England and Other Stories

KEYS

HE DROVE CLARE to the station. The traffic was unexpectedly heavy and they just made it in time. Their goodbyes were rushed and clumsy, but this spared him. He had no idea what to say. ‘Call me,’ he said. Then, ‘Quick!’ Then he said, ‘I love you.’ He hadn’t planned on saying it. It just happened. He watched her blink and scan his face even as she hurried.

‘Quick!’ he said again, and she turned, wheeling her small case into the station entrance. He loitered in the forecourt as her train arrived. He should be going with her, of course, but she’d brushed aside the need for this. They both knew he’d never got on with her brother, couldn’t stand him in fact. And now her brother was suddenly, perhaps dangerously, ill.

It spared him. It would have been false. But as he watched her train pull out he felt a pang. He thought of her sitting there like some newly made orphan or refugee. She had to cross London then take another train from Euston, some four or five hours in all. Plenty of time to be alone with her thoughts, plenty of time before she’d have any reason to call. But he somehow knew she’d only call him if things looked not too bad. If they looked really bad she’d be immersed in it all and in her family and she’d forget him. He’d be peripheral. He was just a husband.

Being an only child himself, who’d lost his parents years ago, he hated the stifling stuff of families, and sometimes couldn’t hide it. It didn’t sound good at all for Adam, and Adam was only forty-two.

He asked himself why he’d never been able to bear him. There was nothing rational about it. Simply because he was Clare’s older brother? No, it was because he was weak. That was the truth. He hated weak men. He could spot them. And the truth about weak men was that they got ill, and even died.

He remained parked for some time after the train disappeared, as if he were now waiting for someone to arrive. It was a leaden August afternoon and thick sparse spots of rain began to fall. He thought about his affair with Vicki. It hadn’t lasted long and it was the only time. He thought of how he’d hidden it from Clare — whether she’d had her inklings or not — and of how his hiding it from her had come to seem like a kindness, even a virtue.

Then he drove back home, only to discover that, in the unusual circumstances, he’d forgotten his keys.

He knew at once where they were, in the pocket of his zip-up jacket, slung over the back of his chair by his desk. He’d decided hastily not to wear it after all. Then, while he’d carried out Clare’s case and put it in the boot, Clare had locked the front door. And now of course he didn’t have the remedy that Clare, with her keys, could come to his rescue.

Rain started to fall in earnest as he sat outside his own home, staring at it like some riddle.

The normal thing in such a situation was to seek the help of a neighbour. He’d done it before. The houses were terraced. At the back of theirs was a window on the first floor with a broken catch. It had been possible that previous time to raise the lower sash from outside, then crawl in. Thanks to his negligence in getting the catch repaired, it might be possible to do the same again. But first he’d have to be let in by his next-door neighbour, explain himself, make embarrassed apologies, borrow a ladder and climb over the garden fence, somehow manhandling the ladder over too.

And now it was August and both the Wheelers on one side and the Mitchells on the other were on holiday. Last time, it had been the Mitchells. He knew they had a ladder. But the Mitchells would be in their place in France.

And the irony was that the window — the window that was by no means guaranteed to save him — was the window to his study and only a few feet from his abandoned jacket, with his keys in it, over the chair. Last time, he’d squirmed through the window, then found himself swimming on his desk.

He could of course call a locksmith. He’d forgotten his keys, but he had his phone. How long would it take for a locksmith to arrive?

At least he was sheltered from this rain in the car.

For a moment he did nothing, immobilised by the fact of being excluded from his own home, his own life. There it was, but he simply couldn’t get to it. There was his desk, with his zip-up jacket over the chair, his drawing board where he’d resolved just to get on with the work he’d brought home from the office — having taken today, Friday, off — right through the weekend if need be while Clare was away.

He had to revise all the drawings on the Neale Road project. It was the stupid developer’s fault, but it was a significant job and they had to swallow it. There was a bit of a panic and he’d said he’d see to it by Monday. He vaguely knew it wasn’t so tricky. The future residents of Neale Road would have a little less space than they might have done, that’s all. But they’d never know about it.

