by Annie Murray
Once again they looked at each other, their smiles fading a little.
‘We have thought . . .’ Marek said.
‘. . . But we don’t really know, until we look.’
Sybil regarded them in silence for a moment. ‘Well, why not stay here?’
‘Could we?’ Katie said. It hadn’t occurred to her that they would be able to. Again she looked at Marek. ‘That’d be ideal, wouldn’t it?’ They would only have had to go and find lodgings in a house elsewhere and start again.
‘I can’t see why not, at least for the time being,’ Sybil said. ‘I’m sure we could arrange things – that is, if it would suit you, of course. It seems foolish to uproot yourselves, especially as your sister is next door now, Marek.’
Though she was trying to sound detached, as usual, Katie was touched to see an urgency in Sybil’s expression. She wanted them to stay: it mattered to her. Glancing at Marek and seeing agreement in his eyes, Katie said, ‘Sybil, that’s so kind of you. I’m sure we’d love to stay here. We’ve been very happy here, and Michael likes it – and we can always help you with the garden and everything. I’ll cook . . .’ As she said it, her spirits soared even higher. They would work out which was to be their private room in the house, but it was so lovely here, and she would have found it a terrible wrench leaving Sybil.
‘You are very good to us, Miss Routh,’ Marek said, with a little bow. ‘We are very grateful.’
‘Oh, not at all!’ Sybil pulled herself up from her chair and stood before them. Katie felt like embracing her, but didn’t quite dare to. ‘Your sister knows?’ she asked Marek.
‘Yes. We told her yesterday. She is glad.’
Sybil nodded. ‘And when is the happy day to be?’
‘We thought in the spring,’ Katie said. ‘May the fifteenth. It’ll only be very quiet – at St Francis’s. As long as the priest can marry us that day. I’ll make my own dress and everything.’
Sybil smiled at her eagerness and, stepping forward, kissed each of them on the cheek. It was so unexpected that Katie found tears in her eyes.
‘I hope you’ll both be very happy,’ Sybil said. ‘I’m very glad that you’ve found one another.’
It was a busy, exciting time. As well as the arrangements to be made, they were both working hard and making plans. Agnieska, who for the moment was working in a shop, had decided to apply to train as a nurse, and Marek sometimes talked about training too, in psychiatric nursing.
‘One day I shall do this,’ he said. ‘But for the moment I carry on earning my living – and I can be with you.’
‘What would you have done if the war had not happened?’ Katie asked both of them. Agnieska said she might have been a teacher, like her parents. But now she felt that nursing was something that was important to her. Marek thought he might have been a farmer.
‘But now everything is different’ was all he said.
Katie could see how much these choices were the result of what they had experienced, how much of the suffering of others they had witnessed, how it had changed them. They were both people of compassion, who wanted to offer the rest of their lives to help.
Over those months, once the brother and sister could see they had a safe, loving listener in Katie, the two of them talked more and more. Experiences came pouring out that they could talk about to no one else. Katie began to appreciate the enormity of what had happened to Poland: the war, the invasions of the Germans from the west and Russians from the east, the gross brutality of both, had been like an explosion that scattered a country and its people into smithereens. Soldiers and others had fled west so that the Polish government itself was in exile in London, many of its forces scattered across Europe. Through Marek and his family, she took in the scale of the Russian deportations east into slave labour, the deaths upon deaths in the Siberian snows or in central Russia. The Jewish population had been almost wiped out in Nazi death camps. And now, thanks to the border agreed by Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences in 1945, the district surrounding Lvov, where the Wozniak family had lived, was no longer Poland, but Soviet Ukraine. And the government of Poland was no longer Polish – it was under the command of Soviet Russia. To return now would mean almost certain death.
