Mrs Sinclair's Suitcase (6 page)

But I know it won’t happen.

I have a vision of Philip at the book fair, being charming, being affable – his great skill, considering his indifference to just about everybody – and I wonder what is going on at the bookshop, with poor Sophie, alone all day, stacking shelves, serving customers, probably harassed. I cannot wait to get out of here and back into the world I love so much.

My grandfather’s letter is still in my handbag so I can read it whenever I need to. I read it now, while I wait for Jenna. I wish I could ask my father about it, but I can’t bear the thought of upsetting him. He has so much to deal with already. Does Dad know that his father was, in fact, alive and probably well – at least, well enough to write a Dear John letter to his mother – in February 1941? And that it looks like his parents may not have been married after all? And that his mother did something unforgivable – at least, as far as my grandfather was concerned – to a child.

Did she have a termination? I wonder.

Was abortion legal in 1941? I think not.

What did my grandmother do to ‘this child’s mother’? Did he actually mean my grandmother? English was not his first language. Perhaps something was lost in the translation of his Polish thoughts into his written English? I wish I could ask my own mother about it; but that’s out of the question. That leaves my grandmother, my beloved babunia.

She’s 109 years old.

I look up from the letter to see Jenna emerging from the building. I watch her trip lightly down the steps and across the lawn – past the ‘Keep off the grass’ sign – to my car. We can go home. She has taken the tablet, she tells me, and she smiles like she has just bagged a bargain in the sales. It’s a smile I recognise.

‘To Marcus, 4eva, luv ’n’ stuff, Natalie’: The card consists of a pink felt heart on a red card background. Handmade, I think. The dot of the ‘i’ is fashioned into a heart shape. I think at first how frivolous it is, but it’s not at all frivolous. It’s simple and eloquent and heartbreaking, so I keep it. I believe it was ‘Marcus’ who brought in the boxes of paperbacks; I watched as he came staggering up the path with his girlfriend, both of them struggling with two boxes each. He addressed her as ‘Kim’.

(Card found in the Harper Perennial edition of
The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy. Reading copy only, so I popped it into the 30p bargain basket under the window, alongside the front door.)

M
y cat, Tara, and I lived a cosy life for many years. She greeted me with good grace every day when I returned from work, and curled up on my lap on Sunday afternoons while I read or watched the occasional film. She was faithful and devoted, unlike most cats, and I almost believed she loved me as much as I loved her. But last Saturday, I arrived home to find Tara stiff and cold on the doormat. I had to pick her up before I could get in the door.

After dark, when nobody could see me, I buried her under the plum tree in my tiny back garden.

It was with a large measure of serendipity that I stumbled upon the vacancy in the Old and New Bookshop. Philip had plans to open up a further room of the shop, to sell a decent range of new books. He needed somebody to manage that side of the business, as well as helping him with the second-hand books. I like to think my newly acquired degree in English Literature helped me to land the job. Philip tells me he liked my friendly, non-pretentious manner and my willingness to clean. He felt I would slot very nicely into his bookshop.

We were a small, tight-knit team, Philip and I, in those early days. Just the two of us, in the shop from nine to five (often much later in his case), both of us for six days a week, most weeks. I have not minded giving up my Saturdays. My social life is sparse. But Philip has always been good company, funny and witty, and observant of his fellow man, if a little too critical. I have enjoyed his company since day one.

As the shop grew, the need for another member of staff became apparent, and Sophie became the third employee. A lovely girl, inside and out – intelligent and kind – perfect for the shop. I think I resented her, at first. I wanted the shop, and Philip – I wanted it all to myself. Sophie was new and pretty and I was jealous, of all things, which was utterly ridiculous. I got over it.

Sophie’s boyfriend, Matt, collects her from work on Saturday evenings, and they often ask me to ‘hang out’ with them. They are getting a Chinese, or a pizza, they’re watching a film. I’m welcome to join them. I always decline.

‘Oh, come on, Roberta. It’ll do you good,’ says Sophie.

‘No,’ I always say. ‘Tara needs feeding.’

A soft shake of Sophie’s head. ‘You need to get over it! Go home and feed her, then pop round to ours. Stay the night. It’s just a cat, not a child. You should live a little. For God’s sake.’

