22 Britannia Road (13 page)

She sees Aurek coming up the hill and runs to meet him, hugging him to her, kissing him, the relief of finding him overshadowing her anxiety. He is safe. That’s all that matters.

The other boy is short and square. It surprises her to see such plumpness. It is rare to see a child that looks so well fed. Perhaps he is a farmer’s child. Doris says the Suffolk farmers are the only ones not to have suffered from rationing; that they fill themselves up on eggs and pies and home-cured hams and sausages. Yes, that’s it. He is a peasant’s child. A prosperous peasant’s son, and his family will be very angry when they find him here with Aurek.

‘Your teacher says you were not at school,’ Silvana tells Aurek. ‘She says she will get the police next time. The police!’ She shakes him by the shoulders. ‘Do you want them to take you away from me? And you bring another boy with you. What will his parents say? What will your father say? Come in and get out of those wet clothes and get by the fire. You look frozen. Go on. Hurry up.’

‘What did she say?’ Peter whispers to Aurek.

‘We have to go in.’

‘Yes,’ snaps Silvana. ‘Yes. In. Go!’

In the front parlour, Silvana undresses Aurek and asks the other boy his name.

‘Peter Benetoni.’

‘In Polish, you are called Piotr. But because you are a boy and not a man we say Piotrek.’ She pauses. He is not listening to her. He’s looking at Aurek as if they are sharing a private joke, laughing at her accent.

‘You too,’ she says to Peter, more sharply than she means to. ‘You take your clothes off. They are soaking wet.’

She hands him a towel and leaves the room, coming back with
fresh clothes when she thinks enough time has elapsed for the fat, sniggering boy to undress and dry himself.

She is helping Aurek into his pullover when somebody knocks at the door.

‘If that’s my dad,’ says Peter, ‘he’s going to kill me.’

‘Nobody will kill you,’ says Silvana. ‘I will talk to him. Tell him you boys made a mistake.’

She stands in the hallway, the shape of a man darkening the coloured glass pane in the door. She ties her headscarf tight and opens the door, preparing words in her head. She will explain that the boys meant no harm.

‘Good afternoon,’ the man says, lifting his hat. ‘I am Peter’s father. Mr Benetoni.’

Silvana forgets her words. Something in the man’s smile makes her forget to speak. Everything about him, from his polished shoes to his trilby hat and even his thick head of hair, shines like something brand new. If the price labels were still attached to his clothes she wouldn’t be surprised at all.

She realizes she is staring like an idiot and looks quickly at the ground, as if she has dropped something. His shoes are brown leather lace-ups. Elegant shoes. They must be handmade. Her eyes take in the turn-ups of his sharply creased trousers. The man is the newest-looking thing she’s seen in years.

‘I’m Peter’s father,’ he says, extending his hand to her.

They shake hands and still she doesn’t look up because she’s blushing now. His hand is wide and fleshy and he encloses her own small fingers gently, the way you would hold a small bird.

‘He is here, isn’t he, Peter?’

‘Yes,’ she says, trying to pull herself together. ‘Yes, he is here.’

She invites him inside and he fills the hallway. He looks well fed like his son, a double chin framing a large-nosed face and bright, concerned eyes. He has dark curls that glisten with hair oil. This is not a peasant farmer. Not at all. Silvana looks at his broad chest and imagines him as an opera singer.

‘I’m very sorry, Mr Benetoni,’ she says. ‘Please do not be angry with the boys. Aurek is very sorry.’

‘Call me Tony,’ he says. He speaks slowly, his voice careful and steady. ‘I’m not angry. What does a day missed from school matter? Peter is often in trouble at school. He hasn’t had an easy life.’

And then he launches into his own story, which is not at all new. They stand in the hall with the door half open, and Silvana has not even asked him if he would like to take his coat off, and he is telling her about his wife who died.

‘I lost her just after Peter was born,’ he says, holding his hands out, splaying his thick fingers as if sand is spilling through them.

Silvana would like to stop him talking. She doesn’t need his sad stories. She has enough of her own, and anyway, the world is full of sad stories. But this man carries on as if he has come to the house explicitly to tell her, and she is drawn in by him. She can feel her head tipping to one side as she listens.