Katie began to feel haunted by it herself. She knew Marek had terrible nightmares from time to time. She thought of his mother, his sister, of the corpses left in piles in the snow. Knowing that she was soon to carry a Polish name by marrying Marek, she felt passionately that she wanted to understand, to be a part of these people who had travelled so far, so terrifyingly and with such suffering and loss. She felt as if her world had expanded, and she had a fierce pride in knowing them, in living with and loving and going to Mass with them. The Church was a vital link with Poland. They learned that the church in Duddesdon, St Michael’s, which had for years been in the Italian quarter, was attracting more and more Poles and sometimes they made their way there for Mass on Sundays. Katie and Michael would go too.
And there were lighter aspects of her Polish education. Agnieska taught her how to cook various dishes, like pierogi, little flour-and-water patties with a filling of potatoes or cabbage or meat.
‘These are delicious!’ Sybil enthused when they proudly brought out their first plateful, which Piotr, Marek and the others fell on with wolfish enthusiasm. ‘So tasty with such simple ingredients – good rationing food.’
‘You like?’ Agnieska was delighted. ‘You eat – I make more!’
‘They’re marvellous,’ Sybil said, and Katie agreed. She and Sybil had joked that they needed to double the garden’s beetroot crop, as the Poles liked them so much.
The memories were not all sad. Marek told them one night that on the ship, the SS Atlantis, that had brought him and Piotr from Naples, no fewer than eight babies were born on the voyage.
‘It was like a – what do you call a birth hospital?’
‘Maternity hospital,’ Sybil said, chuckling.
‘Yes. A lot of babies! Very good!’
Agnieska had spent almost five years in a Displaced Persons camp in India, south of Bombay, before a brief time in a beautiful camp in Uganda, which she said she enjoyed more. She gradually told them stories about it, which Katie knew Marek had never heard before, either. Sometimes round the meal table she would tell him something in Polish and he would repeat for the rest of them in English.
‘She says,’ he related one evening, ‘that when India gained its independence in forty-seven, there were great celebrations, and for a few says everything in Bombay was free: restaurants, taxis.’ Agnieska was laughing. ‘They went to the city and had a marvellous time, living it up – you can say this, living it up?’
‘Yes,’ Katie said. ‘You certainly can.’
‘You’ve certainly seen a lot of the world, between you,’ Sybil said.
‘I’ve got something to tell you, lovey,’ Katie said to Michael, soon after she and Marek had made their decision. They were in their room and she had sat down on the bed and pulled him onto her lap.
Michael said, ‘What?’ absent-mindedly.
‘Are you listening?’
‘Yes.’ He turned his head and his blue eyes looked into hers. She was startled again by how beautiful he was, and she was full of love for him.
‘The thing is, you like Marek, don’t you?’
He nodded.
‘Well, Marek and I are – well, we love each other and we have decided to get married.’ He was staring steadily at her. ‘Which means that we’ll live together – I mean, we’re going to stay here with Sybil . . . And . . .’
‘Will he be my daddy?’
‘He’ll sort of be . . . He’ll be like a daddy to you, a bit like he is now, that’s all.’
‘Oh,’ Michael said. ‘That’s all right. Can I go and play now?’ He was wriggling to get down. Katie felt a bit wounded. She had expected a more emotional response, perhaps even opposition.
‘Are you pleased?’ she asked, as he sli
thered from her lap.
‘Yes!’ he called, in a happy voice. ‘I’m going to play trains with Piotr now. He promised!’
Katie’s life was very full, besides her intense involvement with her future husband and his family, with what they had experienced and where they came from. She and Em tried to make sure they met every month, at either one of their houses, although Handsworth started to win over, as Robbie loved Sybil’s house and the park so much. Gradually they rebuilt a friendship on mutual respect, and the memories and sense of humour they still had in common, as well as the friendship growing between their boys.
And every few weeks she met her father. She did not ask what excuse he made to be absent from home on a Saturday morning, sitting drinking coffee in Lewis’s in Birmingham. She knew he had led a life based on untruth, and it was something she had to accept. It was an untruth that seemed set to continue.
