22 Britannia Road Read online

  He snatched his hand from hers and slapped her across the face, quickly, the way you might knock a crawling fly from somebody’s cheek. Silvana turned away from him as if he had hurt her badly, but she knew it was the other way round. She had done the hurting. When she looked back at him he was red in the face and his eyes watered as though he was about to burst into tears. She was pleased. Pleased to have got a reaction. He loves me, she thought.

  She pretended to be angry. She got up and walked away, and he jumped up and ran after her. When she stopped fighting in his arms he kissed her passionately, slipping a hand inside her dress. His fingers pressed against her, following the curve of her breast, the run of her ribs, as if he were looking for a way to reach inside; as if he wanted to find her heart and take it for himself.

  ‘You’ve already got it,’ she whispered to him.

  He stopped kissing her and looked into her eyes. Then he grabbed her hand and led her into the woods.

  Silvana knew they had crossed an invisible line together, that they couldn’t go back to how they had been before the slap. They made their way deeper into the woods and it got darker the further they pushed through the bracken, the trees growing closer together.

  ‘We could keep going,’ Janusz said, holding back a bramble. ‘We could make a camp and live out here. I could have you all to myself.’

  Silvana laughed. ‘So that’s what you want, huh?’ She was a little afraid but she tipped her chin at him and tried to look confident. ‘My stockings are getting ruined,’ she said. Then she felt mischievous and lifted the skirt of her dress. ‘Look at this ladder.’ She showed him the rip in her black cotton stocking. ‘You’ll have to buy me new ones.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  ‘No. No, it’s nothing.’ Silvana pushed his hand away. She pouted at him. ‘I suppose you’re going to hit me again?’

  He shook his head slowly. ‘Never. I will never hurt you. I will always worship you.’

  Nobody had spoken to her like that before. He knelt in front of her and moved his hand up her skirt, the coldness of his fingers against her warm thigh making her gasp. He was breathing heavily by then, as if he’d been running. When he tried to put his hand inside her underwear, she pushed him away.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Wait a minute.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ He was standing now, his mouth against her ear. ‘Have you done this before?’

  She shook her head. ‘Never. What about you?’

  ‘No. But I want to. Do you?’

  She took a deep breath and nodded. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I do.’

  He kissed her again and they fell to their knees in the bracken.

  It was as though she was the world, the whole wide world, and she let him explore her. And that was how she got her baby: the day Janusz led her into the woods. She would always remember feeling enormous that day, a giant woman, her hardness melted to softness, driven away by the sudden generosity of her body, the beginnings of their son already trawling in her juices.

  ‘I love you,’ Janusz said afterwards. ‘I love you.’

  They lay side by side, holding hands. Silvana closed her eyes and listened to her heart steadying. She was shrinking now, a breeze chilling her bare legs, doubts gathering in her mind over what they had done.

  ‘Do you really?’ she asked. ‘Why?’

  ‘What do you mean, why? I just love you.’

  ‘I want to know why.’

  She wanted him to say he loved her because she was beautiful and because she was the one he had been looking for all his life. (She watched a great many films in those days and was very susceptible to American musicals.)

  ‘Because that’s what happens,’ he said, after a moment’s pause. ‘People fall in love.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And do you love me?’

  Silvana looked at his sweet, serious face, the longing in his eyes, his unbuttoned collar and his braces hanging loose. She stroked his cheek and he groaned, catching hold of her hand and kissing it.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Show me,’ he breathed. ‘Show me again.’

  So she did.

  Poland, 1939

  Janusz

  Janusz struggled off the crowded trolley bus, stepping down into a surging mass of people on Prosta Street. Holding his hat to his chest, he slipped into the crowds of men and women so packed together they moved like a flexing muscle, pushing him towards Warsaw Central station.

