22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [112]
‘Will you really go back?’
‘Janusz will want to see Aurek. He’s his father. I’ll stay here for a few days or so and then we will have to go.’
‘Do you think so?’ says Tony, and she can hear the sadness in his voice.
‘Yes, I do.’
Silvana runs the water away down the sink and turns to face him.
‘Shall we go up?’ he says, offering her a towel for her hands.
The staircase is wooden, no carpet runner, just brass stair rods, piles of newspapers and dust everywhere.
‘Beggar’s velvet,’ says Tony when he sees her looking. ‘That’s what Lucy called those dust balls that gather in corners. This place needs a clean.’
‘I’ll clean tomorrow,’ Silvana says, trying not to jump at the sound of his dead wife’s name. This was her house and he is still proud of her. Proud, too, of the way she made poetry from skin flecks and hair and household dirt.
Tony stands with his hand on the door to the bedroom. He looks at her and she wants to say, Please, don’t ask that of me tonight, even as she knows that she will do what he wants.
‘When you kissed me today, Silvana, it was all I could do to stop myself from making love to you there and then.’
So she kissed him? Is that what happened? It’s not how she remembers the moment at all. Surely it was Tony who made the first move?
He presses against her, full of wanting, his tongue searching her mouth. His hands hold her hips and she feels his penis through his trousers, its insistent blunt-ended heat pressed against her. Silvana doesn’t move. She is cold in his embrace and she knows he feels it.
Memories blaze through her mind. Now her secret is out in the open she is living through the death of her son all over again. She can see the woman she handed him to. See the woman’s face, her cheeks pinched by the cold, her eyes watering in the wind. She still can’t understand how she could have been so careless. How could she have given her son to someone else?
Tony stops kissing her. He lets his lips linger on her cheek for a moment. Runs a hand through her hair and steps away from her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers.
‘You can have the room next to Aurek’s,’ he says. ‘I hope it’s not too cold in there on your own. I can put an extra blanket on the bed.’
Silvana is so relieved she even manages a smile.
‘It’s all right,’ he says, turning away from her. ‘You just need some time, that’s all.’
She sits in her room, waiting for Tony to settle in the bedroom next door, listening to the sound of him undressing: the trill of a zip and the pop of buttons being released; the rustle of a shirt being eased off his back, the polite unfolding of pyjamas. The creak of mattress springs as he gets into bed, and finally the click of the lamp.
When Tony’s bed springs cease their unsettled squeaking, Silvana tiptoes downstairs, picking up a few of the newspapers piled on the stairs. Tired as she is, sleep is not going to come tonight.
In the sitting room at the front of the house she flicks through old newspapers. Many of them contain photographs of children: groups of them standing in train stations and public halls, carrying boxes and suitcases, all of them labelled like lost luggage. She studies them for hours, the hollow eyes of the children staring back. What if Aurek has a mother somewhere? Did she save the boy or steal him? What if there is a woman somewhere, waiting for her son to come home to her?
She turns off the lamp and sits in the dark, staring out of the window, imagining the sea, listening hard for the sound of the waves, rolling in and out, in and out, like the breath of Tony and Aurek asleep upstairs. When a damp-looking daylight seeps across the sky and the seagulls begin noisily circling the pier, she finds a broom and starts cleaning the house.
Ipswich
The sun is low in the sky and in the garden everything is disappearing into shadow. All Janusz’s roses, his plants and the neatly mowed lawn are disappearing into the night. Janusz leans his head against the window in Aurek’s room and listens to the empty house, the gloomy weight of silence. He lies down on the bed and watches the dark