22 Britannia Road (39 page)

She wakes early the next morning, her dress crumpled and creased. She opens her eyes and feels a cool sense of determination. She slides out of bed, slips her feet into her shoes and picks up the headscarf lying on the table. Lucy’s house. Peter’s house. Tony’s house. Anybody’s house but hers.

‘Silvana?’

Tony is sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, looking at her. His eyes are red rimmed and his face is sunken. An empty whisky bottle rolls on the floor at his feet.

‘Where are you going, Silvana?’

He has a rough blue shadow of stubble on his cheeks, and his clothes look as crumpled as hers. He obviously hasn’t slept at all.

She rubs her face. ‘For a walk. And you? When are you going to Devon?’

‘I don’t have to go …’

But he will go with his son and parents-in-law. He will go to Devon. Of course he will. He belongs with them. Not with her. He knows that. And he knows it is over already between them. The moment she told him she knew about the clothes she saw it in his face. Like a film coming to an end and the lights going up.

He looks at her pleadingly, his brown eyes watering, and she understands finally what that look means. The longing in his face, the desire she always thought was aimed at her. It is the longing of a man who desperately wants what he cannot have. She knows it herself. They are united in this at least: the overwhelming desire to find the dead in the living.

She wants to tell him she is no better than him. Didn’t she take a child in order to pretend her own son was still living? That’s what she did. The film is over for her too. Aurek is not her dead son. He is a boy who needs loving for who he is. And Silvana is not Lucy.

‘They want me to go tomorrow,’ he says heavily. ‘We’ll be away for two weeks. You’ll be here, won’t you, when I get back?’

‘I don’t know,’ she answers. ‘I’m going for a walk on the beach. Do you want to come?’

Tony shakes his head. ‘I have to make a delivery. Those cotton sheets. I’ve finally sold them. I’m taking them over to a hotel in Ipswich this morning. Say you’ll be here when I get back?’

She doesn’t answer. She can feel the distance between them now. Overnight, a space has grown between them.

‘We’ll talk more this afternoon,’ he says, and she hears him trying to recapture the confident tone that his voice usually contains. His hands shape the air. ‘I must get up. Get on with things. I’ll see you later. Have a good walk.’

Downstairs, the kitchen is glowing with sunlight even though it is early. She turns her chair away from the window while she drinks a cup of coffee.

Silvana washes the cup, dries it and hangs it on the wooden cup tree that stands beside the sink. She sweeps the floor, opens the pantry door and tidies jars, packets and tins so that all their labels face her. Then she does the same with the pots and pans under the sink, handles facing inwards just like Janusz’s mother used to arrange them in her kitchen. She wants to leave things in good order.

At the front door she breathes in the sea air, steps outside and looks up to the bedroom window. Aurek is sitting there, watching the seagulls. He waves at her and she waves back.

‘I won’t be long. Don’t go anywhere. I want you there when I get back.’

She walks on the deserted beach. She begins to run, soft sand spray flying up. Her red headscarf flutters around her face, and she runs until she has no breath left and has to stop, hands on her knees, waiting for her heart to slow down and her breathing to come back to normal. Finally, she stands up, takes a deep breath, climbs the concrete steps onto the pavements above the beach and walks back towards the house.

Janusz is driving slowly. He has already stopped twice, unsure of what he thinks he is doing. What if she doesn’t want to see him? Both times he got out of the car, studied Aurek’s postcard, and then
got back in and continued on the road heading towards Felixstowe. As he comes into the town, its name proudly spelt out on a huge roadside flower bed, red flowers for the letters on a white background of daisies, a car heading towards Ipswich passes him.

It’s the first he’s seen on the road that morning. The driver slows as he passes. The two men look at each other.

It is Tony.

He looks tired and unshaven, his collar undone, his tie knotted carelessly, and Janusz hardly recognizes him. He wants to punch him, and slows down. They come to a stop in the road. Janusz cuts the engine, flexes his hands into fists and gets out of his car.

Tony winds his window down.

‘Get out of the car,’ Janusz says, lifting his fists.

Tony shakes his head. ‘There’s no point in fighting. She’s waiting for you.’