He said he’d tackle it anyway over the weekend, and felt this piece of noble volunteering already scoring him points. Clare would have to put up with it, but he’d say he couldn’t wriggle out, and she was used to work coming home with him. Then the situation had changed dramatically. His weekend commitment became another, secondary reason why he couldn’t accompany her. It also became his own self-sacrificing task to counterbalance, at least a little, her more demanding mission.

Except now he had this other problem.

He realised that in confronting this minor catastrophe of being locked out, he’d for some minutes suspended all thought of his wife’s much more grievous situation — or her brother’s. He saw her again sitting on the train, the window streaked with rain, not thinking of him. Her keys in her handbag.

The truth was he didn’t think Neale Road should take more than half a day, though he could make out it had taken longer. He saw himself handing in the results to Vicki on Monday and in doing so scoring personal points with her that he couldn’t precisely analyse. ‘There we are,’ he’d say, as if really saying in a certain victorious way (victorious — ha!), ‘No hard feelings.’

He looked at the unremitting frontage of his own home, briefly seeing the immured but none-the-wiser residents of Neale Road.

It was so strange: his life there, himself here, but the sensation was not entirely foreign, or unwelcome.

The rain grew suddenly heavier, a real downpour. Then he saw a light go on, on the first floor, in number twenty, the Mitchells’ place — at 4.30 in the afternoon.

He was surprised how rapidly he solved the mystery. It would be their cleaner. He was sure of it. She came once a week, on Fridays. The Mitchells were away, till Sunday, but they’d no doubt asked her to look in and do a few chores, water the plants and so on, before their return. He remembered now — but he’d hardly forgotten — coming home once from the office early and just as he was reaching for his keys (his keys!) seeing her emerge from the adjacent front door.

She’d been visibly startled to see him standing there so close.

‘I’m John. I live here,’ he said reassuringly, then held up his keys by way of proof. She held up her own keys — or the set of keys the Mitchells had given her. For a moment they’d done a flustered mutual jingling with their two sets of keys, a hand dance, as if this was more effective than speech.

‘Olga,’ she eventually said. ‘I clean.’ She was blonde, indeterminately foreign, no more than twenty-five.

She’d lowered her eyes automatically, at first, from his gaze. Now she suddenly gave him a quick direct stare, half smiling, half something else. He felt the feral punch of it, even as he knew his own stare was stripping away the thinnish dress she was wearing. This mutual jolt was something he hadn’t really felt (except with Vicki) since before he married Clare, though he’d felt it often enough back in those days, and he felt its submerged familiarity now.

Olga. He’d always thought it was an ugly name, implying ugly women. Olga, Friday afternoons. Perhaps he’d noted it even then. So: that light going on next door — it was in the Mitchells’ bedroom — must be her. And Olga could be his legitimate means of getting into his house.

She was perhaps stranded herself, he thought. This sudden torrential rain. No umbrella. We forget things. And if it was that same thinnish dress. And this same bucketing rain, he also thought, might make rather tricky, or at least postponable, the business with the ladder and the fence-hopping and the unsecured window.

He got out and scrambled to the porch of number twenty. Even these few paces left him wet. He rang, then for good measure rattled on the letter box and rang again. It might be her policy not to answer the bell when doing the Mitchells’ cleaning. But, after a moment, more lights came on and she half opened the front door.

‘Remember me?’ he said. ‘John? And my keys? Well now I haven’t got any.’

It was the same dress. A mix of washed-out pinks and greys. Maybe it was the only dress she did the cleaning in.

‘I’m locked out,’ he said, wondering if this was an expression a foreign woman with limited English would understand. He couldn’t hold up a missing key. Was she Russian, Polish, Romanian? It turned out she was Moldovan. He wasn’t quite sure where Moldova was.

But she understood the situation and what he needed to do. She even met his apologetic laugh at the comedy of it all with a cautious laugh of her own. If this was all some ruse on his part, then it was peculiarly inventive.

