22 Britannia Road (32 page)

‘The child called to me like I was his mother. What else could I do? I swapped them. I put our son in the cart and took the child and called him Aurek. I told myself it was our son come back to me.’

Janusz’s mouth moves but he says nothing. His cigarette is still in
his hand unlit, the matches in the other. Surely now he will see how she has been surviving? Will always be surviving, in peacetime or wartime, it makes no difference. He carries on looking at her, and she is sure he understands what she has been living through. That something, perhaps everything, can be saved. She is his wife. The child can be his son. Silvana’s eyes are blurred with tears, but she does not move. While they are still looking at each other there is hope.

It is Janusz who looks away.

‘Go.’

‘You don’t mean that?’

‘Take the boy. Just go.’

He gets up and walks into the garden. Silvana follows him down to the tree house.

‘And you,’ she yells. ‘You with your love letters. Are you any better than me? You and that woman. Hélène, isn’t it? You think I don’t know? Why did you ever want us back anyway? Why did you bring us here if you had her?’

‘I believed in you,’ says Janusz. ‘How could you lie to me about … about my
son
? Get out. Take the child, whoever he is, and go.’

He steps into his potting shed and closes the door.

She looks back at the house and sees Aurek at his bedroom window, tapping his fingers on the glass. Silvana lifts her hand, waves at him, but he goes on, tapping the glass as if he hasn’t seen her.

Aurek sits on the top step of the stairs and refuses to move.

‘
Nie
,’ he says. ‘No.’

‘Please. Get your things.’

The boy won’t speak. He rocks himself on the step and Silvana takes him by the arm and pulls him to his feet, dragging him outside into the street. He growls miserably as she marches him down the hill, trying to twist out of her grip. Only hours ago she was saving him. Now what is she doing to him?

She wonders if Janusz will come after them. She crosses the road and imagines she hears the sound of him running behind them, calling them back. As she walks, she decides he will come on his bicycle, and when she reaches the high street she does hear a bike, the wheels
spinning behind her. She turns, relief cracking across her face. But it’s not Janusz. It’s a stranger who lifts his cap as he passes and rings his bell at Aurek.

By the time she gets to Tony’s pet shop she has given up hoping. She knows Janusz is not coming.

Silvana

One morning, early, they heard men in the forest. There was a commotion of shouting, and Silvana and Aurek hid in thick undergrowth and watched two German soldiers lining up three men against a row of trees.

The soldiers took their time before they killed their prisoners. One of them was never still. His chin was stubbled, his eyes sunken and empty-looking. He walked around, lifting his gun to his shoulder and then lowering it again like a rehearsal, a gesture that he found funny. He was the one who touched the men’s faces with the end of the barrel. It was as if the gun was part of him, an accusing finger that he pushed into the men’s chests and stroked their cheeks with. Sometimes it wasn’t enough for him and he slung the gun across his back as if it got in the way. Then he lifted his hand to the men’s heads in turn, cocking his index finger against his thumb and pretending to jump as his wrist flung upwards.

The other soldier rolled himself a cigarette and smoked it, sucking his cheeks in as he took hard drags, his face showing the structure of his skull beneath the grey-looking skin.

When they shot the men, Silvana pulled Aurek down onto the ground so that their faces were pressed against the earth. The air was filled with the sound of gunshot and the ground smelt of decay. She wiped away her son’s tears. ‘Hush,’ she whispered. ‘Hush.’

When it was getting dark, Silvana and Aurek climbed out of their hiding place and went to look at the dead men. Silvana took a jacket off one, a coat off another. One had a rucksack at his feet
which contained a half-drunk bottle of vodka and some black bread.

Silvana picked up a cap from the floor and rubbed mud off the small red enamel star pinned to it. She put the hat on and smiled at Aurek. He stared. She rocked her head from side to side and did a little dance, feet outwards like a duck. Aurek began to laugh. Breaking a low branch, she used it as a walking stick, head tipping from side to side, feet splayed, kicking leaves up in the air.

