Emma Donoghue - The Sealed Letter

The minutes crawl by, and like some older, wiser, more craven Pandora, she can't bring herself to crack the seal. She reaches for the little silver knife with which she opens letters, and her fingers curl around its handle, but she makes no move to slit the paper. Fido's always thought of herself as a femme de lettres, text the element she breathes with ease, but recently she's come to know how dangerous words are, those black, razor-beaked birds whose feints and swoopings are entirely unpredictable.

But if she doesn't open this letter now, if she locks it away securely enough to thwart the spying eyes of the world-why, its hold on her will only tighten. By day and by night, she'll be aware of it in her safe, propped behind her cash box, beside the Last Will and Testament that leaves everything to be divided between her nephews and nieces because she has no one else in the world. Like some dark lamp it'll keep beaming out its malevolence.

Come, open the thing.

Then it occurs to Fido that she ought to burn it instead. Whatever it may say of her, whatever the insinuating theories or lurid threats a maddened husband might have written down seven years ago-it would only take a few seconds, this morning, for the document to char and curl to anonymous dust. Why should she make herself read it, after all? What possible good can it do her to fill her head with such words?

She thinks of what those words might be; she supplies terrible synonyms. But if she burns the thing, she'll never know, which-it strikes her now-may well prove to be worse. No, she can't bring herself to stand up and carry the letter three steps to the wan fire that lurks in the grate. It is as if the whole secret narrative of her life is contained in this thin envelope. Oh, read it and be done with it! Whatever the document may say-

Below, the door knocker thumps, and Fido flinches.

When Johnson comes in this time, she announces a Miss Smith.

Fido's forehead creases. "I don't believe I know a-"

"Helen Smith, she said to say," mutters the maid, looking away.

Fido slides the letter under a pile of books so fast the edge crumples. Her throat feels blocked. She has an impulse to say she's not at home-but that will only put the interview off, and besides, you coward, you maggot, you pitiful excuse for a woman. "I'll come to the drawing-room. No, on second thoughts, show her in here." Keeping it on a business footing.

"Here?" repeats Johnson.

"As I said."

Alone, she concentrates on steadying and silencing her breath.

When Helen walks into the study, Fido realizes that she was expecting a broken woman. Bruised, at least, if not repentant. But Helen is pearly-faced, today, dressed in scarlet and plum.

"You look very stylish," says Fido. It comes out as a gruff accusation. She's forgotten to offer her visitor a seat. She finds herself toying with her letter-opener, like some vacillating Macbeth; she puts it down.

"I'm going abroad," remarks Helen.

Of course. And yet it's a shock to hear.

"To what country?" Belgium, Fido wonders, perhaps Italy… Not Florence, no; the bitter old father won't open his doors to this prodigal.

"Does it matter?" asks Helen, head cocked almost playfully.

Fido clears her throat. "Not to me personally, no-"

"Nor to me," says Helen with a little shrug.

Her destination is that universal no-place, then, the demimonde. Every city has a twilight brigade of ladies with nothing to live on but cards and gentlemen. Could I have saved her? Fido wonders, with a stabbing sensation in her stomach. If I'd been sharper, firmer, stronger? She tries to summon the tone of the proprietor of the Victoria Press. "Your situation is indeed-"

But a laugh interrupts her, a small, peculiar laugh. "Whether forgiving me or judging me, Fido, the joke is that you've never understood me for a moment."

Fido stares.

"You've always thought me a sentimental Emma Bovary, when the truth is much simpler," Helen says as lightly as if they're discussing the weather. "I took my fun where I found it. If I couldn't bear marriage and motherhood without a little excitement, how was I worse than any creature in creation? We are daughters and sons of apes, after all."

Fido doesn't know how to begin to answer such philosophy. "We are… we are God's children," is all she can manage.

Helen leans her knuckles on the edge of Fido's desk. "Well, if God put the itch in me, God must answer for it, don't you think?"

Silence, a thick miasma filling up the room.

"But I haven't come for chit-chat," Helen adds in a brisker tone.

"What for, then?" Fido has to ask, after a moment.

"Money."

She's winded by the word. It's rarely spoken, in their circles; people prefer means, emolument, resources. "The admiral-surely, if you made a humble appeal, as the mother-"

"My capacity for humility aside," Helen interrupts her dryly, "in his view I'm no longer the mother of his children. I was a false start, don't you know, a fifteen-year error of accounting. I'm informed there are to be no visits, not even a last one."

Only now, and only for a split second, does Fido see a glitter of tears in those sea-blue eyes.

"Why do you ask me for money?" She's almost stuttering.

"Because I have none, except for what a few jewels have fetched," says Helen in a reasonable tone. "Until the day I die, I'll always be asking for my bread, one way or another."

"But why-" Fido tries again. "I thought-because I felt obliged to act as I did, in court-"

Helen flicks open her watch. "Much as it may console you for the two of us to confess, and recriminate, and fall on each other's bosoms in floods of tears-I'm afraid I can't spare the time today."

"All I meant was," says Fido, stiff-jawed, "why ask me?"

"Who better?" Helen considers her, across the desk. "You were the first, after all."

Fido stiffens. It's as if Helen has put her finger on some exquisitely sensitive scar.

"You haven't forgotten," says Helen, crossing her arms. "I'd bet you recall every single night of it, in fact, rather more clearly than I do."

Fido's throat has sealed up like wax.

Helen's smile has something terrible in it. "We were so very young," Fido whispers.

Another sharp little laugh. "Oh, old enough to know what we were about."

"We've never spoken of it."

Helen shrugs. "There was no need, so I deferred to your squeamish sensibilities. But this appears to be the season for naming names."

Fido swallows hard. "After all you've put me through, will you now stoop to extortion?"

"The way I see it, my dear, it's much more simple than that," says Helen. "As you were first to induce me to break my vows-"

"No," Fido whispers. She can't bear the idea that there could be any likeness between herself and the men who stand like bloody flags in Helen's path. "It was… not at all the same thing." The silence stretches like a rope on the verge of snapping. "If we've never spoken of it, it's because words would only distort it. There are no…" She strains for breath. "The words don't fit."

Helen shrugs impatiently. "We took our pleasure like nature's other creatures, I dare say. And now it so happens that someone must pay up. Since you were the first to lay hands on me-long before those others-shouldn't you be that someone?" She waits. "Wouldn't you rather it were you, in a way?"

Tears are falling onto Fido's hands, her desk, her papers. She nods, speechless. Then she fumbles for her pen. "I can let you have a draft on my bank."

"I'd rather cash."

Fido goes to her safe and unlocks it. She lifts out her cash box, which is heavy with a full week's wages for the hands at the press. She hesitates for a moment but can't bear to start counting; she slides it across the desk.