22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [126]
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,