22 Britannia Road (33 page)

‘Don’t speak like that.’

Aurek pushes her away from him again and Silvana gives up. She stands looking at him. He still has mud in his hair and up his legs. Against the white skin of his calves he looks like he is wearing black ankle socks and garters. She wants to plant him in the bath and scrub him clean, but she knows he won’t let her.

‘All right.’ She sighs. ‘Whatever you say.’

She goes downstairs and watches the fishing boats again. She doesn’t know how long she sits like that, but suddenly she is aware of Aurek beside her, stroking her hand, leaning his head against her shoulder.

‘I want to go home.’

‘Soon,’ she promises, wrapping an arm around him. ‘Soon. We’ll be all right, my darling. You’ll see.’

She puts Aurek to bed in the camp bed Tony produces from a cupboard. He pulls it out of a green canvas bag with pale stencilled letters and numbers on the front and a stamp saying it is the property of the British Army. It’s a clattering mix of strong cotton twill,
webbing and wooden dowelling that he folds out and assembles into a bed.

The boy climbs in and digs a nest out of his blankets, pulling them over him so that Silvana cannot kiss him goodnight. She doesn’t blame him. She pats the covers and goes downstairs. In the living room Tony stands waiting for her.

‘In bed, is he?’

‘Yes. He’s sleeping in his clothes. I forgot to bring pyjamas.’

‘I think I’ve got some. In a box around here somewhere. Woolworths cotton flannel. I can have a look.’

‘It doesn’t matter tonight.’

Tony steps towards her and wraps his arms around her. He lifts a stray strand of her hair from her cheek, and she feels the tenderness in his touch. It makes her legs shake. Kindness is the last thing she must have. Her heart twists and aches. Does she love two men? Is that possible?

‘Tony, do you think he heard us?’

‘Who?’

‘Aurek. Do you think he heard what I said to you? In the flat?’

Tony sighs. ‘No. He couldn’t have. Look, I’ll have to go to Ipswich tomorrow. I always have Sunday lunch with my parents-in-law and I need to see Peter. I’ll come back in the evening. I’ll get you settled in, but I will have to go back to Ipswich on Monday afternoon. I haven’t got enough petrol to keep toing and froing. I can be here Friday night. In the meantime, if anybody does speak to you, if the neighbours ask you what you are doing here, I think it might be best to say you are a housekeeper. Best for you. Just to begin with.’

‘Housekeeper?’

‘Yes. Sounds a bit more respectable, doesn’t it?’

She thinks back to the ship that brought her to England. The two choices women had. To be a housewife or housekeeper.

‘More respectable than what?’

‘Silvana, you’ve left your husband. People know me round here. They know I live on my own. I don’t want you to be gossiped about. I want to keep you safe, that’s all.’

Oh
, she thinks.
Oh.
Then it dawns on her that he is afraid of people believing she is his mistress. She begins to cry, and he hands her his handkerchief.

‘It’ll be all right,’ he whispers. ‘Come on now, don’t cry. It’ll all be all right. You know I care for you.’

They listen to the radio, Tony cocking an ear towards it, repeating lines and laughing as if he is alone and not sitting in a room with somebody else’s wife. She can see he has the habits of someone used to living alone. When it ends, they sit in silence for a while. Silvana looks around the room.

‘All these boxes. I had no idea …’

‘That I was a black marketeer? No, I’m not really. I get asked for certain things and I supply them. Once rationing ends, I’ll do something else. Lucy’s father got me into it. He was offered some cheap rum from the navy stores at the docks. He’s a member of a gentlemen’s club in Ipswich and the club agreed to buy the rum. He couldn’t do the deal himself – he’s a magistrate, after all. So I stepped in and we split the cash. That’s how it all started. Once you know the right people, it’s easy.

‘Everybody’s doing it. There’s a man at the Food Office in Ipswich who forges purchase permits for grocers. So, for instance, Mr Blake at Lipton’s gets tenfold the amount of sugar he should get. The surplus he sells on to me. I sell it off ration. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. Like I say, everybody’s doing it.’

Tony gets up and goes into the kitchen. ‘All these boxes will be gone in a day or two,’ he calls out. ‘Don’t you worry about them.’

He comes back with two mugs of cocoa.

‘This’ll make you feel better,’ he says, handing her a mug. ‘I’ve put a dose of whisky in it. It’ll help you sleep.’

