Mrs Sinclair's Suitcase

by Louise Walters

Silver Cross perambulator: £150.00

  Set waffle pram blankets: £5.50

  Set pastel pram sheets: £5.00

  Total: £160.50

  PAID WITH THANKS

  (Handwritten receipt from the now defunct second-hand baby supplies shop Bibs ’n’ Blankets, found inside a Dean edition of Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott, with an intact dust jacket depicting Jo March as a beauty. But a nice enough copy, to be found on the second-hand shelves in the children’s book room, priced at £2.50.)

  Philip lives in the flat above the Old and New, and today is my third foray into his home in eleven years of employment. The first time had been to help prepare a small party we threw when launching the large new books room. Philip had bought ready-made food from Waitrose: canapés, dips, cheese, biscuits, grapes, wine. He needed help taking it downstairs into the shop, where we laid it all out on the large round oak display table in the foyer. On that day, we threw open the French windows and invited customers to sit outside in the garden. That was my idea, and although Philip was doubtful at first, he was prepared to give it a try. It is now something of a tradition that our customers enjoy.

  The second time I entered his flat was to check that Philip was well after being struck down by flu, last winter. He was perfectly well, really, but feeling ‘shitty’. Coughing, red-faced, curled up on his cherry-red leather sofa under a blanket and clutching a hot whisky, watching Judge Judy. He said he was too ill to be bored by daytime television, too ill to change channels. And – the worst thing – he couldn’t read because his eyes were ‘melting in their sockets’. Anyway, he quite liked Judge Judy. A guilty pleasure, he said. Tell nobody. And then he said something quite odd.

  ‘Do you know, Roberta, I only took you on here because you genuinely agreed with me when I said most people were utter and complete rotters. Do you remember?’

  Despite the hyperbole, I did remember. I remembered thinking, here was a person I could work with. But when he was crashed out on the sofa, clutching his hot whisky, obviously feeling hellish, I was surprised that he remembered our ‘interview’ as clearly as I did.

  Jenna. She is … unexpected. Sophie and I watch the lovers with a mixture of amusement and amazement. Philip? Jenna? Philip and Jenna? Customers join us in our bafflement. It will never last, some whisper. She’s not his type. He’s not in her league. She’s not in his league. Some say.

  Philip is not just a bespectacled, bookish type of man, you must understand. He’s scruffy, fond of jeans and loose shirt tails, mousy brown hair curling around his neck. He’s surprisingly handsome, when you look close enough. And Jenna is sweet, and very pretty, undeniably. I can certainly see the attraction, on both sides. Six months on from their first meeting and they are still together, against all expectations, holed up in Philip’s tasteful flat.

  Jenna has stylishly blonde wavy curls, blue eyes. She is the type of woman all heterosexual males between the ages of twelve and a hundred and twelve would stare at in the street, anywhere, everywhere. And here she is, hiding away from the world in the Old and New Bookshop, the girlfriend of its sardonic, forty-something owner. Sophie and I suspect they hold little trysts in the shop. Working together, perhaps hiding away in the back room among the second-hand fiction, the two seem to whirl away from each other if I enter, causing me to stammer an apology, my cheeks burning with consternation. Jenna gives me one of her looks – half amused, half reproachful. I retreat, not daring to look at Philip. I’m never entirely sure which one of the three of us should feel the most embarrassed.

  Jenna reads more now, at least. I can’t imagine that she read a great deal before commencing her employment at the Old and New. She is just not the bookish type, whatever that is. She unpacks our daily deliveries, biting her bottom lip, ticking off books on the delivery note, making sure they are all there, placing them carefully on the shelves, stacking books ordered for customers under the counter. She concentrates like a little girl learning a new trick on her skipping rope. She asks for help quite often, and Sophie and I go to her aid, patiently. We all have to learn, and we’re forming a good team. I know Philip is proud of us all.

  Today, Philip’s flat is dark and silent. And it is Jenna who ushers me in, not quite touching me, but propelling me nonetheless. She switches on a large Tiffany lamp next to the cherry-red leather sofa. She asks me if I want a drink. I don’t. She pours herself a gin and tonic. She has not been at work today: she is unwell. I notice the familiar manner in which she moves around the flat, handling Philip’s things, pouring his gin. In these placid surroundings, Jenna is as jumpy as a wren, and I am sorry for her, without understanding why.

