22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [51]
She heads towards home, her mind clearing. She has been so sure of her own role as villain in this marriage, she never imagined Janusz could be capable of hiding things from her.
But she must harden herself. To ask him about the letters would be to risk their family, and Aurek must have a family. It’s what she promised him. It’s likely that the affair is over. A wartime foolishness. And if Janusz is still involved with this other woman, she must not interfere. She must be hard and serious and stay silent. She has no choice. She must go back and be a good wife. Let Janusz have his secrets. At least now she is not the only one in the marriage with something to hide.
When she walks through the hallway and into the kitchen, Janusz and Aurek are waiting for her.
‘They’re a perfect fit!’ says Janusz.
She looks at his face blankly.
‘The shoes!’ It was you that left them on the table?’
‘Oh. Yes. Yes, I got them from the rag-and-bone man.’
‘I’ve cleaned them. Aurek helped me. A bit of shoe polish brought them up like new. English leather. You remember the doctor we took Aurek to? He had the same shoes, I’m sure.’
‘I’m glad you like them.’
‘I’ll keep them for best, of course.’
‘That’s right,’ she says, sinking into a chair and beckoning to Aurek to come and sit on her lap. ‘Keep them for best.’
Poland
Silvana
As the months went by, Aurek delighted Silvana and entertained Hanka. Full of energy, he played in the rabbit cages and ran with the farm dogs, his back bent, shoulders rounded, touching the ground with his hands for balance, pushing himself off from outstretched fingers. He was fast like that.
Hanka called him a little bear. She told Silvana a story about a boy brought up by bears in a Lithuanian forest. The three of them were wrapped in blankets in their straw bed, Aurek curled tightly against Silvana’s breast.
‘Nobody knew where he had come from,’ said Hanka, tickling Aurek’s fingers. ‘The bears took him as their own. He went about on all fours and grew hair down his back. He lived on a diet of crab apples and honey. A hunter caught him and gave him to the king of Poland, who tried to teach him to speak, but he never learned to do anything other than grunt.
Aurek laughed at the story. Hanka grunted and growled like a bear until Silvana was worried Aurek would hurt himself laughing so hard. They giggled and growled and roared and, finally, when they fell back on the straw exhausted by their laughter, Silvana pressed her face against the top of her son’s head and felt tears run down her cheeks.
‘My little bear,’ she whispered to him. ‘My lost little bear.’
‘Here,’ Hanka said one night when the stars looked sharp enough to slice the black velvet sky into icy ribbons. She held out a dried plum, dark and wrinkled. Silvana’s mouth watered at the sight of it.
‘Would he like this?’
Silvana looked at Aurek, curled up in her arms, head tucked in. She wasn’t sure. Hanka tutted.
‘All children like them.’
She held the piece of fruit out to Aurek and he pushed it greedily into his mouth.
‘See? I knew he would.’
‘What will we do when the summer comes?’ Silvana asked. ‘Will we stay here?’
‘Warsaw.’ Hanka leaned across her and wiped a dribble from Aurek’s mouth. ‘I’m going to Warsaw. You can come if you want.’
‘You’re going to the city?’
Silvana was surprised. She had thought Hanka would go home. Hanka had told her about her family home: a white stucco house with an avenue of lime trees leading to it and Virginia creeper trailing across its façade. A pavillon de chasse, she called it. She had described the shooting trophies in the hall, heads of boar and roe, glass domes containing blackcock and capercaillie and the floors made of marble. Outside were kitchen gardens, a lake full of carp, a dairy and a laundry. It sounded like a wonderful place.
‘Why don’t you go home?’ she asked.
Hanka shook her head.
‘I was a child during the Great War. The Germans took over our house. They had their motor-repair shops in the barns alongside the vegetable gardens. My family hid almost all our possessions, the