22 Britannia Road Part 18

The stables are full of clothes and bric-a-brac. Dining-room chairs are piled to the ceiling of one stall. Bales of damp-smelling linen fill another. Dozens of cats, sleeping in among the linen, wake at Silvana's approach and watch her with sharp eyes. She looks into dark stalls filled with carpets and silk parachutes, beds and blanket boxes. For the first time since coming to England, she feels a moment of recognition. She is surely part of this jetsam of human life.

The following week, Silvana bakes more gingerbread for the rag-and-bone man. He has a sweet tooth and, she suspects, n.o.body in his life to feed it. The simple exchange of cake for time to wander through his barns and stables pleases her.

'It's my birthday,' she tells him, encouraged by the obvious pleasure with which he greets her. 'Today.'

It is probably not the kind of thing you say to a stranger, but Silvana wants to tell somebody. Ja.n.u.sz went off this morning without a mention of it. Not that it matters. She is twenty-eight years old. Too old for cakes and singsongs.

'Well then, you just help yourself,' the man tells her. 'Happy birthday, miss. You go on and take what you want. Most of the clothes go to charity in any case. I sort them and they get sent off to people who need them. Foreigners mainly. Poor beggars who've got nothing.'

For a moment she thinks he is insulting her. But then she stares at his hooded eyes and sallow face and realizes she sees him in the same way, as just another lonely foreigner who has nothing.

Silvana helps him sort the clothes. Bedlinen and cotton for rags. Musty-smelling coats in one pile; men's clothes in another; women's and children's in a third. She thinks of the refugee camp, the long lines of people who came and went and disappeared just like she did onto trains and buses and boats heading for other countries. The clothes they were all given must have started their journey in places like this. Sorting clothes with the rag-and-bone man is like moving among lost people, and they are the kind she knows best.

Silvana opens a hessian sack filled with blouses and imagines the women who once wore them. The stains and cloudy marks on bed sheets are a registry of births and marriages and deaths. Sweat rings on collars make her sigh. She puts her hands in sleeves and traces the roughened seams of st.i.tching pulled open by bodies that must have, day after day, strained against the cloth. Buckets of shoes leave her trembling. The hardened leather shoes and boots are like the misshapen feet of the dead.

She notes the repairs and the slow decline of garments and feels like she is in mourning for the people who once wore them. Yet she can resurrect them. She will package and parcel and sort the clothes. They will travel on, into the arms of men and women and children who have arrived at the end of the war with nothing but the curious realization that they have survived something and a dull sense that they might not survive the beginning of something else.

She finds a black cotton dress with wide skirts, the kind her mother wore. She imagines her mother in the dismal gown, head bent in sorrow or annoyance, her hands holding the shape of her dead sons. Silvana lifts the dress by its shoulders and shakes the creases out of it.

'I'm your daughter,' she says, holding it at arm's length. She gives it another shake and its sleeves flap aggressively, black and sullen, like the wings of a cornered crow.

'So, what shall I do, Mother?' she asks the dress. 'I think of Tony all the time. 'Tell me, what should I do? What would you do? Why can't you help me when I need you?'

The dress gives her no advice. Of course it wouldn't. When did her mother ever help her before? And yet she misses her.

She walks home carrying it over one arm and finds Ja.n.u.sz and Aurek sitting in the front parlour with Doris.

'Happy birthday!'

They break into song. 'Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you...'

Silvana cannot move to take her coat off. Her frozen fingers throb in the sudden warmth, tingling as if they are coming back to life. Mottled red and white, they sting and swell so she couldn't unb.u.t.ton her coat even if she wanted to.

'You thought they'd forgotten,' says Doris. She takes a drag on her cigarette and coughs heartily. 'Jan's been doing things behind your back!'

'Here.' Ja.n.u.sz hands her a large white box with a blue ribbon across it. 'Doris helped us choose it.'

'Me,' says Aurek. 'Me, me, me.'

Doris laughs. 'All right. You chose it. Go on, Sylvia, open it.'

Silvana opens the box and lifts out a dress. It is a dark-blue fabric with a white polka dot. Three-quarter-length sleeves edged with lace and a wasp waist with a boned girdle over a wide skirt.

Ja.n.u.sz hands her another box. He speaks quietly so that only she can hear. 'I've missed too many of your birthdays.'

Inside the box are a pair of court shoes and kid-leather gloves.

'I've kept those boxes in my spare bedroom for weeks now,' says Doris. 'And believe me, it's lucky you're smaller than me or I'd have had that frock and worn it myself! Come on. Give us a fashion show. Let's see what you look like.'

In her bedroom, Silvana puts the black gown in the wardrobe. She changes into her new dress, spinning around to feel the skirts swirl. The skirt is gathered. Imagine that! Folds of fabric all around her. And new! Bought for her, never worn by anyone else. She can't remember the last time she wore a brand-new dress. She slips her feet into the shoes and puts the gloves on, pushing her fingers into firm leather. In the bathroom she looks in the mirror. The dress is beautiful, but the woman staring back at her looks blank-eyed, harsh. When, she wonders, will I look less like a stranger to myself?

