The Sealed Letter

Harry takes off his tailcoat, his waistcoat, his cravat. It's some relief to detach his collar, with its two stiff, upward points, and turn his jaw from side to side. He removes his white shirt and vest. Empties his pockets in a neat pile on the dresser. There's his wife's telegram: Miss F has begged me to stay and dine with Rev & Mrs F. Harry steps out of his long linen drawers. Like a beetle shedding its layers: that was one of Helen's quips, back in the days when they still shared a room. When they were still capable of quips.

The reply he sent to Helen at Taviton Street was perfectly clear, wasn't it? No room for misinterpretation, even by an incompetent telegraphist: Nell gravely ill, come home at once. Most mothers, receiving such a message at a dinner party, would fall into hysterics, or at least ask for a cab to be called immediately. Only Helen could stay on for dessert, so as not to offend a rector and his wife! What can the Faithfulls have thought of such reptilian cold-bloodedness? Or perhaps, it occurs to Harry now, she didn't tell them what was in his telegram at all. He tries to picture her at the table, dithering between a candied walnut and a meringue. At the very least, she could have done him the courtesy of a reply to tell him she wasn't coming. But no, even that would have been too much trouble, too much of an interruption to the cataract of sparkling, self-dramatizing nonsense that pours from those lovely lips.

He's been rather mystified that she's taken up with Fido Faithfull again at all. When Helen first brought the girl home, all those years ago, in '54, it seemed handy for the whole family that moody Mama had a steady friend to keep her company while Papa was at sea. Fido Faithfull had more capacity for conversation than ninety-nine girls out of a hundred; at Eccleston Square, she'd listen to Harry discourse on such subjects as national education or the balance of trade for half an hour at a time, and ask some very intelligent questions. (He suddenly remembers a joke cracked by a fellow officer who lived with his wife and her sister: the happiest marriages are made up of three parties.) But then Harry came back from the Crimea, and a tide seemed to have turned: Fido the peacemaker looked more like a partisan, and there were rumblings of outright war. That hellishly hot summer of '57, when they'd all fallen ill one after another, and Helen had suddenly demanded a private separation-well, in all the chaos he'd no choice but to ask Fido to leave. Harry doesn't bear a grudge, though. He hasn't been surprised to learn that she's taken up reform, though he can only regret the extreme slant of her woman-ism, as the papers call it. No, all that puzzles him, now, is what interest his butterfly wife can hold for a woman of business such as Fido Faithfull has become.

But ever since the Codringtons landed at Portsmouth, Harry's been wasting too much time fretting over his wife's unaccountable whims. It comes of having too little to do, he recognizes that. It'll be better when he's got into a regular way of studying, dropping into Somerset House for his pay and gossip, perhaps a bit of yachting with old friends…

Harry chews on a frayed wooden skewer; rubs on some homemade tooth powder: it's bitter with quinine. Nell, Nell. She was teasing him only this afternoon, before the fever hit; she told him he ought to go to the barber to have his beard trimmed.

Helen's in the girls' bedroom now. Doting Mama rushes to her baby's side, only three hours late. For all her peculiarities, Nan and Nell prefer her to him, Harry knows that, has always known it. It's only natural; children lack discernment. He'd like to open the door quietly, so as not to disturb Nell, take his wife by the shoulder, and pull her onto the landing. Shake her so hard her neat little jaw bounces like a doll's, and the pins spring from her gaudy hair.

Instead he pulls his long, starched nightshirt over his head. He won't wear his nightcap, he's hot enough already.

This is a spare, masculine chamber, with nothing in it but a bed and dresser-both in the family for generations. A jug and basin where he stoops now to wash the last traces of medicated syrup from his fingers. (It didn't seem to bring Nell's chest the slightest relief.) He won't let Helen cram his room with whatnots and objets d'art; really, her taste is verging on vulgar these days. Harry keeps his bedchamber as shipshape as any of the cabins he occupied during his years at sea. When he was a young lieutenant on the Briton, six inches too tall for his bunk-Harry Longshanks, his shipmates called him, or the Giant Cod-he had the brilliant idea of hammering together a foot box that intruded into the next cabin, under that officer's pillow. He thinks of it now, as he lets himself down on the edge of his custom-made, long mahogany bed. Those nights with his sore feet jammed into the cabin wall, the young Harry knew he was happy-wrote to his family every week to assure them of the fact-but didn't know that it was the happiest he'd ever be.

