Mrs Sinclair's Suitcase Read online

  ‘I am Squadron Leader Jan Pietrykowski,’ he said, as though Dorothy should recognise his name. Then, in a deft series of movements, he took her hand, kissed it, released it and, with a flourish, he offered her the flowers.

  She blushed. ‘Oh! Thank you,’ said Dorothy, recovering herself, no longer impersonating her mother. She took the flowers and smelled them, as a matter of politeness rather than curiosity. She could think of nothing further to say. Like all men in uniform, this man looked handsome and smart. Her first impression was of dark hair, slicked across from a side parting, and clear tanned skin. He was clean-shaven, his eyes bright blue. A very bright blue. He had a direct and unflustered gaze that both alarmed and intrigued her. He seemed to be two or three inches taller than Dorothy. Not a tall man, not a short man. But younger – perhaps four, five, six years younger. Too young. Like Albert. It was impossible. And all of this shot through her like a sudden onset of fever.

  ‘I have come to thank you for your brave efforts to save my compatriot on Tuesday,’ the squadron leader announced. Dorothy thought him grandiose, but she was prepared to overlook it.

  ‘Save?’ she said.

  ‘My pilot. On Tuesday. We have heard of your courage. I am here to thank you,’ and Squadron Leader Jan Pietrykowski bowed.

  Dorothy stared at him in shock, amusement. Something else. Something she did not care to pinpoint.

  ‘I see you have a bandage,’ he said. ‘I hope your face is not too sore?’

  And damn that woman, damn her to hell. The tittle-tattling—! Dorothy, essentially kind, could not bring herself to even think the word ‘cow’, let alone ‘bitch’. Too cruel, these words, too impolite. And, she was generous enough to entertain, possibly not even true.

  ‘I see,’ said Dorothy. ‘I didn’t exactly try to save him. Everybody seems to think … never mind. But thank you. My face is not too sore. It will be better soon, I’m sure. Won’t you come in?’

  The squadron leader stepped over the threshold into Dorothy’s kitchen and immediately it struck her that this man’s presence was a comfort, even a sudden joy. This house had been empty of menfolk for nine months; it had become a feminine enclave, and even more so since the arrival of the girls. She indicated a seat at the table, and he sat. He looked around, and Dorothy noticed he took a long time looking at the mantelpiece with its candlesticks, its clock, its thin layer of coal dust.

  ‘This reminds me of my mother’s kitchen,’ he said, sweeping his arm around as if sharing with her a vast panorama, ‘back at home where I come from.’

  ‘Where is that?’ asked Dorothy, preparing teacups, milk, sugar. Her hands shook.

  ‘Polska.’

  ‘Poland?’

  ‘Yes. Poland.’

  Jan Pietrykowski smiled at her, a wide grin that Dorothy found herself staring at despite all her decorous intentions. She had to stop being so … silly. She lost herself in tea preparations. Her hands shook even more. She bit her lip. She repressed an urge to giggle. Had her knees been punched? Surely, they had been.

  ‘I know, I know,’ she said, trying to steady her voice, which was becoming high-pitched. ‘We are all so damned imperialistic. Aren’t we?’ She cleared her throat. What exactly was the matter with her? Surely, she should know.

  If he was taken aback by the coarse language, Squadron Leader Jan Pietrykowski failed to show it. Perhaps he didn’t know the word? But his English was pretty good. Dorothy couldn’t believe he hadn’t heard such words and understood their meaning. Still, she sensed that here was a man she could swear around without incurring judgement.

  ‘My girls taught me that word,’ she said. It sounded to her like a boast.

  ‘“Imperialistic”?’ he said.

  ‘“Damned”. They taught me “bloody” too.’

  ‘Your girls …?’

  ‘Two young ladies from London. They work here on the farm. Since so many of the men have …’ She tried not to sound bitter as she thought of her husband’s abandonment of her. ‘Since so many of them have gone away.’

  ‘You are an angry woman, Mrs Sinclair.’

  She chose to ignore the remark. She made tea, busying herself with the strainer, then pouring in milk – but no milk for him, thank you. Stirring in sugar, one for him, one for her. She was on guard, warned off by this man’s perception. Angry? Yes, she was angry. Of course. But was it so obvious?

  And she was listening to this man, this strange man – who did not take milk in his tea (extraordinary!) – an unexpected guest in her home, a guest in her country, telling her about his life. He was an only child, he said, brought up by his mother alone, his father not known to him. His mother had been strong, independent, left to fend for herself in a small Polish village near a town he called ‘Krakoof’. Dorothy didn’t know where ‘Krakoof’ was, let alone its surrounding villages. The squadron leader’s mother was an intelligent woman, he said, and loved to learn languages, and she taught him English from an early age. Thank God for that, he said, because it was making a terrific difference now that he found himself in England, helping, at least, hoping, to set up a Polish squadron. One day soon, he hoped, he would return to his home, perhaps his mother’s home, perhaps not, but he would resume his life, go back to a reinstated Polish Air Force, be normal again. Damn the Nazis. Damn the Russians.

