22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [90]
It is a black Rover owned by a teacher and his wife. Made in 1940, it has a four-speed gearbox, a busted radiator and two flat tyres. In 1943, the teacher’s wife drove it in a snowstorm and crashed into an oak tree. Since then it has been in a barn under a tarpaulin. Janusz overhears a man telling the story during lunch break.
He turns to the man drinking tea from a flask and offers him one of his sandwiches.
‘They are cheese,’ says Janusz politely.
‘Cheese?’
‘Yes. Real cheddar. From the Co-op. With margarine and onion cut very thinly.’
‘Cheese, eh? All right then. Don’t mind if I do.’
It costs him his lunch, but he leaves work that day with the teacher’s address.
He doesn’t lift the tarpaulin. The rounded shape of the car underneath it is enough to make him dream of country drives, picnics with Aurek and Silvana, driving the boy to school and trips to the seaside on Sundays.
‘Yes,’ says Janusz.
‘Have a cup of tea first, old chap,’ says the teacher. ‘There’s no rush.’
Janusz sits in the kitchen at a big refectory table. He looks out of the window, beyond the stone patio to a lawned garden bordered by beds of red and yellow tulips and behind them shrubs and trees. The kitchen has a black and white tiled floor, like the floor of his parents’ kitchen in Poland, and a big cooking range covered in pans. Above the range hangs a lazy-maid covered in baby clothes.
‘We’ve just had our fourth,’ says the teacher when he sees Janusz looking. ‘I’m afraid he’s got a few problems, poor little chap. We’re selling the car partly to finance a holiday for my wife. She’s finding it rather hard to accept the child.’
Janusz doesn’t know what to say. He nods uncertainly.
The man moves the kettle on the stove. ‘So you’ll be able to fix it up yourself, will you?’
‘I think so.’
The teacher’s wife comes in and offers Janusz a currant bun to have with his tea. She is narrow-faced and creased with tiredness. Pushing her wavy brown hair out of her face, tucking loose strands behind her ears, a gesture she repeats as she speaks, she talks about Russia and the atom bomb and Janusz tells her politely that he is Polish, not Russian.
‘I think Russia having such a bomb would be a disaster. Poland will be Poland again one day, and the Russians will leave our country,’ he says, and then regrets the determined tone in his voice, the emotion he didn’t mean to show.
‘Yes, yes,’ says the teacher’s wife. She smiles at Janusz as if he has not quite understood the complexity of the discussion. ‘But we have to let the people take control. Follow a Russian model whether we like it or not.’
Janusz is there to buy a car, not discuss politics. His collar feels tight, but he resists a desire to loosen it.
‘It’s all down to understanding,’ says the teacher. He wears his glasses on the bridge of his nose or pushes them back over his forehead into unruly waves of red hair. ‘This country is still having a hell of a time struggling with peacetime. We need to find a way to give everyone a sense of worthwhileness in their lives.’
The sound of a baby’s high-pitched screaming floats down from another room and the teacher’s wife puts her head in her hands and gives a sudden cry. The teacher takes his glasses off and cleans them.
‘Susan, that’s enough.’
‘Enough?’ She lifts her head. ‘This is just the bloody beginning.’
Janusz loosens his collar.
‘Can I see the car again?’
He rolls the tarpaulin back, opens the door, dusts off the black leather seats and gets in. He gets out, walks round the car, runs his hand over the dented bonnet, kicks a flat tyre.
‘Yes,’ he says again, and they go back into the house where a woman in a white apron passes the crying baby to the teacher.
‘Hello, little chap,’ says the teacher, handing the child to Janusz. ‘He’s abnormal, I’m afraid. Quite heartbreaking.’
The child has a thick mop of brown hair, and when Janusz takes him he stops crying and smiles, a wide smile that makes his eyes disappear and his face pucker into creases. Janusz