22 Britannia Road (21 page)

‘Who are you keeping yourself for?’ he asked. ‘Your husband is never coming back. He’s dead on a battlefield somewhere. Stop this ridiculous show of independence. It’s not worth it.’

His words broke something in her, and she gave a sob as she opened her arms to him, pressing her lips against his.

It was over fast. He was on her and Silvana was bucking under his fingers, already finished with him as he pushed himself inside her. Afterwards she lay in his arms, aware of Aurek next to her, fidgeting in his sleep.

‘You’d better go,’ she whispered.

‘I like you, forest girl,’ he said.

‘Please, just leave. I made a mistake. I’m sorry.’

Silvana heard him pissing against a tree. Gregor was a dog, a wolf with his pack. She felt like a fool.

Janusz

Janusz and Bruno left Yugoslavia in a fishing boat and arrived in Marseilles, sitting among piles of netting and baskets of fish. France was more beautiful than Janusz had imagined. Dusty yellow mimosa spread a buttery light across the hillsides. Stumpy palm trees and leathery blue agaves shimmered in the heat of an early spring.

They and the other men with them were told they should catch a train to Lyons, where they’d be given uniforms and an army rank. Bruno didn’t want to. He had plans to get to England. When the boat docked and they felt solid ground under them, Bruno pulled Janusz away and they slipped into the shadowy, labyrinthine streets of the old city.

The first thing they did was swim. They stripped off their filthy clothes and ran into the sea. While Bruno splashed and yelled, Janusz dived into the waves and swam out as far as he could. He drifted in
the swell of the waves, looking back at the coastline. The water was crystal clear. He was in a country he had only ever seen in books.

It was Janusz who strung enough French together to get them some rooms, and they ended up in a ramshackle, skinny building in Marseilles’ backstreets. Each day they walked to a small curve of beach near the port and sat in the sun.

‘You look like a lobster from the fish market,’ grinned Bruno through the smoke of a cigarette hanging from his mouth. ‘I’ve never seen a man so sunburnt.’

Janusz ignored him. ‘We can’t do this, just sit around all day. We need to join a French unit.’

‘Maybe, maybe not. I’m in no hurry right now. We can afford to stay for a week or so. If they want us, they can come looking. We can have a couple of weeks before we risk our lives again.’

Each day they hiked to different beaches. Each evening they walked back and ate in bars, plates of grilled octopus and orange sea urchins. Janusz pushed them around with his fork.

‘I don’t know how you can eat this,’ he said. ‘Why can’t we just have a steak?’

‘It’s cheap and it’s good,’ said Bruno. ‘Look over there.’ He nodded towards the waitress. ‘She’s pretty.’ Bruno pushed back his chair and got up from the table. ‘I don’t know what you are going to do tomorrow, but I think I’ll be busy.’

‘With her?’

‘Why not?’

Janusz turned his head away. ‘Do what you want.’ He didn’t think the girl would be interested in any case. Bruno barely spoke a word of French.

The next day, Bruno was still with the waitress and Janusz set off on his own. He found a beach and walked for miles until the sand gave way to rocks and boulders. Seagulls squealed as Janusz found their nests and took their eggs, large blue-white ovals. The birds wheeled and dived at him until he was forced to run, his hands above his head in surrender.

He walked in the tide, trouser legs rolled up, shirt tied around his waist. A heat haze rising off the waves made him dizzy and his head
began to throb. Sitting down by some rocks, he made a pillow out of his shirt and closed his eyes.

When he woke the sun had shifted around and he was in the full heat of its rays. Dizzy and thirsty, he wandered back to his rooms, where he drank a jugful of water and poured another over his head and neck. He lay down, soaking wet, cocooned himself in a sheet and thought of Silvana. He staggered up and hunted around until he found a pen and a scrap of paper by the side of Bruno’s bed. But he couldn’t think what to write. What could he say? I am in France in the sun and I hope you are safe with my parents? He dared not even think of her in Poland. He felt dumb and thick-headed. He put the pen and paper down and collapsed on his bunk.

That night he dreamed in his airless room that his tightening, burnt body had split open like a chrysalis. That another man, another Janusz, emerged from his skin and stepped slowly out into the airless night, eased from his shell by the sweat that poured off him. That this other man stood in the moonlight and loped through the streets until he came to the sea.

