22 Britannia Road (22 page)

‘It’s chickenpox,’ says the doctor. ‘It’s going round. Half the youngsters at the school are off with it. The fever will be gone by tomorrow morning. Then the spots will come.’

‘Chickenpox?’

‘My own son had it two weeks ago.’

Janusz relaxes. Aurek has something other children have. Something normal and curable.

‘Your son?’

‘A bit late really. My boy’s twelve, and I do think it’s better to get these illnesses done with earlier rather than later.’

‘So Aurek is a good age for chickenpox? He’s the right age for it? It’s a normal thing to have at his age?’

‘Well, yes, you could say that. If his temperature is still up tomorrow, let me know. But I’m sure it won’t be.’

Janusz looks at Aurek lying in bed and strokes the boy’s forehead. He is a normal child. Just like any other. The doctor has just said so. There is a whole world of renewed hope in chickenpox.

When Janusz wakes again at dawn and goes to see the patient, Aurek’s temperature has disappeared and a rash covers his body. The sight of these miraculous spots makes Janusz laugh out loud.

‘Hungry,’ says Aurek, picking at a row of tiny red blisters on his cheek.

‘Are you? Well, that’s a good thing. Come here and look out of the window. I’ve something to show you.’

Silvana is sitting on the edge of the bed looking dazed, as if the blue light of the morning beginning to edge into the room confuses her.

‘There,’ he says as they look down on a white world. ‘Snow. Lots of it. It must have snowed all night.’ He turns to Silvana. ‘You look exhausted.’

Silvana nods, yawns and rubs her eyes. She falls back onto Aurek’s bed and curls up into herself, arms wrapped around her knees. Janusz pauses, looking at her pale cheek, her long-lashed eyes closed as if she is sleeping. He remembers her when she was pregnant with their son, all those years ago, the way she liked to sleep in that position, her arms around her belly as though it were something she was guarding.

She opens her eyes. ‘Thank you for last night. You got the doctor and all I could do was act like a mad woman, calling for birch bark.’

‘You made me think of your grandmother.’

‘She was a good woman.’

‘So are you.’

Janusz takes her hand. This is the closest he has felt to her for
months. Aurek being ill has brought them together. And it is right that the boy is the bond between them.

‘I’ll never leave you again,’ he says. ‘Even if there’s another war. I won’t go.’

The moment is obvious to him.

‘Silvana. I think we should try for another child. Give Aurek a little brother.’

Silvana doesn’t reply, and he leans over her and kisses her, feeling her stiffen against his touch.

‘You’re tired,’ he says, pretending not to notice. ‘You should sleep. I won’t disturb you.’

He covers her with a blanket, tucking it around her.

‘Come on,’ he says to Aurek. ‘Let’s get you breakfast. Brush your teeth and wash and I’ll make you porridge.’

While the boy is washing, Janusz goes out into the garden. Everything is covered in white and the sky looks full of more snow to come. Feathery flakes fall steadily around him. In his tiny potting shed he checks his dahlia bulbs are well covered with sand. He is about to shut the door when he stops, lifts the crate of bulbs and pulls a bundle of letters out from under them. He puts them back under the crate. One day he will get rid of them. One day soon. He loves Silvana but he can’t let go of Hélène. Not just yet.

Aurek sits in the kitchen, his eyes sticky with sleep, eating a bowl of porridge. He feels quite well but he can’t understand where the spots have come from. He keeps lifting his pyjama top to look at them. He’d like to ask the enemy to look at them too, but he is busy. Janusz is sitting with his back to him, polishing his boots, buffing black leather, holding up a shining toecap to the light and then furiously rubbing at it all over again, his elbow sliding back and forth like a fiddle player.

‘Are you cold?’ Janusz says, turning his flushed face to Aurek. ‘I can get you a blanket if you’re cold.’

Aurek shakes his head and gives the spots on his cheek a scratch.

‘Don’t touch them,’ warns Janusz. ‘Come on, eat your porridge.’

Aurek takes a spoonful.

‘We’re all right together, aren’t we?’ says Janusz. ‘You and me?’

Janusz puts his boots on the floor and rubs them over with a cloth.

‘Would you like a brother one day? Or a sister? Aurek, are you listening? A new baby would be fun, wouldn’t it?’

Aurek considers this. He thinks of his mother and shakes his head. He doesn’t want to share her with a baby.

