It was curious that he should have sent them without waiting to hear from Eduard again, to identify him more securely, to meet him. It was the keys that had made the envelope misshapen and heavy. Eduard spread them out fanwise on his left palm with his right forefinger and studied them with uneasy curiosity. Two, identical, looked like old-fashioned, respectable front-door keys. The other four were wildly various: one that might fit a big padlock, one with a barrel like a clock key, one plain iron all-purpose that suggested a pantry or cellar door, and one of brass with delicately intricate wards, probably the key to some old piece of furniture, a wardrobe or escritoire. He imagined, with continuing unease, the brass keyhole in the curved mahogany, shelves behind glass, meaningless papers in half-empty drawers.
He requested two days off work at the end of the month. He would go up to Brailava on the Wednesday evening train, come back on the Sunday. Efficiency. See the lawyer, see the house, arrange to have it cleared out and put up for sale. While looking after all this he would be able to see something of the city where his mother had been born and lived as a child. With the money from the sale of the house he would go to Spain. Unearned money should be spent at once, otherwise it festered. What would it cost to go to Egypt? He had always wanted to see the pyramids. Red-coated, waving sabres, cinematic English soldiers charged thinly across a waste of gold behind the back of the indifferent Sphinx and petered out, like water poured onto sand. The Sahara, a furnace, an empty place. The train jerked forward tentatively and stopped again. No one else was in the compartment at the moment; the young couple who had taken the facing seat were standing in the corridor. They had been joking with friends on the platform. Now they shouted and waved and banged the windows childishly as the train, quiet and purposeful, began to glide forward. Eduard’s eyes filled up with tears and his breath stuck in an audible sob. Appalled by the ambush, by the overwhelming advantage grief had over him, he clenched his hands, shut his eyes, feigned sleep, although his face was hot and his breath would not come evenly. He foreswore Egypt, damn Egypt, damn Toledo and. Madrid. The tears dried in his eyes. He watched the northern suburbs slide past beyond the viaducts in the soft, amniotic haze of the September afternoon.
The young couple came back into the compartment, no longer talking or smiling; their animation had been all for their friends in North Station. Eduard continued to gaze out the window as the train ran steadily north on the level embankments by the Molsen. The river was wide, serene, a pale silken blue color between low banks. Willows stood in the late sunlight by the river. The haze was thickening; it looked like rain ahead, in the north, a heavy blueness of clouds. He had got off work early to catch the five o’clock express. They would be in Brailava by half past six, following the river all the way. He got a little drowsy, looking at the silken water.
At a quarter to six there was a tremendous noise and a subsequent absolute silence. As Eduard picked himself up from the floor of the compartment where for some reason he had arrived, the young man kicked him in the shoulder. “Watch that!” Eduard said furiously, and retrieved his briefcase, which had also slid across the floor. There was now a strange, thin commotion of voices in the corridor. “Oh, oh, oh, oh,” the young woman was saying in a silly voice. The commotion grew to a hubbub like that of an audience at intermission, both inside the car and outside along the tracks, shouts, exclamations, descriptions, comparisons, complaints, as it became clear that the engine had hit a hay truck stalled at a crossing, and that though nobody was hurt except for the truck driver, who had been killed, the engine had derailed and there was going to be a delay while they brought a relief engine down from Brailava. Another break, a dash not a period; non-arrival. Eduard walked up and down the tracks a while in the late long sunlight. It was almost seven when a relief engine arrived, from the south not the north, and pulled the train back to a siding at the local station called Isestno, which was not even mentioned on the Krasnoy-Brailava schedule of the Northern Line; and there it waited, while night fell and the rain came on, until the tracks were mended and the relief engine from Brailava came and hauled it on in, arriving at Sumeny Station at half past ten.
There had been nothing whatever to eat on the train and no vendors at mournful Isestno siding, but Eduard did not feel hungry as he walked under the bright cavernous dome of Sumeny, carrying the briefcase which was all he had brought. Now that he was off the train at last, he felt shaken. He had planned to arrive at half past six, find a hotel near the station, have dinner, but now he did not want to stay up and eat out among strangers, he wanted to go home. Other men hurried past him through the high doors into the rainy night
“Taxi?”
“All right,” he said.
“Where to, sir?”
“Fourteen Kamenny Street.”
“That’ll be up Underhill,” the taxi driver said, confirming Eduard’s memory of the name of the district and of the dark-blue crags hunched over a singing man, a man under a hill, and took off, doors and smeared windows rattling. It was dark in the cab and the smell was comfortable. Eduard roused himself, confused, almost from sleep, and sank back into it, almost.
“Fourteen, was it?”
“Right.”
“This one, looks like. There’s Twelve.”
He could see no street number. There was a house; there was rain, trees, darkness. He paid the driver, who said good night to him in the dry, civil, Northern voice.
Three stone steps, flanked by shrubs and some kind of iron fence or ¿file; “14” over the rather ornate wooden doorframe. A strange city, a strange street, whose house? The first of the twin keys fit the lock. He opened the door, looked in, took a couple of steps in, but left the door ajar behind him, to be certain of escape.
Pitch dark; dry; cool. Sound of rain above on high roofs. No other sound.
The light switch came under his hand to the right of the door. He felt that he should say, “I’m here.” To whom? He turned on the light.
The hall was much smaller than it had seemed in darkness. He had, he now realised, felt himself to be in an almost limitless space, but it was only the quiet shabby front hall of an old house on a rainy night. The strip of carpet on the handsome black and grey tiles was worn and not very clean. Somebody’s hat, his great-uncle’s hat, an old felt, lay forlorn on a small sideboard. The light fixture was of yellowish cloudy glass.
The door was still ajar behind him. He returned and closed it, and automatically put the key ring into his trousers pocket.
Stairs went up to the left. The hall went on past them: a door to the right and an end door, both shut. The sitting room would be that one to the right, the end one would lead back to the kitchen. There was a dining room, maybe on the way to the kitchen; it was in a dark dining room that he had heard the loud old voices. He should look into the rooms, but he was tired. He had been sleeping very badly for several nights, and the train trip with its shock and unfelt death and long delay had left him shaky. The hall was all right, the old hat was all right, but he could not take much more. The yellowish light illuminated the stairs as well as the hall. He went up the stairs, his right hand on the narrow heavily varnished railing. At the top he turned and went down the hall to the end door, opened it, and turned on the light He did not know why he chose that door, or whether he had been upstairs in the house as a child. This was the front bedroom, probably the largest. It might be the room his great-uncle had slept in, perhaps died in, unless he had died in hospital, or it might have been the grandfather’s room, or have stood unused for thirty years. It was clean and sparse, bed, table, chair, two windows, fireplace. The bed was made, tight and neat, an old blue coverlet pulled tight. The overhead light in its glass shade was dim, and there was no lamp.