Mrs Sinclair's Suitcase by Louise Walters Read Free Book Online Page A

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, 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.

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