice to a friendship I thought extinct but which a merciful and mysterious providence has seen fit to return to us, like bread that was cast on the waters. I am at your back: remember that. Don't say you're "unworthy," my sweet girl; it brings tears to my eyes. Your heart is a wayward one, but there's no evil in it. Besides, when has "worthiness" ever been the criterion for friendship? The love of women is like the pull of magnets. Since the first day I met you on that beach in Kent, I've belonged to you, and always will.

If as you say it's absolutely imperative for you two to meet in a safe place, then I relent: I have told him to come to my house at half past five tomorrow (the sixteenth) and will expect you half an hour earlier. I need hardly say that I will remain in the room throughout, and I trust you not to allow him to take any further advantage of my hospitality.

Yours as ever-

In Fido's austere drawing-room at Taviton Street, Helen avoids the sofa's associations and picks an old straight-legged chair near the fire.

Fido draws her own chair closer. "Prepare yourself, my darling. You must be very strong."

"Oh yes?" says Helen, irked by Fido's sepulchral tone, and wondering why there's no cake on the tea table.

"You believe you know this man, for whom you've risked ruin?"

Ruin, echoes Helen scornfully in her head; really, she's read too many potboilers.

"Well. I took it on myself to make enquiries among my Scottish relations, for any insight into Anderson's character, and this morning I received some alarming information."

Helen smiles. "What have the detectives discovered, that he once lost a hundred pounds at cards?"

Fido's eyes rebuke her. "He's been linked to one of his cousins."

Helen waits. "Linked?"

"With a view to marriage."

The word makes her mouth curl up. "Whose view? Every eligible bachelor home on leave has the old hens of his family plotting to marry him off."

Fido shakes her head. "My informants were quite specific. This cousin, if you can believe it, has been linked formerly with the colonel's brother."

She's enjoying this, thinks Helen with a vast irritation, but she laughs. "That coda seems to explode the story entirely. So this girl makes eyes at his brother one summer, and Anderson the next, and means equally little on both occasions."

Fido sits back, sucking her lips. "Very well, if you don't tremble at having placed yourself in the shopsoiled hands of the kind of man who dallies with prospective brides-"

"I have no need to look as far as Scotland for imaginary bogeys," snaps Helen. "What makes me tremble is his imminent return to Malta, abandoning me to several more decades of misery with a corpse of a husband."

Water erupts in Fido's cocoa-brown eyes. "I didn't mean-" She puts a hand on Helen's magenta overskirt.

A distant doorbell: thank God.

Colonel Anderson is announced. He's only a little awkward. Fido, very much on her dignity, gives him a cup of coffee.

Helen considers various possible tones and plumps for light satire. "Well, Colonel, you're very good to spare us an afternoon before you take an express train north again. The Scotch climate must have special charms."

The gold moustache wobbles; a half-smile. "Not sure I catch your drift, Mrs. C."

"Oh, was I misinformed? Haven't the dowagers of the Anderson line taken to matchmaking?"

He relaxes into a laugh. (It's this face she loves, Helen realizes: a lad's loose grin.) "What can I say? It would be cruel to stop up their mouths."

Something in her unwinds. "But spare a thought for the poor coz who may be getting her hopes up."

"She's a very sensible sort, I wouldn't worry," says Anderson, leaving his chair and sitting down beside Helen, so close that his knee touches hers, through the layers of silk and linen and steel-framed crinoline.

Fido has moved to the round table and is looking through the Times. Her broad shoulders speak volumes.

"Look here, in all earnest," says Anderson under his breath, "I want to speak to you alone."

"You always want that," Helen murmurs silkily.

"Couldn't you persuade your faithful hound to allow us a momentary tête-à-tête?"

Helen raises her eyes to heaven. "I've had to swear to her that I'm cutting you off by degrees, like an opium habit."

Anderson tugs at his moustache. "How's Harry, these days?"

She makes a face. "An inert, brooding spider. He implies I'm a gadabout; complains I'm spending too much on modernizing the house."

"What a dashed bore." He slips his hand over hers. "But I suppose a husband must hold the reins."

Helen prickles. "You speak like my late mother. Must he hold the reins even when he's knuckleheadedly wrong?"

"That's neither here nor there, I'm afraid. A lieutenant may be wiser than his major, but the chain of command still applies," says Anderson.

