The East Wing

The day my husband converted the east wing into a study, he gave me a tour of the rest of the house. I noticed that only later. He walked me through the kitchen I had cooked in for nine years, the conservatory where my mother's chair still faced the garden, the landing with its three good windows. He named each room as if I were a buyer he hoped to impress. And then, at the foot of the east corridor, he stopped, and the tour stopped with him. "That'll be mine," he said. "Properly mine. I think a man should have one door in his life that nobody else opens." It is the kind of sentence that sounds reasonable until you set it down on a table and look at it. Nine years. One door. I was forty-six years old and I had never in my marriage wanted a room my husband could not enter, and I told myself this meant I was the generous one, the unsuspicious one, the wife who did not need locks. I have since revised that. I think it only meant I had never been curious enough to be refused. Gerald was a careful man. He folded his newspapers along their original creases. He kept the receipts from petrol stations in a wallet behind his other wallet, and when I once asked why, he said, "In case." In case of what, he never specified, and I had stopped expecting him to. A marriage develops its own grammar. Certain questions simply lose their verbs. So when the workmen came — three of them, quiet, recommended by a man Gerald knew from somewhere he did not name — I made them tea and stayed out of the corridor. They were there four days. On the first day they carried in lumber and a roll of something heavy wrapped in grey plastic. On the second day I heard drilling, low and patient, the sound of a tooth being worked on in a room down the hall. On the third day one of them came to the kitchen to refill the kettle and would not quite look at me, and I put that down to shyness, because I wanted to. On the fourth day Gerald hung a door. Not an interior door, the hollow kind that comes white and gets painted to match the skirting. A real door, oak, with a lock that needed a long brass key, and the key went onto Gerald's ring with the others and was never, in my hearing, mentioned again. I want to be fair to myself, because no one else in this account will be. I did not lie awake that night plotting. I lay awake the way you do when a house has a new sound in it, the way you lie awake the first night of a clock. The east wing had been empty for as long as we'd owned the place — two rooms and a short passage, north-facing, cold, used for the things a house accumulates and cannot throw away. Now it had a purpose and a door and a man's pride attached to it, and that should have been the end of the matter. It was not the end of the matter because of the smell. It came under the new door three weeks later, faint, on a Tuesday, while Gerald was in the city. Not unpleasant exactly. Mineral. Cold. The smell of stone that has not seen sun, of the inside of a well. I stood in the corridor in my stocking feet and breathed it and could not place it, and could not stop trying to, and that — not the door, not the key, not the careful workmen who would not meet my eye — that is where it truly began. With me, standing very still in my own house, learning that there was a part of it I no longer recognised by its air. I went back to the kitchen and I made a list, because lists were how I managed myself. Things to buy. Things to mend. And at the bottom, in smaller writing, as if size could make it less of a thing: ask G about the smell. I never did ask him. By the time I might have, I had already found the key, and after that there was nothing he could have told me that I would have believed.