‘I can’t tell them,’ he said bluntly, the last time they met. They had been over and over whether his new family would be able to cope with learning of her existence. His two children thought that he and their mother were married. It would be a shock beyond what he thought they could take on.
‘We’ll have to give it some time,’ he said.
‘What difference will that make?’ she asked brutally. ‘It’ll be a shock for them whenever you tell them. Giving them time to come to terms with something they don’t know about doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Maybe it’s me that needs time,’ he admitted. ‘It could be very rough.’
Katie began to believe that he would never tell them. Her own feelings were mixed. She was at once angry and resentful at feeling, through no fault of her own, like a dirty secret that had to be kept locked away. There had been enough secrets festering, warping and destroying. She wanted to rip through the pretence and lies. She was also curious – his children were her half-sister and brother. What were they like: might they get along? But she was also relieved. Supposing he told them and it spoiled everything. Why upset a family that seemed united, so far as she could tell? She had a new family now – and she had a father, if only in snatches. It was more than she’d ever hoped for. And it was good.
‘I’m getting married,’ she told him.
Michael’s face lit up in genuine pleasure. ‘Are you now? Who’s the lucky fella – the Polish chap you were telling me about?’
‘Yes, his name’s Marek Wozniak.’ She felt such pride in saying his name! ‘Can I bring him to meet you?’
She saw the hesitation, just for a second, the habit of secrecy and checking, before he said, ‘Yes, of course. That’s a fine idea.’
‘And . . .’ She found herself blushing, feeling like a child. Daddy, please, please will you . . . ? ‘Will you come to our wedding?’
He looked back solemnly at her. ‘What about your mother, Katie?’
She frowned. ‘What about her?’
‘In the end she was the one who brought you up all those years – for all her faults. Should you not let her know? I mean . . .’ His kindly face crinkled into a smile. ‘Wild horses wouldn’t be able to stop me coming, if that’s what you’d like – but shouldn’t you ask her first?’
Sixty-Two
Amid what was a time of busyness, of the careful buying of satin and lace for a wedding dress, Katie decided to give her mother one last chance. She was one of the lucky ones – she had a mother alive somewhere, so far as she knew. Perhaps she should try to rise above the past and take any steps she could to heal things. Without telling anyone else she was doing it, she posted a card to Enid Thomas, telling Enid her address, that she was getting married and that she thought Vera ought to know. Writing the card brought back a lot of bitter emotions and she half hoped there would be no reply. And, as the days passed, she decided there wasn’t going to be one.
Then, one day, it came. After work she came home to find a brief letter, in Enid’s painstaking looped hand. Enid had written:
I’ve tried to find out where you mother is. I’m not well myself, so can’t go far. She moved away months ago and no one can tell me anything. Truth to tell, we’d lost touch. She had got to be such a hard, bitter woman and kept herself to herself, didn’t want anybody. Sorry that’s all I know.
I hope you’ll be very happy, Katie. Come and see me sometime and let me meet him.
Regards,
Enid
Katie stared at the words, bitter for a moment, and sad, but knowing that she was also relieved. When Marek came home she showed it to him. He studied the flimsy sheet of paper, then silently came and put his arms around her.
‘It’s all right, I’ve got all I need,’ she said. And held him tight.
There were also arrangements to be made in the house for after they were married. This turned out to be simple: Marek would move into the attic, and Sybil suggested that Katie make a curtain to divide off Michael’s end of the room, for the sake of a little privacy. There was the usual daily round of work and looking after Michael, and there were those close, private loving times.
As the spring came they would take walks in the park, sometimes with Michael, or later, once he was asleep. It was bliss walking round amid the greening trees, even if they did still have to wrap up warm. They would hold hands, stopping often to kiss in the seclusion of the trees, and talk endlessly, planning their future.
