22 Britannia Road (34 page)

He doesn’t ask her about the enemy, but every time he hears footsteps outside the house or sees a man walking on the beach alone, he wonders if it is him, his father, come to take them home again.

Tony comes back on Friday night, and early on Saturday morning they drive to a forest of pine trees a half hour inland. It’s wide and evenly spaced with trees growing in pale soil. Tony drops them off, saying he has business to attend to in Felixstowe.

Aurek gathers the field mushrooms that grow in the grass at the edge of the forest. He can’t remember learning how to hunt for mushrooms. It is something he has somehow always known how to do. He spots a cluster of smooth-skinned death caps and squats down beside them, pulling his knife from his pocket. With a steady hand, he cuts them, discarding the round puffy sac at their base that he knows poisonous mushrooms have. These cause death after a day or so. There’s no cure. He lays them on the ground and looks at them. If Tony was dead, maybe they could go back home? He is already a bad child. It is his fault they are here.

‘What are you doing with those?’

Aurek jumps. He hadn’t heard his mother behind him. He avoids her eyes but is sure she can read his mind, and kicks at the mushrooms, stamps on them until they are a mush under his feet.

‘Make sure you wipe your knife well. Those are dangerous.’ Silvana smiles, puts her hand on his cheek. ‘It’s lovely here, isn’t it? Just you and me. Like it used to be.’

He would prefer it if the enemy was there too, telling him how telephones work or what makes a motor car go. The enemy could build them a tree house. He could make them a proper home in the trees. Aurek reaches out and touches his mother’s hair, twisting a curl through his fingers.

‘Did I do something wrong?’ he asks, and she laughs loudly, as if he has told her a very funny joke.

At twilight, when Tony comes back to get them, the biggest bats Aurek has ever seen have begun to swoop through the branches. He finds a dead one and his mother persuades Tony to let him keep it.

Aurek lays it out on the porch, where it dries hard like leather, but a few days later the wind snatches it up and steals it away. Aurek spends days searching for it along the seafront, crawling under beach huts and fisherman’s huts, in among green nets and wicker lobster pots, his fingers searching through damp newspapers, fish hooks and pink discarded fish guts.

‘Is it good for him to run wild around town?’ says Tony to Silvana when he arrives the following Friday evening and Aurek comes home stinking of fish.

‘Perhaps Peter could come and play with him?’

‘He’s with his grandparents.’

Aurek sits on the front doorstep, his fingers in his ears, pretending not to hear them talking. He tries to imagine the sound fish make under water, wonders whether they sing to each other like birds.

‘Maybe Aurek should go to school? You’ve been here a fortnight. We don’t want the social services coming, asking questions.’

‘He isn’t ready for school.’

‘What is that he’s got in his hair?’

‘Tar. He was down at the boatbuilders’ again.’

‘You shouldn’t let him wander like he does. I could bring him a rabbit. Or a dog. He could have a pet. It might make him stay home.’

‘No,’ says Silvana. ‘We should wait.’

‘Wait for what?’

‘For the right time,’ she replies.

Aurek takes his fingers out of his ears. He knows he won’t have a pet. His mother is not happy by the sea. The right time is never going to come.

Silvana

In the summer heat, Silvana threw off her clothes. She smeared pine sap on their bodies to keep the mosquitoes away and made circles of rowan branches around their camp to keep the soldiers out. The charm worked. There had been fewer of them since she’d been doing this.

Sometimes she lay down in a spot where the sun hit the forest floor and felt it moving across her. Ants crawled around her, big black lines of them, and she heard their legs clicking, jointed bodies rustling as they hurried. She could hear a beetle in leaf mould, its jaws crunching. Woodlice crawling under tree bark sounded like someone grinding their teeth against her cheek. The drone of a fly hurt her ears.

She was turning to wood. Her body hard as oak, skin as thin as the papery strips of silver-birch bark she and the boy ate in winter. Sometimes she imagined being an old woman, dying with only a tiny view of the sky through the branches. If someone found her, they’d knock on her arms and realize she was solid.

Maybe they’d make something out of her. A coffee table, a blanket box perhaps. She was certain that within her body were the rings of her life like a tree. The lean years, the healing growth circling her broken heart in fat bands.

