The Key Is in a Drawer, and Sandra Comes on Tuesdays

The key is in a drawer in Priya’s kitchen, on a ring with a green tag, under the takeaway menus and the fuses. It has been there for about a year.

She did tell Maureen, in the end, at a committee meeting, and Maureen said “oh, good” in a way that suggested the matter had been live in her mind for two years as well.

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Here is what changed.

Sandra comes on Tuesdays. That is an arrangement rather than an event: it was proposed in October, in a phone call that Dan made and that Priya had asked him to make, and it is on a day of the week rather than “whenever I’m passing”, and it has held.

She has never once let herself in, which would be difficult now, but is also not the point.

Twice she has stood on the step in the rain waiting for Priya to finish a call. Both times Priya has seen her through the glass and thought about going faster, and both times has not gone faster, and has felt bad about it afterwards, and has done it again the next time.

She is not proud of that. She has decided it is allowed.

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Here is what did not change.

Sandra has never apologised for the morning. Not once, not in any form, not even the sideways form where somebody says “I know I can be a lot”. The nearest she has ever come is the tea urn, and the tea urn was not an apology; it was an audit.

Priya has stopped waiting for it. She spent about four months waiting for it, and then Meera said the useful thing that sisters say, which was: “She gave you the key in a doorway with forty people in the next room. What exactly do you think an apology from her looks like, if that wasn’t it?”

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And here is the part Priya did not expect at all.

In February, Wendy told everybody. It went round the way these things do, and by the Sunday it had reached Priya through three separate people, none of whom were Sandra.

Priya rang Sandra that evening. Not to talk about the cards; they have never talked about the cards again. She rang to ask what Wendy liked, and Sandra said, without any preamble at all, “Lemon drizzle, and don’t do a big shop, she can’t stand a fuss,” and then, after a pause, “she’ll be pleased you rang.”

And then, because it was Sandra: “Are you doing anything Tuesday?”

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Aanya is nearly two. She has a photograph on the hall wall of herself at four weeks old being held, under a stained-glass window, by a woman in a hat.

Priya chose it. There were forty-one photographs from that afternoon and she went through all of them twice, and picked that one, and got it framed, and hung it at the bottom of the stairs where it is the first thing you see coming in the front door.

She has not explained why to anybody, including Dan, who thinks she chose it because it is the one where Aanya’s eyes are open.

That is not why.