She is aware of his eyes upon her. They have a softness in them that could trip her up.

‘I’m usually on my own in the evenings,’ he says. ‘In the flat above the shop. I used to think of you and wonder what you were doing. And now here you are. Right here with me.’

‘I won’t be staying long,’ she says quickly, and sees the sudden alarm in his face, the way the colour changes in his cheeks. She
straightens her back, drinks her cocoa and summons all the contrariness she has left in her character.

‘It’s very kind of you to help us in this way, but we will go home soon.’

She gets up, takes his mug from him and walks into the kitchen. Tony follows her, standing behind her while she washes up in the sink.

‘Will you really go back?’

‘Janusz will want to see Aurek. He’s his father. I’ll stay here for a few days or so and then we will have to go.’

‘Do you think so?’ says Tony, and she can hear the sadness in his voice.

‘Yes, I do.’

Silvana runs the water away down the sink and turns to face him.

‘Shall we go up?’ he says, offering her a towel for her hands.

The staircase is wooden, no carpet runner, just brass stair rods, piles of newspapers and dust everywhere.

‘Beggar’s velvet,’ says Tony when he sees her looking. ‘That’s what Lucy called those dust balls that gather in corners. This place needs a clean.’

‘I’ll clean tomorrow,’ Silvana says, trying not to jump at the sound of his dead wife’s name. This was her house and he is still proud of her. Proud, too, of the way she made poetry from skin flecks and hair and household dirt.

Tony stands with his hand on the door to the bedroom. He looks at her and she wants to say,
Please, don’t ask that of me tonight
, even as she knows that she will do what he wants.

‘When you kissed me today, Silvana, it was all I could do to stop myself from making love to you there and then.’

So
she
kissed him? Is
that
what happened? It’s not how she remembers the moment at all. Surely it was Tony who made the first move?

He presses against her, full of wanting, his tongue searching her mouth. His hands hold her hips and she feels his penis through his trousers, its insistent blunt-ended heat pressed against her. Silvana doesn’t move. She is cold in his embrace and she knows he feels it.

Memories blaze through her mind. Now her secret is out in the
open she is living through the death of her son all over again. She can see the woman she handed him to. See the woman’s face, her cheeks pinched by the cold, her eyes watering in the wind. She still can’t understand how she could have been so careless. How could she have given her son to someone else?

Tony stops kissing her. He lets his lips linger on her cheek for a moment. Runs a hand through her hair and steps away from her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers.

‘You can have the room next to Aurek’s,’ he says. ‘I hope it’s not too cold in there on your own. I can put an extra blanket on the bed.’

Silvana is so relieved she even manages a smile.

‘It’s all right,’ he says, turning away from her. ‘You just need some time, that’s all.’

She sits in her room, waiting for Tony to settle in the bedroom next door, listening to the sound of him undressing: the trill of a zip and the pop of buttons being released; the rustle of a shirt being eased off his back, the polite unfolding of pyjamas. The creak of mattress springs as he gets into bed, and finally the click of the lamp.

When Tony’s bed springs cease their unsettled squeaking, Silvana tiptoes downstairs, picking up a few of the newspapers piled on the stairs. Tired as she is, sleep is not going to come tonight.

In the sitting room at the front of the house she flicks through old newspapers. Many of them contain photographs of children: groups of them standing in train stations and public halls, carrying boxes and suitcases, all of them labelled like lost luggage. She studies them for hours, the hollow eyes of the children staring back. What if Aurek has a mother somewhere? Did she save the boy or steal him? What if there is a woman somewhere, waiting for her son to come home to her?

She turns off the lamp and sits in the dark, staring out of the window, imagining the sea, listening hard for the sound of the waves, rolling in and out, in and out, like the breath of Tony and Aurek asleep upstairs. When a damp-looking daylight seeps across the sky and the seagulls begin noisily circling the pier, she finds a broom and starts cleaning the house.

Ipswich

The sun is low in the sky and in the garden everything is disappearing into shadow. All Janusz’s roses, his plants and the neatly mowed lawn are disappearing into the night. Janusz leans his head against the window in Aurek’s room and listens to the empty house, the gloomy weight of silence. He lies down on the bed and watches the dark reaching into the room, turning the wardrobe into a huge black cave.

