22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [68]
By the time Silvana puts the key in the front door, she has convinced herself that Janusz will be there, that he will know everything she has said. But when she steps into the hallway, the house is empty and the only sound is the clock ticking on the mantelpiece in the front parlour.
She opens the back door for Aurek, who runs outside and climbs the rope ladder into his tree house. In the pantry, the wooden box sits on a shelf. Just the sight of it brings on anxiety. She will burn the letters. She’ll take them out and burn them, and then the three of them will be able to live like they did before.
She picks up the box and sets it on the kitchen table. Carefully, she pushes her hand through the cloths and brushes and tins of polish, but the letters are not there. She yanks everything out of the box, shaking it, turning it upside down. What now? Slowly she refills the box, picking up the things she threw around, tidying the contents. She puts it back in the pantry and closes the door, leaning against it as though afraid it might spring open of its own accord. Then she steps out into the garden, gulping lungfuls of damp air.
The vegetable plot below the tree has yielded onions and carrots; she and Janusz harvested them together. There are more onions to be lifted. Janusz planted ones that keep growing. Everlasting, they are called. Silvana sighs. What kind of a fool is she turning into where even the name of an onion can make her feel weak?
She runs a hand over the heads of rust-coloured chrysanthemums. The holly bushes Janusz planted are still tiny, but they sparkle with blood-red berries. In Poland they’d say those berries were the sign of a hard winter to come. Blue Michaelmas daisies and white anemones tumble over each other, and the last of Janusz’s giant pink and purple dahlias, staked and supported, proudly rise up towards the sky, glowing in the late-afternoon light.
Silvana picks a few flowers until she has a small bunch in her hand. If Janusz knew she had found the letters, surely he would have said something? He must have moved them thinking she knew nothing about them. She feels a sense of relief that the letters have gone. As if some tight knot within her has been straightened out.
Maybe she feels better because she has told Tony about them? She persuades herself Janusz has thrown the letters away. This means the affair must be over. It was a wartime thing, that’s all. And what about herself and Tony?
She is a master at lying to herself, pretending certain things happened in one way and not another, and she manages to settle the story in her mind. She might have had a small infatuation for Tony, but it is over now. He is just a friend of the family. Nothing more than that. A man with a boy the same age as their son. She looks down at the bunch of flowers in her hands and realizes she has plucked all the petals off and is holding only a few stalks and leaves. She lets them fall onto the lawn.
As the sun sets, the garden becomes sombre. The sky turns turquoise and the first star appears.
‘Come down,’ she calls to Aurek in his tree house. ‘Come inside and we’ll make tea for your father.’
Father is such a good word. It fits with family, mother and son. Safe words. Standing there, on the lawn Janusz has lovingly mown and rolled, looking up at the back of their house, she knows she must never see Tony again. Their friendship is over.
Poland
Silvana
A cold wind installed itself, sweeping through the forests, blowing the leaves off the trees. Silvana watched the leaves tumbling down, circling and dancing around her. It had been over a year since she had left Warsaw. Over a year since she had last seen Janusz. She heard a noise of cracking twigs and sat up as Gregor lumbered into view, carrying a sack, which he dropped in the middle of their camp.
He made a great show of emptying it, handing out black bread and apples to everybody.
‘And I have … salt!’ he said.