‘Well, we might one day. One day we might give you a brother, and you’d be the eldest. You’d have to help look after him.’

Janusz pulls his boots on.

‘We don’t get much time on our own, do we? Your mother keeps you all to herself. Tell me. Do you remember the forest you lived in?’

Aurek frowns. He hates these kinds of questions. He digs his spoon in his porridge and stirs it.

‘I’d like to hear about it,’ Janusz says. ‘When I get back from work you can tell me, hmm?’

Aurek’s mother never talks about the forest, and the enemy always wants to. Between them, Aurek feels like he is a secret neither will share properly. But the enemy is smiling at him, and Aurek tries to think of something to say that will keep the smile there.

‘When I was a baby I swallowed a button.’

‘What?’

‘I swallowed a button. You turned me upside down so I didn’t choke.’

The enemy smiles crookedly. ‘That’s right. You swallowed a button. I’d forgotten. But you can’t remember that, surely?’

‘Mama told me. Do I go to school now?’

‘No. You’ll have to stay home until all the spots are gone. I’m off to work. You be a good boy for your mother.’

Aurek follows Janusz to the front door, the tiles icy under his feet.

When Janusz does up his coat and opens the door, a blast of wind nearly knocks Aurek over.

‘A button,’ Janusz says. ‘Fancy that. I’d forgotten. You were always putting things in your mouth when you were a baby.’

Janusz stares out at the day steadily, like a horse that has suddenly lifted its head in a field and looked into the distance. Aurek shuffles closer. He stands behind Janusz’s legs and peers at the fluttering
snowflakes outside, at the houses on the other side of the road, their grey windows, the frozen milk bottles on the doorsteps. He touches Janusz’s hand. Perhaps the enemy will try to hug him today? If he does, Aurek will let him.

‘Would you like to make a snowman when I get back from work?’ says Janusz, looking down at him.

‘Now?’

‘No. Not now. After work. Men have to work, you know. You will too, one day.’ Janusz pulls his hat tight over his ears and rubs his hands together. ‘Shut the door behind me,’ he says, and then he is gone, marching away with his shoulders hunched against the cold.

‘Hurry back,’ whispers Aurek.

He goes upstairs, climbing into bed beside his mother, who looks like she is sleeping, her eyes shut, hair across her face.

‘Am I going to have a brother?’

Silvana opens her eyes. ‘What?’

‘A baby?’

‘No,’ she says, slipping an arm around him. ‘You’re everything we need.’

Aurek curls up beside her and feels glad. She’s right. They don’t need a baby.

Silvana

It began to rain and the camp turned muddy underfoot. Silvana had almost forgotten the war. Here it was as though they were far from everything, in another world. They lifted their beds higher off the ground, making pallets out of branches and fallen trees, but everything was soaked through and there was no way of drying anything.

The old man stopped getting out of his blankets, staying wrapped up in his own mess day and night. His wife let Gregor take his share of the food. Gregor sat chewing on dry bread while the old woman fussed over him, picking nits from his hair, smiling like an indulgent mother. Elsa and Lottie watched her, and Silvana saw the jealousy in their eyes. The old man stared at the canopy of branches above his head. Maybe he never saw the sky at all. Maybe he wasn’t looking that far.

Silvana took to wandering during the day, walking miles with Aurek on her back. Some nights she couldn’t bear the thought of Gregor so she stayed away from the camp at night too, taking her rabbit skins and making bracken beds for her and the boy. One morning she came back to find the old man staring harder than ever at the sky. The old woman was crying.

‘Is he dead?’ Silvana asked.

‘What?’ Sad-faced Lottie looked up. ‘Him? God, no. He’s not dead.’

‘Why do you ask a question like that?’ the old woman shouted. ‘Don’t I look after him? Is that what you are saying? I’ve cared for
that man all my life. What would you know? Who are you anyway? You never speak to us. You creep around with that child of yours like a thief in the night. What use are you to us?’

Silvana looked around for Elsa. Then she understood. Gregor had gone. He and Elsa had left in the night.

The women left the next morning just as it was getting light. They didn’t speak to Silvana, and she watched them gather their blankets and belongings. Lottie, the pianist, had stopped wearing her hair in a bun. Instead it hung down her back in thick coils. She and the old woman were bent over with the cold, moving like mirror images of each other. Two hags of the forest with twigs in their hair. Silvana was glad to see them go.

