22 Britannia Road (27 page)

He turns to the man drinking tea from a flask and offers him one of his sandwiches.

‘They are cheese,’ says Janusz politely.

‘Cheese?’

‘Yes. Real cheddar. From the Co-op. With margarine and onion cut very thinly.’

‘Cheese, eh? All right then. Don’t mind if I do.’

It costs him his lunch, but he leaves work that day with the teacher’s address.

He doesn’t lift the tarpaulin. The rounded shape of the car underneath it is enough to make him dream of country drives, picnics with Aurek and Silvana, driving the boy to school and trips to the seaside on Sundays.

‘Yes,’ says Janusz.

‘Have a cup of tea first, old chap,’ says the teacher. ‘There’s no rush.’

Janusz sits in the kitchen at a big refectory table. He looks out of the window, beyond the stone patio to a lawned garden bordered by beds of red and yellow tulips and behind them shrubs and trees. The kitchen has a black and white tiled floor, like the floor of his parents’ kitchen in Poland, and a big cooking range covered in pans. Above the range hangs a lazy-maid covered in baby clothes.

‘We’ve just had our fourth,’ says the teacher when he sees Janusz looking. ‘I’m afraid he’s got a few problems, poor little chap. We’re selling the car partly to finance a holiday for my wife. She’s finding it rather hard to accept the child.’

Janusz doesn’t know what to say. He nods uncertainly.

The man moves the kettle on the stove. ‘So you’ll be able to fix it up yourself, will you?’

‘I think so.’

The teacher’s wife comes in and offers Janusz a currant bun to have with his tea. She is narrow-faced and creased with tiredness. Pushing her wavy brown hair out of her face, tucking loose strands behind her ears, a gesture she repeats as she speaks, she talks about Russia and the atom bomb and Janusz tells her politely that he is Polish, not Russian.

‘I think Russia having such a bomb would be a disaster. Poland will be Poland again one day, and the Russians will leave our country,’ he says, and then regrets the determined tone in his voice, the emotion he didn’t mean to show.

‘Yes, yes,’ says the teacher’s wife. She smiles at Janusz as if he has not quite understood the complexity of the discussion. ‘But we have to let the people take control. Follow a Russian model whether we like it or not.’

Janusz is there to buy a car, not discuss politics. His collar feels tight, but he resists a desire to loosen it.

‘It’s all down to understanding,’ says the teacher. He wears his glasses on the bridge of his nose or pushes them back over his forehead into unruly waves of red hair. ‘This country is still having a hell of a time struggling with peacetime. We need to find a way to give everyone a sense of
worthwhileness
in their lives.’

The sound of a baby’s high-pitched screaming floats down from another room and the teacher’s wife puts her head in her hands and gives a sudden cry. The teacher takes his glasses off and cleans them.

‘Susan, that’s enough.’

‘Enough?’ She lifts her head. ‘This is just the bloody beginning.’

Janusz loosens his collar.

‘Can I see the car again?’

He rolls the tarpaulin back, opens the door, dusts off the black leather seats and gets in. He gets out, walks round the car, runs his hand over the dented bonnet, kicks a flat tyre.

‘Yes,’ he says again, and they go back into the house where a woman in a white apron passes the crying baby to the teacher.

‘Hello, little chap,’ says the teacher, handing the child to Janusz. ‘He’s abnormal, I’m afraid. Quite heartbreaking.’

The child has a thick mop of brown hair, and when Janusz takes him he stops crying and smiles, a wide smile that makes his eyes disappear and his face pucker into creases. Janusz holds him on his lap and jiggles his knee to make the boy laugh. He is solid as a block of lard and not much better looking, but Janusz has to stop himself from singing Polish songs to him.

‘You’re good with him,’ the teacher says, and something in his voice makes Janusz suspect he’d like to offer him the baby along with the car.

When he leaves, with a promise from the teacher to help him move the car to Britannia Road on a trailer, the man’s wife hands him a tartan blanket.

‘Take this. You’ll need a car blanket. Good luck with your life here.’

He can see tears welling in her eyes. There’s a wave of sadness coming off her that makes him feel he could drown in it.

‘Your son’s a lovely little chap,’ he says gently. ‘You’re a good mother.’

