22 Britannia Road (26 page)

There they all are, Tony talking with his hands, gesturing to an imaginary audience; Janusz holding his hands firmly behind his back, speaking of work and the weather; Silvana turning a blank gaze towards the fire, the mantelpiece, the door, the sleeping form of Peter by the hearth, the area just above Tony’s right shoulder, the crease in his elbow. The corner cupboard behind his head.

‘I was just asking Silvana if you would like to take the boys to the woods after school next week,’ says Tony.

‘I don’t think we have time,’ Silvana says, trying to sound calm.

‘Well, if you do, I’d be delighted to meet up with you all on Tuesday.’

‘I don’t know if I can make it,’ says Janusz. ‘I’ll try, but we’re changing hours at work at the moment. I may be on nights again.’

‘Oh well, we can wait until you’re free, Jan.’

‘No, don’t wait for me. I’m trying to get in as much overtime as they’ll let me at the moment. I’m hoping for a promotion, in fact. But Silvana can go with Aurek. I know Aurek’s missed having Peter to play with. Silvana?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps. Please excuse me,’ Silvana says, rubbing her eyes. ‘I am tired. I think I’ll go up to bed.’

‘So I’ll see you and Aurek on Tuesday?’

Janusz and Tony are both looking at her.

‘Not next week,’ she says. ‘Perhaps another time, when Janusz is not working.’

She slips out of the door and hurries up the stairs, deciding she will sleep in Aurek’s bed tonight.

When she brushes her teeth and washes her face, she tries not to look at herself in the mirror. She doesn’t use her jar of cold cream. Her face can feel dry and sore. And she won’t brush her hair out tonight. Satisfied with the small punishments she metes out to herself, she takes off her new dress and lays it carefully on the chair in her bedroom, smoothing the fabric with her hand. The dress means no harm, after all. And it is new. It carries nothing inside it but the possible beginnings of her downfall.

She goes into Aurek’s bedroom and climbs into his bed. She waits for sleep to take her.
No dreams of Poland
, she thinks. Please, no dreams of planes and snow and the sound of children crying tonight. Aurek stirs in his sleep, throwing an arm around her, his skin hot against her neck.

Her intentions have always been clear to her. To give Aurek a father. If the boy is safe, she is safe.

‘I’ve got you, my darling,’ she whispers to Aurek, and she knows it is he who holds her. In the rough seas she feels she is floating in right now, it is the boy who is the life raft. Try as she might, she cannot lose this image. This floating in dark waters. But it is not her watery thoughts that bother her; it is the knowing that as surely as the boy holds her up, he is also pulling her under.

Silvana

Silvana woke to find an old man grinding snow into her chest. It was such a ridiculous sight she closed her eyes again, but still he went on, pushing and pummelling her until she couldn’t ignore him. She had snow in her mouth, and as she woke again she thought of the boy and tried to speak, to ask the man where her son was, but words wouldn’t come.

The next time she opened her eyes, Aurek was bundled onto her chest. She wasn’t lying on the red chaise longue but on a pile of logs on a sledge, a goatskin wrapped around her and the boy, being dragged through the forest.

They arrived at a cottage, where a dog barked and two women stood watching them. Silvana tried to focus, to see who they were, but she kept drifting into a light sleep. She saw one of the women bend towards her and Aurek being taken from her. Then she was picked up herself and carried into the cottage, where she was laid on the table, her clothes stripped from her.

‘Mama,’ said one of the women. ‘Maybe we should get them by the fire? She’s like a wet stone.’

‘No, too much heat’s bad for them. Antek, keep rubbing the boy with that towel, especially the skin that’s gone yellow. We’ve got to get them warm from the inside.’

Silvana heard them talking as she drifted in and out of consciousness. Had she been lucky? she wondered. Should they both have died? Or was it the boy’s luck that had saved them? She shut her eyes. Her head burned and her body felt like dough, but her heart filled with love for the child.

They were poor peasants, these people who had saved Silvana and Aurek’s lives, their clothes no better than rags. Several times when Silvana woke from the deep sleep she kept falling into for the first few days, she thought she was at her parents’ home again, her mother standing over her.

The woodsman was delighted by his rescue. He looked in on them each day as they began to recover. He was called Antek, and his wife, a smaller, sober version of Silvana’s own mother, was named Ela.