He thinks of Nell's red cheeks, the terrible thumping sound when she coughs. But she's asleep now, and if she wakes the nurse will see to her, and if she gets worse…She won't get worse, he roars in the privacy of his head. She'll be on the mend by morning. Her constitution is strong. Both his girls have the Codrington sturdiness, and a certain resilience from the Smith side as well.

He doesn't mind having his own room; if anything, he rather prefers it. No capsized dresses litter the polished floorboards, not a cast-off stocking. Separate rooms is a point many marriages seem to reach, as far as Harry can gather from the hints other men drop. On the husband's side, familiarity breeds staleness; on the wife's, passion often proves to have been a fleeting phenomenon of the early years. Harry reads broadly in the sciences, and some years ago he came across a persuasive theory that once a woman has completed her childbearing, her redundant carnal urges fade away.

He sleeps rather better on his own, besides. (On the rare occasions when needs present themselves, he deals with them privately, which he doesn't believe-for all the superstition on the matter-poses any real risk to his health.) All Harry would ask of his wife is a daily, pleasant companionship. A domestic haven; a warm hearth. But he may as well demand a bite of the moon.

Nell gravely ill, come home at once. He's staggered that Helen could simply have ignored his telegram. If it were he who was ill, that would be one thing, but Nell, her youngest, her lastborn… Have the girls become pawns for Helen to hurl against him? Then this is a grim new era.

Harry puts his hand on the oil lamp, but doesn't extinguish it. His mind is too agitated; he won't be able to sleep. (This is how parents sometimes lose children, he thinks: between shutting their eyes in the night, and opening them again in the morning when the servant comes in with the news.)

He lies down on his back and tries an old trick of listing his vessels. His very first, the Naiad, a light frigate for hunting Corsairs during the Algerine war. Then the Asia, under his father, Sir Edward, in the Mediterranean. The Briton. The Orestes, nothing special as sloops went, but the first Harry commanded and dear to him for that. The Talbot, one of an abominable class of ships known in the service as jackass-frigates: very low between decks, with an armament of obsolete popguns. "I should very much like to set fire to that beast of yours, Codrington," Sir Robert Stopford once told him. The St. Vincent, as flag-captain to his father. Off to the Mediterranean again on the frigate Thetis, a useful man-of-war. Leghorn. Florence. Helen. No, he won't think about her.

Has she gone back to her own room by now? She's not the kind of mother to sit up by a sickbed when there's a nurse paid to do it. Is she stretched out on her bed in careless sleep? No, he must shut her out of his mind or he'll never sleep. Next, the Royal George, an old three-decker with an auxiliary screw to adapt her to steam. In '56, Harry was moved to the Algiers, as commodore of a flotilla of gunboats-but then peace forced him home. Malta in '57: an important position, though on shore. Then back to England.

What will his next ship be? If, that is, there'll be another.

This isn't helping.

Stretched out in bed as if on a rack, watching the flickering patterns the lamp makes on the ceiling, he listens out for any sound in the house. When he presses the repeater on his watch, it chimes a quarter to twelve.

Something's nibbling at the edge of his mind. He rears up again, and carries the lamp over to the dresser so he can reread Helen's telegram. Miss F has begged me to stay and dine with Rev & Mrs F. The boy brought it just after seven, when dinner was already on the table at Eccleston Square. Nell, scarlet-cheeked, was pushing her mutton round the plate; Harry, not realizing she had anything worse than a runny nose, snapped at her and made her cry. When he touched her forehead, it seemed to sizzle. Half an hour later he sent a corner boy off to the telegraph office with his own message: Nell gravely ill, come home at once. The bad news must surely have reached Helen by eight, he calculates. If Fido only belatedly asked her to stay to dinner at about seven-very odd behaviour in a hostess, by the by-could the guests really have got through all their savoury courses and reached the dessert by eight? And, granting that for a moment, even if Helen felt some inexplicable appetite for something sweet, while her child lay in the kind of fever that can snuff out a child's life in a night-what could have possessed her to sit there chit-chatting over coffee and cordials with the rector of Headley and his wife for a further three hours?

