Spring Will Be Ours (51 page)

For a moment Elizabeth looked disconcerted. Then she said: ‘People at ease in the world don't much interest me.'

And believed she meant it.

They went for a long walk over the heath: past the ponds, where a few people swam among the ducks, and feathers nudged the reeds; down the long avenue carpeted with yellow leaves to the hill where families flew kites. They stood for a while, watching. It was warm, lazy weather, the very last of summer, but with enough wind to keep the kites aloft; they sailed past distant thick white clouds, and the children bobbed up and down.

Elizabeth looked at Jerzy, watching them. He had a rather thin face, with a high, clear forehead; the wind lifted his hair. His eyes were a greeny-grey, and deep-set; his features had a cast which she supposed was Slavic: she was trained to look at faces intently – the first time she had seen him, talking to the landlady, outside the house, she had thought he might not be English. What was he thinking about?

He turned and saw her looking at him. ‘Shall we go?'

‘All right.'

She had brought a plastic box for blackberries, and they moved down on to a sheltered grassy path banked with dense bushes and brambles. They picked for a while without talking. Clouds of midges drifted across the path in the afternoon sunlight; occasionally someone went past with a dog, or children ran by, shouting. The shadows on the path began to lengthen; beyond the bushes they could hear parents calling: ‘Time to go home!' Their fingers were scratched and stained purple.

Elizabeth stopped picking and carefully eased herself down from the bank, holding the box. She stood watching Jerzy again, reaching up towards a thorny tendril; his expression was as full of concentration as if he were reading, and she wasn't even sure if he'd noticed she was no longer near him. She did not try to explain to herself why to look at him felt so satisfying: she felt simply as if for a long time she had been waiting for a space within herself to be occupied, and now it was. There was a sense of knowing him and of not yet knowing: a strange, exciting sense, too, that she would not fully know herself until he began to do so.

‘Jerzy?'

He looked at her, and jumped down.

‘Here.' He dropped a handful of blackberries into the box, reached out and brushed a strand of hair from her face. She closed her eyes, felt him run a finger over her lips.

‘Are you all right?' he asked.

‘Yes.'

‘Shall we go home?'

‘Yes.'

They walked back over the heath, their arms around each other. At the house, they stopped before the stretch of cracked paving leading to the front door, by the low wall and the steps, leading down to the basement. Jerzy looked down at her and raised an eyebrow.

‘Your place or mine?'

They smiled at each other. ‘I think my place is a winter place,' said Elizabeth. ‘It's dark, and there's a fireplace.'

‘Come upstairs, then,' said Jerzy.

‘And see your photographs?'

‘And see my photographs.'

She followed him up the cold stone stairs past different doorways. At the last one, painted white, he took a key from his pocket and let them in. They climbed the stairs, carpeted in mauve and yellow flowers, and up past more doors – ‘That's where the bottles are,' Jerzy hissed – to the very top, where a landing held a tiny kitchen. At the end was another door. He unlocked it, and held it open: Elizabeth saw whiteness, and early evening sun pouring on to bare boards from an uncurtained window.

‘It's beautiful …'

‘I know.' Jerzy came in behind her, and she heard him close the door and follow her as she went to the window and looked out, over the road towards the trees and the heath, where other people were making their way home. There was a large armchair by the window, with a bedspread flung over it as a cover. She moved to sit down in it, but Jerzy took her hand and turned her towards him. They stood, face to face but suddenly hardly able to look at each other. Somewhere in the house a door banged shut; voices sounded from beyond the trees.

He drew her a little into the room, and then they did look at each other, and this time could not look away. Jerzy put his hand behind her head, and stroked her hair; with his other hand he slowly traced the outline of her lips. Elizabeth put her arms round his waist; they stood motionless, hardly breathing; then they undressed each other, very slowly, and stood naked, running their hands everywhere, until Jerzy picked her up and carried her, over to the bed beneath the eave.