His son. All these years his son has been dead and he has never known. His Aurek. He can’t even think of the boy he has been loving in his place. She brought a stranger into his life and told him he was his son. And did the boy know he was an imposter? Was he a liar too?

He tries to imagine the forest Silvana lived in. Is that where she learned to be so ruthless? He read a newspaper story just the other day about some soldiers who, unable to believe the war was over, were still stumbling around in European forests, their beards full of moss and twigs, their eyes half blind in the murky woodland light, living on rabbits, mice and squirrels.

He should have let them be. Left Silvana to her wildness. Hélène’s family would have welcomed him. He could have gone there after the war, gone to France and found work in Marseilles. Or Canada. There’d been work offers for ex-servicemen in Canada. He could have started a new life there. That’s what he should have done.

He’d imagined peacetime would bring him a sense of belonging. During the war it had kept him going, that thought of peace. He’d believed in it, like a season he knew would arrive one day. War had been winter all the way, years of Decembers and Januaries. Peacetime was meant to be summer. And he’d thought it had finally arrived when he’d got this house, this life in a small English town, his wife and son.

He gets up, rubbing his aching head, and turns on the light. He opens the window, breathing the night air, sniffing for the scent of woodland, the whiff of pine, the tang of mushrooms and moist earth. A faint smell of bonfires and compost heaps is carried on the breeze. Closing the window, he notices the frame is rotten around the latch.
He’ll get on and mend that tomorrow. The house is the only solid thing he knows, and he’ll be damned if he’ll let that fall apart too.

He tidies Aurek’s bed, plumping the pillow and picking up the striped pyjamas he finds underneath it.

And not even a proper burial. He can’t stop thinking about that. She left his son’s body in a handcart. His son. How can he ever forgive her for that?

In his own bed, he lies awake, unable to sleep. He still has the boy’s pyjamas in his hands. He wants to believe Silvana has made a mistake. Surely she is lying about Aurek? Janusz drops the pyjamas onto the floor. He knows she isn’t. He saw the truth in her eyes. His son is dead. He stares at Silvana’s empty bed. He feels fear, a tight knot in his guts, a wartime feeling; the unsteady world Silvana inhabited has become his.

He lights a cigarette, burns his fingers watching the flame run down the match. Does it again, black soot on his thumb, the skin reddened, pain mounting inside him and so much grief it could break him open, grief for not one son but two.

Felixstowe

Aurek is listening to the seagulls. It is not yet light and the sky is still laced with stars, but the birds are mewling like forsaken kittens. He opens the sash window, leans out and copies the birds’ cries until a woman a few doors down, ugly, with a stormy face, looks out of her own window and tells him she’ll hang, draw and quarter him if he doesn’t shut the bloody hell up. He gets back into the camp bed and tries to sleep, hoping he’ll wake again and find himself back in his own bed in Britannia Road.

They have been in Felixstowe for five days. He is still wearing the clothes he arrived in, and his mother doesn’t seem to notice if he is there or not. In the evenings she sits looking through the piles of newspapers, showing Aurek pictures of children he doesn’t want to see. He doesn’t know them. Why should he want to look at them? And she doesn’t know them either, so why does she cry over them?

Tony has gone back to Ipswich. He said he had to keep the pet shop open, that he had to keep to his usual habits in order to avoid arousing any suspicion. He looks at Aurek as if he is a bad boy.

When Tony left he promised he would come back at the weekend. Aurek didn’t understand why, but when he said that, handing his mother money, telling her it had to last for the week, it made her cry.

Men disturbed them last night, Wednesday, knocking on the door, taking cardboard boxes away and bringing bales of cotton sheets. His mother told them she was Tony’s housekeeper. The men lifted their hats and thanked her, and they, too, handed her money. Aurek hid from them. He made a nest in a bale of sheets.

During the day, his mother moves like a sleepwalker. She wanders the beaches and he follows her, trailing along behind, kicking sand
and picking up shells and broken glass. When he is hungry she buys him candyfloss: pink and green clouds of it, which make his teeth ache and his mouth water. Lovely sweetness dissolves on his tongue and he takes wild bites, the roughness of sugar on his cheek, gobs of it in his hair. If he eats it like that, his mother stops walking and watches him. Sometimes she even smiles for a moment. Then she drops her head, studies her feet and walks on again.