that this woman must be—count the years—thirty-six. "To Italy? Or do you mean India?"
"Oh, both: my whole torrid youth!"
"Was it ... was it generally hot in Malta?"
Helen's laugh comes out startlingly deep, like a sob. "So we're reduced to discussing the weather."
Irritation boils in Fido's veins. "As it happens, I'm pressed for time today—"
"Oh, yes, I was almost forgetting what a very important person you've become. The Miss Faithfull, philanthropist, pioneer!"
Fido wants to take her by the lemon-lace-edged shoulders and shake her like a doll. "I prefer to call myself a woman of business."
"I can quite see why I was dropped the moment I left the country," Helen rattles on, "considering how pressed for time you've been, what with all your valiant efforts on behalf of our downtrodden sex."
Her mouth, Fido finds, is hanging open. "Whatever can you mean, dropped?"
A pretty shrug. "It needn't have been done with such brutal efficiency, need it?" Helen's dropped the mocking tone. "Friendships have their seasons, that's understood. But you might have let me down rather more gently, I suppose, after all we'd been through."
Fido blinks dust out of her eyes.
"It wasn't kind, that's all I'll say. Or womanly. It wasn't like you, like what I knew of your heart, or thought I did."
"Stop." She holds up her white-gloved hand till it almost touches those rapid lips.
Helen only speeds up. "You'd had your fill of me and Harry by the time we embarked for Malta, was that it? All at once sick to death of us and our bickerings?" Her eyes have the wet blue sheen of rain. "I know, I know, I quite see that we'd worn you out between us. But I must confess, when I found myself tossed aside like yesterday's newspaper—"
"My dear." Fido almost barks it. "I find these accusations incongruous."
Helen stares at her like a baby.
"Must I remind you, I wrote twice to Admiralty House in Valetta and got not a word of reply to either?"
"Nonsense!"
Fido is bewildered. This is like one of those dreams in which one is caught up in an endless, illogical series of tasks.
"Of course I wrote back," cries Helen.
"From Malta?"
"Of course from Malta! I was a stranger in a strange land; I needed a bosom friend more than ever. Whyever would I have left off writing? I poured out all my worries—"
Fido breaks in. "When was this? What month?"
"How should I recall, all these years later?" asks Helen reasonably. "But I know I replied as soon as I got your letter—the one and only letter I received from you when I was in Malta. I sent several long screeds, but on your side the correspondence simply dried up. You can't imagine my nervous excitement when a packet of post would arrive from England, and I'd rip it open—"
Fido's chewing her lip; she tastes blood. "I did change my lodgings, that autumn," she concedes. "But still, your letters ought to have been sent on directly by the post office."
"Lost at sea?" suggests Helen, frowning.
"One of them, perhaps, but could the Continental mail really be so—"
"Things do go astray."
"What a very absurd—" Fido hears her voice rise pitifully, and breaks off. Scalding water behind her eyes. "I don't know what to say."
Helen's smile is miserable. "Oh heavens, I see it all now. I should have tried again; I should have kept on writing, despite my mortified feelings."
"No, I should! I thought—" She tries now to remember what she'd thought; what sense she'd made of it when Helen hadn't written back, that strange year when the Codringtons were posted abroad and Fido stayed alone in London, wondering what to make of herself. "I suppose I supposed ... a chapter in your life had drawn to a close."
"Dearest Fido! You're not the stuff of a chapter," Helen protests. "Several volumes, at least."
Her brain's whirling under the hot, powdery sky. She doesn't want to cry, here on Farringdon Street, a matter of yards from her steam-printing office, where any passing clerk or hand might spot her. So Fido laughs instead. "Such an idiotic misunderstanding, like something out of Mozart. I couldn't be sorrier."
"Nor I. These seven years have been an eternity!"
What in another woman would strike Fido as hyperbole has in Helen Codrington always charmed her, somehow. The phrases are delivered with a sort of rueful merriment, as if by an actress who knows herself to be better than her part.
She seizes Fido's wrists, squeezing tight enough that her bones shift under the humid cotton gloves. "And what are