Mrs Sinclair's Suitcase (3 page)

‘Mother, it is August, and it is quite warm. Even in Lincolnshire.’

Of course, Dorothy did pack the fur – along with many other items – and together they travelled by train, Dorothy gazing out of the window for much of the journey, trying to ignore her mother’s constant demands. The fields were golden, this glowing August, and she saw men working in them; she saw tractors and wagons and horses and harvesting. It looked like an enviable life, out in the open air, working on the land, in golden fields, in golden sun, with golden skin.

When she met Albert Sinclair, handsome and bucolic, and he told her all about his life on the farm, she was an attentive listener. Why was he at the funeral?

‘My sister was Miss Jane’s charlady, and I did odd jobs for her, cleaning the gutters or raking leaves. Very nice lady, was Miss Jane. A gentlewoman. Not liked by her family, they say. But goodness knows why, because you couldn’t hope to find a nicer person.’

‘“Her family” was my mother and I.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t—’

‘Don’t be sorry. My mother did disown her. She disowns everybody sooner or later.’

Two weeks later, back in Oxford, Ruth disowned her only daughter upon hearing that she was intending to marry this Albert – ‘
Bert?
’ – Sinclair. Dorothy was glad. And if it meant she would end up just like her Aunt Jane – that is to say, forsaken and forgotten – she was even gladder. She left Oxford by train, alone this time, with a carpet bag of ‘belongings’ and her mother’s final admonitions ringing in her ears: ‘You will regret this! It will come to nothing! He’s not good enough for you!’ In this way, Dorothy burst free of her extended and regretful childhood.

Dorothy remained a virgin until her wedding night, on 12th November 1934. It was her thirty-fourth birthday. Albert, still very much a stranger to her, tried to be gentle and kind, but he was so very eager, and so virile, that he did hurt her a little. Dorothy tried not to show it, but he knew, because he wasn’t entirely stupid. He apologised. She accepted his apology. It got better, of course. He was a big man, strong and muscular and leathery-skinned, and Dorothy grew to love the feel of his arms around her, his warmth and strength. Pregnancy followed within four months of their wedding, but it was doomed to early failure.

Then another, and yet another.

Eventually, after nearly four years of marriage and five miscarriages, Dorothy gave up, her longing for a child replaced by impossible, unbearable dreams and a sad resignation. She became a farmhand’s wife, adept at baking and washing and sewing and tending a small vegetable patch, looking after a small brood of hens. She heard nothing from her mother, and after a few stilted letters in which Dorothy talked of her husband, her new life, her pregnancies, she gave up on the relationship. It may as well have been her mother, and not Aunt Jane, lying dead in the ground in Lodderston churchyard.

In August 1938, Dorothy fell pregnant for the sixth time, and it was at this point that she began to write poetry ‘properly’. Falteringly, at first, unsure of how to put down any words that could mean something. But she tried, and she wrote, alone during the day, while eating her dinner or sipping her afternoon tea. She hid her notebook behind the pots and pans, at the back of the cabinet. She hid it in the table drawer, or under the bed. She hid it in places where Albert would not find it.

This pregnancy lasted beyond the first two months. She felt sick, and was sick, indiscriminately, at any time of day. Her breasts were sore and she burst into tears without warning. Mrs Compton, layer-out of corpses and local midwife, visited when Dorothy was four months pregnant, and looked quizzically at her burgeoning belly.

‘Is it a boy, do you think?’ she asked.

‘I have no idea,’ said Dorothy.

Already, the woman was insufferable.

‘And how are you feeling?’

‘Better, thank you. Now that I’m not vomiting any more.’

Mrs Compton nodded in what she must have imagined to be a sage manner. Dorothy looked away from the older woman. She hated her. She could not stand the gaze that seemed to mock even while it cared. Mrs Compton, somewhere in her late fifties, perhaps sixty, had given birth to six children of her own, five of whom had made it to adulthood. Her eldest grown son had died in the Great War. Her three daughters, fat and fecund, and her younger son all lived in the village, had all married other villagers, and all of them contributed at regular intervals to Mrs Compton’s growing army of grandchildren.