She sat in the armchair at the window, wearing his dressing gown, looking at the photographs. Jerzy was kneeling on the bare boards by the lamp, passing black and white prints to her one by one; those she had seen were piled in the lid of the cardboard box on the floor. There was a series of the landlady's children, sprawled on a leatherette sofa watching television; doing their homework at the table while their mother ironed. There was another, of the North London railway line: the station at Hampstead Heath on a late summer evening, a single passenger waiting for a train, walking away from the camera towards the end of the platform, the track stretching ahead between tall banks of ferns and weeds and lupins; the architecture of wires and pylons beyond Camden Road; a black ticket collector at Willesden Junction sitting in his box at night, lit by the ticket office beyond; Hampstead Heath again, but in winter, the banks covered in snow, and early morning passengers pacing, their breath hanging on the air in clouds.

And now there was something else. Elizabeth sat looking at a photograph of crowds of people in a cemetery, at a woman in black standing at the foot of a tall black column, whose steps were piled with wreaths. Her head was bent, her eyes closed; above her on the column was a single word and a date: Katyń, 1940.

‘Who's that?'

‘My mother.'

‘And Katyń?'

‘You don't know about Katyń?'

‘I don't think so,' said Elizabeth. ‘Something in the war?'

‘Yes,' said Jerzy. ‘It was something in the war.'

1978
The first snow had fallen on the heath, and it was very cold. Jerzy and Elizabeth spent winter weekends walking under the bare trees, watching the wind whip the surface of the ponds and a scattering of yellow leaves swirl in the water. Canada geese swept honking across a grey sky; ducks huddled beneath the bushes at the water's edge.

‘Tell me about your family,' said Elizabeth.

‘Tell me about yours.'

‘It's ordinary.'

‘So is mine.'

‘Tell me anyway.'

‘You'll meet them one day.'

‘When?'

‘One day.'

The ponds iced over, and warning notices went up; people threw bread on the ice and the ducks waddled awkwardly over, sliding and squabbling.

‘I have a sister,' said Elizabeth, ‘older than me, married, with a little girl. They live in Northamptonshire, near my parents, who are retired. Our childhood was calm and happy. My father was a bank manager and my mother a teacher. My sister teaches too, and her husband is a surveyor. I have a feeling she is restless.'

Jerzy laughed, ‘I have an older sister, also. She lives in Blackheath, and works for a translation agency. She is not married, but – she is rather beautiful, and clever.'

‘Like you,' said Elizabeth, kissing his jacket. ‘And how many lovers have you had?'

‘Hundreds.'

‘How many?'

‘A few, at university. Enough to know that none of them were right. The right one is here, beside me.'

‘Thank you. Me too.'

Lights in the houses on the heath went on early; they went home for tea in her room, lit the fire and made toast. The room was quite a good size, with wooden cupboards and shelves on either side of the fireplace; there was an armchair, a table at the window, beneath the passing feet, a lumpy single bed. They grew used to sleeping without enough space, curled round each other, down here or up in the attic. Elizabeth kept her clothes on a rail; they grew damp, and she put them in plastic bags in a drawer under the bed. They did not talk about moving, so that some of these inconveniences could be solved, and they had spent Christmas separately, with their own families.

It snowed again, thickly, and the paths over the heath were crisscrossed with footprints and bird tracks. Children shrieked down the hills on toboggans, hungry rooks cawed from bare white branches. Jerzy and Elizabeth walked through the woods to a stone bridge across a stream, where few other people came, and scattered bread and bacon fat for starlings and robins and blackbirds. Jerzy took photographs: Elizabeth with the hood of her jacket up, feeding the birds, walking towards him, away from him, smiling, serious, reaching up to bend and release a low branch and send a spray of snow flying over them both. She borrowed the camera and took pictures of him, leaning over the bridge, walking under the trees with his hands in his pockets, laughing as she pulled a face behind the camera. There were none of them together.

‘Tell me,' Elizabeth said again. ‘What are you so afraid of?'

‘I'm not afraid.'

‘You are. You think I won't understand anything.'

‘Why should you have to?'