She let her hand follow the sun’s path across her ribs, her sunken stomach, her hollow thighs. She knew herself, understood herself. She had no need for any wider knowledge but the moment. She felt the heartwood of her oaken body like a lump in her throat.

Aurek danced in the sunbeams around her, leaping through dappled light, catching the dust that circled them. His head was
getting too big for his body. His belly was a balloon of thin-skinned air. His arms and legs were branches, thin sticks. Her tree man. Forest sprite.

‘Come here,’ she said, sitting up. ‘Come here.’

She settled him on her lap and lifted her breast to his lips. He closed his eyes and she rocked him. For hours she sat, letting him suckle. When her milk stopped flowing, he pulled on her nipple until she cried out with the sharp pain of it, but still she held him, his eyelashes fluttering against her skin. A faint tingling, deep within her, began to burn in her breasts and the milk flowed again. Aurek lay back in her arms and smiled, a slack-jawed, squinting kind of smile, as though the sun dazzled him. Silvana pressed his face to her breast again.

‘You and me,’ she whispered. ‘We’re not dead yet.’

Janusz

Janusz sat in a gloomy Nissen hut in north Wales listening to the rain on corrugated iron. Rows of barrel-shaped huts rose like burial mounds out of the earth. He and the other Poles called them
beczki śmiechu
, barrels of laughs. The huts had small windows punched into their frames, and the wind blew through the ill-fitting glass. Outside, in the wet mud, glistened the tyre patterns of bicycles leading out of the field onto the road beyond. Janusz sat. Waiting for Bruno.

Spring rain had soaked into muddy fields of emerald green and the hedgerows were white with blossom. If the rain didn’t stop soon, it was going to flood the camp again. As it was, a thin layer of dirty water lay on the wooden floors. A drip of water splashed on his face, and then another. The roof was leaking again. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette and dropped the butt onto the floor, where it sank with a fizzle into an inch of water.

All he was concerned about was the state of his chilblains and what bloody awful food the cook might be serving. He looked at his watch. Bruno would be back from duty that afternoon and Janusz wanted to go to the village pub with him.

‘Not a chance,’ Bruno had said when Janusz asked him if he wanted to stay on in the RAF. ‘Sign on for another five years? Not a chance.’

‘I don’t know what else to do,’ Janusz said. ‘We can’t go back to Poland. I might try France. Or Canada. Get a job there. I don’t know …’

‘You should think about it. I’ve already got it sorted out. The war’s nearly over. I’m going up to Scotland. I’m marrying Ruby.’

Janusz frowned. ‘But you’re already married. What about your family? Your children?’

Bruno sighed. ‘That’s another life now. Another world. Jan, old man, you’re so bloody decent. You must know there are plenty of married Poles here who have got themselves English girls. What are they to do? Live here like monks because they’re married to women back in Poland that they’ll never see again? I’ve been away from our country too long. Even if I could find my wife, I doubt my kids would recognize me. They’re better off without me. I can’t go back. I’ve got a life here with Ruby now. You’ve got to take what chances you have.’ Bruno patted Janusz on the shoulder. ‘You’ve had a tough time. Why not find yourself a nice girl here? Ruby’s got lots of girlfriends. We’ll find you a girl all right.’

The sound of other men entering the Nissen hut disturbed Janusz’s thinking. They were talking about the weather. The rains had eased off and the men were discussing the fog that was coming in across the fields. Janusz stood up and pulled on his greatcoat. Bruno would be landing soon. He stepped outside and felt his feet sink into a puddle. Heavy mists swirled around him. Hands in pockets, head down, Janusz trudged towards the airfield and waited in the mess huts for the planes to come in. He sat and watched the fog curl and thicken outside. And what would he do after the war? Go back to Poland? Bruno was right: too much had happened to ever go back.

‘A real pea-souper,’ somebody said.

Janusz got up. Why not live in Scotland? Start his life again? He walked out of the mess hut and nearly knocked into an officer on the steps.

‘Sorry, sir,’ said Janusz. ‘I didn’t see you.’

‘I’m not surprised. Terrible weather,’ said the officer as Janusz stepped to one side to let him pass.

‘I hope the planes are going to come in safely tonight, sir.’

‘They’re not landing here. Visibility’s three hundred yards or less over the airfield. They’ve been diverted to land further north. I’ll let everybody know when our crew is back on terra firma.’

