22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [75]
The women left the next morning just as it was getting light. They didn’t speak to Silvana, and she watched them gather their blankets and belongings. Lottie, the pianist, had stopped wearing her hair in a bun. Instead it hung down her back in thick coils. She and the old woman were bent over with the cold, moving like mirror images of each other. Two hags of the forest with twigs in their hair. Silvana was glad to see them go.
The old man died a week after they left. She tried to dig a hole to bury the corpse, but the ground was too hard and the old man was rigid. Besides, his blankets smelled bad, even in the cold. Silvana dragged him out of his shelter and let the snow that had begun to fall cover him. In hours he was frozen under a blanket of white. She wrapped Aurek in his rabbit furs, picked him up, pulled her coat tight around her and walked away. When the thaw comes, she thought, we will be far from here and the wild animals will have taken him. What she and the boy would be doing though, she had no idea.
Janusz
The farmer and his wife were quietly welcoming to Janusz. They gave him a room at the back of the house, helping him onto the metal-framed bed, where he lay flat on his back and stared at the cracked ceiling and dark beams, wondering if he would ever be able to move freely again. The farmer’s wife covered him with a damp sheet, dropping it lightly over him so that it covered not just his body but his face too. He blinked under the white cotton and felt like a corpse being laid to rest.
On his sunburnt skin, the sheet felt heavy. Just as he was about to move his stiff arms to lift it off him, two hands touched his face and folded the sheet back. He stared up at a girl in a yellow dress. The colour reminded him of the buttercups that grew alongside the river back in his hometown.
He smiled at her and though pain cracked the peeling skin on his face he didn’t care.
‘What’s your name?’ he whispered.
She leaned over him. ‘Did you say something, monsieur?’
He swallowed, tried again to speak. ‘Your name?’
‘Hélène,’ she said. ‘Hélène Legarde, monsieur.’
For a week he lay in bed with a fever brought on by sunstroke. Hélène smeared olive oil onto his burns and gave him tiny sips of water. Her kindnesses made him dizzy with gratitude. She popped the blisters on his back and spread dressings over the raw skin. When she leaned across him, her breasts rested briefly against his chest, sending a bolt of electricity through his spine. He could smell the scent of her, the musky smell of her sweat. It made him want to reach out and touch her. At night he waited impatiently until dawn, when she checked him again.
Once a day she helped him outside to the middy, the ditch at the back of the old stone farmhouse. Hélène left him with a shovel and a bowl of ash, and he squatted in the blessed shade of the stone house, thinking about the simplicity of this family’s life and the sense of peace he had found here.
He walked back into the courtyard, lizards rushing through scorched grass at his feet as he interrupted their sunbathing. In the yard, dogs slept, noses resting on stretched legs. Chickens gathered by a barn door, lying in dirt to keep cool, spreading wing feathers out like fingers. Hélène was there too, her back to him, sweeping the terrace steps. He watched sweat spreading wetly across the back of her dress, making the summer print darken. She turned around, her breasts sliding towards each other as she grasped the broom with both hands and dipped her head, concentrating on her job.
Janusz walked towards her. ‘It’s too hot to work. You must be thirsty. Can I get you a drink?’
She looked up, and he took the broom from her.
‘A drink?’ she asked, her cheeks shining with heat. She walked over to the well in the middle of the yard and began pulling on a thick cord that dangled into its depths. Finally a metal bucket swung into view. She reached into it and pulled out a bottle of red wine.
‘Nice and cold,’ she said. ‘We have a drink together?’
Ipswich
Christmas at number