The man looks so utterly wretched, Janusz forgets for a moment that he’d like to hit him. By the time Janusz remembers, Tony is already moving away, his wheels squealing. Janusz watches him speeding down the empty road. He watches until the car disappears from view.

Silvana only notices the car that passes her because it is going so slowly. It must be someone out for an early morning drive. The car is very clean, polished, a shiny black Rover. The man driving it stares at her as he passes. She carries on walking and then looks back, unsure what to do. A little way down the road, the car has pulled to a stop. She carries on walking a few more paces and then turns round. There is nothing between her and her husband now, not even a child to link them. She knows this, has told herself so, many times. But the sight of Janusz sitting waiting in his car makes her heart soar, and she walks towards him.

Janusz opens the passenger door and watches Silvana get in beside him. He tries to be calm. Silvana touches the dashboard, looks around herself.

‘Aurek would like this car,’ she says. ‘He is very fond of cars.’

They sit in silence, the sun glinting off the windscreen, seagulls
landing and taking off in front of them. The rows of lights that loop along the seafront swing back and forth, jingling, snatched up by the wind again and again. Finally Janusz speaks.

‘I met Hélène during the war.’ He coughs, smooths his thumb and forefinger over his moustache. ‘She died. She died in 1944. I should never have kept her letters. I should have explained to you. Talked more. I shut it all up.’

Janusz looks across at Silvana and sees her eyes are shining with tears. He pulls his handkerchief from his pocket and offers it to her.

‘The thing is, the boy. I’d like to see him.’

‘Do you think I am a bad woman for what I did?’

Janusz shakes his head. He is not sure if she is talking about Tony or Aurek.

‘Am I a criminal?’ she asks.

He looks at her. Her eyes have the same hard stare he has seen in soldiers. The ones who have witnessed too much. Her lips hold more questions, waiting for his response.

She pleads with him. ‘Will you ever forgive me?’

He answers
No
, and
Yes, I think so
, which seem to be the answers Silvana wants to hear.

‘I thought I had lost you both,’ he says.

Silvana touches his cheek with her hand and he feels it tremble against him.

They sit in the car, watching the wind make patterns with the sand on the road, snaking lines of yellow back and forth, and Silvana tells Janusz the story of her war. She lays it out like a book, filling in details, moving back and forth over time until the whole six years they have been apart are accounted for. Some of it is hard to hear, but he listens. He does not turn away from her. She says she wants no more secrets between them.

His own stories of those years are hard to relate. He tries to explain things to her, but he does not want to remember the war. His memories of it are locked down, and he can’t bring himself to open them. He cannot speak of Hélène. Silvana doesn’t press him for details. She changes the subject. For that he is grateful.

‘Maybe it doesn’t matter,’ she says when he falters and loses his place in his own narrative. ‘The past – maybe we make too much of it. What we need is what’s right here.’

But Janusz knows she is just being kind. Of course the past matters. He looks at her and sees the country he left behind staring back at him. Her face is full of the knowledge of his own youth, and he loves her for it. He feels like he does when he mends machines, when all those engineered details that can so easily go wrong are put in the right place, when they are warm and oiled and turning over perfectly.

Silvana hugs herself. ‘He didn’t have a mother. I know he didn’t. He had filth in his hair and sores on his body. I had to care for him. He had nobody. And my own baby, our baby was –’

‘Stop,’ says Janusz. He winds his window down, lets the sea air rush in, breathes deeply. ‘Not that. Tell me about him growing up.’

She tells him about their woodland son and how he grew up in the forest. She tells him the boy’s favourite games and the way he learned to climb trees and hunt for food.

They speak quietly together until both boys become one in Janusz’s mind. It is the best way. He knows the boy he loves isn’t really the boy who swallowed a button, but he will give him these memories. Aurek will own them. There will be no more mystery. He is their son. And that will be his story.

It is awkward, embracing in a car. Janusz leans towards Silvana, but the steering wheel gets in the way and the gearstick lies between them. Silvana leans further forwards, shifting to the edge of her seat, and he manages to kiss her in a clumsy way, their noses bumping.

He wants her. The sound of her breathing in the night. The way she hums when she believes she is alone. All these things. Desire rises in him. His heart beats like a young man’s, full of wanting. At the same time he feels old. Old enough to understand the hurt he has suffered will not disappear overnight. The thought of Tony makes him want to push her away, accuse her all over again. But he pulls her closer to him.

