22 Britannia Road (36 page)

‘Tony, I have to know. You can tell me. Were these Lucy’s?’

He’d been matter-of-fact in his response. ‘No,’ he said, taking her hands in his. ‘Of course not. I gave away Lucy’s clothes years ago. They are yours. Only yours.’

She turns her ankle to see the leather shine in the sun. She’s never had such good boots.

Tony comes back from his swim, hungry. He takes them to a restaurant and a girl serves them boiled potatoes and fish in parsley sauce, dripping the sauce over the tablecloth as she puts their plates down.

‘Aurek, you’re as brown as a berry, old chum,’ says Tony. ‘You could pass as a little Italian lad,’ he continues. ‘Don’t you think, Silvana?’

No
, she thinks.
He looks Polish
.

‘Absolutely,’ she says, wiping the sauce off the edge of her plate with her napkin.

Tony finishes his glass of wine and orders another. Silvana sips her own wine and smiles at Tony and Aurek.

‘Good health.
Na zdrowie!
’ she says, raising her glass to them both.

Here we all are
, she thinks. She feels such tenderness for Tony, she is carried along by it, by the feel of pearls against her neck, the silk stockings he gives her, the food he offers them. Maybe it is the effect of the wine she is not used to drinking, but she looks at Tony and her brown-faced son and believes they can be a family.

After a long and late lunch, they walk through the Massey Gardens. Tony teaches Aurek crazy golf and Silvana sits watching them. At 6 p.m., when the deckchairs on the beach are being packed away and people start drifting towards home, Tony goes to a bar and Aurek and Silvana stroll along the promenade. The two glasses of wine she drank earlier are still making her feel pleasantly numb. Necklaces of coloured light bulbs swing brightly over kiosks selling seafood and sweets and postcards. The air smells vinegary and sharp. Silvana buys Aurek a toy that whirs in the wind and some chocolate. He gives her a lump of it, popping it into her mouth. She closes her teeth on it and feels the sweet, milky texture. She laughs and throws her head back. As she does, she sees a woman looking at her from across the street. The sight of her sobers Silvana up.

‘Look at you,’ Doris says, walking over to her. ‘Your bread obviously landed butter side up.’

Silvana will not be intimidated. She could walk away. She’d like to, in fact. She’d like to turn on her heels and maybe even swish her elegant blue coat as she does so. A toss of the head would be satisfying. But Doris can tell her how Janusz is.

‘So you’re living the high life here by the sea while your poor husband goes barmy, digging up his roses?’

Silvana pushes her hair away from her face. ‘Have you seen him?’

Doris takes her time. She leans in close, like an actress about to speak her most important lines, making her audience wait. And Silvana is a good audience. She hangs on the woman’s silence, waiting for news of Janusz. A smell of cooking fat rises off Doris’s clothes.

‘Your husband destroyed his beloved garden before he left,’ says Doris finally.

‘Left?’

‘Didn’t you know? Your husband has left Britannia Road. He’s moved away.’ She steps back, as if ready to take a bow now she has delivered her line. ‘You’re on your own now, young lady. You made your bed, you can blooming well lie in it.’

And she stalks away, head held high and triumphant.

Aurek pulls on Silvana’s sleeve. He has eaten all the chocolate.

‘I’ll buy you some more,’ Silvana says, watching Doris disappear into the crowds. ‘We can stay out a bit longer.’

They sit in front of a blue beach hut and watch dark clouds enveloping the sky as the sun drapes its red light into the sea. The sky turns turquoise, and Aurek says it is the colour of a blackbird’s egg.

When the stars come out, Silvana and Aurek curl up together on the beach. Janusz has left them. She has failed both him and the boy and her poor dead baby. She sees Tony on the pier looking for them. She can’t pretend everything is all right tonight. He stands under the street light, looking at his watch, and then walks back towards the house. She watches him go.

Silvana pulls the boy onto her lap and they stay there until a salty dampness has soaked their clothes and Aurek asks for his bed.

