Spring Will Be Ours (90 page)

‘Jerzy!' She switched on the hall light, and felt how cold the flat was. She went to the bedroom, found the curtains drawn, with a look about them as if they hadn't been pulled back all day, and the bed unmade. She went to the sitting room, still calling.

The lights were off, the curtains drawn, she could see that from the hall light. Jerzy was sitting in an armchair by the unlit fire, wrapped in a blanket.

‘Jerzy!'

‘What?' he said flatly, and did not look up.

Elizabeth almost hit him. ‘What do you mean, “what”? Didn't you hear me calling you? Of course you did.'

He shrugged.

‘What's the matter?'

He shook his head.

Elizabeth crossed the room, and lit the fire, shivering. ‘You gave me a terrible fright,' she said angrily. ‘What are you playing at? I thought something – something had happened.'

‘Well it hasn't. I just feel bloody awful, that's all. Don't you ever feel bloody awful?'

Elizabeth sat by the fire in her coat and closed her eyes. I can't live with this any more, she thought. I just can't, and that's all there is to it. She knew, then, that the best thing was to say nothing, but she was so angry, and so hungry, and Delia's mocking tone was still ringing in her ears, and she said:

‘How do you think Stefan is feeling now? Don't you think that perhaps he has just a tiny bit more right to indulge in all this melancholia and self-pity?'

‘Don't preach! I do not want to have a bloody sermon.'

‘Why didn't you answer me? Why? Didn't you think for even a minute of what I might be thinking?'

‘I didn't answer because I knew you were going to come in here and preach.'

‘Oh, my God.' Elizabeth got up, and went out to the kitchen. Still in her coat, because the kitchen was always cold, she lit the oven, and turned it up to 9 and left the door open. She banged furiously in drawers and cupboards, and threw together a meal of sweet corn and scrambled eggs on toast and coffee. She ate it alone at the kitchen table, reading yesterday's paper, and then she went to run a bath, and make the bed, and fill a hot-water bottle. She lay in the bath, waiting for Jerzy to come in from the sitting room and say he was sorry, and make it up, but he didn't come, and she went to bed alone and fell asleep almost at once.

In the light from the platform, in the lights along the track, the rails gleamed, wet with frost melted by the last train, already beginning to freeze again, crystals glistening. In the watery yellow lakes of light along the embankment he could see stiff grass and weeds, rime-encrusted, winter's graveyard, then darkness. His breath streamed into the cold as he paced up and down, past the damp wooden seats, the posters, the graffiti.

In Warsaw, in Gdańsk, in Kraków and Bydgoszcz, in cities and obscure small towns all over Poland, they were creeping out at night with hoarded paint, and secretly printed, thin posters, as they had done in the
^p
war. Then, they had scrawled an anchor out of the letters PW – w – you could do that at lightning speed and run, leaving the message:
Polska Walcząca.
Fighting Poland. Now, the anchor swung from beneath the S of Solidarność. To chalk or paint that on a street corner wall, to scribble swiftly: Winter is yours, spring will be ours – just to do that, they were risking everything.

Here, there was nothing to risk, no freedom to lose or fight for, and they played with aerosols, spraying the wall with obscenities, the phone numbers of prostitutes. No – sometimes there was something else, another two letters: NF. Once, a swastika. He had tried to cross that out, but it was done in thick black spray, and was impossible. Let it stay – let them find out here what it was like to live in an occupied country, to wake to find the phone lines cut, hear of arrests in the night, see from your window the tanks, crawling down the street.

He was at the foot of the steps leading up to the bridge, the ticket office and the Christmas lights in the shop windows beyond, and he heard voices. He turned abruptly, walked for the hundredth time back towards the end of the platform, and the warning: Passengers Must Not Go Beyond This Point. The last train of the evening was due in a few minutes: then they would close the barrier at the top of the steps, and no one else would come down.

He had been here for perhaps an hour. The raw air had seeped into his shoes, his coat and gloves; his feet and his face were almost numb, and he was glad. Over there, they had been herded into camps by the thousand; they stood stamping frantically in the snow, interned like criminals, like cattle, all the energy and hope of the summer of 1980 crushed and spat upon. Why should he be spared?

