22 Britannia Road (2 page)

Janusz takes a drag on his cigarette, blows a smoke ring and watches it drift out of shape.

‘I hope so. It’s been six years since I last saw them.’

The estate agent cocks his head on one side, a concerned look on his face.

‘That’s tough. Mind you, look at it this way, you’ve got this house, a job and your family’s coming over here. Add it up and you’ve got yourself a happy ending.’

Janusz laughs. That’s exactly what he is hoping for.

‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘A happy ending.’

When the Red Cross officer told him Silvana and Aurek had been found in a British refugee camp, he had not been able to smile. ‘They are in a bad state,’ the officer said. The man’s voice had dropped almost to a whisper. ‘They’d been living in a forest. I gather they’d been there for a long time. Good luck. I hope it works out for you all.’

Janusz jangles his new house keys on his finger, watching the tweed-jacketed back of the estate agent as he walks briskly down the hill. So this is it. Peacetime. And he’s got a house. A home for Silvana and Aurek when they arrive. His father would have been proud of him, bringing his family back together. Doing the right thing. Looking to the future. He can’t return to Poland. Not now that his country has communist rule imposed upon it. He must face facts. Dreams of a free and independent Poland are just that – dreams. His home is here. Churchill himself said Polish troops should have the citizenship and freedom of the British Empire, and that’s what he’s accepted. Britain is his home now.

If he ever speaks to his parents or his sisters again, if one day they answer his letters and find him here, he hopes they will understand that this is where he has chosen to be.

He pockets his keys and wonders what life here will bring him. When he was offered two jobs, one in a factory making bicycles in Nottingham and one in an engineering works in a town in East Anglia, he sat in a library with a map of Britain and put his thumb on Ipswich. It was a small town with a harbour squatting on a straggling line of blue estuary leading to the sea. With his little finger he could reach across the blue and touch France. That’s what decided it for him. He would live in Ipswich because he could be nearer to Hélène. It was a stupid reason, especially when he was trying so hard to forget, but it eased the pain a little.

He yawns and sighs deeply. It feels good here. The air is clean enough and it’s a quiet place. Terraced brick houses stretch away down the hill. In the distance, a church spire reaches for the sky, the top of it boxed in by scaffolding. Whether the scaffolding is there so that long-awaited repair work can be carried out or because of recent war damage, he doesn’t know. And he doesn’t care. He has stopped believing in God. Now he hopes for specific things. A job to go to. A family to care for and perhaps, one day, a small degree of happiness.

Beyond the church, rows of housing are hemmed by the river and the tall chimneys of the factories. Beyond them are fields and woodland. Above him, the sky is chewing
-
gum grey but some blue is breaking through. Hélène would have said there was just enough blue to make a pair of trousers for a gendarme.

He lights another cigarette and allows himself to think of France. It’s a weakness that he savours briefly, sweet and good as an extra spoonful of sugar in bitter barracks tea. He thinks of the farmhouse with its red tiled roof and blue wooden shutters. Hélène standing at the kitchen door. Her tanned skin and her warm southern accent, the life in her beautiful eyes.

He finishes his cigarette and wanders through the house again, planning, making lists of things that need mending or replacing. Flinging open the back door, he strides out into the garden. It is a long rectangular piece of land. The grass hasn’t seen a mower in years and there are nettles and brambles everywhere. At the end of the garden is an old oak tree. It looks just right for a treehouse for his son. And when the lawn is cut and the weeds are dug up, he’ll
have flower beds and a vegetable plot too. A real English garden for his family.

With his list of things to do in his hand, Janusz stands at the front door and watches the children playing on the wasteland beside the house. Hard to imagine his son Aurek will be one of them soon. Janusz is going to be a good father to the boy. He’s determined to get things right. In the grainy sunlight, the children laugh and leap, shrieking through the afternoon, their shouts mingling with the sharp-edged call of gulls from the quay. When Janusz hears the cries of women calling them home for tea, he locks up and walks back to spend his last night in lodgings.

