The Sealed Letter

by Emma Donoghue

  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 t
o. 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.

  Reasonable Suspicion

  (a suspicion that would convince an uninvolved,

  rational person when described to him)

  No man should look for a wife

  from among the tropics.

  Anthony Trollope,

  He Knew He Was Right (1868)

  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 lan
ding. 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.