22 Britannia Road

by Amanda Hodgkinson

  ‘I want to go to Grandma’s,’ he moans.

  ‘Stop that crying, Peter,’ snaps Tony. ‘Silvana, will you be all right?’

  ‘Yes. Take Peter home. Please just let me go.’

  ‘Look, I can come with you, explain the boys made a mistake …’

  ‘No. I want to go home alone. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘I’ll be at the pet shop,’ he says as she gets out of the car. ‘Silvana, I’ll be there if you need me. Silvana?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, walking away. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  She is feeling anything but fine. Her legs tremble and her eye is weeping and she bows her head, hoping nobody will see her walking stiffly up the hill.

  Earlier she was carrying a picnic basket and walking with Tony and the boys in the woods. Now her world has fallen in. She should have gone home with Aurek straight away. Going back to the flat above the pet shop had been a big mistake. Her knee starts to ache and she begins to limp.

  She will tell Janusz the truth. She will do what she should have done that first day they arrived and he met her off the train. It’s as simple as that. No more lies. Oh, for somebody to give her advice!

  Janusz will see what a gift Aurek is to them. He will see that the boy must be cherished and kept safe. They can move if he wants. Move away and start again somewhere. No more Tony. None of it. She stops outside the house and takes a deep breath.

  There is a car parked outside, and she wonders who it belongs to. Her first thought is that they must have company, but she dismisses that quickly. They don’t know anybody. She pushes the door open. 22 Britannia Road. This is her home. Though what sort of a welcome will be waiting for her she has no idea. She nods at the bluebird in the door, as if it might offer her some kind of luck, and walks through to the kitchen, where she finds Janusz sitting at the table with Gilbert and Doris.

  Silvana knows what she must look like. Her eye is swollen. She has a cut on her cheek. Her dress, the one Janusz bought her, is covered in green mossy stains and rips. She tries to tidy her hair a little and her fingers find a twig. She decides to leave it where it is. She knows she looks stupid enough, outnumbered in her own kitchen, without conjuring bird’s nests out of her hair.

  Doris is the first to speak.

  ‘So you’ve come back, have you? Why didn’t you stay with your fancy man?’

  ‘Janusz, where’s Aurek?’

  Doris glares at her. ‘Now you ask? His father put the poor little mite to bed.’

  Gilbert looks flushed and uncomfortable. ‘Doris, I think we should be getting home.’

  ‘I’ll go when I’m good and ready.’ She dusts her hands across the front of her apron. ‘The poor little kid. Filthy trick, if you ask me. And to think I felt sorry for you.’

  Silvana ignores Doris. She will not be intimidated in her own home. Not while it still is her home, at least. She turns to Janusz. He avoids her gaze.

  ‘That poor child,’ insists Doris. ‘Thank God he’s got a father is all I can say.’

  ‘Calm down, Doris,’ says Gilbert. ‘There’s no need for any trouble. I’m sorry, Jan. We’re just going.’

  Doris makes a snorting noise, pursing her lips. She allows Gilbert to take her elbow and guide her out of her seat. Silvana steps aside to let her pass.

  ‘I understand you all right,’ Doris whispers. ‘Oh yes, I’ve got you figured now. Family planning, my foot.’

  ‘Doris!’ Gilbert pushes her hard.

  ‘I tell you what. You won’t get away with this. This is a respectable street. You’ll get your comeuppance, you’ll see.’

  ‘Doris!’ Gilbert says sharply. He avoids Silvana’s eyes. ‘We’re just going.’

  The front door slams and Silvana can hear them arguing outside. She sits down at the kitchen table.

  ‘I don’t know what Aurek said, but it wasn’t how it looked.’

  She knows it sounds weak even as she says it. She tries again. Hopes she sounds more convincing.

  ‘I was scared and Tony tried to comfort me.’

  Janusz folds his arms. ‘Scared,’ he says. ‘What of this time?’

  ‘Aurek nearly fell out of a tree. I thought I was going to lose him. I have a right to be scared. The world is dangerous, Janusz. Maybe not for you, but for me. I feel it every day.’