She goes downstairs, and Ja.n.u.sz nods his approval.

'You can wear it on Friday.'

'Friday?'

'We're going to the cinema. Doris and Gilbert are coming with us.'

'The cinema?'

She thinks of Warsaw and the film theatres where she went to see matinee performances. Sitting on velvet seats in the dark, her pregnant belly almost touching the seat in front, she had been carried through her favourite American movies on a wave of hopefulness. She'd gone every week and thought that the child when he was born (despite her mother's craziness, she had always believed her prophecy that she was carrying a boy) would grow up to love films.

Doris claps her hands together and Silvana is woken from her reverie. She is grateful to Doris for snapping her out of that line of thought. She pulls Aurek to her, folding him into her skirts.

'We've even got a babysitter arranged,' says Doris.

Ja.n.u.sz nods. 'It's only for a few hours.'

Silvana shakes her head. She is not leaving the boy with a stranger.

'Who?'

'Tony!' says Doris. 'I b.u.mped into him the other day. He said to tell you he's looking forward to seeing you. He'll be here on the b.u.t.ton at 6 p.m., Friday night.'

Ja.n.u.sz runs his finger along the inside of his collar. 'That's all right, isn't it?'

'There you are,' says Doris. 'All fixed.'

'Silvana?' says Ja.n.u.sz. 'Are you all right?'

'You look like you've seen a ghost,' laughs Doris. 'White as a sheet, you are.'

Silvana sits down, her stiff skirts rising up around her. She clasps her hands together and forces herself to smile.

'I'm fine,' she says. 'Absolutely fine.'

Poland

Silvana

Silvana spent days wandering through the forest. It was without end. After Gregor left and the women followed him, she didn't understand the trees. No matter how far she walked, she never found the edge of the forest and she never saw any other signs of life. She looked for men, for the partisans hiding out in the forest, but there was no one. She and the boy were alone. Perhaps, she thought, she should have been more friendly with Gregor? Wherever he had taken Elsa, maybe he could have taken her and Aurek as well.

It was the tiredness that got to her. She was too tired to be cold any more. Too tired to notice the ache in her teeth and the pain in her back from hunching against the icy wind.

She imagined lying down on a bed, one that she and the child could stretch out on. She thought she wanted sleep. After a while she knew it was death she hoped for. Silvana understood everything then. She was her mother's daughter. Unlucky, incapable of bringing up a child.

She remembered the snow in the apple orchard when she was a child and told Aurek about it, hoping to bring some magic to the ice around them. She had made angels in the snow. She and the other children searched for untouched snow then lay down in it and stretched their arms and legs so they appeared like semaph.o.r.e stars spreadeagled on the ground. Carefully, the child lying down would be pulled clear of their imprint and a magical shape like a cut-out angel would be left in the snow with no sign of how it had been made.

She hadn't expected the winter to be so terrible. It wasn't like the snow she remembered from her childhood at all. It was brutal. The trees glowed blue with h.o.a.r frost and the bare branches glittered. Her teeth ached with cold. Her hands stiffened; her jaw froze. Fingers swelled. Trying to do anything with them was difficult.

Aurek stopped crying. He lay in Silvana's arms with his eyes half closed and his mouth open. His apple-red cheeks turned frost-white. She could feel him giving up.

She discovered a small clearing in the forest, a dip in the landscape where only fire-scorched tree trunks remained. A bomb must have exploded there, scooping out earth and trees like a giant hand, leaving a bowl-shaped area sheltered from the winds by high banks of snow. Silvana sat on the crater's edge and slid down the bank on her back with Aurek between her legs. At the bottom, in a flurry of snow, she saw something that made her rub her eyes and blink.

It was then she knew she would never leave the forest again. She stared at it, taking in its beauty. It was the most colourful thing she had seen for a long time. The gold fringing beckoned her like a friend. Tightly sprung, b.u.t.ton-backed in red velvet, a chaise longue sitting on a carpet of white like something enchanted.

Silvana had found other furniture before: tables, broken stools, cupboards. She'd never found anything as beautiful as the red chaise longue.

Black crows flew through the bare branches of the sky. They were urging her on, she was sure of it. For days she had heard them calling her name. At first she'd thought they were mocking her, but then she'd understood. She was part of the forest. The crows were telling her that. They had been leading her here. This was the end. The boy was already fading in her arms.

Silvana walked towards the chaise, her eyes fixed on the roll of carved mahogany at its back. With numb fingers she traced the smooth shine of wet wood and pitted woodworm, black circles against the white crystals of ice that clung to its outline. Dusting off layers of snow, she sat down. Aurek leaned against the red velvet. He put his mouth against it and tasted the colour on his tongue. Silvana bent forwards and lifted him onto her lap, where he whimpered, curling tightly into her. She leaned her head back. It felt good to be giving up. To know she wasn't going to have to walk any further.

