22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [92]
And yet, no matter how Silvana juts her jaw at the world and holds her back straight as an iron bar, he knows she is fragile. She is made of the thinnest eggshell, her toughness a veneer that could be broken with a single clumsy move. He imagines her sitting in the passenger seat of his new car, the way she would hold her hands clasped together, the careful upright look of her.
‘I got my promotion.’ Janusz feels his cheekbones move, his face settling into an unexpected grin. ‘Wait, that’s not all. Do you want to know why I have a blanket? It’s to put over your knees when I take you for a drive.’
She turns, the wooden spoon in her hand dripping soup on the floor.
He takes the spoon off her and puts it back in the saucepan.
‘I bought a car.’
‘A car?’
Aurek is sitting under the kitchen table, playing with a pack of cigarette cards.
‘Did you hear me?’ he asks the boy. ‘We’ve got a car. The Nowaks are going up in the world.’
Aurek crawls out from under the table and Janusz holds his hand out to his son. The boy shoves his hands in his pockets. Janusz remembers being a small boy himself and his own father standing over him, the mix of fear and love he felt for him. He tries to soften his face. To be less imposing.
‘A car?’ says Aurek.
‘That’s right. We have a car.’
Janusz places a hand gently on Silvana’s belly. ‘We just need …’
‘I know.’
‘And?’
She looks down, bites her lip. Then she raises her wide brown eyes to his and nods.
‘All right. We’ll try.’
‘Really?’
He is so surprised and grateful to her, he whoops with joy and stumbles through a few steps of a mazurka, kicking his legs and singing, Aurek giggling at the sight of him.
Janusz stops and regards his family, his life, the small kitchen. The table takes up most of the room, that and the three wooden chairs. The dripping tap that he must fix one day plays a repetitive plink plink tune in the ceramic sink. He looks at the suburban garden through the window. It may not be a big garden, but the lawn is smooth and weed-free, the flower beds are blooming this spring, and the vegetable patch is overflowing with produce. Aurek is making car noises, vroom, vroom, jigging from one foot to the other. On the stove, the pearl-barley soup, brown and viscous, is gently boiling over.
‘You have a smudge on your cheek,’ says Silvana. She wipes it with her finger and he feels the softness of her gesture. He thinks of Hélène.
‘There,’ says Silvana. ‘It’s gone now.’
Janusz looks down at his son and ruffles the boy’s hair gently.
‘Aurek, I do believe you are growing,’ he says. He leans behind Silvana and turns off the stove.
Silvana opens a drawer and looks at her red headscarf. She hasn’t worn it since Doris dyed her hair for her and showed her how to curl and coif it in the modern style. Underneath the scarf is a neat pink box. She takes it out and opens it, running a finger over the diaphragm inside. Doris had helped her get it. She’d given her the name of a doctor.
‘You go and see him. He’ll give you something. Some of them don’t like it when you want to take matters into your own hands. They think you’re trying to escape your duties. They give you all that stuff about the population and your role as a woman. This one’ll see you all right. Me, I’ve been lucky. I had our Geena and afterwards Gilbert never really bothered me for that kind of thing. We’re too old now in any case. I’m looking forward to grandchildren.’
‘I have my son,’ she told the doctor. ‘It’s enough to look after him. I don’t think I could cope with another.’
‘And your husband treats you well?’
‘Yes. Yes, he’s a very good husband.’
And ask about me, she thinks. Ask me if I am a good wife and I could tell you I am a liar and a cheat.
‘He doesn’t want any more children either?’
‘No.