  His chest felt tight, and he wondered if it was the storm-laden weather or the fear of what the future held that made him struggle for breath. A smell of sewers rose up from the grated drain holes in the cobbled streets. The heat of the day had settled like a net over the city, snagging the fumes of traffic and horse shit along with the odours of fish markets and rotting vegetables. For weeks now there had been talk of food shortages, and peasants had started bringing their produce into the city, selling it at inflated prices to families who were stockpiling supplies in their cellars. Janusz looked up at the tall buildings around him and beyond to the sullen August sun. It was glazed with skeins of grey clouds and what little breeze there was blew hot. How he longed for rain to clear the air.

  Jostling past a group of girls, peasants in shawls and country headscarves, he felt a hand brushing his pocket and he dodged sideways, falling into step with some soldiers, hoping that the hawkers and pickpockets would leave him alone if they saw he was going to fight for his country.

  ‘Bloody chaos, isn’t it?’ said a voice next to him.

  ‘Terrible!’ Janusz yelled back, glad to find somebody to talk to. He looked for the man, to find the eyes that belonged to the voice. ‘Are you …’

  But the soldier had already gone and he was talking to the back of someone’s hat.

  He arrived at the station and fought his way inside, clutching his mobilization card to his chest. For weeks, radio broadcasts had urged all available men to go to their nearest railway station, where they could sign up as soldiers ready to defend Poland. For weeks, Janusz’s heart had leapt and drilled against his ribs, waking him in the night with its rhythms. And there was no doubting that the war was going to happen. Here he was, standing in the middle of pandemonium – the station much worse than the crowded streets – his legs trembling while his heart still walloped his ribs in fury as if trying to beat the nerves out of him.

  He looked up the stairs he had just descended, the thin section of the sky still visible above them. It would be impossible to fight his way past the crowds, back up to the station entrance and the over-baked day. He had to go on. He took one last look at the sky and then carried on forwards, into the crush of people.

  Trains were crowded with families trying to leave Warsaw, and whole carriages were being taken over by soldiers. Pulled back and forth, fighting for room to stand, Janusz knocked into crying children, but there was no time to stop and help them. Everywhere he looked he saw bewildered infants, and it occurred to him that if anything were to happen to him, if he were to die during the war, these lost children would be his last view of Warsaw. They were surely who he was going to be fighting for, all the sons and daughters of Poland.

  A harassed-looking soldier told him to hurry up and board a train.

  ‘Which one?’ asked Janusz.

  The man waved his arm in the direction of a platform. ‘Timetable route number 401. Warsaw to Lwow. You get off at Przemysl, 491 kilometres down the line. They need men to work on the town defences there. Now get out of my sight.’

  By late afternoon Janusz’s hat had vanished, his wallet containing his identity card and a few zlotys had been pickpocketed, he had been given a uniform and a kit bag and he had boarded a diesel train heading south-east.

  In carriages up and down the train, soldiers were singing and sharing jokes, but Janusz stayed silent. He prayed Silvana and Aurek would be safe. He’d said goodbye casually, as if he were just going out to buy a newspaper. He’d told himself it was braver to le
ave like that. He’d met up with his father a few days before and that had been the old man’s advice.

  ‘Don’t dwell too long on saying your goodbyes. Women always cry and make a fuss. Make it quick. Goodbyes are best kept short. Be strong and you’ll make a fine soldier.’ His father had looked down then, his hand hovering over Janusz’s shoulder. ‘Just make sure you come back in one piece.’

  Now Janusz regretted the way he had left. In truth, it hadn’t been bravery that had made him turn his back so quickly on his wife and child. It had been the hot tears that had pushed at his eyes as he’d brushed Silvana’s cheek with a kiss. His father had been wrong. She’d been the brave one, standing there dry-eyed, holding their son tightly in her arms.

  In the train’s corridor, Janusz leaned against the door, rocking back and forth with the motion of the tracks, watching the landscape change from tall houses and industrial buildings into flat fields and dark belts of woodland interspersed with hamlets and farms.

