22 Britannia Road Part 17

'I swallowed a b.u.t.ton. You turned me upside down so I didn't choke.'

The enemy smiles crookedly. 'That's right. You swallowed a b.u.t.ton. I'd forgotten. But you can't remember that, surely?'

'Mama told me. Do I go to school now?'

'No. You'll have to stay home until all the spots are gone. I'm off to work. You be a good boy for your mother.'

Aurek follows Ja.n.u.sz to the front door, the tiles icy under his feet.

When Ja.n.u.sz does up his coat and opens the door, a blast of wind nearly knocks Aurek over.

'A b.u.t.ton,' Ja.n.u.sz says. 'Fancy that. I'd forgotten. You were always putting things in your mouth when you were a baby.'

Ja.n.u.sz stares out at the day steadily, like a horse that has suddenly lifted its head in a field and looked into the distance. Aurek shuffles closer. He stands behind Ja.n.u.sz's legs and peers at the fluttering snowflakes outside, at the houses on the other side of the road, their grey windows, the frozen milk bottles on the doorsteps. He touches Ja.n.u.sz's hand. Perhaps the enemy will try to hug him today? If he does, Aurek will let him.

'Would you like to make a snowman when I get back from work?' says Ja.n.u.sz, looking down at him.

'Now?'

'No. Not now. After work. Men have to work, you know. You will too, one day.' Ja.n.u.sz pulls his hat tight over his ears and rubs his hands together. 'Shut the door behind me,' he says, and then he is gone, marching away with his shoulders hunched against the cold.

'Hurry back,' whispers Aurek.

He goes upstairs, climbing into bed beside his mother, who looks like she is sleeping, her eyes shut, hair across her face.

'Am I going to have a brother?'

Silvana opens her eyes. 'What?'

'A baby?'

'No,' she says, slipping an arm around him. 'You're everything we need.'

Aurek curls up beside her and feels glad. She's right. They don't need a baby.

Poland

Silvana

It began to rain and the camp turned muddy underfoot. Silvana had almost forgotten the war. Here it was as though they were far from everything, in another world. They lifted their beds higher off the ground, making pallets out of branches and fallen trees, but everything was soaked through and there was no way of drying anything.

The old man stopped getting out of his blankets, staying wrapped up in his own mess day and night. His wife let Gregor take his share of the food. Gregor sat chewing on dry bread while the old woman fussed over him, picking nits from his hair, smiling like an indulgent mother. Elsa and Lottie watched her, and Silvana saw the jealousy in their eyes. The old man stared at the canopy of branches above his head. Maybe he never saw the sky at all. Maybe he wasn't looking that far.

Silvana took to wandering during the day, walking miles with Aurek on her back. Some nights she couldn't bear the thought of Gregor so she stayed away from the camp at night too, taking her rabbit skins and making bracken beds for her and the boy. One morning she came back to find the old man staring harder than ever at the sky. The old woman was crying.

'Is he dead?' Silvana asked.

'What?' Sad-faced Lottie looked up. 'Him? G.o.d, no. He's not dead.'

'Why do you ask a question like that?' the old woman shouted. 'Don't I look after him? Is that what you are saying? I've cared for that man all my life. What would you know? Who are you anyway? You never speak to us. You creep around with that child of yours like a thief in the night. What use are you to us?'

Silvana looked around for Elsa. Then she understood. Gregor had gone. He and Elsa had left in the night.

The women left the next morning just as it was getting light. They didn't speak to Silvana, and she watched them gather their blankets and belongings. Lottie, the pianist, had stopped wearing her hair in a bun. Instead it hung down her back in thick coils. She and the old woman were bent over with the cold, moving like mirror images of each other. Two hags of the forest with twigs in their hair. Silvana was glad to see them go.

The old man died a week after they left. She tried to dig a hole to bury the corpse, but the ground was too hard and the old man was rigid. Besides, his blankets smelled bad, even in the cold. Silvana dragged him out of his shelter and let the snow that had begun to fall cover him. In hours he was frozen under a blanket of white. She wrapped Aurek in his rabbit furs, picked him up, pulled her coat tight around her and walked away. When the thaw comes, she thought, we will be far from here and the wild animals will have taken him. What she and the boy would be doing though, she had no idea.

