22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [76]
‘Of course,’ says Silvana, who is too tired to argue, let alone think of another year. ‘Whatever you want.’
There is a second-hand Raleigh bike for Aurek and a promise from Janusz to teach him how to ride it. Silvana doesn’t want the boy riding a bicycle. She fears he will fall and hurt himself. Every time she looks at the bike, she imagines Aurek falling. She says nothing. Aurek leans it against the stairs in the hallway and polishes its wheel spokes with his handkerchief.
Silvana gives Janusz a brown paper bag of dahlia bulbs in sawdust. Janusz gives her perfume: Yardley English Lavender. She opens the bottle, breathes in and has a sneezing fit.
With the extra coal allowance the doctor gave them for Aurek, Silvana insists that they stoke the fire and keep the house warm. The snow hasn’t let up and the whole country is freezing. It’s on the radio and in the newspapers. The worst winter in years. She tells Janusz he should be proud: she read in a newspaper that it is Polish miners in Britain who are working round the clock to keep the coal supplies coming.
‘The British moan about foreign workers,’ she says to Janusz. ‘But they would be stuck without our miners, wouldn’t they?’
Even cheered as she is by this thought, she has to admit the Polish miners seem to be failing to keep her warm. She is wearing two pairs of stockings, a petticoat, a thick tweed skirt, two blouses and a cardigan, but it makes no difference.
She shivers and shakes with cold.
‘Come on, Aurek, pay attention,’ says Janusz. He is sitting in his chair by the fire with Aurek on the rug, trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle. ‘That’s the cowboy’s scarf. It’s blue. See? Look at the picture on the box. There’s a piece like that somewhere else in here. Look for the same blue.’
Silvana wonders what Tony is doing, whether he is with Peter in the grandparents’ big house by the park, doing jigsaw puzzles in front of the fire. She sits back in her chair. She hasn’t seen him since October, when she told him about the letters. She should be pleased. Surely it makes her life easier not to see him, and yet she feels angry. How can he step in and then out of her life so easily?
She watches Janusz searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, steadily, logically, while Aurek piles up the wooden pieces into small towers.
‘Time for a glass of sherry,’ says Janusz after he has dismantled Aurek’s pile of jigsaw pieces and put the last section of the sky in place. ‘Aurek, no. Don’t touch it. It’s finished. Go and put the radio on. The King’s speech will be on soon.’
The three of them sit listening to the radio, Silvana sipping her sherry. It tastes terrible, so she gulps it down, eager to finish the glass and be excused. Her head is thumping and she longs only to be in bed.
‘And we should raise our glasses to the Royal Family,’ says Janusz. ‘And a toast to our own son. Aurek, do you want to try some sherry?’
When the national anthem plays Janusz looks at Silvana expectantly, but she does not move. She is sure that she will fall over if she attempts to stand. Janusz stands up, stiff and serious. His faith in the King is touching. Or is it just that she is too tired to be annoyed right now by his constant desire to be a perfect Englishman? Then Aurek surprises her by leaping to his feet and saluting as the anthem plays on.
‘I’ve taught him the words,’ says Janusz. ‘Come on, Aurek. Sing with me.’
To see Aurek singing the British national anthem with his father, both of them standing to attention together, Aurek breaking into crow calls and dog howls as he sings, makes her laugh and then cough and splutter, and finally retch and vomit.
Janusz turns the radio down. ‘Are you all right?’ He bends over her and pulls his handkerchief from his pocket.
Christmas is a terrible time of year, she thinks, wiping her mouth. It leaves her defenceless.
‘I want to go home,’ she mumbles.
Janusz