Sarah Trafford and Wigwam

Sarah Trafford and Wigwam’s friendship is marked by a painful mismatch between care offered and care Sarah can bear to receive. When Wigwam visits at Mark Trafford’s request, Sarah wants her to leave so she can confront a troubling letter alone. Later, after learning that Rufus’s marriage to Wigwam was a long-running deception and hearing that Wigwam may be dead, Sarah finds one certainty in the friendship: she would grieve for Wigwam, and she can recognize the care Rufus showed her even through his false identity.

Friendship Under Strain

Sarah does not call Wigwam herself. Mark arranges the visit, and Wigwam arrives a little after six thirty with a half-hearted explanation that she is only dropping in. Her opening remark is that Mark said Sarah sounded fraught. Sarah responds that Mark is turning into her keeper, but Wigwam does not meet the complaint with reproach. She tells Sarah that everyone has been worried about her. The visit is not a confrontation or an interrogation; Wigwam acknowledges Sarah’s distress with the plainness of someone concerned for her, and Sarah eventually admits that she has been fraught.

That concern does not make Sarah ready for company. Wigwam confesses that Mark made her promise not to leave Sarah alone. Sarah suspects that Mark fears she will stop taking her pill, become a nuisance, or get into trouble; her own response is that she is already in trouble. The letter is the immediate source of that anxiety, and she cannot stop thinking about it. She wants Wigwam to go so she can open it and discover the worst, even though she also thinks of Wigwam as her best friend and feels they have not properly talked for months. The relationship is close enough to make the gap conspicuous, but Sarah’s fear and preoccupation leave little room for closeness in the moment.

Care Given and Care Withheld

Sarah manages the visit by agreeing that Rufus may come around, provided she can get on with her own work and be absent while he settles in front of the television. She finds the prospect of watching television with him, talking to him, or being in his presence repellent, but cannot express that to Wigwam. Instead, she keeps nodding and smiling while Wigwam runs through the local gossip again. Sarah experiences the effort physically: her stretched smile makes her cheeks ache. The scene makes her withdrawal visible not as a rejection of Wigwam’s importance, but as the effort of maintaining an ordinary social performance while she is consumed by the letter and her troubles.

Wigwam eventually leaves, after asking whether Sarah is sure she will be all right. Sarah says that she will be fine. The reassurance is brief, and the contrast between it and Wigwam’s promise to stay conveys how little Sarah can disclose or accept at this stage. Wigwam’s care is practical and direct: she comes because Mark is worried and checks again before leaving. Sarah’s response is to conceal the depth of her distress and wait for solitude. Their friendship thus appears in a small, uneasy exchange rather than in an open conversation: concern is present, but it does not dissolve Sarah’s isolation.

Rufus and the Reassessment of Wigwam’s Marriage

Sarah’s later understanding of Wigwam is shaped by the discovery that Rufus was not the harmless, empty-headed man she thought she knew. Rufus had arrived in Wigwam’s life without a past Sarah could recall, and his apparent identity as a family man had concealed a plan involving Thomas Singleton. Sarah understands the marriage as part of that cover: Rufus had pretended to be Wigwam’s lover while waiting for Thomas to return, intending to kill him. Thomas, she concludes, had been drawn back because he could not stay away from his wife and daughter. Sarah also hears Rufus say that Wigwam has died, but cannot decide whether to believe him.

This revelation changes the meaning of the months Sarah had watched Wigwam spend with Rufus. The relationship was built on an impersonation, and Sarah cannot treat that fact as harmless simply because Rufus had played the part of a lover. Yet she also cannot reduce the whole performance to emptiness. She reasons that no man had cared for Wigwam enough in the past to keep up the pretence for so long. That observation does not establish what Rufus truly felt, or undo the violence his deception served; it marks the painful limit of what Sarah can know. The false marriage may have been instrumental, but its sustained performance still seems to Sarah to have contained care directed toward Wigwam.

Grief and the Friendship’s Remaining Certainty

On the train, Sarah’s reflection on Wigwam becomes a measure of the friendship itself. She thinks that if Wigwam is alive, she would grieve for Rufus, whatever he had done and whoever he proved to be. The conditional matters: Sarah does not know whether Wigwam is alive, and cannot resolve the uncertainty from Rufus’s claim. What she can establish is her own response. She grieves not only for the dead but for the living, whoever they are. Her concern for Wigwam remains even as the identities and loyalties around her have become unreliable.

Sarah’s grief does not restore the easy friendship missing from the earlier visit, nor does the evidence show a reconciliation between them. Instead, the scenes place the relationship across two different kinds of distance: first, Sarah keeps Wigwam at a social and emotional remove while struggling to face the letter; later, she is separated from her friend by the uncertainty of whether Wigwam has survived. In both moments, Sarah’s attention is divided between what she feels and what she can say. Her recognition that Wigwam matters survives that silence. Against Rufus’s invented identity and Sarah’s shaken trust in the people around her, the grief she knows she would feel for Wigwam becomes a rare, personal certainty.