  There’s something amiss.

  I feel like a trespasser in Philip’s domain. He is at a book fair – he’s been away all day – and he warned Jenna not to expect him back until around half past eight that evening. The curtains are still tightly drawn at two o’clock, an empty coffee cup and a plate littered with crumbs still malingering on the coffee table. There’s an air of the slovenly, which Philip normally does not tolerate.

  ‘Bottoms up,’ Jenna says, and she drinks, quickly. I smile at her, not knowing what to say, not knowing what this is about.

  ‘Roberta, I’m in trouble,’ she announces.

  ‘What kind of trouble?’

  ‘Of the old-fashioned kind. You know. “In trouble”.’

  And now she cries, shielding her face with her hand and her empty glass. I move to stand next to her, and I rub her arm, making noises of consolation. I’m not sure what to say.

  In the end, her tears subside. A box of tissues is extracted from the shelf under the large, round smoky-glass coffee table.

  ‘What do you make of me now?’ Jenna asks, pouring another drink and sipping more sedately. Her white hands shake, just a little.

  ‘I’m not going to judge you, Jenna,’ I say. ‘For heaven’s sake, you’re a grown woman, and Philip’s a grown man. It’s not unheard of, is it? It might be … unexpected, maybe … but you’ll work it out. How does Philip feel about it?’

  She looks at me, aghast.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, looking at the floor, at the curtained window, at the large gilt mirror above the fireplace.

  ‘I found out a week ago. I felt tired. My period was late. I did a test. It’s been hell, Roberta, it really has. I don’t want children, you see. I never have wanted children. I never will want children. I’ve always been so careful, but now this … catastrophe.’

  ‘I think you should be having this conversation with Philip,’ I say, and I curse myself for sounding so prim.

  ‘What the bloody hell for?’

  ‘Because … it’s nothing to do with me. It’s Philip’s baby.’

  ‘No. I don’t think so … I mean, I’m not sure.’

  Instantly, guiltily, confusedly, I feel a rush of relief. It’s not his baby. It might not be his baby. It’s all right. It’s somebody else’s baby. But then, whose baby is it? Has she …?

  I am not a courageous person. I shun conflict of any kind. So I sit in silence, not knowing what to say to the trembling woman before me. I cannot think about Philip – the last person in the world, by my reckoning, who would deal in duplicity. Oh, poor Jenna. I can’t imagine how she must be feeling … what a mess.

  She is incredibly pretty, really. A beauty. And like everybody else, including Philip, I’m a sucker for beauty. So you get drawn in, you don’t see. And I can’t blame Philip for … it’s understandable. He’s not a monk, and he shouldn’t have to live like one. And none of it is any of my business, of course. I’m just an employee, nothing more, though I like to think Philip might loosely describe me as a ‘friend’.

  Jenna sighs, and puts down her empty glass. ‘What are you thinking?’ she says.

  ‘Oh, nothing much,’ I say. I’m so useless, especially at wobbly moments, and this is one of those.

  This is a crisis.

  Jenna falls back into the sofa, and she cries, for perhaps a minute, then blows her nose dramatical
ly. I sidle along the cherry-red cushions to sit alongside her, and she leans on my shoulder.

  I tap her knee, rub her back. ‘It’ll be all right, Jenna,’ I say.

  There’s a clinic. A friend of hers … anyway, there’s a clinic. She has an appointment tomorrow morning and will get it all seen to. She’ll clear up this mess. Philip will never know. Thank God he’s at the book fair again tomorrow. He must never know anything about this, ever. She loves him. She truly does. She made a mistake. Don’t we all, Roberta? An old boyfriend, he wants her back, she broke his heart … she felt sorry for him, momentarily. Stupid.

  ‘Have you ever had a termination?’ she asks me.

  ‘No,’ I say, after the briefest of pauses.

  ‘I don’t want to go alone. To the clinic, I mean.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Will you come with me? Please.’

  ‘Yes. Of course I will.’

  ‘Because I can’t ask anybody else. There is nobody else.’

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t want to ask Sophie.’

  ‘I know.’

