Mrs Sinclair's Suitcase Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  Louise Walters was born in Oxfordshire and now lives in Northamptonshire with her husband and five children. She graduated from the Open University in 2010. This is her first novel.

  MRS SINCLAIR’S SUITCASE

  Louise Walters

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Louise Walters 2014

  The right of Louise Walters to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN 9781444777420

  Trade paperback 9781444777437

  eBook ISBN 9781444777444

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Ian, Oliver, Emily, Jude, Finn and Stanley, with love

  1

  8th February 1941

  My dear Dorothea,

  In wartime, people become desperate. We step outside ourselves. The truth is, I love you and I am sorry that only now do I own it. You love me. I will not forget the touch of your hand on my head and on my neck when you thought I slept. The touch of love, no longer imagined. Nobody will touch me like that again. This I know. This is my loss.

  Forgive me, Dorothea, for I cannot forgive you. What you do, to this child, to this child’s mother, it is wrong. It is misplaced, like me, forced out of my homeland, perhaps never to return. You too will never return, if you persist in this scheme. You will persist. Yet even now it can be undone. But I know you will not undo. Your soul will not return from this that you do. Please believe me. In welcoming the one into your arms, you must lose another. I cannot withstand. You know why.

  I do not enjoy writing these words to you. Actually, I cry. Once this war is finished – and it must finish – we could have made a life together. To spend my life with you has become my only great dream and desire. After our first meeting, as I rode away on my bicycle, I knew you were as important to me as water. I knew you were for all time, even as there is no time. I thought of marriage within minutes of meeting you. But it cannot be. You are an honourable woman, but this thing that you do is beyond honour. You do so much to be good, yet you go back on yourself, you invite dishonour. I cannot write clearly, but you will understand. My truly beautiful Dorothea, despite everything, our friendship must here end. I wish you all joy of this world.

  Yours,

  Jan Pietrykowski

  (I found this letter in a 1910 edition of The Infant’s Progress: From the Valley of Destruction to Everlasting Glory. I placed the book on Philip’s desk for pricing, and it went into the antiquarian books cabinet, priced at a modest £15.)

  I clean books. I dust their spines, their pages, sometimes one at a time; painstaking, throat-catching work. I find things hidden in books: dried flowers, locks of hair, tickets, labels, receipts, invoices, photographs, postcards, all manner of cards. I find letters, unpublished works by the ordinary, the anguished, the illiterate. Clumsily written or eloquent, they are love letters, everyday letters, secret letters and mundane letters talking about fruit and babies and tennis matches, from people signing themselves as Marjorie or Jean. My boss, Philip, long used to such finds, is blasé and whatever he finds, he places aside for me to look at. You can’t keep everything, he reminds me. And, of course, he is right. But I can’t bring myself to dispose of these snippets and snapshots of lives that once meant (or still do mean) so much.

  I walked into the Old and New Bookshop as a customer eleven years ago, and returned the following day as its first employee. Quietly impetuous, owner-manager Philip asked me to work with him. As he said, we were soon to enter a new millennium, so it was time to change; time to take stock, literally. He appreciated my way of loving books and my ability to get on with others. He claimed he found people ‘difficult’.

  ‘They’re generally pretty rotten, aren’t they?’ he said, and I half agreed.

  He also once declared, ‘Books tell many stories besides those printed on the pages.’

  Did I know that? I did. Books smell, they creak, they talk. You hold in your hand now a living, breathing, whispering thing, a book.

  Philip told me, on the day I started work in his bookshop, ‘Study books, smell them, hear them. You will be rewarded.’

  I tidy shelves. I make sure they are not too tightly packed. I take stock each year, in May, with the blossom trees discarding their petals, the sun shining through the French windows in the large room at the back of the shop, where we keep the second-hand non-fiction and hardback fiction, the sun’s vernal warmth thrown over my back like a huge comforting arm and the swallows swooping over the garden, shrieking and feasting on flies. I make coffee in the mornings, tea in the afternoons. I help interview new staff: eighteen-year-old gap year student Sophie, who is still with us, enjoying a gap of indeterminate length; and more recently Jenna, who became Philip’s lover within two weeks of starting her job. Jenna was never exactly interviewed. Like me, she walked into the Old and New as a customer; like me, she was engaged in conversation, and offered a job.