At the town hall, he fills in forms and waits in queues for government vouchers for furniture and paint. The furniture comes from a warehouse near the bus station and is all the same: solid, square shapes in thin, dark-stained wood. He buys wallpaper from Woolworths: ‘Summer Days’ – cream-coloured with sprays of tiny red roses in diagonal lines. He gets enough for the front parlour and the main bedroom. He buys wallpaper for Aurek’s room too, asking the advice of a shop assistant, who says she has a son the same age.

He papers the hall and the kitchen in a pale beige, patterned with curling bamboo leaves and twiggy canes in soft green. Upstairs, rose-pink paint for the bathroom and landing. Aurek’s room has grey formations of aeroplanes flying across its walls. It’s a good-sized room. He’ll be able to share it with a brother one day if everything works out the way Janusz wants it to.

Every evening Janusz comes back from work and starts on the house, finishing only when he is too exhausted to carry on. When he lies down to sleep he has the impression his arms are outstretched in front of him, still painting and wallpapering.

Alone on his bed at night, he dreams. He enters his parents’ home, running up the porch steps. The heavy front door swings open and he calls for his mother but he knows he has arrived too late and everybody has gone. In one of the empty, high-ceilinged rooms is a dark-haired woman in a yellow dress. She stands up, takes off her dress and beckons to him, then maddeningly, quick as a fish in
midstream, the dream changes direction and she is gone. He wakes with a start, eyes open, heart thumping. He moves his hand towards the ache in his groin and twists his face into the pillow. This loneliness will kill him, he’s sure of it.

Victoria station is huge, and even at seven in the morning the place is noisy and full of lost people who grab Janusz by the elbow and ask him questions he can’t answer. He wipes the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief and checks his watch. He has been practising what to say to her when he sees her. ‘It’s been a long time’ is what he thinks he will say. It sounds casual and yet full of meaning.

He finds himself searching his mind for Polish phrases, but he’s been immersed in the English language for so long now he has lost the habit. It’s like trying to recall the names of half-forgotten school friends, requiring too much effort and an unwilling excavation of the past. Truth is, there’s too much nostalgia in his mother tongue. If Silvana can speak English it will be easier. They will be making a new life here and she will have to learn the language. ‘Welcome to Britain’ is another phrase he thinks he might use.

The platforms overflow with crowds. Suitcases are piled high on trolleys, and rag-and-bone bales of clothes and belongings are everywhere. People blur past in greys and browns and dark blues. He scans the crowd, trying not to think of Hélène, how he had once imagined it would be her he would meet like this after the war. Then he sees a woman looking his way. He stares at her and feels a jolt of recognition. Everything comes back to him. It is Silvana. His wife. His hand goes up to take off his hat, an awful, narrow-brimmed trilby. It came with his demob suit and he swears it’s made of cardboard. He smooths his hair, spreads finger and thumb across his moustache, coughs, clasps the hat in his hands and walks towards her. She is a wearing a red headscarf and, now he has seen her, she stands out in the colourless crowds like a single poppy in a swaying cornfield.

Janusz focuses on the headscarf until he is near enough to see the embroidered birds with flowing wings sweeping over her forehead and tucking themselves under her chin. She looks thinner, older, her
cheekbones more prominent than he remembers. As she recognizes him she gives a small cry.

A skinny, dark-haired child leaps into her arms. Is that Aurek? Is that him? The last time Janusz saw him he was just a baby, a plump toddler with baby curls. Not even old enough for his first haircut. He tries to see the boy’s face, to find some familiarity in his features, but the child clambers up Silvana like a monkey, pulling her headscarf off, his arms locking around her neck, burying his head in her chest.

Janusz stops still in front of them and for a moment his courage fails him. What if he has made a foolish mistake and these two are somebody else’s family? If all he has really recognized is the forlorn look the woman carries in her eyes and his own lonely desires?

‘Silvana?’

She is fighting the child, trying to pull her headscarf back on. ‘Janusz? I saw you in the crowd. I saw you looking for us …’

‘Your hair?’ he says, all thought of rehearsed lines gone from his mind.

Silvana touches her head and the scarf falls around her shoulders. She looks away from him.

‘I’m sorry.’ He doesn’t know whether it is the sight of her that fills him with apologies or the idea that he has already made her uncomfortable in his presence. ‘Really. I didn’t mean … How are you?’

