22 Britannia Road Part 20

'I love you too,' Ginger Rogers replies.

And they never lose sight of each other again.

'Beautiful,' whispers Silvana as the credits roll. 'Just beautiful.'

By the time they are walking back home, up the hill to Britannia Road, Silvana's new shoes have given her blisters. Doris and Gilbert are up ahead, Gilbert complaining about the pubs shutting early and not getting a drink, Doris talking about sponge cakes and whether her grandmother's recipe is better than Gilbert's mother's.

Silvana stops walking. She takes her shoes off and feels the pavement wet under her feet.

Ja.n.u.sz takes her shoes from her. 'Did you enjoy the film?'

'I loved it. It's been so long since I last went to the cinema. Fred and Ginger are wonderful together.'

'Wonderful. And what about us?'

'Us?'

'Silvana, why don't we try for a baby? It would be good for Aurek to have a brother or a sister.'

She tries to think of something to say, but all she can think of is the impossibility of having another child.

'Look,' he says. 'I went to see the doctor... I went to ask him about... about us. I know you're not happy. You hardly let me touch you these days, and the thing is, the doctor thought that what would do you good what might make you happier is another child. I told him I agreed. Another child would be right for all of us.'

Silvana can see Ja.n.u.sz is waiting for a response, his face lit by the streetlamps.

'I have blisters,' she says.

Ja.n.u.sz hands her back her shoes. 'Is that all you have to say?'

'Yes.'

He turns his back on her and walks on. She hurries behind him.

'I'm sorry. Give me more time. Aurek is still so young.'

'He's nearly nine. He needs a brother.'

'But we can't afford another child.'

'We can if I get this job as foreman.'

'Isn't Aurek enough for us both?'

'So you don't want to try?'

Silvana shakes her head. The thought of another child terrifies her. She mustn't have one. She doesn't deserve one. And how can he ask this of her when he loved another woman indeed, might still love her?

Ja.n.u.sz shoves his hands in his pockets and hurries his step. She watches him catch up with Doris and Gilbert and begin a discussion about the film. The moment is over. Silvana has ruined it. She walks behind them, her shoes in her hand. She'd like to return to the darkened cinema. To sink into a velvet seat and lose herself again in the film's plot.

'Are you coming?' calls Doris. 'Only I want to get home before it rains.'

Silvana looks at Doris, Gilbert and Ja.n.u.sz waiting for her, their breath misting in the night air.

'Of course,' she replies, and quickens her pace, the feel of the cobblestones under her bare feet cold and wet.

Aurek is asleep by the fire when they get back, Peter curled up in the armchair and Tony reading.

'h.e.l.lo,' he says, putting down his book. 'Had a good time?'

Silvana stands dejectedly behind Ja.n.u.sz. Her stockings have holes in the toes and one of the blisters on her heel is weeping.

'Very nice,' she says. 'I'll just put Aurek to bed.'

'No.' Ja.n.u.sz bends down and takes the sleeping boy in his arms. 'I can do it.'

Silvana's heart splinters slightly at the sight of him holding the boy. She watches him carrying Aurek out of the room, the way he presses his cheek tenderly against the child's face.

'So, have you forgiven me?' Tony asks her. He crosses the room and shuts the door quietly.

'Forgiven you?' Now she is alone with him, Silvana can feel her heart beating too fast. She was so sure she wouldn't weaken like this, but the nearness of him is overwhelming.

'For not seeing you. I've missed you. I tried to stay away. I didn't want to complicate your life. Will you meet me?' He steps closer to her. 'When you get Aurek from school? Meet me in the park? I have to talk to you.'

'I can't.'

'Silvana, I need to see you. I can't pretend any more.'

Silvana is desperate to escape his gaze. She can feel it slipping over her hair, across the bodice of her dress. I am a housewife, she wants to tell him. Not a character in a film.

'This is impossible. Peter is in the room.'

'He's asleep. Next week,' he says. 'Tuesday. I'll be at the school gates. Will you come?'

She doesn't get a chance to answer. The door swings open and they both look towards it.

'Can I get you something to drink, Tony?' says Ja.n.u.sz, coming back into the room. 'A cup of tea? Or wine or sherry?'