  There is nobody more passionate about books, the printed word, than my boss, Philip Old. He is driven by his love of books, of the book for its own sake, its smell, feel, age, its provenance. His shop is large, with high ceilings, tip-tappy flagstone floors and a warren of rooms – six in total, plus storage on the first floor. All is spacious and light. We sell new books, old books, antiquarian books, children’s books, shelf upon shelf upon shelf of books, lining the numerous walls of this large, luminous cathedral. The building is set back from the busy Market Square, with a neat, pretty garden, lavender and rosemary bordering the stone path that leads to the large oak door at the front of the shop. In the summer we have strings of bunting along the wrought-iron fence, kindly made for us by a
customer, and a small hand-painted sign that reads:

  Welcome to

  The Old and New Bookshop

  Open today from 9 until 5

  You are warmly invited to browse

  As a business, the Old and New cannot be making a profit. We have a band of loyal customers, of course – such establishments always do – but a small band. So there must be money somewhere, keeping this business afloat, kitting out Philip’s flat on the second floor so tastefully. I have not enquired. Philip never talks about money, as he never talks about his private life.

  I have had my share of romance, if I can call it that. At least, offers of romance. One young man, younger than me, part of the regular geeky Saturday afternoon crowd (and seemingly living in a world at least a decade behind everybody else – he always wears a black and purple shell suit) has proffered me his fax number on more than one occasion. Another, recently (red-faced, not entirely unattractive) told me I was the ‘best-looking’ woman he had seen ‘in months’. Patently untrue, and the genuinely beautiful Jenna nearby, pretending to tidy shelves, giggling. I threw her a look. She threw it back. And a year ago, a head teacher at a local primary school (our town has three), a regular customer with a habit of putting all and sundry on the school account. Hovering after I had served him, after I had handed him his stylish Old and New paper carrier bag, lingering. Clearing his throat, asking me out for dinner on Thursday night, if I could make it. If I was available. He had a charming smile, and thick black hair I suspected was dyed.

  My father brought in some books this morning, old books belonging to my babunia; my grandmother. She has been in a care home for two years now, but it’s taken us a long time to sort through her belongings. There aren’t even that many things. Babunia, thank goodness, is not a great hoarder. But my father cannot work quickly these days. I have already been through her books, of course, keeping back a few for myself that I recall from my childhood. When she agreed to live in the home, she said I must keep whatever of hers I wanted. She had no use for reading now, she said, no use for sewing. It was an inexpressibly sad moment. Yet there was no option for any of us. Dad just could not take care of her any more. I offered to cut my hours at the Old and New, but neither of them would hear of it.

  I saw my father wandering along the path and I waved, but he didn’t spot me. I ran to the heavy front door and pulled it open for him.

  He explained he had around twenty books. He had packed them into a battered old suitcase.

  ‘This was hers too,’ said Dad. ‘Keep it if you like, Roberta.’

  I would keep it. I love old suitcases. And already I could think of a use for it.

  ‘How are you feeling today?’ I asked, searching his face for clues.

  He had been, for some time, habitually pale, a ghastly creamy-grey colour. But he never let on how he was feeling. So he shrugged, his catch-all gesture, meaning, ‘Well … you know.’ He had been in remission a few weeks ago. Now, he wasn’t. Quite a sudden change this time, and frightening for both of us.

  Philip came through from his office and shook my father’s hand. They had met before – twice – and both had confided in me that they found the other to be a ‘gentleman’. Philip insisted on paying my father for the books; my father wanted to give them to him. In the end, Dad accepted twenty quid, a compromise sum. He stayed for a cup of tea, sitting out in the back garden in the pale spring sunshine. Then he shuffled away, his bold, rangy walk vanquished. I tried not to notice.

  I emptied the suitcase. There was a tatty old label on the inside that read ‘Mrs D. Sinclair’. Idly, as I sorted and cleaned the books, I wondered who she was. Dad said this was Babunia’s suitcase, but it must have belonged to this Mrs Sinclair first. My grandmother has always had a thrifty, make-do-and-mend mentality, happy to utilise the second-hand, the new-to-you. Dad says she learned the habit during and after the war, ‘because everyone did’. It wasn’t just a fashionable notion in those days.

  I cleaned the dust from The Infant’s Progress: From the Valley of Destruction to Everlasting Glory (a book I didn’t recall ever seeing in my grandmother’s house) and two neatly folded sheets of paper fluttered out. A letter! There was no envelope, always a pity. I unfolded the sheets. The letter, addressed to Dorothea, my grandmother, was written in anaemic blue ink, the writing small and neat; the paper was an even paler blue, brittle and dry as a long-dead insect’s wing, yellowing around the edges, with little holes creeping along the fold. Of course, I wondered if I should read it. But my curiosity got the better of me. I couldn’t not.