It wouldn't take long for the cold to crackle through her. For the glacial sleep to come. Aurek's body, normally as insubstantial as the powder snow that drifted in the wind, began to feel heavy against her. This way, she reasoned as she let go of consciousness, they would be together for ever. She and the child. She whispered to him, explained how sorry she was to fail him. Twice she said it. Two sorrows, banked up against her, cold as the snow.

Ja.n.u.sz When his skin began to peel in dry white flakes, Ja.n.u.sz dozed in a shaded barn, the scent of thyme, sage, rosemary hot in his nostrils. Gradually he felt stronger, his skin healed and he began to help Helene water the animals, collect eggs. They worked quietly together. She showed him how to milk the goats and stack the hay in the barn. Their hands touched as Helene pa.s.sed him eggs.

'How old are you?' she asked one morning.

He had wanted to ask her the same question but hadn't wanted to be rude.

'I'm twenty-four,' she said. 'Vingt-quatre. Here, catch!' She threw an egg in the air and he caught it. 'Bravo!' she cried and threw him another. Here, catch!' She threw an egg in the air and he caught it. 'Bravo!' she cried and threw him another.

'Twenty-four years old and my mother worries I am too old to find a husband. She thinks I'll be an old maid all my life.'

'And you, what do you think?'

'I think I'm waiting for the right man to come along. Here, catch!'

The egg hit him on the chest and broke in his hands.

She took a twist of hay and wiped his shirt clean.

'Take it off,' she said. 'I'll wash it for you.' She reached out to unb.u.t.ton it and he backed away, feeling foolish.

'Suit yourself,' she said, and walked out of the barn.

She came back to find him hanging his shirt up to dry in the sun. He saw her watching him, leaning against the barn door, her arms folded, a smile playing on her lips.

'Hey, soldat soldat. If you've finished being a washerwoman, I want to show you something.'

She led him into the barn, shooed the roosting chickens away and pulled a tarpaulin off a red car covered in dust. She untied her ap.r.o.n and wiped it over the bonnet, revealing shiny paintwork.

'Whose is this?' He ran a hand over it, tried not to think of how he wanted to take Helene in his arms. Tried not to look into her eyes.

'It's Pascal's. My brother. It doesn't work. He came back from Ma.r.s.eilles with it a week before he joined up.'

'Where is he now?'

'Normandy. He's the reason you're here. Madam Agut, who runs the boarding house where you were staying, is a friend of his.'

Ja.n.u.sz could smell Helene's soap, the heat of her skin. He lifted the bonnet and peered inside. The spark plugs were probably worn. He pulled one out and held it up to the light. Helene took it from him.

'Kiss me.'

She put her hand on the back of his neck and pressed against him. He pushed her away.

'I'm married.'

He was an idiot to say it, but the words tumbled out. A defence against his own desperate desire to tell her he loved the sight of her, the sound of her.

'So where is your wife?'

'Back in Poland.'

'Exactly.'

She kissed him and he felt warmed through, as if he hadn't known until that moment how much coldness still dwelled in his body. He tried to speak, to make her see sense.

'I'm not... This is all I can give you. And I have to leave soon.'

'So we should be together, while we can.' She kissed him again. 'We only live one life. How can you let this pa.s.s?'

And he couldn't.

She slipped off her dress and pulled his head down, cramming a brown-nippled breast, sweet as a sun-warmed apple, into his mouth. He was crazy for her. He dropped to his knees, pulling her down with him, and she climbed across him, strong and determined, her thighs smacking his ribs, hands pulling his hair, the bowl of her hips spread across his face, knees knocking his ears.

He tasted her, but when he tried to hold her she flicked her hips and was away again, sliding down his body. He caught her tightly in his grip and held her as they rolled together, b.u.mping and bucking, on the barn floor, bruising elbows, b.u.t.tocks, faces, knees.

They looked like a couple of wrestlers when they had finished, covered in sweat and dirt. He held her in his arms and she sank her head against his chest. They dozed for a while then he looked down at her and kissed her, his arms scooping her up, drawing her into his embrace. She wound her body around him.

She was a blanket then, against the world. He didn't have to think of murdered old women and young men shooting themselves for the sake of drowning dogs. All the cold and the fear that had brought him here was gone. There was nothing more in his life than her, this warm, beautiful girl, the tough southern sunlight and the pungent smell of s.e.x in his nostrils.

They sat together on the back seat of her brother's car. For an hour they didn't speak. There were no words for how he felt about her. He traced the lines on her hands, kissed the tips of her fingertips, the calluses on her palms, the span of muscle between her thumb and forefinger. Her stubby fingers and calloused palms delighted him. No matter what happened, no matter where he went after this, he knew he would always remember her hands. She asked him about his life and he told her about Silvana and Aurek.

'Wait.' He pulled a photograph from his trouser pocket. 'There. That's them. My wife Silvana, and that's our son.'

'She's pretty. And the boy looks like an angel. I'm very happy for you.'

'Are you?'

'No. I'm jealous.'