‘1945. Where’d you come from?’
Silvana looked back at the forest and the trees. She didn’t need to hide any more.
‘Warsaw,’ she said, wondering if it still existed. ‘We come from Warsaw.’
Ipswich
Janusz fits ten trees into the car. It seems a shame to get mud on the upholstery, but these are the last trees he will be taking. The garden is deeply planted now and although he knows birch trees are not bothered by overcrowding, he still wants to give them the best chance he can. He wishes there was some other way to get the trees than filling up his car with mud, but Gilbert says he will help him clean the car out when they get back home.
He digs up a birch from the hedgerow while Gilbert waits with an old curtain to wrap its roots in.
‘I still think you should give him a thumping.’
‘So did I. To begin with. Now I just don’t want to see him. Fighting is not my way of doing things.’
‘I’ve known Tony for years. I never thought he’d play such a mean trick.’
‘Can you pass me that spade, please?’
‘She and the boy are in Felixstowe you know. Doris saw them.’
Janusz feels the blood rush to his face. He stops what he is doing.
‘She saw them?’
‘Apparently.’
‘And?’
‘She said they looked all right.’ Gilbert pats Janusz on the shoulder. ‘I don’t know what went on, but Doris seemed pretty fired up. You know how she is when she gets the bit between her teeth. She told me they’re moving away.’
‘Moving?’ Janusz can’t hide the panic in his voice.
Gilbert sounds unsure. ‘Well, I know Doris can be prone to exaggerate.’
‘Where are they moving to?’
‘Well, that’s just it. Doris won’t say. Stubborn as an ox, you know. She took it all very badly. Says Sylvie betrayed her trust. But look, why don’t you go and see the boy while you can? I could get you the address.’
Janusz thinks of the postcards he has. He’s driven past the house but never dared stop. The thought of seeing Silvana with Tony haunts him. He’s not sure he would be able to cope with it.
‘I already have it,’ he says firmly. ‘And I don’t want to see them. Not if Silvana is happy with Tony. Let her have what she wants. Why do we even need to talk about this?’
Gilbert sighs. ‘All right, I hear you. I won’t go on. Listen, is it legal, taking trees like this? They must belong to someone.’
‘They’re only saplings. They’re wild. No one wants them. Shine that torch over this way.’
‘Tell me again, then,’ asks Gilbert. ‘Why do we have to do this in the dark if it’s legal to take them anyway?’
Back home in Britannia Road, Janusz unloads the trees, heels them into the earth in the garden, cleans the car and then finally goes into his house and locks the door.
In the bathroom he takes off his clothes and washes himself, slowly, head down like a man caught in the rain, staring at his feet. When he closes his eyes, he swears he hears Silvana coming up the stairs, Aurek playing in the hallway. The house is haunted by the sounds of his wife and the child. And if what Doris says is true, that they’re moving away, then there’s no hope. He grabs a towel and rubs himself dry.
Let them go, he thinks as he dresses. He’s not the one to blame. He may have sent them away, but she is the one who did the damage. He has nothing to reproach himself for. Nothing at all. If she chooses to go, then he can do nothing to stop her.
He walks into the boy’s room, tidies the books on the shelf. He smooths the bedcovers and straightens the picture on the wall. Then he sits on the bed, puts his head in his hands and weeps.
Silvana
The ship put into port in England on an early tide, pushing through darkness and fog. Silvana had arrived in a land of clouds. Everywhere was covered in a smoky fog that banded across the landscape and blurred the shapes of buildings. She concentrated on watching her feet and the backs of the crowds in front of her as she moved slowly down the gangplank in the thick shuffle of bodies.
Land was a shock after so long at sea. As the crowds disembarked and their feet hit solid ground, Silvana and Aurek staggered and rolled like people stepping off a fairground ride, unable to walk in a straight line. They were moved along in winding queues and handed identity cards. Aurek was given a pair of red leather rollerskates tied together with their own laces. A man laid them over his shoulder and Aurek sagged under their weight.