  Similar ages, twenty-something, both are straight-up, no arguments, nine-and-a-half-out-of-ten women, at least. Sophie has chestnut-brown hair, with chocolate-dream eyes, she is toned and tanned and quite beautiful. There’s competition, whispered jealousies – nothing overt, nothing nasty, but it’s there. I enjoy watching their rivalry from the sidelines, safely out of the fray, me, a good ten years older, and a solid seven. On a good day. On a very good day. No competition at all, no need for these girls to feel threatened by me as well as each other, and I can just enjoy the disinterest of the casual observer. Well, not quite. Both of these women are my friends now. And one of them needs me.

  ‘It has to be somebody I can totally trust,’ says Jenna. ‘I’m not going to tell anybody else and Philip must never, ever know. I can’t do this on my own. Please. You’re so sensible and discreet.’

  ‘I’ll go with you, I mean it. Don’t fret. But what about the father?’

  Jenna laughs a desperate, queer laugh.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘Roberta, you really are hopelessly naive at times.’

  She will tell Philip she is meeting a friend for the day – shopping and lunch – and I will phone in sick. Headache, period pains, whatever comes to mind, whatever sounds plausible. It will be a nuisance for Sophie to be on her own all day. But never mind, says Jenna. She’ll cope. We’re not busy at the moment, anyway.

  I listen in silence as she makes her plans. I recall my last birthday, my thirty-fourth. I brought in cakes, split doughnuts oozing with soft artificial cream, with sweet red syrup described as ‘jam’, fresh from the bakery next door to the shop. Jenna declined my offer of a cake, stating weight-watching as a reason. I shrugged and told her I would take it home for my cat, who likes cakes – especially on birthdays. I recall Jenna’s face, her crushed expression, the redness. She muttered an embarrassed ‘sorry’, and took a cake. Of course, I felt dreadful; I didn’t mean to humiliate her. I later found the doughnut in the kitchen bin, a token nibble missing. I realised then that Jenna is used to being disliked. I don’t believe her circle of friends is particularly wide. I resolved to try harder. I’m not the jealous type. And we have become friends, a slow trust growing between us.

  So now I must agree to help her. What else am I to do?

  ‘You’re a good person,’ says Jenna. She blows her nose, and smiles at me bleakly.

  And my thoughts wander, as they are apt to do at stressful times, moments of drama. I want to talk to Babunia. I want to ask her about the letter that is even now whispering its strange words, tucked away in my handbag, calling to me. I can almost remember the letter by heart now. I shall visit her soon; I’m due for a visit, anyway. But can I ask her anything about this letter? I can’t bear the thought of upsetting her, of trying to uncover secrets she does not want uncovered.

  And Jenna is here now, white-faced and scared. I must deal with her first.

  4

  Agatha Mabel Fisher and Nina Margaret Mullens descended upon Dorothy in March 1940. They were both London girls, fresh from their six weeks of training with the Women’s Land Army. They were employed by those up at the hall as farmhands; they were in need of a billet, and Dorothy lived alone in the cottage. She was fortunate, she knew, to be allowed to continue living in the cottage at all. Albert had left to join up, to do his bit, he said, everybody said, but Dorothy knew, as they all knew, that Albert had left to get away from her, to leave behind his disappointment and grief. He wanted other women too, because Dorothy would no longer sleep with him, and she was wise enough to know this, even to understand it. He was only thirty-three. Let him go, she told herself. She did not miss him.

  She had started to hear that some at the hall, and in the village, were questioning her right to stay. Albert should not have left, they said. He was a skilled and experienced farmhand, and could have waited for his call-up, which may never have come. It left his wife in a difficult position. Eventually, they put it to her: stay, and be useful. No rent and a small stipend in return for taking in laundry – all the hall laundry. They installed the latest model of boiler and a mangle in the wash house. There was even talk of one of the new washing machines. They strung up yards and yards of washing lines, criss-crossing the garden. And now she was glad she hadn’t taken on goats, as much as she had wanted them, when Mrs Twoomey had offered her a pair of kids in the spring. They were such little darlings, but too fond of chewing on fresh laundry.