  To pass the time he composed letters in his mind, serious ones to his father detailing the regiment he was joining. He ran through arguments about the possible outcome of the war and concluded that, given the strength of Poland’s armed forces, combined with the British and French aid promised, Germany would surely be forced to leave the Polish borders and Hitler would have to go home with his tail between his legs. Or at least that was what the newspapers were saying. Like everybody, he wanted to believe it.

  As the hours passed and the flat landscape became gently hilly with rivers and forested areas, he thought of Silvana and imagined telling her about the town he was headed for. He knew it was an ancient place full of forts and flanked by mountains.

  The train stopped at every town on the way, picking up more people, putting down others. As it rattled slowly towards his destination, Janusz wrote sonnets in his head to Silvana, counting the lines to make sure they were technically correct. He conjured up images and phrases and for a while he felt almost heroic. He looked at the other soldiers around him and wrote imaginary letters to them boasting about his wife. He described her red curls, the soft plumpness of her breasts, the warm width of her hips. ‘My wife is beautiful, shapely like the mermaid of Warsaw, our city’s symbol,’ he told himself, and wished he had a pen and paper to hand.

  He sat down on his kit bag, drank tea and ate pickled eggs and bread rolls, handed out from the samovar trolley that passed by. Finally, the day slid into star-pierced blackness and the train stopped overnight in a small country station. Janusz made his kit bag into a pillow and wrapped his arms around his knees. He was tired beyond belief. Surrounded by snoring soldiers, all of them shouldered together tight as cattle, sweat steaming off them, Janusz closed his eyes and slept.

  The following morning, which came with a cool breeze off the hills on the far horizon, he composed more letters in his head, ones to the priests at the secondary school in his hometown and letters in French to his old history teacher of whom he had been particularly fond. He was so lost in his own thoughts, puzzling over forgotten French grammar, that it was a few moments before he realized the train was pulling to a sudden halt in the middle of some fields. He looked up at the sky. In the distance, planes were flying towards them.

  ‘It’s the Luftwaffe!’ yelled a soldier, and pushed Janusz roughly out of the doorway. ‘Get the hell out of the way. They’ve got machine-gunners aimed at the train.’

  ‘But we’re not at war yet.’

  The soldier pulled the carriage door open.

  ‘Tell that to the Germans.’

  Around him, men swore and women and children shrieked and cried. Doors were flung open and people stumbled and pushed to get out, jumping onto the bramble-lined railway track, running into the surrounding fields to hide in ditches and woodland.

  Janusz dropped down from the train and ran after a group of men into an open ditch. There he crawled into a clump of tall reeds and squatted on his haunches, breathing rapidly. His uniform was heavy and he could feel sweat running down his face, stinging his eyes. As the planes flew over, he covered his head with his arms. There was a feeling of heat across his back and a roar of engine noise, high-pitched and threatening. Then, when he felt as though the noise would deafen him completely, the planes passed overhead, rising higher in the sky and banking away towards the horizon.

  ‘They’re playing with us,’ said a man near him as the planes disappeared into the clouds.

  ‘Where have they gone?’

  ‘They’ll be back. You wait. They’ve been doing this for the last few weeks, air attacks like this. No bombs, just machine-guns opening fire on villages and train stations, picking off civilians. Scare tactics.’

  Janusz looked over the edge of the ditch, trying to work out where the planes had gone. In a grassy meadow, far off, he saw a peasant girl. Something in the way she moved, a certain toughness, more like a young boy than a girl, reminded him of his sister Eve and his heart gave a lurch. The girl stood in the middle of a flock of geese that began to rise up around her. Four planes came out of the clouds then and looped towards the train, dipping low over the fields. Janusz saw the girl raise a hand as if to shield her eyes. He called to her, but she was too far off to hear him. There came a sound like the hammering of hailstones on a tin roof, and he realized it was machine-gun fire. The last thing he saw as he stumbled back into the ditch was the goose-girl falling.

  Murder was the word that flashed into his mind. He began to run along the muddy stream that lined the ditch, away from the train and the group of men who were crouched together, hands over their heads. Away from the image of the girl falling.

