Mrs Sinclair's Suitcase by Louise Walters

‘fresh’ input) was for one of the book rooms to be given over to a coffee shop. Philip vetoed this immediately. I am secretly thankful for this. But bless Sophie. She is so … modern.
    ‘We’re not bloody Borders!’ spluttered Philip. ‘There’s a reason they went to the wall, you know!’
    And Sophie poked out her tongue at him.
    Of course, he was joking. But he’s right. We are small, independent. We are unique. We deal in books. We deal in the written word.
    I’m preparing a simple dinner to share with … who? My boyfriend? Lover? The man I sleep with?
    We are having triple-glazed chicken in honey, with salad and herby potato wedges. I am not a great cook, finding the whole process rather tedious. A bottle of Pinot Grigio is cooling in the fridge. There is a lemon sorbet in the freezer. Wine is unusual for us because his wife mustn’t smell it when he gets home. She thinks that every other Thursday he attends a yoga class, straight after a staff meeting. This blatant lie, so bare and transparent, frightens me a little. Subterfuge I abhor, although sometimes it is necessary. But I do wish his ideas were a little more inventive.
    Of course, I feel awful. I never thought – or planned, or expected – to end up in a relationship with a man already married. I think I suffered a moment of weakness, a lapse in my normally quite good judgement. And now I seem to be living with the consequences. He’s not happy with his wife, he says, and hasn’t been for some time. She’s ‘difficult’, whatever that means. I don’t press him on this or anything else. I wouldn’t blame his wife for being angry with me if she were to find out, truly I wouldn’t. And maybe she would expel him from their home and he would turn up on my doorstep, bedraggled and tearful.
    Would he expect to move in with me? Would I owe him that?
    I think not. I certainly wouldn’t
want
him to move in with me. And I know I shouldn’t be carrying on with a married man twenty-two years my senior. It isn’t nice and it isn’t fair and it will all come to nothing. I know this.
    His name is Charles. Old-fashioned, but that’s the kind of woman I am, attracted to older men with older-men names. I find them comforting, with none of the rawness and threats of a younger man. They are civilised.
    And you don’t have to love them, if you don’t want to. They are flattered enough if you like them, invite them into your home and listen sympathetically to their woes. That’s the drawback of older men: the woes are endless.
    My older man – who, of course, isn’t mine at all but belongs to her, his wife, the woman whose name is Francesca and who, he tells me, smells like Febreze – has bought me a cat. She’s a replacement for Tara. He knows, as all the regular customers of the Old and New know, that I lost Tara. Their sympathy is enormous, and I believe it is genuine. The death of my cat is a subject up for discussion.
    Our first date was, of necessity, some way off from our hometown. He could not afford for anybody to see him on a clandestine date with that woman from the bookshop. (What’s her name? The plain one. Rebecca?) Mr Charles Dearhead, Head Teacher at Northfield Primary School. He had too much to lose. And so did I, only I wasn’t as scared of losing it as he was. ‘We’ are a secret, and he trusts that I will always, always keep our little secret.
    But I haven’t kept it, not completely.
    ‘Are you seeing somebody?’ asked Sophie.
    It was a quiet Saturday afternoon, a week or two ago. Fax-man had been in, and out, once again reminding me of the ongoing offer of a date. I politely laughed him off, as usual, and continued to look up the difference between swallows and swifts in
Birds of Britain: An Illustrated Guide
. Sophie asked her question, turning to me hastily before another customer arrived at the till.
    ‘Why are you asking?’ I said, grinning at her. I wasn’t exactly bursting to tell anybody about my fling. But it would