The Mediterranean, so clear and fresh by day, had turned silky black, and he paused for a moment at the water’s edge before wading out into it, letting the waves lick his raw new body. He was somebody else. He had been reborn from the air into water. A birth in reverse.

He woke with a terrible thirst. He tried to move, but the pain across his back stopped him.

He heard Bruno’s whispering voice, ‘Jan? Are you getting up today? Listen, there’s a camp in the hills above the city. I met some men last night. The Germans are making their way south. They should be here in a matter of months, maybe weeks. The men I met say we can join a military unit and get a boat to England. We need to move on. What do you think? Jesus, look at you.’

He held up the sheet.

‘God, man, you look terrible. Can you hear me? Look at you, covered in blisters. Jesus help you, you’re sunburnt all over.’

Bruno opened the windows, coughing. ‘You need air in here.’

Janusz opened his eyes. The wallpaper swirled. He tried to speak, but his lips cracked and he tasted blood again.

‘He cannot stay here.’

The landlady stood in the doorway, black and grey hair piled high on her head, coral-pink lipstick and spidery black eyelashes.

‘Stupid boy. You are too fair for the sun. Look at you. You’re dried out like a piece of salt cod.’

Janusz heard Bruno pleading in a broken mix of French and Polish. He forced his dry lips to whisper: ‘I am sorry, Madame. I’ll leave. It’s not safe for you to have me here.’ Levering himself off the bed on an elbow, he gestured to Bruno. ‘Hand me my clothes.’

‘No, no, no.’ The woman sighed. ‘You speak French; that makes it easier. I’ll find somewhere for you to go. I have a friend with a farm. You can rest there.’

She stared at his naked body. ‘When you’re better you can work for them. You’re stocky enough. You look like a peasant.’

A day later, Janusz set out, clothes sticky and uncomfortable, body stiff and painful. As the cart carried him higher into the hills beyond Marseilles the air became sweeter. The smell of the sea faded and was replaced by the scent of pine trees and hot greenery.

Ipswich

Silvana refuses to think of Tony. She avoids walking through the park and stays away from the pet shop. It is hard to keep him from her mind, but she manages it. Every time an image of Tony comes into her head – his brown eyes, his curling black hair shiny with oil, his hands moving as he talks – she clamps down on it, concentrating on the duster she is holding or the coal she is shovelling in the small coal store in the backyard. Like a tailor using only what material they have in their hand, she fashions her life with Janusz.

‘You’re not to play with Peter any more,’ she tells Aurek one evening as she prepares their supper. She busies herself at the stove, banging saucepans together loudly, scraping at their bubbling contents with a wooden spoon, her voice rising over the noise. ‘Aurek? Did you hear me?’

‘Why?’

‘Why?’ She throws the wooden spoon into the sink and faces the boy. ‘What do you mean, why? You will do as you are told, do you hear me? He’s not your friend any more.’

She doesn’t mean to, but the way the boy looks at her, defiantly, as if she is someone to be hated, makes her lash out at him, her hand connecting with his shoulder. He staggers and falls sideways, knocking himself against the table, then scrambles to his feet, backing away from her.

‘Aurek! No,’ she says, horrified. She has never hit him. Never. ‘No,’ she cries. ‘I’m sorry.’

Aurek darts out of the kitchen, through the hall, fumbling with the front-door latch before she can reach him. She grabs the door as he opens it, trying to catch hold of him, but he slips outside into the dark evening, straight out into the pouring rain.

She knows there’s no point in going after him, but she walks the streets, splashing through puddles, the blackness of the night pressing against her eyes. For an hour she searches, although she knows it is no use. He will not come back until he is ready.

‘Where on earth have you been?’ says Janusz when she comes back into the house.

She stands blinking in the hallway, her hair dripping water into her eyes. The house smells of burnt food, and she remembers the pans she left on the stove. The kitchen door is open and she can see a pall of cooking smoke drifting just above their heads.

‘It’s Aurek,’ she says. ‘He’s outside. He’ll come back. We have to wait.’

Two hours later, there is a knock at the front door and Aurek stands there, his clothes soaked through, hair plastered smooth and dark as an otter. It’s more than Silvana can stand. She pushes past Janusz, ignoring the way Aurek shrinks from her.

‘Aurek, let me dry you …’

Janusz puts his hand out and pulls her back.

‘Leave him to me. Come on, young lad. Let’s get you dry.’

