Mrs Sinclair's Suitcase Read Online Free PDF Page B

stay, and be useful. No rent and a small stipend in return for taking in laundry – all the hall laundry. They installed the latest model of boiler and a mangle in the wash house. There was even talk of one of the new washing machines. They strung up yards and yards of washing lines, criss-crossing the garden. And now she was glad she hadn’t taken on goats, as much as she had wanted them, when Mrs Twoomey had offered her a pair of kids in the spring. They were such little darlings, but too fond of chewing on fresh laundry.
    Then the girls, Aggie and Nina. They were always laughing at goodness knows what, they were cheerful and chaotic. Dorothy took pride in working hard for her girls, even in boiling Aggie’s bloodied undies, and the sanitary pads that Dorothy had hastily sewn when the young women first arrived at the farm. The pads were made from a peach-coloured damask tablecloth she had damaged by catching it irretrievably in the mangle. Poor Aggie, she was so slight and fragile-looking, with her blonde curls, her perfect skin, her silvery laugh, and such a pretty little thing, yet she suffered such heavy blood loss, cruel, regular and punctual. In contrast, Nina, who was taller than Aggie, and plump, with a deep smoker’s voice, had scant bleeds, irregular and short-lived. She was a girl who sailed gaily through life with all the finesse of an ocean liner. The girls had not been with Dorothy for long – a matter of weeks, really – but already she felt she knew them, she felt she had the measure of them. She would almost say that she loved them.
    Dorothy put them in her own room. It was the room she had vacated after Sidney, leaving Albert alone and bewildered in the large brass bed. Dorothy had set up house in the tiny bedroom, overlooking the back garden, the Long Acre field and, beyond, the distant elm trees and Lodderston aerodrome. The small bed, narrow and in need of a new mattress, suited her perfectly. She liked to lie on it with her notebook, writing. Rarely did she recognise the words on the page, when she read them back, as her own.
    She made up a new quilt for her little bed, using anything she could find – large patches, small patches, squares, triangles, indescribable shapes – a crazy quilt. She hung her few clothes in the tiny wardrobe, arranged her undies in the top drawer of the dressing table and put a vase of wild flowers on the table next to her bed. Every night, when she retired, she shut the door firmly behind her. Albert didn’t knock, not once, and Dorothy was grateful for that. Then he was gone. In August 1939, he simply fled. She didn’t know exactly where he was or what he was doing. She heard nothing from him at all. He sent no money. This is divorce, she thought, and her solitary life began in earnest. She became self-sufficient, baking her own bread, keeping back a few eggs each week from her hens; she made new clothes from old clothes, became a truly accomplished seamstress, and learned to use the old Singer sewing machine that Albert said had been his mother’s. This year, she had cultivated all her own fruit and vegetables, with varying success, but she ate so little that it barely mattered. Eating became something she did to survive; there was no pleasure in it. Food tasted vile to her, and the act of chewing and swallowing made her feel sick. She began to hate her body, its thinness, its strange and disgusting needs, its inability to be a normal woman’s body, the fact that it could not do that which it was designed to do. Whether that design fault came from God, or Nature, she no longer knew or cared.
    Then, the billeting of these girls: loud cockneys, their laughter and energy and bad language filling the house, Dorothy cooking for them, cleaning their clothes and bedlinen, mending for them, tending to their comforts after a long and hard day’s work. And there were many of those; she had never known anyone to work so hard. Albert had found it easy, with his strength.