Philip and I have a professional relationship, but we can laugh and joke together, and often we do. We rarely talk about our lives away from the shop. Philip bought the eighteenth-century building housing the Old and New twelve, thirteen years ago. I believe, I get the feeling, there is no mortgage, there are no loans to repay. Sophie and I speculate that he may have won the lottery. Or inherited money from a dead relative. Of course, we never ask. Some months, I know the Old and New is lucky to break even. It often makes a loss, and usually only makes a profit in December – and even then, only in good years. Yet Philip continues to run his independent bookshop as a going concern, and he has converted the uppermost floor into his comfortable and handsome flat. He is simple in his tastes. Books, obviously, lots of books in his personal collections. And paintings, mostly prints, but I suspect a few originals too, all nicely framed. Plants, lots of houseplants – unusually, for a man, I think. That lovely sofa in the roomy lounge, an old rocking chair. A small television in the corner. No game stations, no Xboxes or whatever they’re called, just a handful of well-chosen DVDs. A clean kitchen, small and functional. All is simple and old-fashioned – or, at least, pretending to be simple and old-fashioned.

One of Sophie’s recent ideas (Philip values her ‘fresh’ input) was for one of the book rooms to be given over to a coffee shop. Philip vetoed this immediately. I am secretly thankful for this. But bless Sophie. She is so … modern.

‘We’re not bloody Borders!’ spluttered Philip. ‘There’s a reason they went to the wall, you know!’

And Sophie poked out her tongue at him.

Of course, he was joking. But he’s right. We are small, independent. We are unique. We deal in books. We deal in the written word.

I’m preparing a simple dinner to share with … who? My boyfriend? Lover? The man I sleep with?

We are having triple-glazed chicken in honey, with salad and herby potato wedges. I am not a great cook, finding the whole process rather tedious. A bottle of Pinot Grigio is cooling in the fridge. There is a lemon sorbet in the freezer. Wine is unusual for us because his wife mustn’t smell it when he gets home. She thinks that every other Thursday he attends a yoga class, straight after a staff meeting. This blatant lie, so bare and transparent, frightens me a little. Subterfuge I abhor, although sometimes it is necessary. But I do wish his ideas were a little more inventive.

Of course, I feel awful. I never thought – or planned, or expected – to end up in a relationship with a man already married. I think I suffered a moment of weakness, a lapse in my normally quite good judgement. And now I seem to be living with the consequences. He’s not happy with his wife, he says, and hasn’t been for some time. She’s ‘difficult’, whatever that means. I don’t press him on this or anything else. I wouldn’t blame his wife for being angry with me if she were to find out, truly I wouldn’t. And maybe she would expel him from their home and he would turn up on my doorstep, bedraggled and tearful.

Would he expect to move in with me? Would I owe him that?

I think not. I certainly wouldn’t
want
him to move in with me. And I know I shouldn’t be carrying on with a married man twenty-two years my senior. It isn’t nice and it isn’t fair and it will all come to nothing. I know this.

His name is Charles. Old-fashioned, but that’s the kind of woman I am, attracted to older men with older-men names. I find them comforting, with none of the rawness and threats of a younger man. They are civilised.

And you don’t have to love them, if you don’t want to. They are flattered enough if you like them, invite them into your home and listen sympathetically to their woes. That’s the drawback of older men: the woes are endless.

My older man – who, of course, isn’t mine at all but belongs to her, his wife, the woman whose name is Francesca and who, he tells me, smells like Febreze – has bought me a cat. She’s a replacement for Tara. He knows, as all the regular customers of the Old and New know, that I lost Tara. Their sympathy is enormous, and I believe it is genuine. The death of my cat is a subject up for discussion.

Our first date was, of necessity, some way off from our hometown. He could not afford for anybody to see him on a clandestine date with that woman from the bookshop. (What’s her name? The plain one. Rebecca?) Mr Charles Dearhead, Head Teacher at Northfield Primary School. He had too much to lose. And so did I, only I wasn’t as scared of losing it as he was. ‘We’ are a secret, and he trusts that I will always, always keep our little secret.

But I haven’t kept it, not completely.

‘Are you seeing somebody?’ asked Sophie.