  Janusz still won’t look at her. She tries to follow his gaze, and in desperation picks up her chair and places it in front of him.

  He runs a finger around his collar. Stares at her coldly.

  ‘How long has this been going on?’

  She has to tell him the truth, pull the words out of herself, force them to come. It feels like she is dredging something long-dead from a river.

  ‘I have to tell you. About Aurek.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘After you left us in Warsaw I got on a bus out of the city. Aurek was ill. Do you remember how he always picked up colds? He couldn’t breathe properly. He cried all the time. When the bus broke down I followed women and children and old people. Everybody was walking.’

  Janusz reaches for his cigarettes and matches. ‘This has nothing to do with Tony –’

  ‘It has everything to do with us.’

  Silvana stops talking. She gets up and closes the kitchen door. What she has to say must not be overheard by Aurek.

  ‘I gave Aurek to another woman to carry. I was tired. I shouldn’t have done it. I thought it wouldn’t matter, not just for a minute or two. Then I heard the planes. They flew over us and one of them crashed. There was an explosion. I should have kept him with me. I should never have let him out of my sight.’

  She stops to get her breath. Now she has Janusz’s attention her courage is failing her. Perhaps she should stop here? Tell him yes, she kissed Tony, and leave it at that. Better to be known as an adulteress than a mother who failed her child.

  Hot tears run down her face. How can she explain that she has been living with loss since the day her son slid from between her legs in a stranger’s home – or that loss colours every memory she has ever had or will have. Loss fills her heart: it is there in the trees, in the rattle of the leaves in the wind and in the living, mysterious body of a child she has grown to love. A child she calls Aurek.

  ‘I tried to find him. I was confused. I called his name. I was frantic. I found the woman, but she was dead. Our Aurek was beside her.’

  ‘I wrapped him in my coat and rocked him. I don’t know how long I stayed like that. I got up and started walking. After a while I sat down again. But he was still cold.’

  ‘For God’s sake.’ Janusz slams his hand down on the table. ‘What the bloody hell is this about?’

  The violence in his words hurts.

  Silvana sits back in her chair, her head in her hands.

  ‘I just wanted him to have a proper family. He loves you, anyone can see it. I’ll go. I’ll leave. Be a father to him, that’s all I ask.’

  ‘What are you taking about?’

  ‘Our son,’ she says, knowing she is about to hurt him more than he could ever hurt her. ‘I’m trying to tell you. Our son died. Our real son. He was dead when I found him beside the woman.’

  Janusz is wide-eyed. His mouth twists, as though she has forced him to taste something bitter. She stops an urge within herself to reach out to him. Her touch would revolt him.

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘How could I lie about that? Our son was dead in my arms. I didn’t know what to do. I got up and walked with him, and then I heard a baby crying. I followed the sound and I found a child in a wooden handcart. He was around the same age as Aurek. He stretched out his arms to me. He needed me, you see? He chose me. He was crying all alone and it was me that heard him. I’m sure he had no one. He’d been left in a big pile of blankets and my boy … our baby, he was dead.

  ‘The child called to me like I was his mother. What else could I do? I swapped them. I put our son in the cart and took the child and called him Aurek. I told myself it was our son come ba
ck to me.’

  Janusz’s mouth moves but he says nothing. His cigarette is still in his hand unlit, the matches in the other. Surely now he will see how she has been surviving? Will always be surviving, in peacetime or wartime, it makes no difference. He carries on looking at her, and she is sure he understands what she has been living through. That something, perhaps everything, can be saved. She is his wife. The child can be his son. Silvana’s eyes are blurred with tears, but she does not move. While they are still looking at each other there is hope.

  It is Janusz who looks away.

  ‘Go.’

  ‘You don’t mean that?’

  ‘Take the boy. Just go.’

  He gets up and walks into the garden. Silvana follows him down to the tree house.

  ‘And you,’ she yells. ‘You with your love letters. Are you any better than me? You and that woman. Hélène, isn’t it? You think I don’t know? Why did you ever want us back anyway? Why did you bring us here if you had her?’