She pulls her fingertips out of his grasp. She glances at the round table, and meets their hostess's reproachful eyes. Fido has pulled out her watch and taps it solemnly. Helen puts on a tragedy face, looks into her lap.

"This is absurd, we can't do anything here," says Anderson in a very low growl.

"We can talk."

"Not at ease. I'll tell you what: why don't I head off, and wait around the corner on Gordon Street, then in ten minutes you have a cab called and pick me up?"

"Because-" She hesitates. And changes her mind as quick as a blink, because why does the woman always have to be the careful one? And given the risks Helen's already run, is running now, for this man's sake, why hold back?

Anderson doesn't wait for her yes. "Miss Faithfull-" He rises to his feet.

"Look crushed," she breathes.

His face falls obediently. "I'm going to take my leave now," he says in hollow tones.

"Very well, Colonel," says Fido, rising like some stern but not ungentle schoolmistress.

"You've been immensely kind. I can't…" Anderson breaks off there, to Helen's relief. (He doesn't share her talents for invention.)

Fido rings for his coat, cane, and hat, and walks him to the stairs.

When she comes back into the room, Helen's arranged herself in a frail position on the sofa, face in one hand. Fido sits down beside her, very quietly, and asks "Is it-by any chance-over?"

"I tried," says Helen through her fingers. "I marshalled all my arguments. I gave him no hope. But the insane persistence of the man-"

"He must be eaten up with love for you," says Fido in a choked tone.

She nods. "I don't know why."

"Oh Helen…"

After a minute, she adds, "Little by little, he will realize I mean what I say. You must bear with me, Fido. Keep on being my rock."

The woman's solid arms wrap around her, and for a moment Helen feels dizzy, because both versions are true: in the back of her head she's laughing at the spinster's naïveté, and yet she'd like nothing better than for Fido to sort out her life for her, somehow. Helen's acting and she's sincere, at the very same moment; she wants to summon a cab and rush around the corner to join her lover, and she wants to stay here all evening, rocked like a baby in these strong arms. "I'd better go," she says at last, rousing herself, pressing the back of her hands to her eyes. "Harry likes dinner at seven on the dot," she adds. "He claims, a quarter-hour later and he's afflicted by heartburn!"

When Anderson climbs into the cab on Gordon Street, the warm September breeze rushes against their faces. He reaches out with one hand to draw the pleated leather curtains that close off the front of the hansom.

Helen restrains his arm. "What are you doing? On such a beautiful evening too-we may as well hang a banner from the roof."

He chuckles, and leaves the leather half-closed. "Where to?"

"Anywhere but home," she finds herself saying.

His grin is that of a child surprised with a present.

"I can't bear to go into that mausoleum and shut the door. Take me somewhere entertaining, won't you?"

"Somewhere sensational, as your girls are always saying?"

But she doesn't want to think about Nan and Nell, already putting on their white pantaloons and short crinolines for dinner with their parents. She'll have to send a telegram to explain her absence.

Anderson flips open the little trapdoor in the roof. "Driver, to the moon!"

"What's that, sir?" the man behind them calls over the clatter of hooves.

"Seems the lady doesn't want to go to Belgravia, after all," Anderson tells him.

"What about the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens?" Helen asks in a low voice. "I've never been. Unless it's not the thing?"

"No, no, this early in the evening it should be perfectly all right," says Anderson. "Chelsea, driver: the Cremorne, if you please."

Belatedly, Helen wonders whether the Cremorne has other associations for her lover. Has he gone before, with other ladies? She tells herself to stop fretting. If she's to risk Harry's temper by missing dinner, by God she means to enjoy the escapade.

There's a telegraph station in the Gardens, for receiving bookings. Helen sips a sherry while Anderson goes in with her message: Miss F has begged me to stay and dine with Rev & Mrs F. She congratulates herself on its brilliance and brevity: now Harry will picture her discussing the state of the Church with Fido's stout, unsmiling parents, up from their Surrey parish in all their tedious glory.

The day's generous light is cooling; the trees throw down long shadows. A steamboat emerges from Battersea Bridge and draws up at the landing station; Helen watches black coats, salmon skirts, turquoise wraps spill from its crammed decks. The Cremorne seems to attract all sorts: she notices some swells in evening capes, but also country families (the females in their red petticoats) and, of course, the clerk brigade. At the Chinese bandstand, the orchestra's playing Tales from the Vienna Woods, rather too fast for Helen's taste. Her eyes pick out Swiss chalets, miniature temples, and a marionette theatre scattered among the trees; even something marked American Bowling Saloon.

