Emma Donoghue - The Sealed Letter

"Mm, nothing sinking about these girls, by the looks of it," says Anderson with an appreciative scan of the room that Fido doesn't like.

"Your hands, is that what you call them?" asks Helen in amusement, wiggling her fingers. "As if you're some monstrous octopus!"

Fido grins, but uneasily; it's strange to have her old friend here in the workroom, crackingjokes. "I see myself in a maternal role, really," she says in a low voice. "Miss Jennings here, for instance, is only thirteen; apprenticed by the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb."

"Awfully kind of you," remarks the colonel.

Fido shakes her head. "She's been rather more trouble to train, but wonderfully immune to distraction."

"Oh, but you have the coarser sex here too," Helen mutters, catching sight of Mr. Kettle chalking his hands.

"Well, of course there are tasks beyond the average girl's strength," says Fido a little defensively. "Carrying the type cases, feeding and striking off the sheets… So I hire one male clicker to oversee each company of five typos: he distributes copy, makes up the girls' work into columns and imposes the matter-puts the pages in the right order," she glosses. "But I'm proud to say I employ twenty-five girls here and fifteen at Farringdon Street."

Helen is hanging back, looking at the long racks covered with iron frames. "They're known as chases" says Fido, at her elbow, "but when they're filled with type and secured we call them formes. " It occurs to her that she's being a bore. "Miss Clark is setting up a line at a time on a composing stick-if I may, Miss Clark-it's adjustable in width, you see." She offers the stick to Helen.

She pulls back. "I mustn't get stained; Harry and I dine at the Beechams' tonight."

Anderson chuckles. "There's no ink on it yet, Mrs. C."

That name has jarred on Fido's ear each time he's used it. Too vulgar, or too presuming? It sounds like something a butcher might call his wife. She tells herself not to be such a snob; military circles have their own jargon. "Everything's thoroughly scrubbed after each print run," she assures Helen. "The trade absolutely depends on hygiene and order." How pompous I sound, how elderly, at twenty-nine.

"You'd never take me on, Fido," Helen remarks. "Far too disorderly, not to mention too plump in the fingers."

"Your fingers are irrelevant, but your character would be an obstacle," Fido agrees, loosening into laughter.

She offers them tea in her office.

"Aha, Tennyson, capital." Anderson points his cane's silver tip at a framed verse on the wall and recites:

Fido smiles slightly. "In fact, the poet's a Miss Anna Walker."

Helen smiles at his discomfiture.

"Rather in the laureate's manner, though," ventures Anderson after a second.

Over shrimps and bread and butter, it emerges that some of Fido's Scottish connections are acquainted with some of the colonel's.

"This establishment is a great credit to you, Miss Faithfull," he tells her.

"Yet we've had our enemies," she says, theatrically.

Helen stops chewing a large shrimp.

Aha, that's hooked her. "Ceaseless sabotage, in the early days," says Fido. "Windows smashed, frames and stools daubed in ink to destroy the hands' dresses, sorts jumbled up in their cases or scattered like birdseed, machines prised apart with crowbars… the waste was simply ruinous, quite apart from the distress caused."

"My dear, how sensational," cries Helen.

Strange how a few years can reduce humiliation to an anecdote. "There were scurrilous attacks on me in the journals; I had to grow a rhinoceros's hide. But the Victoria Press was self-supporting in a year, I was honoured with Her Majesty's approval, and now we win medals for excellence from the International Exhibition." Well, one medal. In her attempt to impress her old friend, Fido's getting carried away.

"Bravissima," cries Helen, clapping her hands. "And to think, when I first knew you, it was four costumes a day and routs at Lady Morgan's."

Fido laughs. "I'm afraid we were a wild pair, my soi-disant chaperone and I," she tells Anderson.

"We had a policy of dancing with anything in trousers that asked us," contributes Helen.

"And made facile and impertinent remarks, in the name of youthful artless-ness. You, as the married lady, should have reined me in."

"Ah, but Fido's always been my better self," Helen tells Anderson. "And look at her now, how she's transformed herself from deb to philanthropist…"

"Miss Faithfull, on that theme," he asks playfully, "wouldn't you admit that some of your woman-ist set want to go too far?"

Fido arranges her smile. (It's little by little that the world will be changed, she reminds herself, as mice nibble a hole in a wall.) "I assure you, Colonel, we don't mean to smash the social machine, only to readjust its workings."

"But one hears of calls for women judges, MPs, officers-"

"Oh, if any argument's pushed ad absurdum …" Fido controls her temper. "My own belief is that there should be no legal bars to our sex's progress-and certainly none are needed, because it's inconceivable that more than a handful would ever attempt to enter the professions you mention. Women naturally prefer the nobler spheres of education, medicine, and welfare."

"Nobler than your line, Anderson," Helen teases.

"Well, more conducive to human happiness than war is, shall we say?" suggests Fido.

He snorts. "I'll grant you that, Miss Faithfull. What those miserable Americans are suffering this year, on both sides…"

She likes him for that.

"But I'll confess, we soldiers are always panting for another dust-up."

"The colonel's glory days were in the Crimea," Helen says with a little yawn.

"And as for poor Navy men like Codrington," he adds, "the last real action he saw was at Acre, a quarter of a century ago!"

Rather a sneering remark to make about his friend, Fido thinks. "More tea?" she asks.

Fido shouldn't be here this morning, strolling along the banks of the Serpentine; she should be at Langham Place, attending a meeting to discuss the draft of SPEW's quarterly report. But the sky's the blue of a vein, and the September breeze has cut the heat deliciously. And Helen asked her to come walking in Hyde Park, after all, and for the seven years in which she's done without her friend, it strikes Fido now, she's attended too many meetings.

"You must have read The Woman in White? " Helen asks.

"I got it twice from Mudie's, then bought my own," Fido admits. "The loyal, ugly Marion-she breaks my heart."

"I wore a white shawl all that summer."

"You're still a slave to fashion! What about Mrs. Norton's novels? Or Miss Braddon's?"

Helen nods eagerly. "My favourite title of hers is Three Times Dead."

"Do you take Temple Bar? The current serial is by Miss Braddon," Fido tells her, "it's called The Doctor's Wife, but she's really just an Englished Bovary. Now, Lady Audley can be accused of stealing from The Woman in White- "

"But she's so elegant and audacious, I forgive her everything."

"There's that interesting passage," Fido recalls, "that suggests such crimes result from women being frustrated in their ambitions to enter the professions."

"My favourite is the scene in which she shoves her husband down the well."

Fido lets out a hoot. "Do you remember reading Bleak House to each other, all that first winter?"

"Of course. The death of Lady Dedlock-you made me shudder so, I couldn't sleep."