  He does know those kinds of words, Dorothy thought. ‘Yes,’ she said. How old was he?

  ‘I am thirty years old,’ he said.

  Did she actually ask aloud? Voices then – hers, her voice, hers aloud, in her head – all were blurring, converging in a confusing mix of anger, revelation and, above all, she realised with horror, titillation. Nine years. Nine years? Oh! Oh no.

  ‘And you are a … pilot?’

  ‘Yes. A squadron leader.’

  ‘Ah yes, you said. I’m sorry. You must think me terribly stupid. It’s just that I am tired, rather.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, and he stood, gulping back his tea.

  ‘I didn’t mean that you had to leave. I’m sorry. Please tell me more … are there many Polish pilots at Lodderston now?’

  ‘Many, enough to form a squadron. But we are not believed in, our talents it seems are not obvious. We are told to do exercises. But all of us have already fought the Germans, in our own country and in France. We are not novices. We are forced to have English lessons! But I explain I can translate, teach my men myself. We are frustrated. So some of my men play the fool in the air, and now one of them dies without need. But I can see that you must rest. Thank you for what you did. I will myself inform the pilot’s family of your brave actions,’ and the squadron leader made for the door, opening it.

  ‘Oh no, please don’t. Please. It was not … it was nothing. It was stupid, in fact.’

  Please don’t, oh, no, no, please don’t go. He was such an interesting person.

  ‘Brave,’ the man repeated, firmly.

  ‘I’m an only child too,’ blurted Dorothy.

  ‘I thought that was so,’ he said, stepping through the door, out into the bright afternoon sunshine, obviously determined to escape.

  She knew she was being ridiculous. But she liked the way the sun shone on his black hair. Again, he took her hand and kissed it. He nodded to her, and said goodbye. He left. She crept through to the lounge and watched him through the lace curtains, the lace curtains that had become yellowed by the girls’ cigarette smoke, and needed laundering. The man had climbed on to a bicycle, and he rode off in the direction of Lodderston and was gone, swallowed by the May blossom, the blue sky, the thick green hedges, the heat haze rising from the road.

  Dorothy wandered back into the kitchen. She picked up the wild flowers, she smelled them again, she filled her best enamel jug with water and arranged the flowers, lingering over the task. She placed the jug artfully on the mantelpiece. She stood a while, looking at the flowers. She took out her notebook and wrote feverishly for minutes, perhaps half an hour. She felt she had something to write about. Finally. She smelled
the back of her hand where he had twice kissed it. She breathed in, long and deep. Nothing. She picked up the teacup that he had drunk from, and held it to her nose. She smelled the rim, the handle, examined it closely. Impetuously, without any thought of guilt or disgust, she ran her tongue around the rim of the cup, but it tasted only of tea.

  He cycled away. He’d wanted to stay longer, of course. He wanted to look back at this Englishwoman, who he knew was watching him through the lace curtains. He wanted to wave. But he thought he had better not. He couldn’t explain, even to himself, how he had felt, sitting in the woman’s kitchen, drinking her sweet strong tea, listening to her gentle voice. He could have listened to her for the rest of his days.

  It was odd how a person of significance could just appear in your life, unexpectedly. He had not known what to expect, knocking on her door. He was there to thank her, as he thought he ought to do. He was carrying out just another of his many duties. And when the door opened, there she stood, instant, charming.

  He would see her again. He knew this. He had to see her again. He knew. He would return as soon as he could. And he felt – he was certain – she would want that, and there would be no need for a pretext.

  5

  A photograph: black and white, a man, perhaps in his late thirties, handsome, with a moustache, his arm around a woman. She is short, with obviously blonde hair, a little younger than him, and she smiles broadly into the camera. On the back of the photo it reads: Harry and Nora, Minehead, August 1958. And under that, in a round teenage hand, it says: Nanna and Grandpa Lomax.

  (Found inside a paperback edition of A Bouquet of Barbed Wire by Andrea Newman. It’s an old copy, but in good condition, so I placed it on the general fiction shelves priced at £1.00.)

  I drive to the clinic. Jenna sits resolute alongside me, staring at the people and buildings and trees and vehicles that we pass on our journey. Apart from giving me terse directions, she says nothing. I try to make conversation, but now is not the time, and so I silence myself. We listen to Radio 4 until the building looms before us. A small ignominious brass plaque on the stone gatepost announces that this is the Evergreen Clinic. Evergreen is, I think, a strange choice of name for such a place. I know how Jenna must feel, sitting so still alongside me; yet she appears to be unmoved. I swing the car up the gravelled drive, and park in a marked space. As if on cue, heavy drops of rain falling on to the roof of the car break the silence.