‘Charlie Chaplin,’ she whispered. ‘I’m Charlie Chaplin.’

Aurek copied her, his laughter quiet like the murmur of a fast-running stream.

Janusz

On a concrete runway, in an East Anglian field in the pouring rain, Janusz imagined the farm up in the hills beyond Marseilles. When his squadron was moved to Yorkshire, he trudged through snow, dreaming of Hélène with her brown hair in plaits.

In Kent, he imagined her voice in his ear. Every new thing he saw he wanted to tell her about. He wrote letters to her, describing the pretty stone houses in villages, the English churches with their grassy graveyards and big vicarages attached. He picked roses in the summer of 1943 and pretended he could give them to her.

Flying over Italy in spring 1944, dropping propaganda leaflets, he recorded the colours of the hills, the fields, the cities. Just for her.

And Hélène wrote to him. Letters that might arrive out of sequence or three at once after a long wait. He read them all; he knew each one by heart.

When a letter arrived for him in the autumn of 1944, Janusz opened it gladly, in front of the other men in his mess hall, settling down in an armchair. He was surprised to see it was written in English. And it wasn’t from Hélène. It was from her brother.

Janusz didn’t read any more. He folded the letter up and put it in his wallet. He listened to the blood running through his veins until he thought he could hear it draining from him. Blood must have been seeping from his body, because he couldn’t stand. His ankles, knees, thighs were closing up like a fan. His head rolled. The wind blew over him like a wail of a voice, or it may have been his own voice. Or her voice.

Or it may have been the sound of his blood and his heart beating so very loud when he wanted it to stop. He clasped his head in his hands, aware of the fragility of flesh and blood, the easy way people were killed and blown apart by guns and bombs and terribly afraid that he, on the other hand, was condemned to live through it all.

Ipswich

‘You can’t stay here, Silvana. Not in the flat.’

Tony is sure about that. It’s the first thing he says when he opens the pet-shop door, ushering her inside quickly. She thinks she sees panic in his eyes. She is sure she knows what thoughts are racing through his mind. How has he become lumbered with this woman and her child? He is a man of the town after all. He knows local dignitaries, and his dead wife’s father is a magistrate. He can’t afford to be seen collecting foreign waifs and strays.

She is about to apologize for coming, about to walk out. The docks, she thinks. I will go and find a ship and we’ll stow away. Then Tony grabs her hands in his. She can smell whisky on his breath and his eyes have a wild look in them. Fear. That’s what she can see in them. He tells her that he will look after her. He will not let her down. What about a hotel for the night?

Silvana says no. She doesn’t want to be in a hotel with people staring at her.

Finally he says he will take her to the house by the sea. It’s the only thing he can think of.

‘Yes,’ she says. How can she say no? She is homeless.

She nudges Aurek, hoping he will express some kind of thanks, but the boy kicks at her shin and pinches the skin on the back of her hand, so that she pushes him away. She regrets the action immediately, pulls him back to her too fast and he falls over at her feet.

‘Thank you,’ she says, and Tony smiles at her.

‘Shall we have a drink?’

Tony steps around Aurek carefully, the way somebody might move past an unreliable dog.

‘A bit of Dutch courage before we go?’

Tony doesn’t talk in the car, and Silvana is happy with that. She tucks Aurek up on the back seat with a blanket and he eyes her warily.

‘Where’s Peter,’ he demands.

‘With his grandparents,’ she whispers. ‘You’ll see him again soon. Now go to sleep for a little while.’

The town of Felixstowe sits on the edge of pale yellow sand and rough open sea. Coloured lights greet them. The sea is dark and inky, but the lights on the pier and along the seafront shine red and yellow, swaying in the wind, so that the colours smudge and blur in the rain.

‘The pier used to be longer,’ Tony says, slowing down. ‘Part of it was demolished during the war. It would have been too easy a landing point for the Germans. They talk of rebuilding it, but I doubt it. Years ago, I used to fish off the end of it.’

He parks the car and cuts the engine. The noise of the wind becomes louder, and rain stings Silvana’s face when she steps onto the kerb.