‘Sadly, I’m no kind of mother,’ she replies. ‘I hope you enjoy the car.’

Janusz cycles home, the blanket balanced over the handlebars, compiling a list of spare parts he needs. Apart from the brown Humber van owned by a family that live three doors down, Janusz’s car will be the first in Britannia Road.

His head is so full of his thoughts that he doesn’t notice a car pulling alongside him. He nearly slams straight into it when it stops in front of him on the concrete bridge over the river.

‘Evening,’ says his boss, winding down his window. ‘Glad to see you, in fact.’

Janusz dismounts from his bike, smooths his moustache, stands up straight.

‘The job as foreman. You still want it?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s yours. Nice to give a bit of good news to somebody. Come into the office tomorrow.’

He shakes Janusz’s hand and drives off, waving regally.

Janusz climbs back on his bike. He reaches the bottom of the hill and, instead of dismounting and pushing the bike up the road as he usually does, he feels a spurt of energy, puts his head down and cycles as hard as he can, not looking up until he makes it to the top. He comes to a triumphant stop at the top of the hill and looks back at the town, the fields bordering it, the estuary that leads to the sea and the roads that go all the way to London and beyond.

He is on top of the world up here. And this is a fine country, where a man can arrive with nothing but a broken heart and make something of himself. He’d like to be able to see his father and tell him the news of his promotion. He’ll write to him again. Useless, perhaps, sending letters when he has never had a reply, but he still does it. And why shouldn’t he imagine he can converse with the missing? Perhaps his father, wherever he is, might be thinking of his son too?

He wheels his bike through the small alley they share with Doris and Gilbert and pushes the gate into his own backyard, taking off his bicycle clips and leaning against the wall while he waits for his breathing to come back to normal. Then he walks down to the potting shed.

Inside, among cans of oil, the lawnmower and boxes of flower bulbs, are the letters. He takes them and lays them in a metal dish. With a match he sets fire to them, before he can talk himself out of his actions. It is time to put the past behind him. To do things right. If they are going to have another child one day, he has to stop hanging on to the past. The letters burn quickly, all her words turning to silver and black, small dustings of them drifting in the air. When the flames die down, he presses his fingers into the silken ashes and cleans the bowl.

In the kitchen, Silvana looks up from the pot she is stirring on the cooker. He smiles at her as he opens the back door and puts the blanket on the table. She always manages to look startled when she sees him, as if she is still surprised to find him there beside her. Maybe she sees the same look on his face too. Maybe she reacts to him, to
the fact that he is faintly relieved to find she hasn’t gone off on one of her walks and not come back.

‘What’s that?’

‘A blanket. What are you cooking?’

‘Pearl-barley soup.’

‘Do we have any meat?’

‘No. Not today.’

‘We’ll have meat every day of the week from now on.’

‘How’s that?’

She is wearing her best dress and the shoes he bought her, the white ones. She looks quite smart, if you ignore the splattering of soup on her shoes. He slides his arms around her waist. Janusz feels glad to have her in his arms – his wife, who would do anything to protect their son. That is how she presents herself. Like a soldier who would kill for her country. And her country is their son.

And yet, no matter how Silvana juts her jaw at the world and holds her back straight as an iron bar, he knows she is fragile. She is made of the thinnest eggshell, her toughness a veneer that could be broken with a single clumsy move. He imagines her sitting in the passenger seat of his new car, the way she would hold her hands clasped together, the careful upright look of her.

‘I got my promotion.’ Janusz feels his cheekbones move, his face settling into an unexpected grin. ‘Wait, that’s not all. Do you want to know why I have a blanket? It’s to put over your knees when I take you for a drive.’

She turns, the wooden spoon in her hand dripping soup on the floor.

He takes the spoon off her and puts it back in the saucepan.

‘I bought a car.’

‘A car?’

Aurek is sitting under the kitchen table, playing with a pack of cigarette cards.

‘Did you hear me?’ he asks the boy. ‘We’ve got a car. The Nowaks are going up in the world.’

Aurek crawls out from under the table and Janusz holds his hand out to his son. The boy shoves his hands in his pockets. Janusz
remembers being a small boy himself and his own father standing over him, the mix of fear and love he felt for him. He tries to soften his face. To be less imposing.