But it was she who made the first move. That is, the move to say that he — they — shouldn’t attempt his breaking-and-entering plan, or at least not straight away. With this rain he’d get soaked. And suppose the ladder slipped. It could be dangerous.

And suppose, he might have said, the rain continued for hours still. Suppose it continued all night.

Which it did. In fact the rain, gushing down incessantly, was like some conspiring screen (had anyone seen him enter not his own house but number twenty?). More than that, there was something insistent about it, the very noise of it like a rush of blood.

He’d been here before. And she knew it. She’d been here before. Though he’d never been before, like this, inside the Mitchells’ house. But he’d been in this place, or in a place like it, many times before, before Clare. He recognised it as his element.

Many years ago he’d discovered his power — a simple power that was also so like a mere proneness, a gravitation, that he wondered why other men didn’t simply, naturally have it too. Why for other men it could sometimes seem so damn difficult. It was just weakness perhaps, other men were just plain weak. Or they just didn’t know how to pick up a scent.

Years ago he could have said to another man, though of course it was unthinkable actually to say it, that in a little while, just a little while, he’d have that one there. That one over there. And in a little while after that, probably, he’d make her cry.

So sure was he of this repeated cycle, so familiar, even faintly fatigued by it, that he’d wanted relief and sanctuary. He’d wanted marriage, a wife, a house and all the other things that go with them. And he was an architect by choice and qualification — he fashioned domestic spaces. But he knew there was still this stray animal inside him. And now he was locked out of it all anyway.

There it was, just the other side of a wall: his life. It even seemed for a moment that he and Clare might actually be there. He had turned into someone else. There they were. He felt tenderly, protectively towards them. And of course if they were there, then Clare couldn’t be travelling somewhere northwards on a train to where her brother was gravely ill, perhaps even dying. And he couldn’t be here.

It was a weird thing to be occupying the Mitchells’ house, even — as it proved — their bed. Weird and undeniably wrong, but undeniably thrilling and enveloping, like the rain, which didn’t let up. It wasn’t his house, it wasn’t hers. They had that in common. They were both displaced people, though in his case all it took was a wall. Weird and undeniably violating. It made the Mitchells seem the imposters.

At some stage of the evening, or night, he managed to ask her where she was from and why and how she’d come to England. He couldn’t get from her much more than the hint of some gaping separation, or loss, that even in his comforting arms (or he thought they might be comforting) she didn’t want, or know how, to explain. Where was Moldova? She seemed to retreat behind her poor English. He didn’t press or insist. No more than she did about his mysteriously absent wife.

So he just held her, as she seemed to want him to do, as if just being held was his side of a bargain that she’d secured from him.

He thought, as he held her, of how Clare hadn’t called. It was really dark now, it might be the middle of the night. She could have arrived and had news, but she hadn’t called. And how would he have spoken to her if she had? He hadn’t switched off his mobile — as if that might have been an admission of something. But of course she would call on their home phone, the land line. He strained his ears as if to hear it ringing through the wall: an unanswered phone in an empty house. But heard nothing.

She hadn’t called, so no problem. Or that is, according to his earlier logic, things must be bad for her brother.

He thought of when, if at all now, but it somehow didn’t seem to matter, he’d perform that farcical act with the ladder, his legs poking from the window. He thought of himself breast-stroking on his desk. He thought of himself, earlier, driving Clare diligently to the station and saying unexpectedly ‘I love you’ and returning, truly meaning to knuckle down to work and not knowing at all then how this sudden chain of events would overtake him. He thought of his jacket, with the keys in the pocket, hanging over the chair.

Of course Clare had her inklings.

As he held her, she began to shudder uncontrollably, then to sob and to cry out loud. He’d somehow known this would happen, without knowing why, and knew he must hold her, it was all he could do. He held her and she cried. Then after a while, a long while it seemed, the crying and sobbing ceased and she fell asleep, but he continued to hold her, alert and alone in the dark with just the hiss of the rain.