Ja.n.u.sz The farmer and his wife were quietly welcoming to Ja.n.u.sz. They gave him a room at the back of the house, helping him onto the metal-framed bed, where he lay flat on his back and stared at the cracked ceiling and dark beams, wondering if he would ever be able to move freely again. The farmer's wife covered him with a damp sheet, dropping it lightly over him so that it covered not just his body but his face too. He blinked under the white cotton and felt like a corpse being laid to rest.

On his sunburnt skin, the sheet felt heavy. Just as he was about to move his stiff arms to lift it off him, two hands touched his face and folded the sheet back. He stared up at a girl in a yellow dress. The colour reminded him of the b.u.t.tercups that grew alongside the river back in his hometown.

He smiled at her and though pain cracked the peeling skin on his face he didn't care.

'What's your name?' he whispered.

She leaned over him. 'Did you say something, monsieur monsieur?'

He swallowed, tried again to speak. 'Your name?'

'Helene,' she said. 'Helene Legarde, monsieur monsieur.'

For a week he lay in bed with a fever brought on by sunstroke. Helene smeared olive oil onto his burns and gave him tiny sips of water. Her kindnesses made him dizzy with grat.i.tude. She popped the blisters on his back and spread dressings over the raw skin. When she leaned across him, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s rested briefly against his chest, sending a bolt of electricity through his spine. He could smell the scent of her, the musky smell of her sweat. It made him want to reach out and touch her. At night he waited impatiently until dawn, when she checked him again.

Once a day she helped him outside to the middy, the ditch at the back of the old stone farmhouse. Helene left him with a shovel and a bowl of ash, and he squatted in the blessed shade of the stone house, thinking about the simplicity of this family's life and the sense of peace he had found here.

He walked back into the courtyard, lizards rushing through scorched gra.s.s at his feet as he interrupted their sunbathing. In the yard, dogs slept, noses resting on stretched legs. Chickens gathered by a barn door, lying in dirt to keep cool, spreading wing feathers out like fingers. Helene was there too, her back to him, sweeping the terrace steps. He watched sweat spreading wetly across the back of her dress, making the summer print darken. She turned around, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s sliding towards each other as she grasped the broom with both hands and dipped her head, concentrating on her job.

Ja.n.u.sz walked towards her. 'It's too hot to work. You must be thirsty. Can I get you a drink?'

She looked up, and he took the broom from her.

'A drink?' she asked, her cheeks shining with heat. She walked over to the well in the middle of the yard and began pulling on a thick cord that dangled into its depths. Finally a metal bucket swung into view. She reached into it and pulled out a bottle of red wine.

'Nice and cold,' she said. 'We have a drink together?'

Ipswich

Christmas at number 22 smells of cabbage, baked fish and calamine lotion. They open their presents on Christmas Eve and Ja.n.u.sz says next year they'll wait and do it on Christmas Day like the rest of England.

'Of course,' says Silvana, who is too tired to argue, let alone think of another year. 'Whatever you want.'

There is a second-hand Raleigh bike for Aurek and a promise from Ja.n.u.sz to teach him how to ride it. Silvana doesn't want the boy riding a bicycle. She fears he will fall and hurt himself. Every time she looks at the bike, she imagines Aurek falling. She says nothing. Aurek leans it against the stairs in the hallway and polishes its wheel spokes with his handkerchief.

Silvana gives Ja.n.u.sz a brown paper bag of dahlia bulbs in sawdust. Ja.n.u.sz gives her perfume: Yardley English Lavender. She opens the bottle, breathes in and has a sneezing fit.

With the extra coal allowance the doctor gave them for Aurek, Silvana insists that they stoke the fire and keep the house warm. The snow hasn't let up and the whole country is freezing. It's on the radio and in the newspapers. The worst winter in years. She tells Ja.n.u.sz he should be proud: she read in a newspaper that it is Polish miners in Britain who are working round the clock to keep the coal supplies coming.

