Graham Swift - England and Other Stories

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.