Harry turns out the lamp with a single twist of his thumb. He walks back to bed, but he can't lie down; his outrage will suffocate him. He sits bolt upright on the overstuffed edge of the mattress, staring out into the smoky darkness.

"Didn't you get my telegram?" That's what he'd asked her, a rhetorical question. "Of course," she said, in her musical voice. But all of a sudden he doesn't believe it. There's only one explanation that fits the facts. He has to admit this much: Helen loves her girls. She might sit cracking nuts while Harry was dying, but she wouldn't ignore a telegram about one of her daughters. So she never received it tonight-but she felt obliged to pretend she did. Because this evening she wasn't at Miss Emily Faithfull's, Number 10 Taviton Street. (Harry looked the address up in the directory earlier this evening, while the boy stood scratching one knee.)

Harry's mind is buzzing. Facts slide together like bolts. Helen was somewhere else tonight, then. With someone else.

A vast revulsion, growing. His eyes, wide open to the darkness, burn as if scales are peeling away.

Over breakfast, the Codringtons eat almost nothing, and talk only of Nell. How she seemed yesterday, at the onset; the signs they should have noticed; the infections that have been going around; the effect of dirty London air. The doctor's been again, and administered various doses, and assured them that the fever should break today.

Harry finds it surprisingly easy to maintain a normal tone while cutting his toast into smaller and smaller triangles. It strikes him that he and Helen must sound, and look, and seem, like an ordinary couple. Marriage is a habit much like any other, he supposes. He thinks of that house in Bayswater he was telling the girls about the other day: the facade perfectly correct, the trains roaring by beneath.

It's not that he's never considered the possibility of Helen and other men. In Malta, she quickly adopted the Continental style for wives, and was never without some idle army officer or other tagging along. But the very openness of her actions meant that they didn't alarm Harry. She was bored, she preferred the company of other (younger, jollier) men to his; what was noteworthy in any of this? There were petty improprieties that pressed themselves on his notice only now and then, in the intervals of business; generally he chose to overlook them, sometimes he mentioned them mildly to Helen if they seemed liable to cause talk, and though she rolled her eyes she corrected her behaviour accordingly. Flirtatiousness, that's all he ever suspected. Games and poses: he knew that to react to them with any heat would be to fall into her trap.

Their discussion of Nell's health over the breakfast table has lapsed into silence. Helen stretches out her hand for the Telegraph.

Harry shakes his head. "You never read anything but the advertisements."

"They're by far the most interesting part," murmurs Helen, snatching it up and opening it.

An automatic giggle from Nan, her mouth sticky with preserves.

Rage, like a swelling vein behind his eyes. Where was Helen last night? Who in the world was she with? She's only been back in London a matter of weeks; can that be long enough to form what they used in his youth to call a criminal connection?

"I can't be alone in my preference," says Helen, "as the first four pages are given over to advertisements. Listen to this, for instance," she goes on. "'The lady who travelled from Bedford to London by Midland train on the night of the fourth inst. is now in a position to meet the gentleman who shared the contents of his railway lunch basket.'"

"I don't know that this is the most suitable stuff for-for Nan," remarks Harry. He'd been going to say the girls, but Nell is still in bed, of course. Coming down the stairs, he heard her coughing like a wounded seal.

"Why, Papa? What was in his basket?" Nan is big-eyed.

"It's no worse than 'Orrible Murders, in my humble opinion," says Helen, and goes on to the next. '"mary ann do come home. You labour under an illusion.' Or here, Nan, listen to this: even more pathetic, but it must be a code. 'The one-winged dove must die unless the crane will be a shield against her enemies.'"