The line hummed, and he heard behind him the rattle of the southbound train. More footsteps came pounding down the steps, doors slammed, the train moved slowly past him and swung, carriage by carriage, into the distance. The last alighted passenger walked away; on the bridge, someone was drunkenly singing ‘Jingle Bells'. Then there was only the sound of the traffic, and no voices. He stood looking along the gleaming rails, and saw again the thousands of figures, stamping behind snow-covered barbed wire, and himself outside it, free, undeserving of freedom, belonging neither with them, in a doomed country, nor here, in a country of exile.

Above him the barrier creaked, and was slammed shut. The neon strips over the platform flickered and went out; then the light in the ticket office. A few stinging flakes of snow began to fall into the blackness – it did not feel as if it were going to be a generous fall, but perhaps, by tomorrow, the heath would be blanketed. He walked slowly along the platform, hearing his own steps as if, already, they did not matter, or were made by someone else who did not matter, and he made out the telegraph pole, and the outline of the notice. When he reached it, he used it to hold on to for a moment, to feel his way on to the slope of concrete leading down. It was only a short slope, and then he could feel gravel and frozen earth, before he stumbled over the first rail, and out on to the track.

Stefan? No.
Jerzy? No.
Jan.

For a while he just picked his way over the cold concrete sleepers between the first two rails. Within yards of leaving the platform, the track was lit only intermittently, by the street lamps and houses in the roads running between South Hampstead and Gospel Oak; he could hear himself panting, as he negotiated each sleeper, as if he were afraid, though he didn't feel afraid, not out here. He felt driven. Beside him, the electrified rail stretched out like an uncoiled snake, a companion, ready for him when he chose. He didn't choose yet. He stopped and felt in his pocket for his cigarettes and lit one, the tiny flame of the lighter very bright. He snapped it shut, and stood smoking, and went slowly on.

After the rally, unable to bear his wife and daughter watching him, worrying about him, any longer: unable to stand Stefan, the Pole from Poland who was sleeping with his daughter, observing him, baffled; unable to bear his own feelings, or to be among the crowd, with anyone, any longer, he had gone down into the tube and found a press of people queuing up at the ticket machines, pouring on to the platforms. He almost turned back, then, but there were people everywhere, above, below. He bought a fifty-pence ticket, just to get through the barrier, and walked blindly in the crush to a platform, he didn't notice which.

He thought: I don't have to go home, I don't have to go to the office, I don't have to go anywhere. But he had to go somewhere. He thought: I have no one to talk to, not without frightening them, or seeing them pity me. He caught the first train that came into the platform.

He stood in a smoker, jammed up against the handrail, dozens of people all round him, as the train moved into the tunnel. It was very hot, the heating on full blast, and airless, and the train moved slowly, creaking. Everyone was talking about the rally: why weren't they all on the march? He strained to hear a Polish voice, and could not.

At Bond Street, more got on, forcing him back and away from the doors. If he wanted to get out now in a hurry, he couldn't. He began to sweat. At Oxford Circus the doors could hardly open for the people already in the carriage: on the platform, another wave surged forward, pushing and elbowing – people who'd already been to the Embassy, perhaps, and who now were going home. Jan coughed thickly, feeling for his cigarettes, just to be sure. The train moved off again, even more slowly; it felt as if it were being dragged down by the weight of all the passengers, too many, far too many; if there were an accident, or if for some reason they simply had to stop …

Jan had not been on the tube for over twenty years.

The carriage swayed, creaking. The carriage lights flickered, briefly, once, then again. The train went still more slowly, and then it stopped, juddering.

For a minute or two, it was as if no one had noticed. People went on talking, awkwardly turning the pages of the Sunday papers in the crush. Gradually, the talking stopped. Throats were cleared. The lights in the carriage flickered again, and for a terrifying second went out altogether. Then they were on again, dimly.

Jan felt sweat pour down him.

‘Excuse me …' He pushed and shoved his way towards the windows, leaning across the people sitting down, fumbling with the catch. Further along, a woman was trying to do the same.