Silvana looked at the boxes of skates and toys in front of her.
The man smiled. ‘Does he like them?’ He pointed at the skates.
Aurek was struggling, trying to take them off his shoulders.
He tipped up a box towards them. ‘Why don’t you have a look?’
The box of toys had teddy bears and jigsaw puzzles, tin cars and dolls. A small wooden rattle sat on top of them. Plain and polished. Silvana grabbed it. The man laughed.
‘Is that what you want? He’s a bit old for baby stuff, isn’t he?’
Silvana shook her head. She took the rollerskates off Aurek’s shoulders and gave the boy the rattle. She thought of her father, of the carved rattle he had made for her and how she had kept it. What had happened to it? Had she left it behind in Warsaw? She couldn’t remember and didn’t want to. She looked at Aurek and smiled.
‘This is yours. Do you understand? It’s a magic rattle. You keep it very safe now and it will bring you good luck.’
She closed his fingers over the handle and held them tight for a moment. When she let go, she saw the white imprint of her own fingers on the boy’s hand. He held the rattle to his chest and nodded at her, his eyes big and dark with belief.
And still the journey wasn’t over. They were herded towards a waiting train crowded with people from the boat. As they pulled into London, Silvana hoisted Aurek onto her hip, holding him tightly. The train rumbled and clanked and came to a stop with a hissing of brakes. Doors began to bang open and the sound of shouting, of people calling each other and children crying, filled the air. She joined the queues to leave the train and finally got to an open door. She hesitated. The station looked huge. A guard on the platform held out his hand.
‘Come on then, miss. Down you get.’
Silvana stepped down from the train. She straightened her headscarf and looked around at the crowds, trying to see Janusz among them.
‘We’re here,’ she whispered, as much to herself as to the boy. ‘We’re here.’
Felixstowe
Silvana is lying awake in her bed, listening to a summer storm. There are loud rolls of thunder and the rain pelts the streets outside her window. She can hear Tony shifting in his bed, the bed springs complaining. He is a terrible sleeper, she concludes. For so many nights now she has listened to the sound of him, the slam of his body turning over on the mattress, an arm flung across the sheets, the feathery punching of his pillows, the frequent sighs.
She gets out of her bed and pulls on a dressing gown. She is well aware that he wants her. And now Janusz has gone, and she has given up hope, there is little reason for them both to lie awake trying, as Tony says, to be decent human beings.
She forces her feet into a pair of slippers that are too tight. Tony produced them out of a box for her a few days ago: black Chinese silk embroidered with red, pink and peach roses threaded through with a leafy green stitch that might be ivy.
Padding quietly across her room, she opens the door, crosses the small landing and goes into Tony’s room. There is total silence apart from the rain outside. Is he holding his breath? She can hear nothing. Thunder grumbles and a flash of lightning lights the room for a moment. She steps towards the bed. Tony is visible briefly in the flash of lightning, his head on the pillow, lying on his back, hands folded across his chest. She stands over him and breathes in the warm smell of him.
‘Are you awake?’
‘At last,’ he says.
‘Tony?’
‘At
last.’
He seems to grow larger, rising out of the bed so that she thinks of him as a bear, his huge shadow covering her in darkness. She takes a sharp intake of breath and then he has his arms around her, his lips on her neck, damp kisses while he pulls her nightclothes off her. He picks her up and lays her down on the bed, naked except for her slippers, which, try as she might, she cannot take off.
It is over quickly, but while Tony’s heavy frame presses down on her, so that she feels that he is indeed a bear of a man and she a long-awaited meal, she worries about the slippers. When the moment arises, when her feet come together briefly, she pushes one against the other, trying to free her crushed toes. She scrapes her heels along his calf muscles and at one opportune moment grabs her foot in her hand and tries to prise the slipper off. It comes away in her hand, freeing her toes, just as he groans and stalls above her.