In a clearing, an aeronaut in form-fitting yellow leotards is checking her rigging while five men hold her basket to the ground; the gas flare roars like a monster, and high above, the vast silk balloon is swelling and rolling. Helen wonders what it must be like to trust yourself, night after night, to a sack of hot air. She thinks of the famous Madame Genvieve, swollen in pregnancy, toppling from her tightrope.

Anderson, appearing at her shoulder, makes her jump. "I've managed to secure the last booth at the Crystal Platform," he says with that hint of sheepish pride common to gentlemen who've just had to hand over an outrageous tip.

"How marvellous." She slides her hand into the crook of his arm.

The orchestra's struck up a scottische, but no one's dancing yet; in the faint pre-dusk the Crystal Platform has the shoddy air of some Christmas decoration lost behind a sofa. But the booths are crowded with revellers. While Helen and Anderson are beginning supper at their tiny table, reminiscing about a masked party they once attended in Valetta, the "thousand lamps" come on all at once, to a general oooh, and Helen puts her chicken wing down so she can clap. Arches and festoons of gaslights; globes and cut-glass drops in garnet, topaz, emerald. However is it done? Spangled strings carry the radiance off in every direction through the trees, making the sky dark behind them. The Cremorne scintillates like some fairy fort sprung up on the banks of the Thames. For a moment Helen wishes her daughters were here to see this, then tells herself not to be a fool. (Perhaps she'll find them a slide of the scene, sometime.)

And now the firework display begins, and Helen can't eat a bite more, only sip her cold wine and grip Anderson's hand under the tablecloth. When there's a particularly loud crack or boom she digs her nails into his palm. The music is louder, now-a thumping polka, followed by a gallop-and the platform's come alive with couples. There are few families left in the Gardens, she notices; the crowd's changing, and young bucks roam the outskirts.

The orchestra strikes up a waltz. "One dance?" says Anderson in her ear. "Or had I better be taking you home?"

It only takes her a second to decide. "'Hung for a sheep,' as they say," she replies. "I feel as if I haven't danced in years." Not since that farewell ball in Valetta, when Harry stayed till the end, for once, and she and Anderson had to avoid each other's miserable eyes all evening.

She shakes off the memory and lets her lover lead her onto the polished floor. There's no one here who knows them, she tells herself. The colonel's an unobtrusively graceful dancer; it's like riding a horse who needs no signals. As she lets him spin her round, the gas lamps whirl and blur behind his halo of blond curls. This is a strange outdoor ballroom; many women are dancing in their summer capes, men with their hats on and canes in their hot fists. Anderson pulls her close; her skirt sways like a huge butterfly. She feels that at any moment their momentum may spin them up to orbit over the massive elms and sighing poplars; to whirl and float higher than balloons, birds, clouds, into the shiny night air. He presses his silky whiskers against her cheek, and she's laughing, and he is too. "Perhaps I'll never go home," she cries.

Anderson jerks as if he's been shot in the back.

Helen pulls away too, to look at his face, and now they've lost their rhythm, they've broken the line, and she stumbles, her heel caught in some hard-faced shopgirl's lacy hem. "I do beg your pardon," Anderson is saying in all directions, but Helen makes blindly for the booth. By the time she finds the right table he's at her side, begging her to finish the dance. Instead she gathers her cape and bag with shaking hands.

Only when they're well away from the platform, past the lavender bower and geranium beds, does Helen say a word. "It was a joke."

"I know that," he insists.

"Then why did you flinch?"

"I did no such thing."

"Don't take me for some green girl." Helen shakes off his arm as they take a path through the trees. "I've not the least intention of running away from my husband." She watches Anderson's face for the least flicker of grief, finds none. "I don't intend to make any claim on your protection," she growls, "for all the passion you've professed."

"Oh my darling," he groans.

"You needn't fear for the loss of your bachelor freedoms."

"Now that's too much." Anderson seizes her by the elbows, pinning her to the spot. It's dim here in the dark wood; the sounds of the pleasure gardens are hushed. "My only fear is for you, Helen, as you should know. It's because I treasure you that I've never once asked you to come away with me."

Helen looks away, licking her lips: tastes dye in the balm.

"Be sensible," says Anderson. "What could I offer you that could make up for such a… catastrophe?"