Ela stood crookedly, shaped by her meagre life like a tree shaped by the wind. When she walked she carried her head low, her back bent like a shelf for the snow to settle upon. She complained of stomach pains and drank bottles of medicine the colour of charcoal.

They had just one daughter, a stocky young woman called Marysia.

‘There are soldiers in the village, an hour’s walk along the river,’ Ela said as she sat massaging Silvana’s legs with goose fat. ‘You should stay close to the house.’

‘Germans?’ Silvana asked. She had been at the cottage for a couple of weeks and was just beginning to feel strong enough to take notice of where she was.

‘A few hundred of them. We have no problems with them.’

‘The villagers call us kulaks because they think we’re on the side of the Germans,’ Marysia said. ‘But they’re jealous because we don’t have to work for the soldiers like they do.’

‘The Germans are not so bad,’ Marysia told Silvana when her mother had left the room. ‘Some of them are better than the animals that call themselves men in the village.’

‘Such gentlemen to take our country,’ Silvana replied.

‘Let them take it,’ Marysia said. ‘They’re welcome to it. Before they came we were hungry. Now I have food whenever I want. And look –’ She lifted her skirts and turned an ankle, showing off a pair of laced brown boots with a small heel. ‘These come from Paris. I’d let you try them, but I don’t think you’d get them on.’

Silvana looked down at her swollen feet. Her toes were scarlet, her feet covered in a red rash that marbled up her legs, stopping just below the knees.

Marysia tutted. ‘You’ll have scars. What were you doing in the woods anyway? Were you hiding? Are you Jewish? The boy looks Jewish.’

‘My son is Polish. So am I.’

‘I don’t care either way,’ Marysia said. ‘My father thinks you and the boy are a couple of miracles. He’ll let you stay here as long as you like. I’ll let you stay as long as you pull your weight.’

Silvana stood up stiffly. It seemed as though she had lived many lives, that the day Janusz left her in Warsaw was the day one life ended and another began. And now here she was, starting again. A miracle no less. But she was nothing of the sort. She and the boy were foundlings from the forest, mysteries even to herself. In the kitchen, Aurek was sitting on Antek’s lap, wrapped in oilcloths. Antek was teaching him a song. ‘
Oto dziś dzień krwi i chwały
’, ‘Today is a day of blood and glory’.

The old woman sat watching in a chair by the fire.

‘Ah, there you are,’ Antek said. ‘Come and sit down.’ He handed Aurek to Silvana.

‘I was just saying how I thought you were nothing but a pile of old clothes when I found you. That’s all I thought you were: a heap of blankets. I found the chaise a few days before. Thought it might be useful. There’s lots of stuff in the woods now. People trying to get to the Russian side. They carry their furniture and belongings as far as they can, then abandon them. See that clock?’ A wide-hipped grandfather clock stood against the whitewashed wall. It had a hand missing and the front was made of a different-coloured wood from the body. ‘Mended it myself. I reckon it came from the same house the chaise longue came from. And then I saw you and I thought you were a pile of clothes.’

‘Do you think you could show me the chaise longue again, when the weather improves?’ Silvana asked. ‘I had a bag with me. I’d like to go back and try to find it. And a necklace. A glass pendant. It’s probably lost, but my husband gave it to me.’

‘I didn’t see a bag and I never saw a necklace. There was nothing but you and that broken seat.’

‘The things that come out of the forest,’ said his wife in a hushed voice. ‘You hear such stories.’

‘The drowned woman,’ said Marysia. ‘Tell us about the drowned woman.’

‘That’s a stupid story,’ grumbled Antek.

‘Go on, Mama, tell the story. I’m sure our guest wants to hear it.’

‘All right,’ said Ela. ‘She was a drinker, this woman. She had a son but that didn’t stop her. Her husband chucked her out. Kept the baby and threw her out in the street.’

‘She slept with different men,’ said Marysia. ‘Nobody knew who the father of her baby really was.’ She stared at Silvana. ‘Do you like a drink?’

‘Marysia!’ snapped her mother. ‘Are you telling the story or am I?’ She shifted in her seat and continued. ‘The woman went straight to the Jewish tavern in the village. When the bar closed, she wandered around in the dark and stumbled into the forest, where she fell into a deep pond. They found her there the next day, drowned. The child screamed and cried, and nothing would silence it.’