  ‘I believed in you,’ says Janusz. ‘How could you lie to me about … about my son? Get out. Take the child, whoever he is, and go.’

  He steps into his potting shed and closes the door.

  She looks back at the house and sees Aurek at his bedroom window, tapping his fingers on the glass. Silvana lifts her hand, waves at him, but he goes on, tapping the glass as if he hasn’t seen her.

  Aurek sits on the top step of the stairs and refuses to move.

  ‘Nie,’ he says. ‘No.’

  ‘Please. Get your things.’

  The boy won’t speak. He rocks himself on the step and Silvana takes him by the arm and pulls him to his feet, dragging him outside into the street. He growls miserably as she marches him down the hill, trying to twist out of her grip. Only hours ago she was saving him. Now what is she doing to him?

  She wonders if Janusz will come after them. She crosses the road and imagines she hears the sound of him running behind them, calling them back. As she walks, she decides he will come on his bicycle, and when she reaches the high street she does hear a bike, the wheels spinning behind her. She turns, relief cracking across her face. But it’s not Janusz. It’s a stranger who lifts his cap as he passes and rings his bell at Aurek.

  By the time she gets to Tony’s pet shop she has given up hoping. She knows Janusz is not coming.

  Poland

  Silvana

  One morning, early, they heard men in the forest. There was a commotion of shouting, and Silvana and Aurek hid in thick undergrowth and watched two German soldiers lining up three men against a row of trees.

  The soldiers took their time before they killed their prisoners. One of them was never still. His chin was stubbled, his eyes sunken and empty-looking. He walked around, lifting his gun to his shoulder and then lowering it again like a rehearsal, a gesture that he found funny. He was the one who touched the men’s faces with the end of the barrel. It was as if the gun was part of him, an accusing finger that he pushed into the men’s chests and stroked their cheeks with. Sometimes it wasn’t enough for him and he slung the gun across his back as if it got in the way. Then he lifted his hand to the men’s heads in turn, cocking his index finger against his thumb and pretending to jump as his wrist flung upwards.

  The other soldier rolled himself a cigarette and smoked it, sucking his cheeks in as he took hard drags, his face showing the structure of his skull beneath the grey-looking skin.

  When they shot the men, Silvana pulled Aurek down onto the ground so that their faces were pressed against the earth. The air was filled with the sound of gunshot and the ground smelt of decay. She wiped away her son’s tears. ‘Hush,’ she whispered. ‘Hush.’

  When it was getting dark, Silvana and Aurek climbed out of their hiding place and went to look at the dead men. Silvana took a jacket off one, a coat off another. One had a rucksack at his feet which contained a half-drunk bottle of vodka and some black bread.

  Silvana picked up a cap from the floor and rubbed mud off the small red enamel star pinned to it. She put the hat on and smiled at Aurek. He stared. She rocked her head from side to side and did a little dance, feet outwards like a duck. Aurek began to laugh. Breaking a low branch, she used it as a walking stick, head tipping from side to side, feet splayed, kicking leaves up in the air.

  ‘Charlie Chaplin,’ she whispered. ‘I’m Charlie Chaplin.’

  Aurek copied her, his laughter quiet like the murmur of a fast-running stream.

  Janusz

  On a concrete runway, in an East Anglian field in the pouring rain, Janusz imagined the farm up in the hills beyond Marseilles. When his squadron was moved to Yorkshire, he trudged through snow, dreaming of Hélène with her brown hair in plaits.

  In Kent, he imagined her voice in his ear. Every new thing he saw he wanted to tell her about. He wrote letters to her, describing the pretty stone houses in villages, the English churches with their grassy graveyards and big vicarages attached. He picked roses in the summer of 1943 and pretended he could give them to her.

  Flying over Italy in spring 1944, dropping propaganda leaflets, he recorded the colours of the hills, the fields, the cities. Just for her.

  And Hélène wrote to him. Letters that might arrive out of sequence or three at once after a long wait. He read them all; he knew each one by heart.