‘A car?’ says Aurek.

‘That’s right. We have a car.’

Janusz places a hand gently on Silvana’s belly. ‘We just need …’

‘I know.’

‘And?’

She looks down, bites her lip. Then she raises her wide brown eyes to his and nods.

‘All right. We’ll try.’

‘Really?’

He is so surprised and grateful to her, he whoops with joy and stumbles through a few steps of a mazurka, kicking his legs and singing, Aurek giggling at the sight of him.

Janusz stops and regards his family, his life, the small kitchen. The table takes up most of the room, that and the three wooden chairs. The dripping tap that he must fix one day plays a repetitive
plink plink
tune in the ceramic sink. He looks at the suburban garden through the window. It may not be a big garden, but the lawn is smooth and weed-free, the flower beds are blooming this spring, and the vegetable patch is overflowing with produce. Aurek is making car noises,
vroom, vroom
, jigging from one foot to the other. On the stove, the pearl-barley soup, brown and viscous, is gently boiling over.

‘You have a smudge on your cheek,’ says Silvana. She wipes it with her finger and he feels the softness of her gesture. He thinks of Hélène.

‘There,’ says Silvana. ‘It’s gone now.’

Janusz looks down at his son and ruffles the boy’s hair gently.

‘Aurek, I do believe you are growing,’ he says. He leans behind Silvana and turns off the stove.

Silvana opens a drawer and looks at her red headscarf. She hasn’t worn it since Doris dyed her hair for her and showed her how to curl and coif it in the modern style. Underneath the scarf is a neat pink box. She takes it out and opens it, running a finger over the diaphragm
inside. Doris had helped her get it. She’d given her the name of a doctor.

‘You go and see him. He’ll give you something. Some of them don’t like it when you want to take matters into your own hands. They think you’re trying to escape your duties. They give you all that stuff about the population and your role as a woman. This one’ll see you all right. Me, I’ve been lucky. I had our Geena and afterwards Gilbert never really bothered me for that kind of thing. We’re too old now in any case. I’m looking forward to grandchildren.’

‘I have my son,’ she told the doctor. ‘It’s enough to look after him. I don’t think I could cope with another.’

‘And your husband treats you well?’

‘Yes. Yes, he’s a very good husband.’

And ask about me
, she thinks.
Ask me if I am a good wife and I could tell you I am a liar and a cheat
.

‘He doesn’t want any more children either?’

‘No. We both feel our son is enough.’

He nodded and wrote her a prescription. He had half a finger missing from his right hand and scarring across the back of his wrist. He held his pen awkwardly, wrote slowly.

‘You’re not alone,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of. A lot of couples feel like this. The war has affected all of us. Quite frankly, who would want to bring a child into this world?’

‘You’ll be all right, love,’ Doris said when Silvana came home. ‘We women always are. We have to be.’

Silvana lays her headscarf back over the pink box. It’s been three weeks since she agreed to try for a baby. Three weeks of feeling like she should be burning in hell and three weeks since Janusz has been nothing but kind, bringing flowers for her and toy cars for Aurek. A perfect husband when she is fast becoming a terrible wife. She can’t go on like this. All her lies are stacking themselves up. Sooner or later, they will fall apart.

Silvana

For six months Silvana stayed in the cottage. She gladly threw herself into the steady peasant life. It was a slow, hidden world she had moved into, and it suited her. Nobody asked her who she was or where she and the boy had come from. She was a young woman unafraid of hard work. That’s all the family were interested in. And that suited her fine. She cooked, fetched water from the well, cleared their fields of stones and planted out crops in May.

Each Friday, Marysia disappeared from the house for hours. She came back on Saturday morning with a flush in her cheeks and a bag of bread and meat. Once, she carried an ox tongue into the kitchen and her mother took it without a word of surprise. Silvana asked where she had found meat like that, but Ela didn’t seem to hear and Marysia only laughed, a coarse laugh. She set her hands on her waist and flicked her hips at Silvana.

‘Be careful. Talk of the wolf,’ she said, ‘and he’s sure to appear.’

Ela was often ill, and Marysia left it to Silvana to nurse her. One day when Ela lay doubled up with pain she asked Silvana to bring her last bottle of medicine.