Emma Donoghue - The Sealed Letter

"I didn't know what it meant," cries Helen, "how long a married life can be! And what other choice had a girl like me?"

"Carina." She's trying to marshal her arguments, but compassion confuses her. "I do feel for you."

Helen's eyes glitter like sand. She throws herself on Fido.

Fido registers the hot weight of Helen's face against her collarbone, through the cotton, and smells some kind of floral water in her hair. Two ladies standing pressed against each other, skirt to billowing skirt, on the banks of the Serpentine at three in the afternoon: an incongruous sight perhaps, but Fido refuses to care. "Little One," she whispers.

"The relief of letting it out, you can't imagine," sobs Helen, muffled.

I'm the only one in the world she's told, Fido thinks, with a kind of vertigo. We didn't exchange a word for seven years, but still, four days after meeting again, I'm the one she trusts. This secret's weighing heavy on her already, but she's proud to bear it.

As Fido lets herself into 19 Langham Place, a middle-aged lady hurries up the steps behind her. "Please excuse me-is this the office of the Female Employment Register?"

"That's correct."

"Can you help me?"

Looking at the strained forehead, the soft white hands, Fido doubts it. "Do take a seat in our reading room," she says, showing her in.

The lady grasps Fido's sleeve. "I'm-I don't know you, madam, but I must tell you I'm in most urgent need of remunerative employment. My daughters and I-my husband's a physician," she goes on disjointedly.

Fido waits uncomfortably.

"His practice failed," says the stranger in her strangulated voice. "He has abandoned us. That was four months ago, and we have no other resources."

"My sympathies. I'll make sure someone upstairs will come and write down your details for our register," Fido tells her, gently taking back her sleeve.

As she goes up the stairs, she's remembering the first few such petitioners she met, when she came to work here six years ago, with her carpetbag full of essays and her boundless confidence. (Our heartiest young worker, she'd heard Bessie Parkes call her once, to a stranger.) How spring-like the atmosphere at Langham Place was back in '58: change like ripe fruit dangling almost within their gasp, fruit for which former, more fearful generations had never dared to reach.

Today Bessie Parkes, Jessie Boucherett, Isa Craig, and Sarah Lewin (their secretary) are poring over a portfolio of drawings at the big office table. "Hello, Fido," beams Isa Craig.

"We missed you yesterday," remarks Bessie Parkes.

"Yes, I am sorry. My lungs have been playing up," says Fido, startled by the lie even as she produces it; why couldn't she have simply said she was otherwise engaged? She turns to Miss Lewin to tell her about the doctor's wife downstairs.

"Quite unemployable," sighs the secretary, pushing back her chair.

"Every other day, these reduced gentlewomen turn up at my press," Fido remarks, "and I always redirect them here, to the Employment Register-"

"But their mistake's a natural one, as the Victoria Press is so much better known," says Isa Craig warmly.

"What do you believe becomes of these tragic cases, when we turn them away?" Fido wonders.

"Is this person… handsome?" asks Jessie Boucherett.

"Not unpleasant to the eye."

"Then she'll probably put herself under some man's protection, in the end, rather than starve," says Jessie Boucherett.

Protection, thinks Fido, disgusted by the customary euphemism.

"Which of us could throw the first stone?" asks Bessie Parkes. "The Magdalene was forgiven, we're told, because she loved much. Remember Adelaide's masterpiece, 'A Legend of Provence'?"

Fido doesn't meet any of her comrades' eyes, but she can tell what they're all thinking. They've noticed, without Bessie Parkes ever having announced it, that she no longer works on Sundays; they know she's on the brink of converting from the Unitarian Church to Adelaide Procter's: Rome.

Isa Craig has turned away to wipe her eyes.

"Isa, my dear, you mustn't keep dissolving into tears at the mention of the beloved name." Bessie Parkes speaks in exalted tones. "Adelaide doesn't want us to mourn. Wasn't I with her at the last, and didn't I tell you how she went willingly, radiantly, to her beloved Jesus?"

This strikes Fido as sanctimonious cant, but she says nothing.

"After retching up blood for two years," mutters Jessie Boucherett.

Religion is one of those topics on which the women of the Reform Firm will never agree, which is why they have a policy of keeping it out of the English Woman's Journal.

Bessie bites her lip. "The poem of Adelaide's I mentioned, for any of you who may not recall its details, is about a nun who nurses a handsome knight; he seduces her to run away with him. Years later, a broken beggar, she comes back to the convent, and finds that the Virgin has been impersonating her there all this time, keeping her place."

"That's right," says Isa Craig, nodding. "The twist is that the nun can take up her old life again without fear of the holy sisters' judgement, because none of them ever knew she was gone."

Fido's lost in thoughts of Helen. She fears she may have been too hard on her yesterday. Who is Fido, who's never married a man nor been tempted by one, to stand in judgement on a platonic affaire, an unhappy wife's slim consolation? After all, these things die away on their own, like mayflies: the Channel and the Mediterranean will divide Helen from Anderson again in a matter of weeks.

"The infinite sympathy of the divine, the limitless mercy," marvels Bessie Parkes. She quotes from the poem: "No star is ever lost we once have seen, We always may be what we might have been. "

At that moment Fido realizes something with a sickening sensation in her chest, like a tendon snapping: I'm jealous. That's what lay behind all her stern words yesterday: not ethics, so much as hurt. With his spaniel curls and his flippancy, Anderson hardly seems worthy of Helen's burning attention. (But then, what man would?) Something glorious happened on the last day of August on Farringdon Street, a friendship that seemed extinct flared up red and phoenix-like-and what business has a blond puppy to be blundering into such a story?

"On a more practical note," says Sarah Lewin, breaking the silence with her throaty whisper, "I must announce that subscriptions to the Journal are down this month."

"Heavens!"

"Not again!"

"Mm, I'm afraid they've slipped below six hundred."

Bessie Parkes lets out a long sigh. "Would you be so good as to look into it?" she asks their secretary. "Sound out a few subscribers who've decided not to renew…"

"I hear from many sides that our serial novel's popular," puts in Isa Craig.

"Ah, but what has the novel to do with the advancement of women?" asks Bessie Parkes.

Fido shrugs, her mind still wandering. "Every pill needs a little sugar."

It's just at this point that Emily Davies glides in and takes her seat at the table. "I do apologize for my lateness, but I bring rather extraordinary news," she announces in her usual brisk staccato. The Journal 's editor is looking particularly doll-like today, Fido notices: bands of mouse-coloured hair framing her diminutive features. She slides a paper out of her thick pocketbook. "This morning I received a letter-they call it a memorial, in their stiff way-from the University of Cambridge…"

The members of the Reform Firm are all agog.

"…approving, on a strictly once-off basis, our request to have girls admitted to its local examinations."

"After all this time," Fido whoops, seizing the document.