  ‘Will you come in with me? Please,’ says Jenna.

  ‘Yes. I thought that was the plan.’

  ‘Oh, thank you. I’m grateful. But I’m scared.’

  Of course she is.

  ‘You don’t have to go in,’ I offer.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  And I know she does. There is no point in prolonging the inevitable, no point in trying to dissuade Jenna. It’s a one-woman show.

  We walk across a neat lawn where a single magnolia stands alone in the centre – white, pretty, hopeful. We slowly ascend the imperious steps leading to the door marked ‘Entrance’. Inside is dark, oaky, leathery. A lady with long, long blonde hair and a name badge stating ‘Rita’ sits primly at a tacky, veneered desk. I don’t believe that Rita is her actual name. She invites us to take a seat in the waiting room, which was obviously once the large sitting room of a grand house. Daytime television blasts out from what appears to be a 1980s set. There are many women here, nervous, waiting, like Jenna, waiting to do something hellishly profound. Right or wrong. It isn’t my place to judge. Of course. Yet I feel vaguely nauseous, clammy. Some of the women are young, just girls, with mothers chaperoning them, mothers as nervous as their daughters. But, like Jenna, they look resolute. There are one or two couples, the men holding the women’s hands, stroking their arms. Why are they here? What events have led up to this day, this place, this decision? I shall never know. It isn’t my destiny to know.

  After an interminable half-hour, Jenna is called and she disappears like a ghost into an unseen room, the door closing quietly behind her. I watch the television and learn how to make triple-glazed chicken in honey, or some such concoction. I clamp my mind off from where I am, what I am doing, what is going on behind the door, the conversation that will be taking place.

  Jenna emerges after fifteen minutes or so, white-faced. She beckons me and I follow her outside, where the sun is shining and the birds are busying themselves in the trees, in defiance of this place. Jenna sits on the bottom step and lights a cigarette, which shocks me greatly. Her hand is trembling, cigarette smoke curling around her slender beringed fingers. I didn’t know she was a smoker.

  ‘I can have a tablet,’ Jenna says. ‘Today, once I’ve seen a doctor.’

  ‘A tablet?’

  ‘It will make the pregnancy come away and I’ll bleed. Like a period.’

  ‘You’re definitely pregnant, then?’ I say, disappointed. How lovely if she had been mistaken, there had been no baby to … deal with.

  ‘Oh yes. I could see it. A little flake. On the screen. It was like watching a film, but there wasn’t much to see. Just shadows and … pulses. Five and a half weeks gone. It’s a good job I’m on the ball, eh?’

  ‘Do you still want to do this?’ I ask, my voice high-pitched and laboured. ‘Are you going to go ahead?’

  ‘I am. Absolutely. This is just a mistake, a great big one. It’s not a baby, not yet. It’s just a blob of cells and matter. No eyes yet, no mouth or even a proper brain. No skin. There’s no crime here, Roberta. Don’t go all holier than thou on me. I’m within my rights to do this. It’s all perfectly legal.’

  ‘I know that. I wasn’t trying to … it’s okay.’ I have nothing else to say.

  Jenna obviously does not have a working knowledge of regret. Not yet, anyway. I don’t want to cry, so I think hard about triple-glazed chicken in honey, about driving home, being there, safe and alone. I have a sudden yearning to eat hot buttered crumpets dripping with gooseberry jam, the delicious jam Babunia made each year until she was too old to manage it. I recall the bottles lined up on the highest shelf in her pantry.

  Jenna drags heavily on her cigarette. This secret between us is already forcing an intimacy that feels too intense. I wish she hadn’t asked me to help. And I wish I hadn’t agreed to. Sophie would have done a better job; she has common sense and compassion in bucketfuls. I hold back too much. It’s something of a problem in my life.

  What is it my grandfather said to my grandmother, apparently from beyond the grave? Your soul will not return from this that you do.

  And as Jenna prepares to return to the trammelled darkness of the Evergreen Clinic to be ‘seen’ by a doctor, she suggests I wait for her in the car. She’ll be all right now. The worst is over, she says. I sit cocooned in the magnified silence of a car when the engine isn’t running and I think of Philip, about him never knowing of the events of this day. And thank God for that, because I understand my boss enough by now to know that he would be appalled and hurt, ashamed of this young woman, ashamed of me. And it wouldn’t be the abortion itself, nor even the fact that the … baby may not be his. It would be the lies and the deceit. Oh, how I want Jenna to cry and deliberate and to change her mind, run out of this building. I want the door to open and Jenna to charge out, clutching her belly, protecting her baby, embracing the instincts that she must be working so hard to suppress. I want to greet her with a huge smile of relief, strap her in the car myself and speed out of the gate, never to return.

  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, bu
t 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.

  6

  ‘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.)

  My 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.