Standing between the two men, Silvana can feel the heat of Ja.n.u.sz's controlled displeasure towards her.

'A nightcap,' says Tony, who acts as though he is completely unaware of the cold wind that has just blown in with Ja.n.u.sz. 'What a good idea.'

There they all are, Tony talking with his hands, gesturing to an imaginary audience; Ja.n.u.sz holding his hands firmly behind his back, speaking of work and the weather; Silvana turning a blank gaze towards the fire, the mantelpiece, the door, the sleeping form of Peter by the hearth, the area just above Tony's right shoulder, the crease in his elbow. The corner cupboard behind his head.

'I was just asking Silvana if you would like to take the boys to the woods after school next week,' says Tony.

'I don't think we have time,' Silvana says, trying to sound calm.

'Well, if you do, I'd be delighted to meet up with you all on Tuesday.'

'I don't know if I can make it,' says Ja.n.u.sz. 'I'll try, but we're changing hours at work at the moment. I may be on nights again.'

'Oh well, we can wait until you're free, Jan.'

'No, don't wait for me. I'm trying to get in as much overtime as they'll let me at the moment. I'm hoping for a promotion, in fact. But Silvana can go with Aurek. I know Aurek's missed having Peter to play with. Silvana?'

'I don't know. Perhaps. Please excuse me,' Silvana says, rubbing her eyes. 'I am tired. I think I'll go up to bed.'

'So I'll see you and Aurek on Tuesday?'

Ja.n.u.sz and Tony are both looking at her.

'Not next week,' she says. 'Perhaps another time, when Ja.n.u.sz is not working.'

She slips out of the door and hurries up the stairs, deciding she will sleep in Aurek's bed tonight.

When she brushes her teeth and washes her face, she tries not to look at herself in the mirror. She doesn't use her jar of cold cream. Her face can feel dry and sore. And she won't brush her hair out tonight. Satisfied with the small punishments she metes out to herself, she takes off her new dress and lays it carefully on the chair in her bedroom, smoothing the fabric with her hand. The dress means no harm, after all. And it is new. It carries nothing inside it but the possible beginnings of her downfall.

She goes into Aurek's bedroom and climbs into his bed. She waits for sleep to take her. No dreams of Poland No dreams of Poland, she thinks. Please, no dreams of planes and snow and the sound of children crying tonight. Aurek stirs in his sleep, throwing an arm around her, his skin hot against her neck.

Her intentions have always been clear to her. To give Aurek a father. If the boy is safe, she is safe.

'I've got you, my darling,' she whispers to Aurek, and she knows it is he who holds her. In the rough seas she feels she is floating in right now, it is the boy who is the life raft. Try as she might, she cannot lose this image. This floating in dark waters. But it is not her watery thoughts that bother her; it is the knowing that as surely as the boy holds her up, he is also pulling her under.

Poland

Silvana

Silvana woke to find an old man grinding snow into her chest. It was such a ridiculous sight she closed her eyes again, but still he went on, pus.h.i.+ng and pummelling her until she couldn't ignore him. She had snow in her mouth, and as she woke again she thought of the boy and tried to speak, to ask the man where her son was, but words wouldn't come.

The next time she opened her eyes, Aurek was bundled onto her chest. She wasn't lying on the red chaise longue but on a pile of logs on a sledge, a goatskin wrapped around her and the boy, being dragged through the forest.

They arrived at a cottage, where a dog barked and two women stood watching them. Silvana tried to focus, to see who they were, but she kept drifting into a light sleep. She saw one of the women bend towards her and Aurek being taken from her. Then she was picked up herself and carried into the cottage, where she was laid on the table, her clothes stripped from her.

'Mama,' said one of the women. 'Maybe we should get them by the fire? She's like a wet stone.'

'No, too much heat's bad for them. Antek, keep rubbing the boy with that towel, especially the skin that's gone yellow. We've got to get them warm from the inside.'

Silvana heard them talking as she drifted in and out of consciousness. Had she been lucky? she wondered. Should they both have died? Or was it the boy's luck that had saved them? She shut her eyes. Her head burned and her body felt like dough, but her heart filled with love for the child.