He drops onto the mattress beside her, breathing heavily. Quickly, she pulls the other stubborn slipper off and throws it across the room, her own breath coming in short gasps.
‘Are you all right?’ he asks, his hand searching for hers. He grips it tightly. She has the sensation of having lived through a small earthquake. Outside the rain quickens and lightning flashes again.
‘I’m fine, yes.’
They lie listening to the rain and the wind and he asks her about Poland. About what she left behind.
‘Tell me about your family. Your parents?’
‘I can’t remember,’ she says firmly. ‘I can’t remember a single thing.’
He turns and twists onto his side, facing her.
‘I don’t need to know. I think I like you being a mystery. I have something important to tell you in any case.’
Janusz? she thinks. Some news of him?
‘Somebody has offered to buy the pet shop.’
‘The pet shop?’
‘They’re willing to pay good money. House prices are rising around here. You’ve got to do what you can to turn a profit these days. My father-in-law thinks it’s time Peter went away to board. He wants him to go to his old school. It’s miles away in Wiltshire. My father-in-law will pay for it. But it’s not just the fees, is it? You’ve got to have the whole lot, the right car, the right clothes. The accent. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what they’re giving him. Peter doesn’t need me at all.’
He talks about class and money and what people expect in Britain, shifting his weight in the bed, his hand occasionally brushing against her breasts or her hip.
‘It won’t be for ever, this situation here. I don’t like to leave you all week while I run the shop in Ipswich, and I’ve had enough of the black-market stuff. It’s time to get out.’ He caresses her hand. ‘I’m thinking of buying a place in London. In September, when Peter has gone to boarding school. Nobody would know us there. We could say we were married.’
‘What about Aurek?’
Tony is silent for a moment. He has obviously not considered Aurek.
‘He’ll be with us.’
Silvana shivers. She slips out of bed and searches for her discarded nightdress. Tony switches the bedside lamp on. He watches her.
‘Come and get back under the covers.’
‘No. I should go back to my own bed. I don’t want Aurek to wake and find me here.’
Tony throws the covers back, pulls her towards him, and she gives in, climbing back between the sheets. She doesn’t want to go back to her cold bed all alone. The gutters gurgle and the sound of rain washing through the downpipes into the storm drains outside makes her feel as though the sea might be pulling the house into its depths.
‘So what do you think?’ Tony asks. ‘Shall we give London a go? I’ll look after you like a princess. You’ll have everything you want, I promise.’
Silvana rests her head on his shoulder. Tony is full of these ideas. She has learned that each week brings a new scheme, and it always involves promises.
‘Aurek and I will be –’ She stops herself. She almost told him she would be going home soon. She should really give up on all that. Especially now Janusz has gone.
He strokes her hair gently.
‘And if you say yes now, I promise I will get you a pair of slippers in a bigger size tomorrow.’
She closes her eyes.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes.’
Aurek has his torch on under his covers. He is writing. It takes him a long time, printing each letter, trying to control the pen. He struggles, but it is important and he will not give up. He has ink on his face and blue-stained teeth and lips. He is so tired by his efforts that when he falls exhausted into his dreams, his pen dribbling onto his pyjamas, he sleeps soundly, curled up, knees to his chin all night, a peaceful whorl of a child.
In the morning, his mother talks to him of the storm the night before. She asks him if he heard it. He tells her he heard nothing.
‘Not even the wind rattling the windows?’
He shakes his head. ‘Nothing.’
‘Good,’ she says. ‘That’s very good. Why have you got ink on your face?’
Aurek shrugs.
‘And you slept soundly all night?’
‘All night,’ he promises.
He’s careful not to let her see him take the stamps from Tony’s writing desk. Careful to slip out of the house unnoticed.
Ipswich
It is midsummer, and Janusz has seventy silver-birch trees planted in the back garden. Seventy trees in brown soil when everyone else has holly bushes, roses, pyracantha and garden gnomes. The trees are spindly but robust and already reaching for the skies like colt-limbed young men full of the promise of the future. Every one of his saplings has taken root and grown delicate summer foliage. Janusz is going to make sure time allows these trees to become thick-trunked and strong.