  When a letter arrived for him in the autumn of 1944, Janusz opened it gladly, in front of the other men in his mess hall, settling down in an armchair. He was surprised to see it was written in English. And it wasn’t from Hélène. It was from her brother.

  Dear friend,

  I am Hélène’s brother. I hope you are quite well. I hear a lot about you from Hélène. My parents speak well of you. I have news that is hard to tell. I try writing before but I don’t know if the letters are arriving. Our home has suffered of war but not destroyed and we live always at the farm. I must tell what happens and how sorry I am.

  Hélène and I are in the city together. Le Panier near the Vieux port and German soldiers barricade us in the street. Hélène got caught in the crowd and I lose her there. There is no one left in Le Panier. The soldiers shoot everyone. I search and I find Hélène in a hospital. I am very sorry. Her wounds were bad. She asked for you many times. She died in hospital. I am sorry to give you this news. I think you are good man. I finish this letter with my gratitude for your fighting in this war and for your sufferings …

  Janusz didn’t read any more. He folded the letter up and put it in his wallet. He listened to the blood running through his veins until he thought he could hear it draining from him. Blood must have been seeping from his body, because he couldn’t stand. His ankles, knees, thighs were closing up like a fan. His head rolled. The wind blew over him like a wail of a voice, or it may have been his own voice. Or her voice.

  Or it may have been the sound of his blood and his heart beating so very loud when he wanted it to stop. He clasped his head in his hands, aware of the fragility of flesh and blood, the easy way people were killed and blown apart by guns and bombs and terribly afraid that he, on the other hand, was condemned to live through it all.

  Ipswich

  ‘You can’t stay here, Silvana. Not in the flat.’

  Tony is sure about that. It’s the first thing he says when he opens the pet-shop door, ushering her inside quickly. She thinks she sees panic in his eyes. She is sure she knows what thoughts are racing through his mind. How has he become lumbered with this woman and her child? He is a man of the town after all. He knows local dignitaries, and his dead wife’s father is a magistrate. He can’t afford to be seen collecting foreign waifs and strays.

  She is about to apologize for coming, about to walk out. The docks, she thinks. I will go and find a ship and we’ll stow away. Then Tony grabs her hands in his. She can smell whisky on his breath and his eyes have a wild look in them. Fear. That’s what she can see in them. He tells her that he will look after her. He will not let her down. What about a hotel for the night?

  Silva
na says no. She doesn’t want to be in a hotel with people staring at her.

  Finally he says he will take her to the house by the sea. It’s the only thing he can think of.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. How can she say no? She is homeless.

  She nudges Aurek, hoping he will express some kind of thanks, but the boy kicks at her shin and pinches the skin on the back of her hand, so that she pushes him away. She regrets the action immediately, pulls him back to her too fast and he falls over at her feet.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, and Tony smiles at her.

  ‘Shall we have a drink?’

  Tony steps around Aurek carefully, the way somebody might move past an unreliable dog.

  ‘A bit of Dutch courage before we go?’

  Tony doesn’t talk in the car, and Silvana is happy with that. She tucks Aurek up on the back seat with a blanket and he eyes her warily.

  ‘Where’s Peter,’ he demands.

  ‘With his grandparents,’ she whispers. ‘You’ll see him again soon. Now go to sleep for a little while.’

  The town of Felixstowe sits on the edge of pale yellow sand and rough open sea. Coloured lights greet them. The sea is dark and inky, but the lights on the pier and along the seafront shine red and yellow, swaying in the wind, so that the colours smudge and blur in the rain.

  ‘The pier used to be longer,’ Tony says, slowing down. ‘Part of it was demolished during the war. It would have been too easy a landing point for the Germans. They talk of rebuilding it, but I doubt it. Years ago, I used to fish off the end of it.’

  He parks the car and cuts the engine. The noise of the wind becomes louder, and rain stings Silvana’s face when she steps onto the kerb.

  ‘This is the house Lucy and I lived in,’ Tony says, taking her bag and ushering her towards a narrow, weatherbeaten house painted pink. ‘I moved out after she died. I use it as a store now. I’ll have to tidy up a bit, but it’s somewhere for you to stay.’