'The British moan about foreign workers,' she says to Ja.n.u.sz. 'But they would be stuck without our miners, wouldn't they?'

Even cheered as she is by this thought, she has to admit the Polish miners seem to be failing to keep her warm. She is wearing two pairs of stockings, a petticoat, a thick tweed skirt, two blouses and a cardigan, but it makes no difference.

She shivers and shakes with cold.

'Come on, Aurek, pay attention,' says Ja.n.u.sz. He is sitting in his chair by the fire with Aurek on the rug, trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle. 'That's the cowboy's scarf. It's blue. See? Look at the picture on the box. There's a piece like that somewhere else in here. Look for the same blue.'

Silvana wonders what Tony is doing, whether he is with Peter in the grandparents' big house by the park, doing jigsaw puzzles in front of the fire. She sits back in her chair. She hasn't seen him since October, when she told him about the letters. She should be pleased. Surely it makes her life easier not to see him, and yet she feels angry. How can he step in and then out of her life so easily?

She watches Ja.n.u.sz searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, steadily, logically, while Aurek piles up the wooden pieces into small towers.

'Time for a gla.s.s of sherry,' says Ja.n.u.sz after he has dismantled Aurek's pile of jigsaw pieces and put the last section of the sky in place. 'Aurek, no. Don't touch it. It's finished. Go and put the radio on. The King's speech will be on soon.'

The three of them sit listening to the radio, Silvana sipping her sherry. It tastes terrible, so she gulps it down, eager to finish the gla.s.s and be excused. Her head is thumping and she longs only to be in bed.

'And we should raise our gla.s.ses to the Royal Family,' says Ja.n.u.sz. 'And a toast to our own son. Aurek, do you want to try some sherry?'

When the national anthem plays Ja.n.u.sz looks at Silvana expectantly, but she does not move. She is sure that she will fall over if she attempts to stand. Ja.n.u.sz stands up, stiff and serious. His faith in the King is touching. Or is it just that she is too tired to be annoyed right now by his constant desire to be a perfect Englishman? Then Aurek surprises her by leaping to his feet and saluting as the anthem plays on.

'I've taught him the words,' says Ja.n.u.sz. 'Come on, Aurek. Sing with me.'

To see Aurek singing the British national anthem with his father, both of them standing to attention together, Aurek breaking into crow calls and dog howls as he sings, makes her laugh and then cough and splutter, and finally retch and vomit.

Ja.n.u.sz turns the radio down. 'Are you all right?' He bends over her and pulls his handkerchief from his pocket.

Christmas is a terrible time of year, she thinks, wiping her mouth. It leaves her defenceless.

'I want to go home,' she mumbles.

Ja.n.u.sz leans towards her, pushing a lock of hair away from her eyes. 'Me too,' he whispers into her ear. Or at least she thinks that is what he said. She looks into his eyes.

'Wesolych swiat,' she says. 'Happy holidays.'

Then she lets Ja.n.u.sz help her up to bed.

The rest of Christmas and New Year pa.s.s by in a blur. The doctor is called and says she has flu. Her head feels like a steam iron, clunky and heavy, and her body is something she would gladly give up if she could.

During the day, when Ja.n.u.sz is back at work, Doris takes Aurek to school. She brings Silvana beef tea and Easton's tonic, a sticky brown syrup that Doris swears by and Silvana silently swears at. And all the time, while Silvana lies in bed recovering, she has the feeling that Aurek is slipping away from her.

In the garden, the light is fading. Trees are frosted with white. The rickety garden fence is soft grey against the freezing snow that clings in ice-beaded lines along the top of it. On the ground the snow is the same dry white as a sugar loaf. On the old oak tree at the bottom of the garden the snow is a different colour again. Against the tree's black trunk it is as blue-white as breast milk.

Silvana turns away from the wintery scene outside her window and looks at Aurek sitting at the kitchen table. Doris has just brought him back from school.

'Are you still friends with Peter?'