It was a quiet Saturday afternoon, a week or two ago. Fax-man had been in, and out, once again reminding me of the ongoing offer of a date. I politely laughed him off, as usual, and continued to look up the difference between swallows and swifts in
Birds of Britain: An Illustrated Guide
. Sophie asked her question, turning to me hastily before another customer arrived at the till.

‘Why are you asking?’ I said, grinning at her. I wasn’t exactly bursting to tell anybody about my fling. But it would be quite nice, I thought, to tell somebody, if only to get another perspective. I realised that we had swifts swooping around the Old and New in the summer. Not swallows. And definitely not house martins.

‘You are,’ she said, triumphantly. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘I might be,’ I replied, and winked at her.

‘Who? Who? Who is it?’

‘He’s married,’ I warned. I had hoped it would sound sophisticated, but it didn’t.

‘Really? Oh! Well, that doesn’t necessarily … who is it? Does he come in here?’

‘Yes.’

A pause. A customer inconveniently filled it, and Sophie hastily, politely served her.

‘Who is it?’ Sophie hissed at me as soon as the customer was out of earshot.

‘Charles Dearhead.’

There was no mistaking Sophie’s disappointment. I wanted to reach out and gently swipe it away, as I might a stray strand of hair from her face. I hold a great deal of tenderness for Sophie.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, and shrugged.

Of course it wasn’t all right. But it was better than nothing. I’d had rather too much of nothing, and Charles had become my ‘something’.

I didn’t love him. I would never love him. Sophie and I both knew it. And all this passed between us in those few seconds, telepathically, a silent conversation in which nothing was said but everything was communicated.

‘He’s a lot older than you,’ said Sophie, breaking our spell.

‘Twenty-two years older.’

‘Too old?’ she asked.

She made me think. But not for long.

‘Maybe. But he’s nice. I like him. He’s kind to me. And he is handsome, for his age,’ I said, my vanity coming to my defence.

‘He’s married to his wife,’ said Sophie, and our eyes widened and we giggled.

‘I know what you mean, though,’ I said, and I whispered, ‘Mrs Francesca Dearhead, no less. Have you ever seen her?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘He says she’s difficult.’

‘Aren’t you worried that you’ll be found out? Philip might sack you. Scandal at the Old and New?’

‘Philip wouldn’t sack me. And he’ll never find out. Nobody will. I don’t make a song and dance of it, and neither does he. It’s all okay, Sophie. Okay?’

Jenna emerged from the children’s book room, where she had been busy putting out the new books delivered that morning. She is a neat person, when she tries, and putting out new stock, arranging shelves, especially in the children’s section, has become one of her particular duties. She smiled at us as we cut short our conversation. I don’t think she heard any of it; perhaps she thought we were talking about her.

Jenna offered to make coffee. As the kettle boiled loudly in the kitchen, and we could hear her clattering around with cups and saucers, Sophie said my affair with ‘the Dearhead’, as she called him, was okay, if I said it was. And it was none of her business, which was obviously true.

But I care for her opinions. I know she knows I cannot be truly happy with a man like Charles Dearhead, even if he is handsome. She thinks I deserve better, and maybe that is so. But, living as I do, alone, Charles feels right for me, and he is a sweet man in his own way. And I quite like his way, the fact that he never really wants to speak about me. I can lose myself in his life, and it means I don’t have to think too much about my own, which, I convince myself, is infinitely better than his.

Ah, but here he is now. Hassled. Frowning. I’ve put my Billie Holiday CD on for him. He likes jazz, and so do I. It’s good to have that in common. If I sit him down in my small but comfortable lounge, massage his shoulders, pour him a glass of wine … there. That’s better. Is he? Yes, he is, he is actually smiling now. And asking me what is for dinner because it smells delicious and he can’t really believe that he will be able to stay here for the night, our first night together. He sips wine and looks smug. He parked his car two streets along. You never know who might be prying, he says.

Her mother is ill, you see. Francesca’s. She’s knocking on, he told me, and keeps falling over. She hurts herself, breaks her bones. This latest issue is nothing serious but she needs an operation, he thinks. And there’s talk of a home, but she won’t go into one. Which isn’t really terribly fair on Francesca, who has her own life down here and can’t keep dashing up to the Dales every time her mother sneezes.