22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [77]
‘Wesolych swiat,’ she says. ‘Happy holidays.’
Then she lets Janusz help her up to bed.
The rest of Christmas and New Year pass by in a blur. The doctor is called and says she has flu. Her head feels like a steam iron, clunky and heavy, and her body is something she would gladly give up if she could.
During the day, when Janusz is back at work, Doris takes Aurek to school. She brings Silvana beef tea and Easton’s tonic, a sticky brown syrup that Doris swears by and Silvana silently swears at. And all the time, while Silvana lies in bed recovering, she has the feeling that Aurek is slipping away from her.
In the garden, the light is fading. Trees are frosted with white. The rickety garden fence is soft grey against the freezing snow that clings in ice-beaded lines along the top of it. On the ground the snow is the same dry white as a sugar loaf. On the old oak tree at the bottom of the garden the snow is a different colour again. Against the tree’s black trunk it is as blue-white as breast milk.
Silvana turns away from the wintery scene outside her window and looks at Aurek sitting at the kitchen table. Doris has just brought him back from school.
‘Are you still friends with Peter?’
She has promised herself she will not do this, but here she is.
‘I never meant it when I said you shouldn’t be friends, you know. I’m sorry for what I said. He’s a nice boy. Why don’t you ask him over to play?’
‘Peter’s not at school.’
‘Not at school?’
‘The teacher says he’s not coming back. He’s gone away.’
So it really is true. Tony has left. And to think, she had nearly told him everything. Aurek looks as if he might cry. His only friend, and she has forced him to leave town.
‘You can have the day off school tomorrow,’ she whispers to him.
As it is, the school is closed. The snow keeps on falling and the roads become impassable. Everybody talks about it being the worst winter in living memory. Janusz stays home for a week when his factory closes and they live on soup with dumplings because even if the shops had any food in them, which is doubtful, they are all closed.
Every morning, Silvana goes walking. She knows she should stay in the house, but her legs won’t let her.
‘We have snow like this in Poland every year,’ she says to Janusz. ‘I don’t know what the fuss is about.’
‘People are freezing in their homes,’ says Janusz. ‘Don’t you read the news? The country is on its knees. And you can’t take Aurek with you. It’s too cold for him out there.’
‘I just need to walk,’ she says. Truth is, she is ashamed of what she feels when she sees Janusz and the boy together. She has what she wanted, a father for Aurek. He loves the boy and Aurek, she can see, is beginning to trust him. She should be happy, but instead she can’t bear to see them together.
She trudges through the blue light of sleet and ice, her lungs burning with cold, and pretends she is back in the frozen Polish winters of the war, back with her own memories and the importance of survival, of having nothing else to consider.
She walks past sheep huddled in fields. She sees a train buried in snow, glassy icicles hanging like daggers off shopfront windows. In the centre of town, Tony’s pet shop is shut up, blinds over the windows, a closed sign in the door. She stands in front of it, looking up at the windows of the flat above the shop and wonders where he could be.
The estuary freezes over and Silvana walks out onto the ice, listening to the low moan of wind skating across its surface. She feels the ice bow and creak under her feet. If the ice opened and she fell into the dark waters, her secret would be gone with her. Only Aurek would be left. Just a boy and his father. But the river doesn’t take her. She is as dry and weightless as the wind itself, and the constant snap and shiver of ice as she steps out towards the middle of the river becomes companionable, like sticks breaking on a forest floor.