The front door is open, the light in the hall left on. Silvana and Aurek tiptoe upstairs. While Aurek climbs into his camp bed, she opens the door to the main bedroom. Tony is snoring lightly. She goes downstairs, gathers up some of the old newspapers the house is filled with and hunts through the kitchen drawers. She finds a pair of scissors and carries them to the living room, where she spreads the newspapers in front of her and begins cutting out pictures of children. She is businesslike about it, scanning page after page. When she finds a child’s image, she stops and studies the article that accompanies it. She still doesn’t read English very well, but she is quick to spot certain words and phrases.
Orphans … missing
 …
lost … last seen … A tragic story … A mother’s sorrow
. Sometimes the children are smiling in their
photographs, as if they can see the ghosts of their families around them. Each face makes her cry for her own dead son.

She works quietly through until she has a stack of cuttings in front of her. Looking up to rest her eyes, she watches the lights on the seafront. Even in the forest, she never felt as lost as this.

Silvana

A soldier climbed down from the first truck, hands out as if he were approaching a pair of cornered animals.

‘All right now,’ the soldier’s voice rang out. ‘Do you know? Do you know yet?’

Silvana backed away, pulling Aurek into her embrace.

‘The war. It’s over. You speak English?
Polsku?
’

‘
Polsku? Tak
.’

He beckoned to a couple more men, who got down from their vehicles and walked over. One of them handed Silvana a metal flask in a harness, and she took it cautiously.

‘Go ahead, it’s water,’ he said. ‘Drink. Here. Like this.’ He held his hand to his lips and mimed drinking.

Silvana took it and tipped it back like he had. The water ran down her chin. She lifted the bottle and let the cold water run over her face.

‘You go right ahead. But you can drink it too if you like.’ He put his thumb to his mouth and made a glugging noise.

Aurek snickered and snorted. He ran in circles, his thumb pressed to his lips. Silvana looked back at the forest. All along the line of trucks, men stood watching them. Aurek kept on laughing and Silvana began to laugh too. When she stopped and looked at all those faces surrounding her, she was surprised. They looked unhappy. Like they’d seen too many sad films. Or maybe they thought she had.

One of the soldiers came towards her speaking in Polish.

‘What’s your name?’

She thought for a moment. Who should she say she was? Marysia?
Hanka? She coughed, felt her throat dry with the effort of speaking. She decided to be herself.

‘Silvana Nowak.’

‘Do you have any identification papers?’

She looked at Aurek playing in the dirt beside her, pulled him to his feet and held him close.

‘My son.’

‘OK,’ said the soldier. ‘Can I see your papers?’

‘My son,’ Silvana repeated.

The soldier folded his arms, looked at her quizzically.

‘Where do you live?’

‘What year is this?’

‘1945. Where’d you come from?’

Silvana looked back at the forest and the trees. She didn’t need to hide any more.

‘Warsaw,’ she said, wondering if it still existed. ‘We come from Warsaw.’

Ipswich

Janusz fits ten trees into the car. It seems a shame to get mud on the upholstery, but these are the last trees he will be taking. The garden is deeply planted now and although he knows birch trees are not bothered by overcrowding, he still wants to give them the best chance he can. He wishes there was some other way to get the trees than filling up his car with mud, but Gilbert says he will help him clean the car out when they get back home.

He digs up a birch from the hedgerow while Gilbert waits with an old curtain to wrap its roots in.

‘I still think you should give him a thumping.’

‘So did I. To begin with. Now I just don’t want to see him. Fighting is not my way of doing things.’

‘I’ve known Tony for years. I never thought he’d play such a mean trick.’

‘Can you pass me that spade, please?’

‘She and the boy are in Felixstowe you know. Doris saw them.’

Janusz feels the blood rush to his face. He stops what he is doing.

‘She saw them?’

‘Apparently.’

‘And?’

‘She said they looked all right.’ Gilbert pats Janusz on the shoulder. ‘I don’t know what went on, but Doris seemed pretty fired up. You know how she is when she gets the bit between her teeth. She told me they’re moving away.’

‘Moving?’ Janusz can’t hide the panic in his voice.

Gilbert sounds unsure. ‘Well, I know Doris can be prone to exaggerate.’

‘Where are they moving to?’

‘Well, that’s just it. Doris won’t say. Stubborn as an ox, you know. She took it all very badly. Says Sylvie betrayed her trust. But look, why don’t you go and see the boy while you can? I could get you the address.’

Janusz thinks of the postcards he has. He’s driven past the house but never dared stop. The thought of seeing Silvana with Tony haunts him. He’s not sure he would be able to cope with it.

