22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [79]
She notes the repairs and the slow decline of garments and feels like she is in mourning for the people who once wore them. Yet she can resurrect them. She will package and parcel and sort the clothes. They will travel on, into the arms of men and women and children who have arrived at the end of the war with nothing but the curious realization that they have survived something and a dull sense that they might not survive the beginning of something else.
She finds a black cotton dress with wide skirts, the kind her mother wore. She imagines her mother in the dismal gown, head bent in sorrow or annoyance, her hands holding the shape of her dead sons. Silvana lifts the dress by its shoulders and shakes the creases out of it.
‘I’m your daughter,’ she says, holding it at arm’s length. She gives it another shake and its sleeves flap aggressively, black and sullen, like the wings of a cornered crow.
‘So, what shall I do, Mother?’ she asks the dress. ‘I think of Tony all the time. ‘Tell me, what should I do? What would you do? Why can’t you help me when I need you?’
The dress gives her no advice. Of course it wouldn’t. When did her mother ever help her before? And yet she misses her.
She walks home carrying it over one arm and finds Janusz and Aurek sitting in the front parlour with Doris.
‘Happy birthday!’
They break into song. ‘Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you …’
Silvana cannot move to take her coat off. Her frozen fingers throb in the sudden warmth, tingling as if they are coming back to life. Mottled red and white, they sting and swell so she couldn’t unbutton her coat even if she wanted to.
‘You thought they’d forgotten,’ says Doris. She takes a drag on her cigarette and coughs heartily. ‘Jan’s been doing things behind your back!’
‘Here.’ Janusz hands her a large white box with a blue ribbon across it. ‘Doris helped us choose it.’
‘Me,’ says Aurek. ‘Me, me, me.’
Doris laughs. ‘All right. You chose it. Go on, Sylvia, open it.’
Silvana opens the box and lifts out a dress. It is a dark-blue fabric with a white polka dot. Three-quarter-length sleeves edged with lace and a wasp waist with a boned girdle over a wide skirt.
Janusz hands her another box. He speaks quietly so that only she can hear. ‘I’ve missed too many of your birthdays.’
Inside the box are a pair of court shoes and kid-leather gloves.
‘I’ve kept those boxes in my spare bedroom for weeks now,’ says Doris. ‘And believe me, it’s lucky you’re smaller than me or I’d have had that frock and worn it myself! Come on. Give us a fashion show. Let’s see what you look like.’
In her bedroom, Silvana puts the black gown in the wardrobe. She changes into her new dress, spinning around to feel the skirts swirl. The skirt is gathered. Imagine that! Folds of fabric all around her. And new! Bought for her, never worn by anyone else. She can’t remember the last time she wore a brand-new dress. She slips her feet into the shoes and puts the gloves on, pushing her fingers into firm leather. In the bathroom she looks in the mirror. The dress is beautiful, but the woman staring back at her looks blank-eyed, harsh. When, she wonders, will I look less like a stranger to myself?
She goes downstairs, and Janusz nods his approval.
‘You can wear it on Friday.’
‘Friday?’
‘We’re going to the cinema. Doris and Gilbert are coming with us.’
‘The cinema?’
She thinks of Warsaw and the film theatres where she went to see matinee performances. Sitting on velvet seats in the dark, her pregnant belly almost touching the seat in front, she had been carried through her favourite American movies on a wave of hopefulness. She’d gone every week and thought that the child when he was born (despite her mother’s craziness, she had always believed her prophecy that she was carrying a boy) would grow up to love films.
Doris claps her hands together and Silvana is woken from her reverie. She is grateful to Doris for snapping