"What kind of code, Mama?"

"Murderers hatching their plots, perhaps?"

"Enough," barks Harry. "Do you want to give the girl nightmares again?" He holds out his hand for the paper, and watches it shake. Feminine evasions, equivocations, he's caught her out in those before, over the years. Never a barefaced lie. Never till last night: "Miss F has begged me to stay and dine with Rev & Mrs. F."

"Perhaps I do. Nightmares are said to clean out the brain, like purgatives," says Helen, meeting his eyes for half a second. Like the glancing of fencers' foils.

"What's a purgative?" Nan asks.

"Now now, you know not to pay Mama any attention when she's in one of her nonsensical moods," says Harry, folding up the Telegraph so tightly the paper wrinkles.

Upstairs, to check on Nell. She asked for water half an hour ago, he learns, but fell back asleep before the nurse came back with it. Her cheeks are cotton stained with strawberry.

Into his study, to begin a letter to his brother.

Dear William,

Dear Will,

I would to God you were in London. I find myself in a position of peculiar discomfort and could do with your sound

I could do with your sympathetic yet objective counsel. Something seems to have

Something has occurred which has given rise in me

Something has occurred which has led me to >m a suspicion of my wife behaving in a way I suspect my wife.

No, it's impossible. The words "Dessert can't last three hours," set down in spidery lines of ink and posted to Gibraltar, would sound demented.

General William Codrington would write back from Gibraltar with uneasy warmth: I rather believe you've got a little carried away, old boy. Too much time on your hands? These half-pay stints are the devil…

Harry tears the draft into very small pieces before he throws it into the elephant's-foot basket.

His sisters? Equally impossible. Jane lives in London, so he could speak to her face to face, at least, but what could he tell her? She's never liked Helen, but that won't prepare her to listen to a mass of vague, outrageous allegations. Her face would turn pinched with distress.

No, broaching this subject to anyone in his family, without an iota of proof, would only cause embarrassment. It's not sympathy Harry wants, besides, but a thread to follow through this labyrinth. Someone who understands already; someone who can help him decide whether what he guessed, in the darkness of last night, is a paranoid invention or the rank truth.

"My dear Admiral, how it gladdens our hearts to see you again after so long," cries Mrs. Watson. "I was remarking to the reverend only the other day, how much we've missed your company-and that of your wife," she adds after a minuscule pause.

His old friend is looking rather older; she's more papery at the temples. At his wife's side, the snowy-bearded Reverend Watson nods like a jack-in-the-box.

"You're kind to say so," says Harry, dry-mouthed. Until they left Malta, several years before him, the Watsons were his closest intimates. Since then, a few civil, pedestrian letters on either side. He hadn't yet thought to look them up, since getting back to London; the friendship seemed like something folded away in tissue. But here he is sitting on a horsehair sofa in the Watsons' dull fawn drawing-room, in one of the less fashionable, but still genteel, parts of London.

"Are your charming children well?"

"Nan is," he says with difficulty, "but Nell's suffering from a very bad cold on the chest."

He listens to the expressions of sympathy, recommendations of liniments and plasters. He stirs himself. "Your wards, are they still with you?"

"Alas, no; residing with relatives in Northumberland," Mrs. Watson tells him. "The reverend and I are a lonely Darby and Joan, these days."

They have nothing to do, Harry realizes; any visit is a welcome one. He takes a long breath, and plunges in. "You were always so very good to my wife, Mrs. Watson, even at times when she tried your patience sorely."

"Oh-" she waves that away. "I was always glad to play my part. How is dear Helen, if I may still call her that?"

How to answer? "Good, as to her health. As to her character…"

The seconds go by. "It's always been a singular one," remarks Mrs. Watson, eyes on the faded blue carpet.

Harry forces himself on. "Over the years in Valetta, during those congenial Sunday visits-you and I often touched on her manner. Its… wildness, its irregularity."

"Alas, yes," says Mrs. Watson. "Hers is a constant struggle, and she's always had my sympathies."

