22 Britannia Road Part 27

She is aware of his eyes upon her. They have a softness in them that could trip her up.

'I'm usually on my own in the evenings,' he says. 'In the flat above the shop. I used to think of you and wonder what you were doing. And now here you are. Right here with me.'

'I won't be staying long,' she says quickly, and sees the sudden alarm in his face, the way the colour changes in his cheeks. She straightens her back, drinks her cocoa and summons all the contrariness she has left in her character.

'It's very kind of you to help us in this way, but we will go home soon.'

She gets up, takes his mug from him and walks into the kitchen. Tony follows her, standing behind her while she washes up in the sink.

'Will you really go back?'

'Ja.n.u.sz will want to see Aurek. He's his father. I'll stay here for a few days or so and then we will have to go.'

'Do you think so?' says Tony, and she can hear the sadness in his voice.

'Yes, I do.'

Silvana runs the water away down the sink and turns to face him.

'Shall we go up?' he says, offering her a towel for her hands.

The staircase is wooden, no carpet runner, just bra.s.s stair rods, piles of newspapers and dust everywhere.

'Beggar's velvet,' says Tony when he sees her looking. 'That's what Lucy called those dust b.a.l.l.s that gather in corners. This place needs a clean.'

'I'll clean tomorrow,' Silvana says, trying not to jump at the sound of his dead wife's name. This was her house and he is still proud of her. Proud, too, of the way she made poetry from skin flecks and hair and household dirt.

Tony stands with his hand on the door to the bedroom. He looks at her and she wants to say, Please, don't ask that of me tonight Please, don't ask that of me tonight, even as she knows that she will do what he wants.

'When you kissed me today, Silvana, it was all I could do to stop myself from making love to you there and then.'

So she she kissed him? Is kissed him? Is that that what happened? It's not how she remembers the moment at all. Surely it was Tony who made the first move? what happened? It's not how she remembers the moment at all. Surely it was Tony who made the first move?

He presses against her, full of wanting, his tongue searching her mouth. His hands hold her hips and she feels his p.e.n.i.s through his trousers, its insistent blunt-ended heat pressed against her. Silvana doesn't move. She is cold in his embrace and she knows he feels it.

Memories blaze through her mind. Now her secret is out in the open she is living through the death of her son all over again. She can see the woman she handed him to. See the woman's face, her cheeks pinched by the cold, her eyes watering in the wind. She still can't understand how she could have been so careless. How could she have given her son to someone else?

Tony stops kissing her. He lets his lips linger on her cheek for a moment. Runs a hand through her hair and steps away from her.

'I'm sorry,' she whispers.

'You can have the room next to Aurek's,' he says. 'I hope it's not too cold in there on your own. I can put an extra blanket on the bed.'

Silvana is so relieved she even manages a smile.

'It's all right,' he says, turning away from her. 'You just need some time, that's all.'

She sits in her room, waiting for Tony to settle in the bedroom next door, listening to the sound of him undressing: the trill of a zip and the pop of b.u.t.tons being released; the rustle of a shirt being eased off his back, the polite unfolding of pyjamas. The creak of mattress springs as he gets into bed, and finally the click of the lamp.

When Tony's bed springs cease their unsettled squeaking, Silvana tiptoes downstairs, picking up a few of the newspapers piled on the stairs. Tired as she is, sleep is not going to come tonight.

In the sitting room at the front of the house she flicks through old newspapers. Many of them contain photographs of children: groups of them standing in train stations and public halls, carrying boxes and suitcases, all of them labelled like lost luggage. She studies them for hours, the hollow eyes of the children staring back. What if Aurek has a mother somewhere? Did she save the boy or steal him? What if there is a woman somewhere, waiting for her son to come home to her?

She turns off the lamp and sits in the dark, staring out of the window, imagining the sea, listening hard for the sound of the waves, rolling in and out, in and out, like the breath of Tony and Aurek asleep upstairs. When a damp-looking daylight seeps across the sky and the seagulls begin noisily circling the pier, she finds a broom and starts cleaning the house.

Ipswich

The sun is low in the sky and in the garden everything is disappearing into shadow. All Ja.n.u.sz's roses, his plants and the neatly mowed lawn are disappearing into the night. Ja.n.u.sz leans his head against the window in Aurek's room and listens to the empty house, the gloomy weight of silence. He lies down on the bed and watches the dark reaching into the room, turning the wardrobe into a huge black cave.

His son. All these years his son has been dead and he has never known. His Aurek. He can't even think of the boy he has been loving in his place. She brought a stranger into his life and told him he was his son. And did the boy know he was an imposter? Was he a liar too?

He tries to imagine the forest Silvana lived in. Is that where she learned to be so ruthless? He read a newspaper story just the other day about some soldiers who, unable to believe the war was over, were still stumbling around in European forests, their beards full of moss and twigs, their eyes half blind in the murky woodland light, living on rabbits, mice and squirrels.