He waters them. Feeds them with bone, dried blood and fishmeal fertilizer every week. Like a mother picking nits from a child’s hair, he forages in the leaves and branches, picking insects off them. At their roots he clears the soil of other plants. He talks to them in the evenings and takes his coffee with them in the mornings. He is not sure why he planted them any more. He is only aware of the fact that to survive, they need him. For now, that’s enough of a reason.
He sits down under his trees and thinks of Hélène, realizing it is hard to remember her face any more. Without the letters she is fading from his mind. Her voice has gone from him. The flutter in his heart that used to come when he thought of her is still there, but it’s kinder to him now. It hurts him less. This is how it happens, he thinks. Memories shrink. Like a soap bar used over and over, they become deformed, weaker scented, too slight and slippery to hold.
Janusz goes into the front parlour and looks at the framed picture on the mantelpiece. He and Silvana and the boy.
He has to admire the way she went about things. Bringing up the boy the way she did. Coming to England to him in order to give him a family. She is a single-minded woman. Or she was, until she fell for Tony Benetoni. He studies Silvana’s face in the photograph. Her expression is blank. Or is it? Is that her stubbornness showing in the way the corners of her mouth lift? And her eyes, so big and dark. What do they reveal, her pupils widening like a camera lens, taking in her new home, the stranger who was her husband and a life she could only guess at.
And if one day his family in Poland get in touch with him? What will he tell them? They don’t know his son is dead. He has to tell his parents. They have a right to know. By the time he has found paper and a pen, he is not so sure. He starts writing, his address at the top corner, the date.
Dear Mother and Father,
I hope this finds you in good health. I have some news …
He folds the paper in three and slips it into his shirt pocket, sliding the pen in beside it. Picking up his cigarettes, he lights one and wanders back out into the garden. How can he tell them their grandson is dead? If they ever got the letter, it would break their hearts. He looks at his trees and the blue sky above them and
remembers the day he first held his son in his arms. The love he had felt that day.
Standing under the oak tree at the bottom of the garden, he swings the rope ladder dangling from the tree house back and forth. He takes a last deep drag on his cigarette, throws the stub to the ground, steadies the ladder and puts a foot on its lowest rung, hoisting himself up. He’s clumsy, but he manages to clamber onto the platform. He crawls into Aurek’s den and lets his eyes adjust to the light. That’s when he sees the wooden rattle. It’s lodged against a branch inside the tree house. Is it really the one Silvana’s father made? And does it matter? Now he remembers that she never answered him when he asked her. It was he that believed it to be a family heirloom.
He picks it up. A small line of writing is etched on one side of it. Made in England. Janusz gives the rattle a shake. The tree creaks in the wind, an answering voice.
Sitting in the tree house, knees bent, his back against the rough bark of the tree trunk, he pulls out the letter and his pen and starts writing again.
I have built a tree house for Aurek and he enjoys it just as I did when I had one as a child. In fact, your grandson is more agile than I remember I ever was. I would like you to be able to see how fast he can climb the rope ladder into it. You would be proud of him.
Felixstowe
The boxes have mostly gone. The only room in the house Tony stores things in now is the kitchen, and soon everything will be gone from there too. They will be moving to London, and Tony is winding the business down as fast as he can. Silvana likes the cluttered feel of the kitchen. The rest of the house is spick and span, but the kitchen is filled with boxes of soap powder and Bird’s Custard packets. She has moved the piles of newspapers from the stairs into it. She has to squeeze past them to get to the back door.
During the week, when Tony is in Ipswich working in the pet shop, organizing the move, she spends hours sorting through the newspapers, scissors in one hand, the other turning the pages. She goes to bed late and thinks about Janusz, trying to imagine his grief, but she has too much of her own to put herself in his place.
22 Britannia Road Page 29