  The ground around him shook as the machine-gunners opened fire again.

  Janusz heard himself cry out. And then there were no words, just red behind his screwed-up eyelids and splinters of noise like firecrackers exploding in his eardrums. He stumbled and tripped, falling forwards, hitting his head as he landed, face down in the ditch. Pain surged through him. Silver stars dazzled and died in his vision. He felt a pressure on his chest as if his lungs were being squeezed. He couldn’t catch his breath. There was blackness.

  He came to, lying on his belly. Coughing and choking, he rose onto all fours, gulping the air. The planes had gone, leaving blue smoke drifting in their wake, carrying the smell of engine oil and burning. He realized he was quite some way from the train now and the ditch was deep, its sides hiding him from view. He put his hand to his head and felt blood. Had he been shot? Then he saw what had hurt him: a stone sticking out of the shallow ditch-water. His blood was on its flint edge. He must have been knocked unconscious when he fell. He tried to get up, but his legs felt incapable of supporting him. I’ll get up, he thought. I must get up.

  He was aware of soldiers nearby, and once or twice he saw them above him on the grass verges. Too weak to call out to them, he stayed silent and hidden in the tall reeds. Exhaustion hit him and he fell into a trembling sleep. Within his foggy dreams he heard the sound of the train pulling away, but his limbs were too heavy to move and he let sleep overcome him again.

  At the end of the day, in the dimming light, he crawled out of the ditch and lay on his back staring up at the sky. What was he going to do now? With cautious fingers he prodded and felt the swelling above his eye. The blood had dried. He sat up and then slowly got to his feet. The sound of geese honking in the distance made him think again of the girl, and he set off, walking stiffly across the fields towards the noisy birds.

  The geese stood in a group around her, hissing and snaking their necks at him as he approached. He couldn’t bring himself to touch the body, so he sat down and wept beside it. What kind of a soldier was he? He had lain in a ditch while all around him people had needed help. He punished himself with these thoughts until finally he took the dead girl by the shoulders and turned her over.

  A wrinkled face framed by long white hair stared blankly past him. She was a tiny old woman the size of a child. He couldn’t get his thoughts straight. Who was this? Where had
the girl gone? Had he been mistaken? He touched her cheek. It was cold. His own face was burning hot. How could he have thought she was a young woman?

  He picked up the body and carried it to the edge of the field, laying it down under a tree. He removed her bloodstained birch-bark sandals, tidied her clothes and closed her eyes.

  He was twenty-two years old and he had lost his regiment before he’d even joined it. Thunder rumbled in the sky. The storms that had been threatening for days finally broke. The sky turned dark and the rain came pelting down, needle-sharp and carried horizontally by strong winds. Janusz turned up his collar and started walking. He hoped he was heading in the right direction for Warsaw. He didn’t know where else to go.

  Ipswich

  So far, what Silvana has seen of Britain is a country as worn down as her own. Signs of the war are everywhere, in the fire-damaged buildings they pass, the queues outside shops and the blank faces of the people. She thought she might have been able to leave her dark sadnesses behind in Poland, but here loss squats in every corner, persistent and obstinate, calling up the past when it is obvious to her that forgetting is what everybody needs to do. But then who is she to think like this? Her own memories threaten her constantly, and forgetting doesn’t come easily.

  And yet, as she walks briskly behind Janusz up the steep cobbled hill past more of the red-brick houses that crowd these suburban streets, she feels determined, if not a tiny bit hopeful. The way Janusz had looked at the boy when he met them at the station had been loving. Accepting.

  She wants to thank him, but he’s walking so fast she has to keep encouraging Aurek to run beside her to keep up. Just as she is thinking it is warm enough to take off her coat and walk with it over her arm, Janusz stops outside the last house in a terrace.

  ‘We’re here,’ he says, smiling. ‘Here’s the key. Welcome home.’

  She turns the key over in her hand. Aurek reaches out and touches it, and she holds it out to show it to him.