22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [113]
His son. All these years his son has been dead and he has never known. His Aurek. He can’t even think of the boy he has been loving in his place. She brought a stranger into his life and told him he was his son. And did the boy know he was an imposter? Was he a liar too?
He tries to imagine the forest Silvana lived in. Is that where she learned to be so ruthless? He read a newspaper story just the other day about some soldiers who, unable to believe the war was over, were still stumbling around in European forests, their beards full of moss and twigs, their eyes half blind in the murky woodland light, living on rabbits, mice and squirrels.
He should have let them be. Left Silvana to her wildness. Hélène’s family would have welcomed him. He could have gone there after the war, gone to France and found work in Marseilles. Or Canada. There’d been work offers for ex-servicemen in Canada. He could have started a new life there. That’s what he should have done.
He’d imagined peacetime would bring him a sense of belonging. During the war it had kept him going, that thought of peace. He’d believed in it, like a season he knew would arrive one day. War had been winter all the way, years of Decembers and Januaries. Peacetime was meant to be summer. And he’d thought it had finally arrived when he’d got this house, this life in a small English town, his wife and son.
He gets up, rubbing his aching head, and turns on the light. He opens the window, breathing the night air, sniffing for the scent of woodland, the whiff of pine, the tang of mushrooms and moist earth. A faint smell of bonfires and compost heaps is carried on the breeze. Closing the window, he notices the frame is rotten around the latch. He’ll get on and mend that tomorrow. The house is the only solid thing he knows, and he’ll be damned if he’ll let that fall apart too.
He tidies Aurek’s bed, plumping the pillow and picking up the striped pyjamas he finds underneath it.
And not even a proper burial. He can’t stop thinking about that. She left his son’s body in a handcart. His son. How can he ever forgive her for that?
In his own bed, he lies awake, unable to sleep. He still has the boy’s pyjamas in his hands. He wants to believe Silvana has made a mistake. Surely she is lying about Aurek? Janusz drops the pyjamas onto the floor. He knows she isn’t. He saw the truth in her eyes. His son is dead. He stares at Silvana’s empty bed. He feels fear, a tight knot in his guts, a wartime feeling; the unsteady world Silvana inhabited has become his.
He lights a cigarette, burns his fingers watching the flame run down the match. Does it again, black soot on his thumb, the skin reddened, pain mounting inside him and so much grief it could break him open, grief for not one son but two.
Felixstowe
Aurek is listening to the seagulls. It is not yet light and the sky is still laced with stars, but the birds are mewling like forsaken kittens. He opens the sash window, leans out and copies the birds’ cries until a woman a few doors down, ugly, with a stormy face, looks out of her own window and tells him she’ll hang, draw and quarter him if he doesn’t shut the bloody hell up. He gets back into the camp bed and tries to sleep, hoping he’ll wake again and find himself back in his own bed in Britannia Road.
They have been in Felixstowe for five days. He is still wearing the clothes he arrived in, and his mother doesn’t seem to notice if he is there or not. In the evenings she sits looking through the piles of newspapers, showing Aurek pictures of children he doesn’t want to see. He doesn’t know them. Why should he want to look at them? And she doesn’t know them either, so why does she cry over them?
Tony has gone back to Ipswich. He said he had to keep the pet shop open, that he had to keep to his usual habits in order to avoid arousing any suspicion. He looks at Aurek as if he is a bad boy.
When Tony left he promised he would come back at the weekend. Aurek didn’t understand why, but when he said that, handing