Dorothy did, in fact, think her baby might be a boy. She had a name for him already: Sidney. But she did not share this with Mrs Compton. Albert – hard-working and, by now, hard-drinking, losing his looks – had already said she could call the child anything she liked so long as it wasn’t ‘daft’. Sidney he approved of. Sidney it was to be. Albert was relieved that his wife was to bear him a child at last. Men on the farm, in the village, in the pub, had made barbed remarks about his childless marriage. He couldn’t be doing it right. Did he know where to put it? The taunts had got under his skin, and made him turn against his wife; a hard face, a solid back, a shrug, a look of scorn. But at last Albert was proud of his wife’s round, hard belly, her wide smile. To him she became beautiful; she became the wife he wanted her to be.

When she was five months pregnant, Dorothy caught the bus into Lincoln to buy things for the baby, feeling like a prodigal daughter returning home. She bought a suitcase, for storing all the things she was planning to sew and knit. The suitcase was compact, eighteen inches wide, eight inches deep, a mere thirteen inches from front to back. It was a rusty brown colour, with a dark brown Bakelite handle, two small catches and a toylike key. Inside, the suitcase was lined with paper in a pale tartan print, and there was a small gummed label upon which she could write her name, so she wrote

Mrs D. Sinclair

in her large, looping hand. She licked the label and stuck it to the inside of the suitcase.

While in town she also bought fabric and wool, and refreshed her stocks of threads and needles. Now was the time to make. The talk of impending war was, to her, as insubstantial as the first wash a watercolour artist applies to the naked canvas. War was obscure, it was obscured, and perhaps it was happening a long way off, and perhaps it was not even happening at all. She was pregnant, she no longer felt sick, and she had her energy back. This was all she knew. The baby would need cardigans, gowns, jackets, bootees, blankets, shawls. The baby would need a happy glowing mother, a capable and creative and provident mother.

The suitcase slid perfectly under the bed, and Dorothy set to work on filling it straight away. Within a few delirious weeks she had made two gowns in a soft cotton lawn, three knitted matinee jackets with hats and bootees to match, a knitted blanket in soft pale lamb’s wool, and a white christening robe. She showed nobody the fruits of her labours, not even Albert, who was aware of her industriously clicking knitting needles, her frowns and sighs and occasional exasperations, her satisfied smiles when the work was going well. She sewed and knitted in near silence each evening by the light of the oil lamp, while he read the newspaper and told her about the war that he said was certainly coming. She barely listened, so involved was she in the approaching birth, the motherhood that was within her grasp at last. Each stitch brought her closer to that moment, that new and mysterious state of being. Each stitch confirmed the reality of the baby in her womb. Each stitch brought her closer to the day when she would leave behind, at last and forever, irrevocably, her girlhood. Every hope she had ever had was invested in each click of the needles, in each pinprick to her fingers. The mother-to-be was satiated with life and vigour.

Upon completion, each garment was laundered and, if necessary, starched and pressed. One by one, she laid her handmade treasures in the suitcase, with great care, as though each item were the baby himself. She retrieved her notebook from the cabinet in the kitchen, and hid it under the baby clothes at the bottom of the suitcase. This was her new hiding place, her domain – secret, private, inviolable. She sprinkled in dried lavender she had saved from her garden, ostensibly to keep the moths from feasting on the wool, but really because she loved the no-nonsense, vinegary-sweet scent of lavender, the safest scent in the world. By the time she was ready to give birth, the layette was complete, and generosity had entered her marriage. Albert saved for and bought a perambulator, huge and black. He fashioned a crib, working in his shed after his long days on the farm. He insisted his wife put her feet up in the evenings and he brought her tea, which he prepared himself.

And the suitcase sat under the bed, waiting to be emptied of its treasures, waiting for its lid to be thrown open and its contents grasped by eager, trembling hands. If she reached out, she could touch it, this dream which was no longer a dream. This time, it was solid and large and inexhaustible. If any apprehension entered her heart, Dorothy could not recall it afterwards. She could only remember the anticipation, the exasperating, cloying, heavy desire for the mystery of motherhood to begin.

For surely now it would begin.

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.)

P
hilip 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.