Aurek looks darkly at Silvana and then puts his hand in Janusz’s outstretched palm. He might as well have stabbed her with a knife.

Silvana sits on the top stair listening to Janusz talking to the boy in his bedroom, explaining that he must not run off. Slowly, it occurs to her that this is something she should be pleased about: the fatherly tone in Janusz’s voice, the quiet sternness. Instead she feels bereft. They don’t need her. Neither of them. They don’t need her at all.

A week later, when Aurek has still not forgiven her, he comes down with a fever. His temperature rises and by the following evening he is as floppy as a rag doll. Silvana pulls dried herbs from jars in the pantry: thyme, stonecrop, willow bark, lavender, all the plants she has gathered and dried through the summer months. She runs a cold bath and throws the herbs into it.

‘Get in,’ she tells Aurek, who is staggering weakly beside her.

Janusz stands at the bathroom door.

‘He’s shivering. Are you sure it’s a good idea? We’ve got aspirin. Can’t you give the boy some aspirin and put him to bed?’

She is not listening. Aurek is ill and it is all her fault.

‘Let me at least look after my son,’ she snaps as she lifts the boy into the bath. ‘This will bring his fever down. But I need birch bark. The fever has to be broken. You’ll have to find some trees. Get me some bark and I can boil it and then add it to the bath. It’s the only way to bring a fever down.’

‘Where the hell am I going to find birch trees?’

‘I tell you, I need birch bark.
Brzoza
. There’s a copse of birches in Christchurch Park. I’ve seen them. If you won’t go, I’ll do it.’

Silvana knows she sounds like a mad woman. Maybe that is what her time in the forest has done to her. The war has turned her into a Baba Jaga, an old witch of the forests. And it is her fault the child is ill. Worse, she does not know what to do. She looks at Janusz and waits to hear what he has to say. He’s the English one here.

Aurek wraps his arms round his knees and coughs. His ribs shine under the water and he coughs again, sending a spasm through his shoulders.

‘I can’t go into the park at ten o’clock at night,’ Janusz says. ‘For God’s sake. That’s enough of this. Get Aurek into his pyjamas and wrap him up in bed. I’ll go for the doctor.’

‘A doctor?’

‘That’s what he needs. Get him out of the bath. His lips are turning blue.’

She turns her eyes on the child and nods. ‘Yes. You’re right. A doctor. A doctor will know what to do.’

She lifts Aurek, water dripping down the front of her dress, and the child, still burning hot to the touch, faints in her arms. Memories rush towards her, panic rising in her chest. The mud underfoot. The fur coat covered in blood. She is a terrible mother, cursed just like her own mother.

‘Janusz, hurry!’ she screams, but he has already gone. She holds her son tight in her arms and sobs into his neck.

It is raining hard; icy rain that is turning to sleet. Janusz nearly tumbles off his bike, freewheeling down the hill, skidding through freezing puddles. He pumps the pedals, bent over the handlebars,
wanting to get to the doctor’s house as fast as he can. Silvana’s fear has taken him over. He no longer thinks the boy just has a bad cold. Now other diseases crowd his thoughts.
Polio. Tuberculosis. Pneumonia
.

The sleet stings his face and he turns off the main street, hurtling up a gravel driveway. Nothing is more important than the boy. Pedalling like a fury, energy surging through him, he can feel a tight knot of love for his strange son, lodged in his heart, snug as a bar of metal in a lathe. The relief he feels when he sees a light still on in the doctor’s front rooms is so great he throws his bike to the ground and takes the steps onto the porch two at a time, banging on the door with his fists so that the doctor’s wife opens the door angrily, scolding him for scaring her half to death.

The bedroom is cold. It is the first thing Janusz notices when he shows the doctor into Aurek’s room. He doesn’t bother to take the man’s coat. The way he has left it buttoned up suggests he doesn’t want to part with it.

‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ says the doctor, rubbing his hands together briskly. ‘He’s going to be all right.’

Janusz realizes he has been holding his breath. He sighs with relief. Silvana has tidied the room in the time he was absent: Aurek’s books are lined up; the picture of puppies in a wicker basket hangs straight; the rug looks like she might have swept it. She has forgotten her wet dress, and it clings to her. Janusz finds himself studying the line of her suspender belt, which shows clearly against the soaked fabric. It’s been so long since he last touched her. He turns to face the doctor, hoping he has not seen him staring.