Janusz followed him back into the mess hut. He waited. An hour later the news came in.

The squadron had been flying blind in thick cloud base. Only five of thirteen planes had touched down successfully. Bruno’s plane had crashed in a cornfield and gone up in flames.

Ipswich

Janusz clings to his routines. He works as many hours as possible and then goes home and mends things – the kitchen chair with its broken rung, the back door, the dripping tap, next door’s guttering – but two weeks and three days after he told Silvana to leave, he still cannot find enough to do to occupy himself.

Heartache burns like a fever in him. He cannot sleep. His muscles twitch, his mind races and at dawn he throws off his bedcovers, dresses and hurries out into his garden. He is so drunk with grief, it is all he can do to stop himself from roaming the streets looking for a fight.

The honeysuckle Janusz trained up the wooden fence has just begun to bud with flowers, and the holly by the shed glows dark green. Janusz grabs the honeysuckle’s stem, soft as an exposed throat, and throttles it in his fist, yanking it off the fence. No more flowers. No more suburban garden. No more wife and son. He takes his spade, angrily digging at the holly’s woody roots. He rips roses from the soil, slashes flowers with a scythe, kicks over shrubs and piles their ragged remains in a funeral pyre in the middle of the lawn.

The garden was always a dream. A dream of his son playing on a green lawn and his wife cutting English roses from the flower borders. And now there are no more dreams. A splash of rain falls but he carries on his destruction, finding some kind of pleasure in digging up plants, turning the lawn over to a furrowed plot of soil. He wants black soil. Bare earth. The ground new and flecked with stones.

Perhaps he’s lost his mind, but he can’t stop digging in any case. His muscles are pumping like pistons. Shouldering his work like a farmhorse pulling a plough through deep clay, he kicks the spade, driving it into the soil with a murderous energy.

Hours later, he leans against the fence, wiping sweat from his face.
He doesn’t rest for long. Throwing down his spade, he goes inside, finds an old newspaper, soaks it in lawnmower fuel and pushes it into his bonfire. He lights it and steps back, smoke clouding around him, stinging his eyes, the smell of smouldering plants filling the air.

The rain gets heavier but still he doesn’t look up from his work. He carries on, even though the red-flamed heart of the bonfire has died, suffocated by the rain and the thick clods of green turf and plants he is piling uselessly onto it.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

Gilbert is looking over the fence.

Janusz steps out of the smoke.

‘Clearing up,’ he says. ‘Getting rid of it all. Leave me alone, please. This is my business.’

And he walks back into the drifting, choking smoke.

Felixstowe

Silvana is unsure, but Tony insists. He is smiling, waving his hands as he talks, excited as a child at Christmas.

‘It’s all right. Come upstairs. I’ve got a present for you. Something special.’

She steps through the open door of his bedroom. She has avoided this room so far. Avoided the memory of his wife which must lurk in the rose-patterned wallpaper and the polished wooden furniture.

‘This house,’ she asks, ‘does it make you sad? Do you think of your wife when you are here?’

‘No,’ he says as he ushers her inside. ‘No, we barely spent any time here together. And I’ve had lodgers since she died. The house has been decorated several times. There is nothing left that belonged to Lucy.’

Silvana sits at the dressing table, the chintz fabric pleated around it like a tidy skirt. She presses her knees together and takes in the details of the room: the pink satin bedspread on the double bed; the bed table with a small lamp on it; and above the bed, a print of a mountain landscape, green hills rolling down to a lake where sheep graze.

Tony brandishes a key in his hand and unlocks the big wardrobe.

‘Here,’ he says, swinging the wardrobe door open. ‘For you.’

Colours glint shoulder to shoulder. The wardrobe is packed full of clothes. Brick red, holly green, duck-egg blue, eau de nil, salmon, pale blue, black, coral pink, cream, gold and silver. Furs, silks, ribbons, velvet, feathers, pearls, sequins. Evening gowns, tailored jackets, day dresses, trouser suits, silk nightdresses, blouses with tiny pearl buttons. Silvana runs her hands over them all. Tony laughs and pulls a fur coat out for her to see.

‘They’re all for you.’

Silvana can’t believe her eyes.

‘Where did they come from? You’ve the contents of a dress shop in here.’