  I have since read this letter again and again, and I still can’t make sense of it. At first I experienced the strange sensation of needing to sit down. So I did, on the squeaky footstool, and my hand trembled as I read slowly, trying to take in every word.

  Dorothea Pietrykowski is my grandmother. Jan Pietrykowski was my grandfather, never known to me, never even known to my father. These are incontrovertible facts.

  But this letter makes no sense.

  Firstly, my grandparents were happily, if briefly, married, but in this letter he seems to declare that he cannot marry her. Secondly, it is dated 1941. Polish Squadron Leader Jan Pietrykowski, my grandfather, died defending London in the Blitz, in November 1940.

  2

  Dorothy Sinclair sweated in her wash house, where the air was clammy with steam. Moisture clung to her face as she wiped her forehead repeatedly with the back of her hand. Her headscarf had long ago slipped off and she hadn’t bothered stopping her work to re-knot it, so her hair stuck to her face like the predatory tentacles of some lurking, living creature. It was important to keep busy on this day.

  The copper in the dark, far corner hissed and bubbled like a cauldron, boiling Aggie and Nina’s clothes. Their uniforms, on a meagre ration, were muddied and stained almost daily. But Dorothy knew that presenting her girls with a pile of clean, starched and ironed laundry once a week was the least she could do. And despite the discomforts, she loved the work, in her own way. Washing frocks, stockings, undies, cardigans, the girls’ breeches and shirts and knickers, and all the laundry from up at the house, was more than just a household chore: it was now her living. Scrubbing, dipping, sweating, stirring, all of these had a rhythm of their own and gave meaning to her day. Turning the mangle over and over, as she did now, wringing the life out of clothes and sheets and tablecloths. And the ultimate pleasure, Dorothy’s favourite part of the day: pegging the clothes and linens out on the lines, and watching the sheets and cloths and pillowcases billowing and flapping like triumphant angel wings.

  It was important to keep busy on this day. On … this … day.

  She mustn’t think. About anything. Since that day, she had become adept at not thinking. Oftentimes now she thought in images. Language was partisan, ambiguous. She no longer trusted words. Yet she could not turn her back on them completely. She liked to write, so she tried to write. She wrote furtively, alone, in her notebook. She could not draw, so it had to be words. She hoped she was fashioning her ramblings into something like poetry. But it was hard to make sense, hard to sound pleasing.

  She looked up from her laundry. She listened, and stared at the open door through which so little steam seemed to escape. Something was wrong. Since losing … since Sidney … she had developed a sixth sense, almost akin to smell. She ‘sniffed’ the air now. Letting Nina’s breeches hang loose and bedraggled either side of the mangle, she wiped her hands on her pinny and went to the door of her wash house. She looked up, but was dazzled by the sun, by the rows of white sheets and pillowcases and glittering tablecloths. She squinted up into the innocent blue sky. Small clouds sprinted across it, forgetful children racing home for tea.

  Then she heard a drone, a low hum mixed with splutters and growls, like those of a threatened dog. Almost immediately she saw it, a Hurricane, weaving through the air. Surely descending too fast? She had never seen one coming in to land this quickly. Her heart began to thump, the blood thickened in her head, a tight
ness grabbed her around the throat. Was the pilot playing a game? Dorothy stared. No. This was not a game. The pilot was in trouble, and he was not the only one.

  ‘Please no,’ she said aloud, as she ran along the red-brick path. Hens scattered before her, cross and fussing and stupidly unaware of the new catastrophe looming above them. Dorothy reached her back gate, opened it and stepped out into the Long Acre, a field she liked to imagine was as immense as an Arabian desert. She had feared something like this would happen. She had seen the pilots, such young men and so reckless, looping the loop, showing off. It was only a matter of time, she always thought, and now that time had surely arrived. Why didn’t he bail out? The stricken Hurricane lurched towards her, listing wildly, like a broken pendulum. Dorothy looked back at her cottage in horror. She turned once more to the Hurricane and, with relief, she saw it veer away from her and her home, heading instead for the emptiness of the huge field. She walked mesmerised through the swaying ears of barley, scratchy-soft and clinging to her bare legs. It was a sensation she loved, usually, and felt herself in tune with.

  The aeroplane was close now, close to its inevitable, barely controlled landing, close to the earth and to her and the swaying barley. It swooped over her head like a giant bird, its shadow providing her with momentary relief from the sun.

  ‘Dorothy!’

  It was Aggie calling, from a long way away, Dorothy thought. She saw two fawn shirts quivering far across the Long Acre. The girls were running. Dorothy ignored Aggie’s shrill calls.