‘We don’t get much time on our own, do we?’ Katie said one mild evening as they were out strolling around. They had stopped to embrace, near the old church that looked over the park. Sometimes she felt guilty that Michael dominated her time so much. She knew how hungry Marek was to be with her alone.
‘It’s all right.’ He held her close and she felt his breath on her hair. ‘It is how it is with family. And soon . . .’ He leaned back to look into her eyes. ‘Soon we shall have our own family, yes?’
‘Yes, my love.’ She reached up and caressed his cheek. She longed to give him everything, to make him happy and settled in his new country.
How he longed for family, and for her! They had talked often about their moral view of things, how their physical relations should wait until after they were married. In reality it was not so simple. Living so close to each other, both so in love and full of longing for each other, it became impossible to resist.
The first time he had come to her room, very late. She woke to the sound of him whispering her name.
‘Marek?’ Heart pounding with excitement, she sat up, pleased to know he was close at any time. ‘Is everything all right?’
He felt his way to sit on the side of her bed. ‘Yes.’ There was a silence. ‘I need to be with you. Can I come into your bed?’
They had lain many times on top of the sheets, twined together, kissing. Now she pulled the covers back and felt his long, lean frame climb in beside her and his lips seeking out hers. Quietly, intensely, they loved each other and slept pressed together, his belly at her back. When the dawn came she turned to find him watching her, smiling when he saw she was awake. She leaned up on her arm and looked down at him, the light reaching in at the edge of the curtain picking out the angles in his face. How she loved that face! She always wanted to touch his cheek, feeling the sharp angle of his cheekbone. She stroked back his hair.
‘You’re very beautiful,’ he whispered.
‘So are you.’ She smiled joyfully, then lay and held him. ‘I love you so much. I can’t really believe it.’
He rested his hand on her belly. ‘Soon you will be my wife,’ he said. ‘My dear wife, Katie.’ He said it with such happiness in his voice that she almost wanted to weep.
‘I must go soon to my own room,’ he said, ‘or little Michael will be awake.’
He kissed her and sat up.
‘Marek . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘If we keep doing this, I might have a baby.’
‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘Yes, I think so. That is good!’
And so it had not been the last time that he had slipped into her bed. Both of them
longed for the time when he could stop creeping about and claim the room as their own, as husband and wife.
Appropriately, the news came just after Easter. They had journeyed through the days of the Easter Triduum, the darkness of death being gradually overcome by light, bringing a time of flowers and holiday.
Katie had spent as much time as she could on her dress and, having got in from work that evening, was down at the back of the house where the light was best, hand-sewing lace onto the bodice. She had made tea for Sybil and the two of them were sitting together. Marek had just got in from work, come and kissed her and run upstairs to change.
Then there came a thunderous, crazed banging of the front-door knocker and screaming, high-pitched and incomprehensible. Archie leapt to his feet barking crazily. Sybil almost spilled her tea.
‘What on earth?’ she exclaimed.
Katie was on her feet. ‘It’s Agnieska – I’m sure it is.’
Marek had heard and was running downstairs again, still pulling on a shirt, as Katie tore along to open the door. Agnieska almost fell in through it. She was in more of a state than anyone Katie had ever seen, her hair half down, eyes wild, tears on her cheeks. But Katie couldn’t work out what any of it was about, as Agnieska cannonballed past her, straight at Marek, shrieking in Polish, seeming barely able to get the words out. She had a piece of paper in her hand. She banged it on his chest, she slapped it with her hand, she yelled out a stream of words, then shoved it into his hand and burst into convulsive weeping, hands over her face.
Katie focused on Marek’s face, the growing look of wonder mixed with disbelief, the tension as he read. He clutched the paper to him and said something in Polish. Then he became aware of Katie and Sybil, standing in helpless bewilderment at each end of the hall.
‘God be praised!’ he cried. ‘Look . . .’ He held out the paper, hardly able to speak, either. ‘It is from the Red Cross. It is our sister Ewa – she is in New Zealand!’