He is a foreigner too. Italian parents who came to Suffolk and worked in the cider orchards. He was born and brought up in England, and lost his mother when he was just a child. When he was old enough to leave school, his father moved to Kent but Tony stayed in Suffolk and married a local landowner’s daughter. Her parents were furious. She had married down.

‘Down?’ Silvana is not sure what this means.

‘Down. She was upper-class. They thought I wasn’t good enough for her. Once we had Peter, they changed their minds. They’ve been very good to me. And then, after the birth of Peter, my wife became ill and died.’

He tells her how, when Italy entered the war, he was interned, separated from his parents-in-law and his son and sent to prison, despite all the influence his father-in-law wielded in town.

‘Local politics,’ he said. ‘A lot of people profited from the war, and my father-in-law was on the wrong side of certain people at that time. He got me out eventually, but it took some time.’

Silvana struggles to keep up with his story; it is long and winding and involves different places – the Isle of Wight, a prison in Kent, other places in England she has never heard of – and the machinations of local councils and crooked government officials. She finally edges round Tony and shuts the front door. Then she
finds she is stuck between him and the staircase. Peter opens the parlour door.

‘Hello, Dad.’

‘Peter, what are you wearing?’

‘I got wet. These are Eric’s clothes. He lent them to me.’

They are so obviously small for him that Silvana wants to apologize for making the boy look ridiculous. ‘Not Eric,’ she says. ‘
Aurek
.’

‘Well,’ says Tony. ‘We must make sure you give them back to him. Peter, what am I to do with you? Why are you getting other boys into trouble?’

‘Oh, no,’ says Silvana, climbing the stairs slightly to give herself a better vantage point to look at them all. ‘Don’t be angry with Peter. Aurek doesn’t like school either.’

‘He’s my friend,’ says Peter.

Silvana likes the boy suddenly. If he is a friend to Aurek then he is a friend to her. No matter that he is a child with no obvious graces.

‘I blame myself for his misbehaviour,’ says Tony. He addresses her as if they are alone. ‘I never liked school and I have always told Peter that. It’s my own mistake.’

Silvana suddenly remembers she has not offered him something to drink. Janusz would think this unforgivable. What should it be, tea or sherry?

‘But I must make you tea.’

She takes a hurried step down, misjudges the stair and swings into mid-air, falling forwards. Peter’s father catches her.

He has strong arms, this man. She can smell the lemony scent of him. Clean and soapy. What on earth is she thinking? His cheek shows a shadow of dark stubble. Dashing. She read that word on a cinema poster just the other day.

This man is dashing.

He carries on talking, setting her upright, ignoring her excuses and discomfort, as if women always fall into his arms, telling her how he breeds canaries and owns a pet shop.

Not an opera singer then.

‘No, it’s very kind of you but we mustn’t take up any more of your
time,’ says Tony. ‘I must say, it has been a real pleasure to talk to you, Mrs …’

‘Please, my name is Silvana.’

‘Silvana. What a beautiful name. And I will make sure Peter brings back the clothes you’ve lent him.’

As Silvana and Aurek walk them to their car, Janusz appears, walking up the hill, back from work, a newspaper and his dictionary under his arm, his face grimed with oil and dirt.

‘This is my husband,’ she says, glad to see Janusz’s welcoming smile. She feels exhausted by Peter’s father and all his talk, exhausted by her own girlish reaction to him earlier. She wants her husband beside her. He knows how to talk to people. She has long ago lost the skill.

‘What a view you have up here,’ Tony says to Janusz after they shake hands. ‘I’ve always liked this terrace. I know a couple who live in the street, the Holborns?’

‘Doris and Gilbert? The Holborns are our neighbours,’ says Janusz. ‘Yes, we know them very well.’ He sounds proud. ‘Everybody keeps to themselves here, you know how it is. But the Holborns are very friendly.’

‘I should call in on them again. I haven’t seen Gilbert in ages. If you see them, say hello from me. Tell them if there’s anything they need they can give me a call.’

Janusz doesn’t get angry with Aurek that night. Nobody mentions the truancy. Instead Janusz says he is pleased Aurek has found a friend.

‘A black Wolseley? That’s a lovely car to own. I wouldn’t mind a car of my own. Hey, Aurek? That’s what we’ll get one day, and I can drive you out to the woods to play.’

