22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [93]
He nodded and wrote her a prescription. He had half a finger missing from his right hand and scarring across the back of his wrist. He held his pen awkwardly, wrote slowly.
‘You’re not alone,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of. A lot of couples feel like this. The war has affected all of us. Quite frankly, who would want to bring a child into this world?’
‘You’ll be all right, love,’ Doris said when Silvana came home. ‘We women always are. We have to be.’
Silvana lays her headscarf back over the pink box. It’s been three weeks since she agreed to try for a baby. Three weeks of feeling like she should be burning in hell and three weeks since Janusz has been nothing but kind, bringing flowers for her and toy cars for Aurek. A perfect husband when she is fast becoming a terrible wife. She can’t go on like this. All her lies are stacking themselves up. Sooner or later, they will fall apart.
Poland
Silvana
For six months Silvana stayed in the cottage. She gladly threw herself into the steady peasant life. It was a slow, hidden world she had moved into, and it suited her. Nobody asked her who she was or where she and the boy had come from. She was a young woman unafraid of hard work. That’s all the family were interested in. And that suited her fine. She cooked, fetched water from the well, cleared their fields of stones and planted out crops in May.
Each Friday, Marysia disappeared from the house for hours. She came back on Saturday morning with a flush in her cheeks and a bag of bread and meat. Once, she carried an ox tongue into the kitchen and her mother took it without a word of surprise. Silvana asked where she had found meat like that, but Ela didn’t seem to hear and Marysia only laughed, a coarse laugh. She set her hands on her waist and flicked her hips at Silvana.
‘Be careful. Talk of the wolf,’ she said, ‘and he’s sure to appear.’
Ela was often ill, and Marysia left it to Silvana to nurse her. One day when Ela lay doubled up with pain she asked Silvana to bring her last bottle of medicine.
‘What is it?’ Silvana asked, looking at the thick cloudy mixture.
‘Chaga. And yes, it tastes as bad as it looks. But it works. I get it from a Russian doctor who makes it for me.’
Silvana held the bottle up to the light. ‘A Russian doctor?’
‘He’s in hiding, not far from here. He is a very good doctor.’
There was only one person who could have made this for her. Gregor. And this was the cottage, then, that he had got food from when they were all together in the woods. Silvana handed Ela the bottle and said nothing, but for weeks afterwards, every time she looked across the fields, she wondered whether Elsa had had her baby and if Gregor might come to the cottage one day.
Janusz
Janusz and Hélène lay on a grassy mound together. Below them the Mediterranean sea was a thin pen line of blue meeting a sky the same colour. Villages, vineyards and towns, soft and gauzy in the heat, spread out below them. Waxy-leaved myrtle grew in clumps around them, hiding them from view.
‘Stay,’ Hélène said, her head resting on Janusz’s shoulder. Stay here with me. We can be happy together, you and me.’
Janusz smiled at her. ‘How can I? If I stay here I’ll be arrested.’
‘The war won’t go on for ever.’
Janusz pressed his fingers against his eyes.
‘Janusz, are you listening? Will you? Will you stay?’
He took his hands away and looked at her.
‘Stay,’ she repeated.
He thought of the sailors at the docks in Marseilles, unloading goods from Africa, the Ivory Coast, places where the sun mapped lines on faces toughened by sea air and salt water. When he had stepped onto the docks nearly three months ago, Janusz had envied these men their bronzed muscularity. He had listened to their voices and tried to copy their fierce vowel sounds, the questioning rise to every sentence. He felt closer to them now, as if his body turning from red to brown was part of something deeper. Janusz was warmed by their laughter, comfortable in his new skin. I am a Frenchman, he thought. He was wrapped in sunlight