‘I already have it,’ he says firmly. ‘And I don’t want to see them. Not if Silvana is happy with Tony. Let her have what she wants. Why do we even need to talk about this?’

Gilbert sighs. ‘All right, I hear you. I won’t go on. Listen, is it legal, taking trees like this? They must belong to someone.’

‘They’re only saplings. They’re wild. No one wants them. Shine that torch over this way.’

‘Tell me again, then,’ asks Gilbert. ‘Why do we have to do this in the dark if it’s legal to take them anyway?’

Back home in Britannia Road, Janusz unloads the trees, heels them into the earth in the garden, cleans the car and then finally goes into his house and locks the door.

In the bathroom he takes off his clothes and washes himself, slowly, head down like a man caught in the rain, staring at his feet. When he closes his eyes, he swears he hears Silvana coming up the stairs, Aurek playing in the hallway. The house is haunted by the sounds of his wife and the child. And if what Doris says is true, that they’re moving away, then there’s no hope. He grabs a towel and rubs himself dry.

Let them go
, he thinks as he dresses. He’s not the one to blame. He may have sent them away, but she is the one who did the damage. He has nothing to reproach himself for. Nothing at all. If she chooses to go, then he can do nothing to stop her.

He walks into the boy’s room, tidies the books on the shelf. He smooths the bedcovers and straightens the picture on the wall. Then he sits on the bed, puts his head in his hands and weeps.

Silvana

The ship put into port in England on an early tide, pushing through darkness and fog. Silvana had arrived in a land of clouds. Everywhere was covered in a smoky fog that banded across the landscape and blurred the shapes of buildings. She concentrated on watching her feet and the backs of the crowds in front of her as she moved slowly down the gangplank in the thick shuffle of bodies.

Land was a shock after so long at sea. As the crowds disembarked and their feet hit solid ground, Silvana and Aurek staggered and rolled like people stepping off a fairground ride, unable to walk in a straight line. They were moved along in winding queues and handed identity cards. Aurek was given a pair of red leather rollerskates tied together with their own laces. A man laid them over his shoulder and Aurek sagged under their weight.

Silvana looked at the boxes of skates and toys in front of her.

The man smiled. ‘Does he like them?’ He pointed at the skates.

Aurek was struggling, trying to take them off his shoulders.

He tipped up a box towards them. ‘Why don’t you have a look?’

The box of toys had teddy bears and jigsaw puzzles, tin cars and dolls. A small wooden rattle sat on top of them. Plain and polished. Silvana grabbed it. The man laughed.

‘Is that what you want? He’s a bit old for baby stuff, isn’t he?’

Silvana shook her head. She took the rollerskates off Aurek’s shoulders and gave the boy the rattle. She thought of her father, of the carved rattle he had made for her and how she had kept it. What had happened to it? Had she left it behind in Warsaw? She couldn’t remember and didn’t want to. She looked at Aurek and smiled.

‘This is yours. Do you understand? It’s a magic rattle. You keep it very safe now and it will bring you good luck.’

She closed his fingers over the handle and held them tight for a moment. When she let go, she saw the white imprint of her own fingers on the boy’s hand. He held the rattle to his chest and nodded at her, his eyes big and dark with belief.

And still the journey wasn’t over. They were herded towards a waiting train crowded with people from the boat. As they pulled into London, Silvana hoisted Aurek onto her hip, holding him tightly. The train rumbled and clanked and came to a stop with a hissing of brakes. Doors began to bang open and the sound of shouting, of people calling each other and children crying, filled the air. She joined the queues to leave the train and finally got to an open door. She hesitated. The station looked huge. A guard on the platform held out his hand.

‘Come on then, miss. Down you get.’

Silvana stepped down from the train. She straightened her headscarf and looked around at the crowds, trying to see Janusz among them.

‘We’re here,’ she whispered, as much to herself as to the boy. ‘We’re here.’

Felixstowe

Silvana is lying awake in her bed, listening to a summer storm. There are loud rolls of thunder and the rain pelts the streets outside her window. She can hear Tony shifting in his bed, the bed springs complaining. He is a terrible sleeper, she concludes. For so many nights now she has listened to the sound of him, the slam of his body turning over on the mattress, an arm flung across the sheets, the feathery punching of his pillows, the frequent sighs.