Key to the Door Read Online Free PDF

chromium-plated prizes that kept the girls polishing and cleaning all Saturday morning as if they were silver and gold. Supported behind glass on especially wrought nails, these horseshoes had been accumulated by Merton from apprenticeship to his becoming one of the finest craftsmen in the county. She took down a big shoe and held it, feeling its weight and knowing it would slip easily from her fingers if a fair grip wasn’t kept on the bend. Two prongs pointed upwards and the grooved, smoothly polished side—meant to tread the soil on more workaday productions—was held facing her. A ray of red paint had been spilled into the groove from pronged tip around bulging curve to pronged tip—red because blood from the horse’s foot wouldn’t be noticed when the nails went in, she had always thought. On the left side were four holes and on the right side three. Beginning from left to right she muttered: Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday; and then looked at the three remaining holes on the right, completing the week: Friday Saturday Sunday. The first four were to be said quickly because you wanted them to go as fast as possible, thus bringing you sooner on to the last three, which you spoke more slowly because they were enjoyable days—looking at the seven holes through blood-red paint and holding the prongs upwards so that no luck would run out.
    She remembered Merton singing rhymes when they were children, holding each child on his knees in turn and chanting the words to them, again and again, as rain poured down and thunder boomed. When they were afraid of black Sunday evenings in summer, the sing-song chant had gone in and stayed, seven nails for a nursery rhyme rough-edged into them who were disturbed at being so close and not knowing with what amount of ease to take his momentary kindness and good nature, so that the jingled forgeries had stayed there for good.
    She saw herself taking a basket from the pantry, opening the door so that Merton would not hear, and returning up the steps to fill it with all thirty horseshoes. Then the outer door would open and into the choking rain she’d go, hatless and without a coat, between the pigeon coop and the house-side, her skirt soaking on long nettles and grass, shoes sogged and distorted on stones until she turned into the open and went towards the well. How would she find it? As easily as if it were a birth wart in the centre of her hand. And then I’ll throw the horseshoes one by one into it, hear each splash as it hits bottom and sinks, and laugh to think the old man will never see them again.
    The impossible dream faded; her hand covered her ear and cheek, was hidden by long hair; leaning on her elbow, she went on looking at the case of horseshoes until she grew too sleepy to stay awake.
    She was just back from Engine Town with a box of buttons to sew on her blouse, dodging mud-puddles under the railway bridge and negotiating ice-ruts in the lane so as not to wet her shoes in the piled snow. Looking out of the bedroom window, her desire to solve any problem was killed by the hard winter. Perhaps the year would break through. A long thick layer of cloud spearheading towards the Pennines was ghost-green on top and turning pink below, indicating a half-beaten-to-death sun lurking somewhere, licking its wounds after an agonizing Armageddon of autumn. Lines of snow lay in the furrows of the next field, and in the garden it gathered in uprooted cabbage hollows like deserted pools of unpalatable milk. Winter’s juggernaut crushed everything except people, who still went to work, quarrelled, played football, got married, and died.
    She walked up the lane on Sunday afternoon when her father was sleeping off his dinner and beer, noticing black withered beads of elderberries clinging still to twigs contorted by icy cold. Three greyhounds flashed through a hedge into a hollow of Cherry Orchard, back legs skidding on frost-flowers when they tried to