so hard, she bangs her shoulder against the window frame. "How dare you!"
Fido presses on. "Anderson's been a brute, yes, but perhaps ... a rational one. Whatever could you have hoped for, what future could there have been, in your connection with this man?"
She speaks through closed teeth. "It's been keeping me alive."
"But tainting your relation to your husband, your children, your own heart," says Fido pleadingly. "This way it's over with one sharp cut, and you're saved."
"Saved?" Helen's eyes narrow.
Fido starts to stammer. "It's my, I wouldn't speak this way if I didn't feel it to be my duty—"
"Damn your duty," says Helen in a voice that comes out as deep as a man's. "Are you my vicar or my friend? I can't bear preaching, today of all days."
"My dearest, I'm only fearful for your welfare. For your—"
"My what? My soul, or my reputation?" asks Helen, sardonic.
"All of you!"
They lapse into a fraught silence. Fido, desperate to turn Helen's anger back towards its rightful object, says, "It's the cowardice of it I can't forgive. To think, Anderson fled like a rat to Scotland, and proposed to this cousin, just two days after your last rendezvous!"
"Two days." Helen speaks so hoarsely Fido can hardly hear her. "After two years."
Fido stares at her. "I beg your pardon?" she says after a few seconds.
Helen's watching her own hand scrunch her pink skirt into a thousand creases. "Am I so easy to forget?"
"What was it you said about two years?"
Helen finally meets her eyes with a look of irritation. "What?"
"You said two years. You don't mean to tell me—" Fido pulls in a long breath of stale, hot air, and speaks with as much control as she can muster. "It was my understanding that you and Anderson—that it was only a fortnight ago that matters came to—that consummation—" She silently curses her tied tongue: why is it so difficult, after a genteel education, to put plain words on things? "Two weeks since he took you on my sofa!" That comes out far too loud.
Helen's looking into her upturned hands, as if to read the lines.
What's she going to tell me, Fido wonders? That she misspoke, that what she meant was that Anderson's been yearning for her from afar for the past two years, like some medieval troubadour? That until he followed her to England, he never dared speak a word of it, or ask the least favour? But I don't believe that.
"Two weeks, I meant. Of course I meant two weeks," Helen repeats. "Right now I don't know one word from another."
"Oh, I think you meant two years," says Fido, her tongue like a stone in her mouth. So that afternoon, in her drawing-room, those terrible sounds behind the door: they weren't the beginning. How stupid Fido can be about the dim world of the relations between men and women. She's the fool who's stumbled late and oblivious into this play, the butt of the joke.
"Two weeks, two years," mutters Helen, "what's the difference?"
"Get out," says Fido, leaning across her to grab the handle and thrust open the door.
Surveillance
(watch or guard kept over
a suspected person or prisoner)
So far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and
the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved or hostile
society is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the
threshold, it ceases to be home; it is then only a part of that
outer world which you have roofed over and lighted fire in.
John Ruskin,
Sesame and Lilies (1865)
At thirty-five a Captain and the "hero of Trafalgar," now at fifty-seven, and a Rear-Admiral, Sir Edward Codrington was raised to the august position of Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, with his flag on the Asia.
In his study, Harry straightens in his chair, mulls over the grammar of his sentence, then bends to his pen again. Jane, working interminably on the memoirs of their late father, keeps asking her brother for an account of the naval side of things, and now, at last—to keep his mind from gnawing on itself like a rat—he's writing it. Harry will be fifty-seven himself next year, and a vice-admiral is one rung above a rear, so to an outsider his career may seem to be advancing faster than his father's, but the fact is that Sir Edward Codrington is remembered by a grateful nation, and his younger son is the hero of nothing in particular.
The front door. That'll be Nan, going to the museum with Mrs. Lawless. Her hair's held back with a sky-blue ribbon today. Nell