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,