‘Because I love you,' said Elizabeth. There was a silence. ‘Do you love me?'

‘You know I do.'

‘Why don't you say so?'

He shook his head. ‘I've never said it to anyone.'

‘Why should that stop you saying it to me?'

‘I'm sorry. I will one day.'

‘When?'

‘One day.'

They walked on, through the white silent woods. Every now and then there was a sudden fall of snow, from a branch or a rhododendron bush; pigeons clattered over the treetops; a crow called, throaty and hoarse.

Jerzy said: ‘I've met other Poles, born here, who find it difficult to talk about their families to English people. It sounds … precious, to say that, as if we think of ourselves as special, or superior, but it isn't that, or at least I don't think it is. It's more a fear of embarrassing, or something. I mean, there's hardly a Polish family which wasn't amputated, or imprisoned, or suffered in the war in a way the British can't understand – because you weren't occupied.'

He took his arm away from her, and paced up and down.

‘When my family came here, with thousands and thousands of others, most of them had histories which they all had to bury, while they got on with starting a new life. But of course they couldn't bury them, and they told their children. My mother and grandparents – my father's parents – told Ewa and me. We grew up in another country. Perhaps for others it was less so, or more so – I can remember plenty of children at Saturday school whose mothers wouldn't let them speak English at home at all. It wasn't like that for us, exactly, but neither were we like the families who became extremely successful here. We didn't quite manage that: my grandparents simply buried themselves, like lots of their generation, in the exile community – the
emigracja.
My father was young, he was supposed to make a go of it, but …' He paused. ‘But he was scarred by the war, I think, in a way which cut him off from everyone, even us. Especially us. He and I … I was very afraid of him when I was young.'

‘But not now.'

He didn't answer.

‘Jerzy? Tell me about it. About him.'

They had walked in a circle, and were back at the bridge again: they stood, looking down into the cold brown water, frozen hard. Jerzy brushed snow from the parapet and leaned on it, a little away from her. Their breath streamed on the air.

Elizabeth reached out and touched his arm, but he didn't turn. She felt a faint, guilty flicker of irritation.

‘You do realize,' she said lightly, ‘that we suffered too, in the war? My father was in a Japanese prison camp.'

‘Was he?' Jerzy scratched the surface of the parapet. ‘But then – forgive me – but in the end your country had its freedom. And Poland began another occupation.'

‘Is that how you think of it?'

‘Of course. How else are we to think of it?'

Elizabeth shook her head, and fell silent. The snow that remained on the bridge was delicately marked with the prints of birds'feet; from below, a blackbird cautiously looked up at them, head on one side, hungry.

After a while, Jerzy said: ‘I told you when we met that I wasn't very good with people, didn't I? You can give up now, if you want.'

‘I don't want. Don't be so defeatist.'

He stood up, and moved away from the bridge. ‘Am I defeatist? You sound like my father. Incredibly, that's who you sound like.' He began to walk quickly away through the snowy trees, and she ran to catch up with him.

‘Jerzy … I didn't mean to hurt you. Please …'

‘Leave it,' he said. ‘Just forget it, all right?'

They walked home in silence, across the white, empty heath.

A few weeks later, Elizabeth took Jerzy to her studio, small and plain, at the top of a house full of people renting rooms. The studio had two windows overlooking roads and rooftops; a slope of the heath was just visible, with the last of the snow in patches.

‘You just … look around,' she said, and took the kettle, plugged into the wall outside, to the landing bathroom.

Jerzy walked, over to the easel, and stood looking at the canvas there. He was standing at a glass door, opened on to a long narrow garden, full of trees. Greenness and yellowness clustered round the door; shrubbery and sky were blurrily reflected in the glass. A path led down the garden, and a small girl was sitting in the middle, her back to him, bent over a doll whose legs flopped from her lap. The foreground of the painting was as he had imagined, full of light and colour, but something else was there, too, in the long bars of shade which fell from the trees at the end of the garden, across the path, and across the little girl.

The studio door opened.