‘Mind out, mate,' said the man below him.

‘Excuse me …' He pulled and tugged, and at last got it free, and slammed the upper window down. A pitiful waft of stale air came in and was lost among the smoke, the breathing passengers. Jan was panting. He leaned right over the people sitting before him, whose knees were pressed into his and peered through the open gap, trying to see anything, up ahead.

Distantly, a red light glowed.

Then it was just a signal. Thank Christ. They'd be moving again in a minute.

Unless it had failed. If there was a signal failure, they could be down here another half hour, another hour.

He got out his cigarettes and lit one, quickly.

‘Hey!'

‘Not now, mate.'

‘For God's sake put it out.' That was the woman, further down, her voice rising as he felt his voice would rise, hysterically, if he tried to speak. He took a long, frantic puff, and dropped the butt, stubbing it out. He thought: I was half-mad before I came down here. If we don't move soon …

The train creaked, and stumbled forward. They were moving, they were moving. Jan felt his whole body tremble as the train gathered speed, and then it slowed again, and drew into Tottenham Court Road station. The doors opened, and Jan pushed his way through and out on to the platform. He moved quickly through the passengers waiting there, and almost ran up the stairs and out of the station to the blessed freedom of the open air.

For a while he just stood there, by the news stand, as the crowds milled round Macdonald's, opposite, brightly lit. Then he crossed over, and stood at the bus stop, waiting for the number 24, which would take him to South Hampstead, and to Jerzy and Elizabeth, who had not got married yesterday. When the bus came, he climbed to the top deck, and sat smoking as they stopped and started in the traffic, and the winter afternoon light in Camden Town began to fade. I'll go and see my son, he thought, I never see him.

But when the bus eventually stopped at the terminus beneath the trees of South End Green, and he climbed down the stairs and got off, he knew at once that he wouldn't. He couldn't. He paced up and down beneath the trees, and depression gnawed at his stomach like a rat, as it had for years.

Across the road from the trees was a café, but that was closed. There was a row of brightly lit little shops, also closed, with Christmas decorations and snow sprayed on to the window panes. There was a pub, and that was open. He went in and had a whisky, and then another, but he wasn't used to it and he didn't want to get drunk. He wanted to die.

A winking fruit machine thumped and rattled; he sat and watched a couple collect a shower of ten-pence pieces. Across the bar a television hung on the wall was roaring; the bar was strung with Christmas cards and fairy lights, with a plastic Father Christmas in the middle. Jan finished his drink and got up and went outside. He stood wondering where to go next, heard the banging doors of a railway carriage, and knew. The tube was out of the question, for every reason. An empty railway track was fine. He walked to the station and bought a ticket to Gospel Oak because it was the nearest and the only name he could remember anyway. Then he went down, and waited …

He finished his cigarette, and found he was near another bridge. For a moment he hesitated; it was absolutely dark under there. He didn't want to slip and fall, he wanted to know exactly what he was doing. He felt in his pocket again, brought out the lighter, and snapped it on. It shone like a little life, as he went carefully over the sleepers under the bridge.

‘I said pass on the fucking candle!' It was snatched away from him, and went out.
He could hear himself panting hard again as he came out and realized like an animal, from the smell of cold grass and earth, that on the left the track was now running right next to the heath. A few lights from the upper windows of houses on the long road on the right were just enough to see by, but the snow was beginning to fall more thickly. He brushed flakes off his face, stood still, and made out the distance between here and the third rail. He only had to take a few steps. He only had to bend down and touch it. He stepped forward, and stopped. He took off his gloves, and lifted his foot, to cross the second rail, and almost overbalanced, and heard himself shout. He stumbled back, and stood between the two safe rails, shaking. The snow whirled.

He put his head in his hands and howled.

There was a bell ringing somewhere. It pierced Elizabeth's sleep like an arrow, and she woke, or rather half-woke, and listened. She heard the sitting room door open, and Jerzy go to the front door of the flat, and she knew without opening her eyes that it was very late. Flat 2 are locked out again, she thought, or half-thought, and turned over and fell deeply asleep again, very warm.