22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [4]
At the town hall, he fills in forms and waits in queues for government vouchers for furniture and paint. The furniture comes from a warehouse near the bus station and is all the same: solid, square shapes in thin, dark-stained wood. He buys wallpaper from Woolworths: ‘Summer Days’ – cream-coloured with sprays of tiny red roses in diagonal lines. He gets enough for the front parlour and the main bedroom. He buys wallpaper for Aurek’s room too, asking the advice of a shop assistant, who says she has a son the same age.
He papers the hall and the kitchen in a pale beige, patterned with curling bamboo leaves and twiggy canes in soft green. Upstairs, rose-pink paint for the bathroom and landing. Aurek’s room has grey formations of aeroplanes flying across its walls. It’s a good-sized room. He’ll be able to share it with a brother one day if everything works out the way Janusz wants it to.
Every evening Janusz comes back from work and starts on the house, finishing only when he is too exhausted to carry on. When he lies down to sleep he has the impression his arms are outstretched in front of him, still painting and wallpapering.
Alone on his bed at night, he dreams. He enters his parents’ home, running up the porch steps. The heavy front door swings open and he calls for his mother but he knows he has arrived too late and everybody has gone. In one of the empty, high-ceilinged rooms is a dark-haired woman in a yellow dress. She stands up, takes off her dress and beckons to him, then maddeningly, quick as a fish in midstream, the dream changes direction and she is gone. He wakes with a start, eyes open, heart thumping. He moves his hand towards the ache in his groin and twists his face into the pillow. This loneliness will kill him, he’s sure of it.
Victoria station is huge, and even at seven in the morning the place is noisy and full of lost people who grab Janusz by the elbow and ask him questions he can’t answer. He wipes the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief and checks his watch. He has been practising what to say to her when he sees her. ‘It’s been a long time’ is what he thinks he will say. It sounds casual and yet full of meaning.
He finds himself searching his mind for Polish phrases, but he’s been immersed in the English language for so long now he has lost the habit. It’s like trying to recall the names of half-forgotten school friends, requiring too much effort and an unwilling excavation of the past. Truth is, there’s too much nostalgia in his mother tongue. If Silvana can speak English it will be easier. They will be making a new life here and she will have to learn the language. ‘Welcome to Britain’ is another phrase he thinks he might use.
The platforms overflow with crowds. Suitcases are piled high on trolleys, and rag-and-bone bales of clothes and belongings are everywhere. People blur past in greys and browns and dark blues. He scans the crowd, trying not to think of Hélène, how he had once imagined it would be her he would meet like this after the war. Then he sees a woman looking his way. He stares at her and feels a jolt of recognition. Everything comes back to him. It is Silvana. His wife. His hand goes up to take off his hat, an awful, narrow-brimmed trilby. It came with his demob suit and he swears it’s made of cardboard. He smooths his hair, spreads finger and thumb across his moustache, coughs, clasps the hat in his hands and walks towards her. She is a wearing a red headscarf and, now he has seen her, she stands out in the colourless