They were poor peasants, these people who had saved Silvana and Aurek's lives, their clothes no better than rags. Several times when Silvana woke from the deep sleep she kept falling into for the first few days, she thought she was at her parents' home again, her mother standing over her.

The woodsman was delighted by his rescue. He looked in on them each day as they began to recover. He was called Antek, and his wife, a smaller, sober version of Silvana's own mother, was named Ela.

Ela stood crookedly, shaped by her meagre life like a tree shaped by the wind. When she walked she carried her head low, her back bent like a shelf for the snow to settle upon. She complained of stomach pains and drank bottles of medicine the colour of charcoal.

They had just one daughter, a stocky young woman called Marysia.

'There are soldiers in the village, an hour's walk along the river,' Ela said as she sat ma.s.saging Silvana's legs with goose fat. 'You should stay close to the house.'

'Germans?' Silvana asked. She had been at the cottage for a couple of weeks and was just beginning to feel strong enough to take notice of where she was.

'A few hundred of them. We have no problems with them.'

'The villagers call us kulaks because they think we're on the side of the Germans,' Marysia said. 'But they're jealous because we don't have to work for the soldiers like they do.'

'The Germans are not so bad,' Marysia told Silvana when her mother had left the room. 'Some of them are better than the animals that call themselves men in the village.'

'Such gentlemen to take our country,' Silvana replied.

'Let them take it,' Marysia said. 'They're welcome to it. Before they came we were hungry. Now I have food whenever I want. And look ' She lifted her skirts and turned an ankle, showing off a pair of laced brown boots with a small heel. 'These come from Paris. I'd let you try them, but I don't think you'd get them on.'

Silvana looked down at her swollen feet. Her toes were scarlet, her feet covered in a red rash that marbled up her legs, stopping just below the knees.

Marysia tutted. 'You'll have scars. What were you doing in the woods anyway? Were you hiding? Are you Jewish? The boy looks Jewish.'

'My son is Polish. So am I.'

'I don't care either way,' Marysia said. 'My father thinks you and the boy are a couple of miracles. He'll let you stay here as long as you like. I'll let you stay as long as you pull your weight.'

Silvana stood up stiffly. It seemed as though she had lived many lives, that the day Ja.n.u.sz left her in Warsaw was the day one life ended and another began. And now here she was, starting again. A miracle no less. But she was nothing of the sort. She and the boy were foundlings from the forest, mysteries even to herself. In the kitchen, Aurek was sitting on Antek's lap, wrapped in oilcloths. Antek was teaching him a song. 'Oto dzi dzie krwi i chway', 'Today is a day of blood and glory'.

The old woman sat watching in a chair by the fire.

'Ah, there you are,' Antek said. 'Come and sit down.' He handed Aurek to Silvana.

'I was just saying how I thought you were nothing but a pile of old clothes when I found you. That's all I thought you were: a heap of blankets. I found the chaise a few days before. Thought it might be useful. There's lots of stuff in the woods now. People trying to get to the Russian side. They carry their furniture and belongings as far as they can, then abandon them. See that clock?' A wide-hipped grandfather clock stood against the whitewashed wall. It had a hand missing and the front was made of a different-coloured wood from the body. 'Mended it myself. I reckon it came from the same house the chaise longue came from. And then I saw you and I thought you were a pile of clothes.'

'Do you think you could show me the chaise longue again, when the weather improves?' Silvana asked. 'I had a bag with me. I'd like to go back and try to find it. And a necklace. A gla.s.s pendant. It's probably lost, but my husband gave it to me.'

'I didn't see a bag and I never saw a necklace. There was nothing but you and that broken seat.'

'The things that come out of the forest,' said his wife in a hushed voice. 'You hear such stories.'

'The drowned woman,' said Marysia. 'Tell us about the drowned woman.'

'That's a stupid story,' grumbled Antek.

'Go on, Mama, tell the story. I'm sure our guest wants to hear it.'

'All right,' said Ela. 'She was a drinker, this woman. She had a son but that didn't stop her. Her husband chucked her out. Kept the baby and threw her out in the street.'

'She slept with different men,' said Marysia. 'n.o.body knew who the father of her baby really was.' She stared at Silvana. 'Do you like a drink?'