She has promised herself she will not do this, but here she is.

'I never meant it when I said you shouldn't be friends, you know. I'm sorry for what I said. He's a nice boy. Why don't you ask him over to play?'

'Peter's not at school.'

'Not at school?'

'The teacher says he's not coming back. He's gone away.'

So it really is true. Tony has left. And to think, she had nearly told him everything. Aurek looks as if he might cry. His only friend, and she has forced him to leave town.

'You can have the day off school tomorrow,' she whispers to him.

As it is, the school is closed. The snow keeps on falling and the roads become impa.s.sable. Everybody talks about it being the worst winter in living memory. Ja.n.u.sz stays home for a week when his factory closes and they live on soup with dumplings because even if the shops had any food in them, which is doubtful, they are all closed.

Every morning, Silvana goes walking. She knows she should stay in the house, but her legs won't let her.

'We have snow like this in Poland every year,' she says to Ja.n.u.sz. 'I don't know what the fuss is about.'

'People are freezing in their homes,' says Ja.n.u.sz. 'Don't you read the news? The country is on its knees. And you can't take Aurek with you. It's too cold for him out there.'

'I just need to walk,' she says. Truth is, she is ashamed of what she feels when she sees Ja.n.u.sz and the boy together. She has what she wanted, a father for Aurek. He loves the boy and Aurek, she can see, is beginning to trust him. She should be happy, but instead she can't bear to see them together.

She trudges through the blue light of sleet and ice, her lungs burning with cold, and pretends she is back in the frozen Polish winters of the war, back with her own memories and the importance of survival, of having nothing else to consider.

She walks past sheep huddled in fields. She sees a train buried in snow, gla.s.sy icicles hanging like daggers off shopfront windows. In the centre of town, Tony's pet shop is shut up, blinds over the windows, a closed sign in the door. She stands in front of it, looking up at the windows of the flat above the shop and wonders where he could be.

The estuary freezes over and Silvana walks out onto the ice, listening to the low moan of wind skating across its surface. She feels the ice bow and creak under her feet. If the ice opened and she fell into the dark waters, her secret would be gone with her. Only Aurek would be left. Just a boy and his father. But the river doesn't take her. She is as dry and weightless as the wind itself, and the constant snap and shiver of ice as she steps out towards the middle of the river becomes companionable, like sticks breaking on a forest floor.

The town stays frozen for weeks and then the thaws come, causing the river to flood and the ca.n.a.ls to fill with surging brown waters. In the centre of town, the buses and trams start running again, people walk the streets in wellingtons and sou'westers and the schools are all open.

On a bright morning, after taking Aurek to school, Silvana walks through the backstreets of Ipswich. She pa.s.ses by the Methodist church with its bleak yellow-brick front and sees a small pa.s.sageway she has not been down before. She enters it, running her fingertips against narrow moss-lined brick walls, marvelling at the darkness that gathers at her feet like blackened leaves.

The pa.s.sageway comes out into a cobbled street full of garages and repair shops. Cars, lorries, vans and coaches are parked in an orderless jumble, blocking the road. She makes her way through them, and at the end of it she finds a yard. A painted sign hangs over the wooden doors: Harry Goldberg & Son. Rag & Bone & Sc.r.a.p Metal Merchants. Harry Goldberg & Son. Rag & Bone & Sc.r.a.p Metal Merchants. The man who sold her the shoes. She is curious, drawn to the place. The man who sold her the shoes. She is curious, drawn to the place.

The next day she bakes gingerbread. Half of it she puts on the kitchen table for Aurek and Ja.n.u.sz. The other half she wraps in a tea towel and takes to the rag-and-bone man. He remembers her. He pushes the gingerbread into his mouth and smiles, showing sticky teeth and receding gums.

'Have a look around. I've got everything here, antiques an' all. I have dealers coming down from London to look over my stock. My father ran this place before me. He used to buy bones an' all. Boiled 'em up right here.'

'Bones?'

'Rag and bone. That's what we dealt in. We sold bones for fertilizer. No money in it now. Have a look around.'