The Spare Key

The key lived on Gerald's ring, and Gerald's ring lived in his trouser pocket, and a man's trouser pocket is the one place in a shared house that remains genuinely private. But there is a second key to almost everything. Houses are built by people who lose things, and people who lose things make spares. I found it the way you find the things you are not looking for and have therefore not hidden from yourself: by tidying. Gerald kept a bureau in the morning room, and the bureau had a drawer that stuck, and one wet afternoon I decided the drawer would stick no longer. I emptied it onto the carpet — pencils, a magnifying glass, a tin of collar studs, a coil of garden twine — and at the back, where the drawer met the frame, something had wedged. A small envelope, the brown sort, soft with age. Inside it, a key. Long. Brass. The twin of the one I had watched go onto his ring. I knew it at once. I want that on the record. I did not stand there wondering what door it opened. I knew, the way you know a face, and the knowing went down my arms like cold water, and I sat back on my heels on the morning-room carpet with the key in my open hand and understood that my afternoon, and possibly a great deal more than my afternoon, had just changed its nature. Here is what an honest woman would have done. She would have put the key back in the envelope and the envelope back behind the drawer, and that evening, over the lamb, she would have said: Gerald, I found a spare key to your study while I was tidying, and I should like you to tell me what is in there, because the not-knowing has begun to keep me awake. And Gerald would have answered, and the answer would have been true or untrue, and either way the marriage would have had to absorb the question. I was not, it turned out, an honest woman. I was a curious one, and curiosity and honesty are not the friends people assume. Honesty wants to be told. Curiosity wants to find out. They are different appetites and they are rarely satisfied by the same meal. I did not put the key back. I carried it up to my own room and I put it in the toe of a winter shoe, in a box, in the wardrobe, and the small theatre of that — a married woman of forty-six hiding a key in a shoe in her own house — should have told me something about the state of things. It did tell me something. I simply chose to file the something rather than read it. For four days I did not use the key. I want you to know that, because it matters to me, even now, that I was not greedy about it. I let it sit in the shoe and I went on with the marmalade and the garden and the long civil evenings, and twice I took the key out and looked at it and put it back, the way you press a bruise to confirm it is still a bruise. Gerald noticed nothing. Gerald, in those four days, was if anything more pleasant than usual — he brought me a punnet of the early raspberries, he asked after my sister, he mended the latch on the conservatory door without being asked. I have wondered since whether some animal part of him had registered the change in the house's weather and was, in its careful way, trying to mend that too. On the fifth day he went to the city. A concern. One night, possibly two. He kissed my cheek in the hall, the dry brief kiss of long marriage, and he said, "Don't wait dinner," and the car went down the drive and turned at the poplars and was gone. I stood in the hall and listened to the house. It is astonishing how loud an empty house becomes once you intend to do something in it. I could hear the clock, and the fridge, and a bird, and my own pulse, which had moved up into my ears. I went upstairs. I took the key out of the shoe. And I walked the length of the landing toward the east wing, and the cold mineral smell came to meet me halfway, like something that had been waiting, and was glad.