Silvana remembers Janusz as a young man, always mad about cars. It reminds her of who they both once were. He hasn’t changed. She feels something move within her, as though someone has put his hand on her heart and squeezed it. It is love. Not just gratitude but real love.

‘You look different,’ he says.

‘Do I?’

‘Yes. There’s something about you today.’

She laughs, a womanly sound. She can feel a warmth inside her, as if the sun has been shining on her. Janusz puts his arms around her waist and kisses her. She closes her eyes and breathes in the scent of his skin. It takes her back to the riverbank where they met, to the dusty seats of their hometown’s cinema, where their hands touched in the dark.

Is it really possible that meeting Peter’s father, the man with a brand-new smile, has nudged the block of coldness wedged inside her for so long?

Silvana

Silvana walked away from the wreckage of the plane and sat down at a crossroads beside an abandoned, wooden handcart and a pile of spilled blankets. She sat there for a long, long time. The rain turned to sleet. She put on her fur coat and cradled her child inside it. He was crying lustily and the sound was something wonderful to her.

Someone stopped in front of her and she looked up. A woman stared down at her.

‘Go away,’ Silvana said. ‘Get away. Get away from my baby.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ the woman said briskly. ‘I don’t want your child. I want you to get up. You’re going to die sitting here in the cold.’

She was older than Silvana, and even in that terrible weather, wearing, as she was, a man’s overcoat and peasant boots, she had a worldliness about her, an aura of sophistication that made Silvana see her not as she was, with her ragged clothes and thin pale face, but as she could be, as she probably had been, a red-lipped pouting beauty with diamonds in her hair.

‘Come on,’ the woman said, frowning so that her pencil-thin eyebrows creased. ‘Get up off your arse and get moving.’

Silvana sat up straighter, tried to tidy her hair. ‘Leave me alone. Just go away.’

‘I am not going away. You and the child will die of the fucking cold if you don’t get up. And what is the point of leaving those blankets in the mud? Pick them up and wrap them around him. He looks half frozen.’

Something in the woman’s voice, the clear commanding sound of it, made Silvana get up, picking up the blankets as she did so.

‘His name’s Aurek,’ she said. She lifted the boy so that the woman could see him. ‘This is my son. I’m his mother. I lost him and then I found him.’

‘Did you? Well, you’re the sorriest-looking mother I ever saw.’

The woman held out a pair of flat, lace-up leather shoes. ‘Here, take these. You can’t go barefoot, you’ll get frostbite. They’re all I have. They’re dance shoes, although with that wound on your ankle, you don’t look like you’ll be dancing for a while.’

The woman’s name was Hanka. She said she sang in clubs in Warsaw, and named places Silvana had never heard of.

‘I was going to get my big break and sing with an American orchestra, then Hitler messed things up for me.’

Hanka laughed. ‘You’re lucky I met you. I’ll look after you. You and your miserable baby.’

They walked together along muddy roads and endless tracks, until Hanka finally persuaded a farmer to let them stay in his barn.

‘Do you have any money?’

Silvana shook her head. She’d spent the savings she and Janusz had on the bus journey and food along the way.

‘Jewellery?’

Silvana looked at her wedding ring. She touched her throat and felt the small glass medallion Janusz had given her.

‘No,’ she said.

Hanka frowned, hands on hips. She grabbed Silvana’s hand.

‘Give me your ring. We need food, right? Then give me your ring.’

Silvana watched as Hanka handed over her wedding ring to the farmer.

‘Is that all?’ the man asked.

Hanka put her hand on her hip and looked slyly at him. ‘What else do you want?’

She walked away and he followed her into a stable. Silvana stood in the farmyard waiting. The farmer came out later, pulling his belt tight on his britches, telling them they could stay as long as they liked.

‘Oh now, don’t look so worried,’ Hanka told Silvana afterwards
when the farmer’s wife had silently brought them dishes of beetroot soup and cups of hot tea.

‘He won’t touch you. I’ve told him you’re out of bounds. You need to wise up.
Hart ducha.
It means strength of will. That’s what you need, Silvana. I can sell myself if I must, but I am my own person. I do what I want. Look at you. Let me guess. You married a peasant and this is your child, whom you believe will make your fortune one day.’

‘My husband is not a peasant,’ Silvana replied. ‘He is an engineer.’

‘Ah, a clever peasant,’ she said. ‘And where is he now?’