The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue Page A

says Helen in marvelling tones. "What you were saying about marriage the other day at my house—that a wife's whole identity is swallowed up—"
    Fido tries to remember what bold statements she might have made. "Oh but my dear ... I'm not being pious, nor a prude. It's a matter of..." She struggles for words. "Self-respect. Being true to oneself. You did take a vow."
    "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