‘Come back,’ he whispers. ‘Please come back.’

‘The house is along the seafront,’ Silvana says. ‘And you turn –’

‘I know,’ he tells her, and starts the engine.

Aurek is sitting out on his window ledge when he sees the car driving up the road. He watches it stop outside the house. Sees his mother get out and then his father. He has come! They stand by the car and look up at him. Aurek waves, slowly at first, then faster. He stands up, hanging onto the window frame, losing his balance slightly, tipping forwards. He has to grab the sill to stop himself falling out of the window. Both Janusz and Silvana lift their hands to him in alarm.

‘No!’ they shout. ‘No!’

The car journey is long and slow and Aurek slips about on the leather back seat, sliding from one window to the other. Fields give way to allotments and blackened railway tracks. Aurek stares at the rust and metal of the gasworks, lets his eyes skip over tangled wire fences, yellow scrubland, terraced houses.

He feels the shade of magnolia trees and yew hedges press briefly against the window, shutting out the sun, and grips the seat tightly so he won’t slip away from the view. They pass the war cemetery and Aurek glimpses the tidy lines of salt-white crosses behind the dark yew trees. He played there sometimes, catching lizards and slow-worms, putting them in jam jars filled with bits of grass, pink quartz and green granite chippings. He is itching to go there again, to sit motionless, waiting for the lizards to come out and bask on the graves.

They drive on, over a humpback bridge, past the newly pointed wall of the house on the corner advertising Colman’s Dairy in chalky blue paint, a bottle of milk nestling in the C of ‘Colman’s’. Aurek’s eyes are open wide, taking it all in. He is a sailor coming into port, watching for the cliffs of his homeland, his eyes full of the town, the broad sky, the small white clouds, the dirty haze of pigeons settling on rooftops.

They are speeding up the hill to Britannia Road, the car shaking over the cobbles. They sail over a bump in the road and Aurek flies forward, slamming into the gap between the front seats.

‘Aurek!’ his mother cries. She grabs his shoulder and he scrambles through to sit on her lap in the front. They arrive outside number 22 and Aurek bounds out of the car, running to the house, banging on the front door as if someone might open up to him and let him in.

‘I have something to show you,’ Janusz says, unlocking the door.

They walk through the hall, into the kitchen and outside.

The light in the garden is pale. The bark of the trees is paler still, the colour of new moons and baby teeth. All the leaves form a sweet fluttering of green. Aurek breathes in the smell of a warm day. He walks to the oak tree and sits down underneath his tree house. His mother sits next to him, his father the other side. The way they look at him makes him feel safe; it’s like he’s everything they ever wanted.

That’s what his father says to his mother.
You and the boy are everything to me.

Aurek closes his eyes and listens to the sparrows chattering in the trees. Somewhere, in another garden, or in the fields beyond the houses and factories, he hears the summer calling to him. A cuckoo’s refrain, its woody voice repeating over and over. Aurek can’t resist its needy cry. He opens his mouth and begins to sing.

Forgetfulness comes softly over the years. In time, Aurek will grow up thinking of England as his home. But still, as an adult, when he sees his mother staring out of the window or his father silent in his armchair, he wonders how hard it must have been for them both, leaving Poland to give him a safe life. A shadow of a memory will move in his mind then, quick, like a small boy playing hide-and-seek, running barefoot through the rooms of 22 Britannia Road.

The shared ghost, he believes, of their old country.

Heartfelt thanks to Rachel Calder and to Juliet Annan, Jenny Lord, Pamela Dorman and Julie Miesionczek. Thanks also to Sarah Hunt Cooke.

I am very grateful to Dr Kathy Burrell, Senior Lecturer in Modern History at De Montfort University, Leicester, for generously reading the novel and commenting on the historical aspects of it.

Special thanks go to Kit Habianic for reading early drafts. Also to Deborah Goodes, Marcia Edwards, Gill Hamer and all the talented writers who helped me at Lorraine Mace’s excellent Writing Asylum. Huge thanks to Richard Butler for being my computer guru and to Delyth Potts for always believing in me. Thank you, Melanie Watson, Aimy Kersey and Annie Benoit for your friendship and support.