He should have let them be. Left Silvana to her wildness. Helene's family would have welcomed him. He could have gone there after the war, gone to France and found work in Ma.r.s.eilles. Or Canada. There'd been work offers for ex-servicemen in Canada. He could have started a new life there. That's what he should have done.

He'd imagined peacetime would bring him a sense of belonging. During the war it had kept him going, that thought of peace. He'd believed in it, like a season he knew would arrive one day. War had been winter all the way, years of Decembers and Januaries. Peacetime was meant to be summer. And he'd thought it had finally arrived when he'd got this house, this life in a small English town, his wife and son.

He gets up, rubbing his aching head, and turns on the light. He opens the window, breathing the night air, sniffing for the scent of woodland, the whiff of pine, the tang of mushrooms and moist earth. A faint smell of bonfires and compost heaps is carried on the breeze. Closing the window, he notices the frame is rotten around the latch. He'll get on and mend that tomorrow. The house is the only solid thing he knows, and he'll be d.a.m.ned if he'll let that fall apart too.

He tidies Aurek's bed, plumping the pillow and picking up the striped pyjamas he finds underneath it.

And not even a proper burial. He can't stop thinking about that. She left his son's body in a handcart. His son. How can he ever forgive her for that?

In his own bed, he lies awake, unable to sleep. He still has the boy's pyjamas in his hands. He wants to believe Silvana has made a mistake. Surely she is lying about Aurek? Ja.n.u.sz drops the pyjamas onto the floor. He knows she isn't. He saw the truth in her eyes. His son is dead. He stares at Silvana's empty bed. He feels fear, a tight knot in his guts, a wartime feeling; the unsteady world Silvana inhabited has become his.

He lights a cigarette, burns his fingers watching the flame run down the match. Does it again, black soot on his thumb, the skin reddened, pain mounting inside him and so much grief it could break him open, grief for not one son but two.

Felixstowe

Aurek is listening to the seagulls. It is not yet light and the sky is still laced with stars, but the birds are mewling like forsaken kittens. He opens the sash window, leans out and copies the birds' cries until a woman a few doors down, ugly, with a stormy face, looks out of her own window and tells him she'll hang, draw and quarter him if he doesn't shut the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l up. He gets back into the camp bed and tries to sleep, hoping he'll wake again and find himself back in his own bed in Britannia Road.

They have been in Felixstowe for five days. He is still wearing the clothes he arrived in, and his mother doesn't seem to notice if he is there or not. In the evenings she sits looking through the piles of newspapers, showing Aurek pictures of children he doesn't want to see. He doesn't know them. Why should he want to look at them? And she doesn't know them either, so why does she cry over them?

Tony has gone back to Ipswich. He said he had to keep the pet shop open, that he had to keep to his usual habits in order to avoid arousing any suspicion. He looks at Aurek as if he is a bad boy.

When Tony left he promised he would come back at the weekend. Aurek didn't understand why, but when he said that, handing his mother money, telling her it had to last for the week, it made her cry.

Men disturbed them last night, Wednesday, knocking on the door, taking cardboard boxes away and bringing bales of cotton sheets. His mother told them she was Tony's housekeeper. The men lifted their hats and thanked her, and they, too, handed her money. Aurek hid from them. He made a nest in a bale of sheets.

During the day, his mother moves like a sleepwalker. She wanders the beaches and he follows her, trailing along behind, kicking sand and picking up sh.e.l.ls and broken gla.s.s. When he is hungry she buys him candyfloss: pink and green clouds of it, which make his teeth ache and his mouth water. Lovely sweetness dissolves on his tongue and he takes wild bites, the roughness of sugar on his cheek, gobs of it in his hair. If he eats it like that, his mother stops walking and watches him. Sometimes she even smiles for a moment. Then she drops her head, studies her feet and walks on again.

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 Sat.u.r.day morning they drive to a forest of pine trees a half hour inland. It's wide and evenly s.p.a.ced 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 gra.s.s 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 s.n.a.t.c.hes 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.

Poland

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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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.'

Ja.n.u.sz

Ja.n.u.sz 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 miechu beczki miechu, barrels of laughs. The huts had small windows punched into their frames, and the wind blew through the ill-fitting gla.s.s. Outside, in the wet mud, glistened the tyre patterns of bicycles leading out of the field onto the road beyond. Ja.n.u.sz 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 b.u.t.t 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 b.l.o.o.d.y awful food the cook might be serving. He looked at his watch. Bruno would be back from duty that afternoon and Ja.n.u.sz wanted to go to the village pub with him.

'Not a chance,' Bruno had said when Ja.n.u.sz 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,' Ja.n.u.sz 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.'

Ja.n.u.sz 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 Ja.n.u.sz 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.'