‘This is the house Lucy and I lived in,’ Tony says, taking her bag and ushering her towards a narrow, weatherbeaten house painted pink. ‘I moved out after she died. I use it as a store now. I’ll have to tidy up a bit, but it’s somewhere for you to stay.’

There are two heavy padlocks on the door, and Silvana stands shivering in the rain while Tony pulls keys from his pockets and fumbles with locks in the dark. Aurek runs up and down the street, and she doesn’t bother to call him back. He wouldn’t come anyway. Finally, Tony lets them in and feeds the electricity meter in the hall. When the lights come on, Silvana blinks in surprise.

Cardboard boxes fill the hall. Packed to the ceiling are labelled boxes of soap and washing powders, biscuits, chocolates, custard, cigarettes. The place looks like a warehouse. A staircase rises in front of them, stacked with piles of newspapers.

‘We’ll get the place warmed up,’ says Tony, moving a wooden crate out of the way. ‘Sorry about the boxes. This lot’ll all be gone soon enough.’

He has lost his buoyancy. He seems embarrassed and unsure, and she senses that this is the side of his life not many people see.

‘What’s that smell?’ she asks. There is a sweet odour coming from somewhere.

‘Aah. I’ve got a crate of bananas in here. They’re going tomorrow. Come on in. I know it’s a bit of a mess, but it’s a roof over your head.’

Silvana and Aurek wait in the cold front room, sitting on cardboard boxes full of tins of corned beef, while Tony goes out to buy fish and chips. Aurek turns his back to Silvana and she knows he is angry. She tries to sound cheerful.

‘This is an adventure,’ she tells him, and nearly chokes on the tears that thicken in her throat. ‘Well, I’m hungry,’ she says when he doesn’t answer her. ‘Shall we get the table set for supper?’

The boy curls up into a ball and turns his back to her, so she leaves him to himself and goes into the kitchen, a narrow room, more modern than her own, with matching units in a pale-yellow Formica. Opening cupboards and drawers, all of them seemingly full of tins of fruit, she finally locates some plates and knives and forks. When Tony comes back he moves a case of London Gin off the kitchen table and they sit down.

‘You’re hungry, Aurek,’ says Tony. ‘I didn’t know you could eat so much.’

For Silvana, it is nothing new. The boy always eats as if the food in front of him might be his last meal, and she has long forgotten that other children don’t behave like this. She looks at Aurek. He has changed lately. He has filled out a little, and his hair is longer and thicker.

‘Where do you put it all?’ Tony is asking. ‘Have you got a tapeworm, Aurek?’

Aurek looks suddenly anxious.

‘It’s a long wiggly worm that eats all your food before you can get the goodness from it. Lots of kids get them.’

Silvana shakes her head and puts her hand on Aurek’s arm.

‘Aurek, he’s only joking.’

‘Of course I am. I didn’t mean to upset you, old man. Here, have some of my chips. Your mother’s right. You do need to eat.’

After they’ve finished, Tony smokes a cigarette and reads a newspaper. Aurek sits on the floor of the kitchen while Silvana washes up
the dishes. When she’s done she drifts back to the front room with its bay window and hears Aurek slip in behind her. She stares out at the night and the lights from the ships out at sea. Despite everything, it is a relief to have confessed to Janusz, to have told him the truth. He has deserved at least that for a long time now. It’s a kind of relief, but it also may be the stupidest thing she’s ever done. She looks at the boy and feels afraid. Where has her promise to him gone now? Who will be his father?

Silvana prepares a bath for Aurek. She twists the bath taps on full and brown water glugs out. Through the open door she can hear classical music playing on the radio. She thanks God it is not Chopin. A Polish melody would undo her. Steam rises in the room and Aurek appears at the door.

‘There you are,’ says Silvana. ‘It’s all ready for you. Don’t stay in for too long.’

She begins to undress him, but he pushes her away.

‘No,’ he says angrily. ‘I do it myself. Go away.’