Don't Change the Locks

The man who was selling us the house had one condition, and it was such a small and strange condition that I agreed to it standing in the hallway before I had properly heard it. "Don't change the locks," Mr. Aldous said. We were doing the final walk-through, Greta and I, the way you do — admiring rooms we already owned, making the ownership feel real by pointing at things. Mr. Aldous was an old man, very neat, very precise, the sort of old man who has clearly lived alone a long time and has developed a relationship with his house that is closer than the one most people have with their families. He had been pleasant all morning. And then, at the front door, with the keys in his hand, he had said it. "I'm sorry?" I said. "The locks." He held the keys out, but he did not yet let go of them. There were four keys on the ring, ordinary keys, and one of them was older than the others, darker, a long iron thing with a looped head. "I'd ask that you don't change them. Any of them. I know it's a peculiar thing to ask. People do change the locks when they move in — it's sensible, you don't know who else has a key, it's the first thing the advice tells you to do. I'm asking you not to." Greta, beside me, was already smiling the smile she does for eccentric old men, warm and a little amused. "Of course," she said. "Whatever makes you comfortable." But I was looking at Mr. Aldous's face, and Mr. Aldous's face was not the face of an eccentric old man making a sentimental request. It was careful. It was the face of a man choosing his words off a shelf where he had kept them ready for a long time. "It isn't sentiment," he said, as if he had heard me think the word. "I want to be clear with you, because you seem like decent people and decent people deserve clarity. It isn't that I'll miss the house, or that the locks have some meaning to me. It's a practical request. The house — " he paused, and in the pause I heard the old place settle around us, a tick of timber, the small private noises a house makes " — the house works a certain way. It has worked that way a long time, longer than I've been in it. And the locks are part of how it works. If you change them, you'll break something, and it won't be a thing you can see, and it won't be a thing you can fix, and you'll spend a great deal of money and a great deal of fear finding that out. So I'm asking you, as the last favour of the sale: leave the locks. Especially — " and here he turned the iron key on the ring so that it faced us, the long dark looped one " — especially this one. This is the cellar. Leave the cellar exactly as it is, and leave its key on this ring, and the house will be good to you." He let go of the keys then, and they were heavy in my hand, heavier than four keys should be, and Mr. Aldous shook Greta's hand and then mine, and he said he hoped we would be very happy, and he walked down the path of the house that was now ours and did not once look back at it, which I thought, watching him go, was a strange thing for a man who loved a house to do. He did not look back at all. He walked like a man crossing a line and not wanting to know whether anything followed him over it. "Well," said Greta, when his car had gone. "That was charming and completely mad. Lovely man." She took the keys off me and bounced them in her palm, cheerful, already moving on, already mentally arranging furniture. "We'll get a locksmith out next week obviously. I'm not living somewhere a stranger has a key to, favour or no favour." "He asked us not to." "He asked us a lot of things." She laughed, and went on into the kitchen of our new house, our dream house, the house we had stretched ourselves thin and frightened to afford, and her voice came back warm and ordinary through the empty rooms. "Frank, he's an old man who's lived alone too long and started thinking the house has feelings. We're not keeping a stranger's keys because he did a spooky voice about the cellar." I stood in the hall with the afternoon light coming through the glass above the door, and I looked down the passage toward the low dark door under the stairs, the cellar door, and the long iron key in my hand had gone warm, the way a thing goes warm when you have been holding it without noticing. I told myself Greta was right. I told myself a locksmith, next week, and an end to the whole odd business. It is March now, four weeks since that afternoon, and I am writing this down because I need to set it somewhere outside my own head, and I want to be honest about the order things happened in. We did call the locksmith. He came on a Tuesday. And by the end of that Tuesday I understood, completely and for the rest of my life, exactly why Mr. Aldous had asked — and exactly why he had not looked back.