  Then the girls, Aggie and Nina. They were always laughing at goodness knows what, they were cheerful and chaotic. Dorothy took pride in working hard for her girls, even in boiling Aggie’s bloodied undies, and the sanitary pads that Dorothy had hastily sewn when the young women first arrived at the farm. The pads were made from a peach-coloured damask tablecloth she had damaged by catching it irretrievably in the mangle. Poor Aggie, she was so slight and fragile-looking, with her blonde curls, her perfect skin, her silvery laugh, and such a pretty little thing, yet she suffered such heavy blood loss, cruel, regular and punctual. In contrast, Nina, who was taller than Aggie, and plump, with a deep smoker’s voice, had scant bleeds, irregular and short-lived. She was a girl who sailed gaily through life with all the finesse of an ocean liner. The girls had not been with Dorothy for long – a matter of weeks, really – but already she felt she knew them, she felt she had the measure of them. She would almost say that she loved them.

  Dorothy put them in her own room. It was the room she had vacated after Sidney, leaving Albert alone and bewildered in the large brass bed. Dorothy had set up house in the tiny bedroom, overlooking the back garden, the Long Acre field and, beyond, the distant elm trees and Lodderston aerodrome. The small bed, narrow and in need of a new mattress, suited her perfectly. She liked to lie on it with her notebook, writing. Rarely did she recognise the words on the page, when she read them back, as her own.

  She made up a new quilt for her little bed, using anything she could find – large patches, small patches, squares, triangles, indescribable shapes – a crazy quilt. She hung her few clothes in the tiny wardrobe, arranged her undies in the top drawer of the dressing table and put a vase of wild flowers on the table next to her bed. Every night, when she retired, she shut the door firmly behind her. Albert didn’t knock, not once, and Dorothy was grateful for that. Then he was gone. In August 1939, he simply fled. She didn’t know exactly where he was or what he was doing. She heard nothing from him at all. He sent no money. This is divorce, she thought, and her solitary life began in earnest. She became self-sufficient, baking her own bread, keeping back a few eggs each week from her hens; she made new clothes from old clothes, became a truly accomplished seamstress, and learned to use the old Singer sewing machine that Albert said had been his mother’s. This year, she had cultivated all her own fruit and vegetables, with varying success, but she ate so little that it barely mattered. Eating became something she did to survi
ve; there was no pleasure in it. Food tasted vile to her, and the act of chewing and swallowing made her feel sick. She began to hate her body, its thinness, its strange and disgusting needs, its inability to be a normal woman’s body, the fact that it could not do that which it was designed to do. Whether that design fault came from God, or Nature, she no longer knew or cared.

  Then, the billeting of these girls: loud cockneys, their laughter and energy and bad language filling the house, Dorothy cooking for them, cleaning their clothes and bedlinen, mending for them, tending to their comforts after a long and hard day’s work. And there were many of those; she had never known anyone to work so hard. Albert had found it easy, with his strength. But these girls fought hard to get the work done, they sweated and cried and kept going, kept going, they blistered, they chafed, they sustained bruises and cuts and calluses. But they never gave up. They inspired Dorothy; they refreshed her life with a new flood of hope and purpose.

  Three days after the Hurricane crashed in the Long Acre, Dorothy – in some pain, still wearing her dressings, but still trying to be useful, still managing to cook for the girls, managing a fraction of the growing mountain of laundry she was tasked with – had a visitor.

  She heard the front gate latch being lifted and the gate being shut, and quickly hid her notebook in the cutlery drawer. She was working on a new poem. It felt like a breakthrough, at last, a couple of sentences with direction. A novelty. Annoyed, she steeled herself for a visit from Mrs Compton. To appear calm, she hummed a tune. She did not want Mrs Compton to get even an inkling of how she was feeling; there was no need. In fact, there was danger in the older woman knowing anything.

  But the knock was not Mrs Compton’s. It was brisk. Unmistakeably, it was a man’s knock. Wiping her hands on her pinny, Dorothy approached the door and opened it.

  ‘Mrs Sinclair?’ said the man standing there, in an indeterminate foreign accent that Dorothy guessed was Polish. He held behind his legs a large bunch of hedgerow flowers, trying to hide it.

  ‘Yes?’ said Dorothy. She sounded stiff and formal – like her mother, she realised with horror.