From the reverend, an abstracted "Mm."

"I do hope there's been some amelioration, since your return to the bracing moral climate of the home country?" she suggests, her head on one side like a sparrow.

Harry shakes his head.

A little escape of breath from her thin lips, which are only slightly darker than her skin. "I feel sure-pardon the liberty, dear Admiral-I've always felt sure that Helen will reform, if you'll only tell her straight out what you expect of the mother of your children, without softening or prevarication. I'm afraid a free rein unleashes the worst in such a nature." She pauses. "If you were to entrust the task to me, I would accept it as my Christian duty to try to impress upon her-"

"It's too late for such conversations," interrupts Harry. "Recently-" That sounds slightly more considered than last night. "Recently, I must tell you in all confidence that I've come to suspect-"

Her gaze is owlish. What big eyes you've got, grandmama, he thinks irrelevantly, though Mrs. Watson can't be more than ten years older than his wife.

"That it's not only her manner," he goes on gruffly. "That here in London, her conduct itself-that she might possibly have actually stepped beyond the bounds of-beyond the bounds." He makes himself produce a brief account of last night.

Mrs. Watson's mouth forms a tiny circle. She turns to meet the reverend's watery eyes.

Harry's shocked them, he knows it. "But I have no proof," he winds up, "and I'm aware that jealousy's the besetting fault of older husbands."

"No!"

Her roar makes him jump.

"You, Admiral-the kindest, the least suspicious-" Mrs. Watson presses her fingers to her mouth, then takes them away. "The only wonder is that you've tolerated the intolerable for so long."

Harry stares at her. "You knew?" he asks in a boy's squeak.

"Not for sure. We only feared, didn't we, my dear?"

Another speechless nod from the reverend.

What shocks Harry is what lies behind the shock. Beneath the rage, beneath the mortification, he's feeling something he has to recognize as relief.

She's risen and crossed the room; she perches beside him on the horsehair sofa. "We never dared speak out. We hinted, we probed on occasion, but how could we put words to our dreadful deductions, when you were too gallant to hear a word against her? In conscience, we couldn't take it upon ourselves to be the first to accuse the mother of your children, without firm evidence-but I can tell you now, it seemed to us in Malta that Helen's dealings with various man-friends were consistent with the worst interpretation!"

Various man-friends? Harry's head suddenly weighs too much for him; he drops it into his hands. The points of his collar prick his jaw like knives. He tries to answer, but all that comes out is a sob. The tears stop up his mouth: slippery in his palms, soaking his beard, spilling into his collar and cravat. Salt as seawater but hot. He's weeping like a child, weeping for all the times over the years that he's shrugged instead, weeping for all he hoped when he stood up in that chapel in Florence beside his dazzling little bride and said so ringingly, I do.

Beside him, Mrs. Watson waits.

Finally he clears his throat with a sound like a rockfall. "I've been an utter idiot," he says into his wet fingers.

"Never that! Only the best of husbands." Her voice is as sweet as a mother's. "We considered you as a martyr among men, didn't we, Reverend?"

"We did," confides the old man.

Harry is mopping himself up with his handkerchief. "Well," he says through the folds of cotton. "No longer."

"No," agrees Mrs. Watson. "There comes an end to forbearance. For the little girls' sake-"

At the thought of Nan and Nell, he almost breaks down again.

"-not to mention your own. For the sake of religion, and, and decency itself," she goes on, "you must prove her guilt."

He balks at the word. "Or otherwise. It's still possible-"

"Of course, of course. It must be investigated, that's the word I was looking for," she assures him. "Enquiries must be made."

"How-" Harry breaks off. "It's all so tawdry."

"That's why it had much better be put on a professional footing at once, oughtn't it, Reverend?"

"Oh yes, at once, my dear."

"So that a man of your noble character needn't be embroiled in sordid details," she tells Harry.

"Professional?" he repeats dully.

"Why don't you let us play Good Samaritans-leave that in our hands?" says Mrs. Watson, giving him a light, careful pat on the sleeve.