The old man died a week after they left. She tried to dig a hole to bury the corpse, but the ground was too hard and the old man was rigid. Besides, his blankets smelled bad, even in the cold. Silvana dragged him out of his shelter and let the snow that had begun to fall cover him. In hours he was frozen under a blanket of white. She wrapped Aurek in his rabbit furs, picked him up, pulled her coat tight around her and walked away. When the thaw comes, she thought, we will be far from here and the wild animals will have taken him. What she and the boy would be doing though, she had no idea.

Janusz

The farmer and his wife were quietly welcoming to Janusz. They gave him a room at the back of the house, helping him onto the metal-framed bed, where he lay flat on his back and stared at the cracked ceiling and dark beams, wondering if he would ever be able to move freely again. The farmer’s wife covered him with a damp sheet, dropping it lightly over him so that it covered not just his body but his face too. He blinked under the white cotton and felt like a corpse being laid to rest.

On his sunburnt skin, the sheet felt heavy. Just as he was about to move his stiff arms to lift it off him, two hands touched his face and folded the sheet back. He stared up at a girl in a yellow dress. The
colour reminded him of the buttercups that grew alongside the river back in his hometown.

He smiled at her and though pain cracked the peeling skin on his face he didn’t care.

‘What’s your name?’ he whispered.

She leaned over him. ‘Did you say something,
monsieur
?’

He swallowed, tried again to speak. ‘Your name?’

‘Hélène,’ she said. ‘Hélène Legarde,
monsieur
.’

For a week he lay in bed with a fever brought on by sunstroke. Hélène smeared olive oil onto his burns and gave him tiny sips of water. Her kindnesses made him dizzy with gratitude. She popped the blisters on his back and spread dressings over the raw skin. When she leaned across him, her breasts rested briefly against his chest, sending a bolt of electricity through his spine. He could smell the scent of her, the musky smell of her sweat. It made him want to reach out and touch her. At night he waited impatiently until dawn, when she checked him again.

Once a day she helped him outside to the middy, the ditch at the back of the old stone farmhouse. Hélène left him with a shovel and a bowl of ash, and he squatted in the blessed shade of the stone house, thinking about the simplicity of this family’s life and the sense of peace he had found here.

He walked back into the courtyard, lizards rushing through scorched grass at his feet as he interrupted their sunbathing. In the yard, dogs slept, noses resting on stretched legs. Chickens gathered by a barn door, lying in dirt to keep cool, spreading wing feathers out like fingers. Hélène was there too, her back to him, sweeping the terrace steps. He watched sweat spreading wetly across the back of her dress, making the summer print darken. She turned around, her breasts sliding towards each other as she grasped the broom with both hands and dipped her head, concentrating on her job.

Janusz walked towards her. ‘It’s too hot to work. You must be thirsty. Can I get you a drink?’

She looked up, and he took the broom from her.

‘A drink?’ she asked, her cheeks shining with heat. She walked over to the well in the middle of the yard and began pulling on a thick cord that dangled into its depths. Finally a metal bucket swung into view. She reached into it and pulled out a bottle of red wine.

‘Nice and cold,’ she said. ‘We have a drink together?’

Ipswich

Christmas at number 22 smells of cabbage, baked fish and calamine lotion. They open their presents on Christmas Eve and Janusz says next year they’ll wait and do it on Christmas Day like the rest of England.

‘Of course,’ says Silvana, who is too tired to argue, let alone think of another year. ‘Whatever you want.’

There is a second-hand Raleigh bike for Aurek and a promise from Janusz to teach him how to ride it. Silvana doesn’t want the boy riding a bicycle. She fears he will fall and hurt himself. Every time she looks at the bike, she imagines Aurek falling. She says nothing. Aurek leans it against the stairs in the hallway and polishes its wheel spokes with his handkerchief.

Silvana gives Janusz a brown paper bag of dahlia bulbs in sawdust. Janusz gives her perfume: Yardley English Lavender. She opens the bottle, breathes in and has a sneezing fit.

With the extra coal allowance the doctor gave them for Aurek, Silvana insists that they stoke the fire and keep the house warm. The snow hasn’t let up and the whole country is freezing. It’s on the radio and in the newspapers. The worst winter in years. She tells Janusz he should be proud: she read in a newspaper that it is Polish miners in Britain who are working round the clock to keep the coal supplies coming.