He means the question rhetorically, but there's one obvious answer. She considers, for the first time, the image of Anderson as a husband. Would he still wear that lazy, boyish smile? Would there be anything left of the man who once wooed her with his eyes across a crowd?

"All you'd lose-and the disgrace of it, besides-"

"Now you're being cruel," she says, very low.

"This snatched love is all we have," he says into her ear, "but by God, it's sweet. And to think that many die without a taste of it!"

All very stirring; Helen's mouth twists. She shivers. "It must be late. I ought to go home. What time is it?"

"Not very late," says Anderson. He tugs her by the hand, leads her step by step away from the path, into the darkest part of the wood where the aromatic trees grow close together.

She knows what he's up to. Men are so predictable: they can only think of one way to end a quarrel. "Take me home."

"I will, I promise. Just a little further, won't you, to show you've forgiven me?"

The cool part of her brain thinks, Never mind your offended feelings, Helen; this is the best chance you'll have in weeks. She's still frowning, but her feet follow him into the lush black vegetation, one step at a time.

Helen lets herself in with her key at ten past eleven. She steps quietly through the darkened hall. She won't rouse her maid, even; she can undress herself when she must.

There's a light burning on the landing. As she tiptoes past the girls' door it suddenly opens. She prepares to shush them back to bed, but it's her husband.

Helen produces a marionette's smile. "You're still dressed."

His face is haggard. "Didn't you get my telegram?"

"Of course," she says automatically. Whatever does he mean? It was she who sent one, from the Cremorne. Did Harry shoot off a reply to the house on Taviton Street? A civil Give my respects to the Faithfulls? Or a sullen Very well? But neither would have needed an answer, so why is he asking whether she received it? Helen's always been a good bluffer; when she can be bothered to play cards, she usually wins. "I know I'm late, but I thought it might offend the reverend and his wife if I dashed off before dessert."

His lower lip has a raw patch, she notices now; it's dark with blood. "You're extraordinary. Not so much as a word in response, all these hours. Not a single word!"

Helen's stomach is a snake tightening round itself. "I'm awfully sorry-"

"She got worse after I sent for you," he tells her. "She was saying your name."

She looks away, so he won't read the shock in her eyes. She, which she? An accident? A sudden illness? And the worst of it is Helen must pretend she already knows all the facts. "Yes, the poor girl," she says hoarsely. "Has Doctor Mendelkirk-"

"He confirmed what I'd gathered from Household Management, when Mrs. Nichols and I finally found where you'd stuck it, in the middle of the atlases."

Oh get on with it, you petty despot!

"It's a dangerous cold on her chest," he tells her. "She's been burning up. She's had a dose of salicine but it hasn't broken the fever yet. Nan was in a state too, she kept refusing to go to bed."

It's Nell, then. My baby. "I'll go in to her right away," says Helen.

But Harry puts out his long arm. "The doctor gave her something to make her sleep."

"Then I won't be disturbing her, will I?" asks Helen, pushing past him.

In the girls' room, one of the little beds has been drawn close to the fire, and a screen arranged round it to enclose the steam puffing from a kettle. The air stinks of turpentine. A stranger's dozing in an easy chair; she must be a hired nurse. Helen sits on the very edge of the bed and watches her younger daughter's flushed face. The narrow chest under the lawn ruffles rises and falls regularly, but too fast, with a hoarse creak. Helen wants to scoop Nell up in her arms, but fears to wake her. Is Harry still out there on the landing?

Surely he can't mean to catch her as she emerges, and continue the interrogation? Why doesn't he come in and stand beside her, put his hand on her shoulder, even, like an ordinary husband and father, with an ordinary heart?

She waits, counts Nell's breaths for a quarter of an hour. There, surely Harry will have gone back to his own room by now. He'll be lying down in his nightshirt like some long marble effigy. Helen creeps to the door, puts her head out to scan the empty landing.

"Mama?"

She spins round, but Nell is still motionless. It's Nan who's sitting up, huge-eyed in her bed. Helen puts a finger to her lips and goes over to her elder daughter.

"You didn't come home."

All my accusers. "Mama had a social engagement," she says absurdly.

"Nell coughed and it was green," the girl confides.

Helen finds her eyes wet. "She'll be better in the morning."

"Will she?"

Helen has no idea. "Go to sleep now."

"May I kiss you goodnight?"

The request sounds oddly formal. "Of course, of course, my sweet girl." Helen leans down, offering one hot cheek. Let her not smell my guilt.