Silvana pulls her scarf back onto her head and knots it under her chin. ‘The soldiers cut it.’

It’s hard to hear her clearly with the racket and grind of trains arriving and departing and guards calling across the platforms. He takes a tentative step closer.

‘We were living in the woods,’ she says. ‘Did they tell you? The soldiers found us and told us the war was over. They cut our hair off when they found us. They do it to stop the lice. It’s growing back slowly.’

‘Oh. It doesn’t matter. I … I understand,’ says Janusz, although he doesn’t. The child clutches something wooden in his hand. It looks vaguely familiar. Janusz frowns.

‘Is that the rattle your father made?’

Silvana opens her mouth to speak and then closes it again. He notices her cheeks colour slightly in a blush that disappears as quickly as it comes. But of course it is the rattle. She doesn’t need to say a word. The dark wood, the handmade look to it: it has to be. He smiles with relief, suddenly reassured. Of course this is his family.

‘You kept it all this time? Can I see it?’

He reaches out, but the boy pulls it to his chest and makes a grumbling sound.

‘He’s tired,’ says Silvana. ‘The journey has tired him.’

It’s a shock to see a child so thin. His son’s face has a transparency to it, and the way his skin is tight, revealing the cradling structure of bones beneath – it makes Janusz’s heart ache like a soft bruise.

‘Aurek? Small, isn’t he? Hello, little fellow. Don’t be frightened. I am your … I am your father.’

‘Your moustache,’ says Silvana, pulling the boy onto her other hip. ‘It’s different. It makes you look different.’

‘My moustache? I’ve had it for years. I’d forgotten.’

‘Six years,’ she says.

He nods his head. ‘And my family? Do you have news of them? Eve? Do you know where she is?’

Silvana’s eyes darken. Her pupils widen and shine, and he’s sure she is going to tell him Eve is dead. That they have all died. He holds his breath.

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know where any of them are.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I never saw them again after you left us.’

He’s been waiting for news of his family for years. He’d thought Silvana might arrive with letters from them, stories about them. Some information on their whereabouts. They stand in silence until Janusz speaks again.

‘Well, you’re here now.’

Silvana answers in a whisper and he has to lean in towards her to hear what she is saying.

‘I can hardly believe it. I can hardly believe we’re here.’

Janusz laughs to stop himself from crying. He presses her hand
into his, curling his fingers over hers. He feels tired suddenly. It is as much as he can do to look her in the eye.

‘I expect we’ve both changed … but it doesn’t matter,’ he says, trying to sound relaxed. ‘We’re still the same people inside. Time doesn’t change that.’

Even as he says it, he knows he is lying. She does too. He can see it in her eyes. The war has changed all of them. And Silvana’s hair is not just short. It has turned grey.

Silvana

The very first time Silvana saw Janusz he was swimming. It was late spring in 1937 and all about was a feeling of listlessness, as if the sudden appearance of the sun had turned the town into a child that wanted only to play in the streets all day. Silvana had finished her afternoon shift at the Kine cinema where she worked as an usherette. The daylight was always surprising to her after the dark interior of the cinema, and she stood on the pavement feeling the breeze playing with her skirt hem, the sunlight stroking her cheek. She was eighteen years old and all she knew was that she didn’t want to go home just yet. That to walk in the sun, though she had nowhere to go, was preferable to the damp silences that would creep over her the moment she entered her parents’ small cottage.

She wandered down the tree-lined main street, past the square with its water fountain and tall, crumbling houses, and took a dusty path into the shadows of the red-brick church and the presbytery. Once past those solid buildings she left the shade behind, the sunlight leading her down the road out of town. A few hundred yards ahead was her parents’ one-storey wooden house, painted the same blue as the other peasant cottages that surrounded the town. Silvana stopped and stepped off the road into an apple orchard. It had once belonged to her family but her father had sold it. He worked on other people’s farms now, gathering wood, harvesting, whatever the season asked of him. The trees were loaded with white petals, big clouds of blossom, the grass under the trees soft and wildly green. A scene of ripenings and hopes. She stood in the dappled light and breathed in deeply, knowing that whatever happened to her in life, wherever she
went – and she hoped it would be far away from this small town – she would always love this place.