‘So what happened?’ Silvana asked.

Ela sat back in her chair. ‘She came back from the dead. Three days later she came back to suckle her son. The sound of him crying brought that wretched woman back. After that, she never left her cottage, never spoke a word, spun wool every night, prepared the meals and raised her boy. Her husband said he liked her better dead than alive.’

‘And it really happened,’ said Marysia.

‘Of course it didn’t,’ said the woodsman. ‘It’s a stupid tale you women like to tell. Why don’t you quieten down with all your nonsense and let me talk? At least I can tell God’s truth and not some story put about by women with too much time on their hands.’

He stood up and warmed himself by the fire.

‘You couldn’t have been there long. I found you just in time. I rubbed you down with snow as fast as I could. I used up so much snow I was sweating by the time I brought you round. Sweating in all that snow! It made me laugh out loud. I cleared an area this wide. Back to the earth. If I hadn’t decided to take that red chaise home, you would have died. Like I said, it’s a miracle I found you. Like God had left you there.’

Marysia snorted with laughter. ‘Either him or the devil.’

Silvana shifted Aurek on her knee and pretended not to hear.

Janusz

Every morning, at first light, Janusz breakfasted with the family before they worked the fields together. He learned how to manage vines and grow crops, and took charge of the vegetable garden. The famer’s wife showed him how to tend roses and care for the fruit trees in the orchards.

In the afternoons, when the heat was too much to work in and everybody slept, Hélène pulled Janusz into the barn, where they made love, salt settling on his lips, sweat stiffening his hair and dripping into his eyes, rivulets running down his back, between his buttocks. She seemed to turn the air thick with the heat of her lovemaking, always wanting more from him, always desiring him, loving him.

He couldn’t bear to let her out of his sight. He was so full of her he couldn’t understand his joy. He knew the war continued, but it didn’t matter to him any more. It was all somebody else’s business. He was not part of any of it.

The farmer asked Janusz if he was going to marry her. He didn’t want to know about Janusz’s past. He needed a man to work the farm. He wanted grandchildren. Lots of them.

‘If the Germans come down here, we’ll hide you. I know what war is like. I was a poilu in 1914. Stay here. Hélène’s a good girl. She’ll make you a good wife.’

‘I will, sir,’ said Janusz. He was so serious, he saluted the old man. And the old man stood to attention and saluted him back.

Ipswich

Janusz is counting on his promotion at work. He wonders if they will choose another man, a British man, over him. He is wearing his best shoes, the ones Silvana gave him, polished and bright. His hair is oiled, his face clean and his collar starched. There is not a man who works as hard as he does on the shop floor, of that he is sure. But will that be enough?

He waits in the office where the secretaries work, listening to the chatter of typewriters, and when the boss comes out of his glass-fronted booth, cigar in hand, Janusz asks him whether he has made a decision about who will replace Mr Wilkens as foreman. The boss tells him not yet, but he believes the Poles are all damn good workers. Janusz runs a finger around the inside of his collar, clears his throat, feels suddenly hopeful and says so.

The boss says he should be. He has a factory to run and doesn’t give a pig’s arse what the locals think of foreigners stealing their jobs.

‘But just don’t touch their women. We know what you Continentals are like. Young Lotharios, the lot of you,’ he laughs, and pats Janusz on the shoulder. Then he strides out, leaving Janusz alone in the room with six silent typewriters and six giggling secretaries looking at him as if they think he might be a Polish Casanova in blue overalls. It takes most of the afternoon for his normally pale cheeks to lose their red glare of embarrassment.

Janusz has always believed in things falling into place. He knows patience and a sense of duty will be rewarded. This belief comes from his father and his grandfather. He is one of Poland’s sons and has a steady understanding that right will somehow or other always be rewarded by right.

Like a stream trickling over pebbles will smooth and shape them,
so Janusz’s hopefulness is a slow and unending force that runs coolly through his life, rubbing, rolling and forming it. So when the chance to buy a car falls into his lap the same day the work promotion is almost his, he isn’t surprised at all.

It is a black Rover owned by a teacher and his wife. Made in 1940, it has a four-speed gearbox, a busted radiator and two flat tyres. In 1943, the teacher’s wife drove it in a snowstorm and crashed into an oak tree. Since then it has been in a barn under a tarpaulin. Janusz overhears a man telling the story during lunch break.