Love Among the Single Classes Read online

  Love Among the Single Classes

  Angela Lambert

  This book

  belongs to

  H.J. v. K. B.

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Cast of Characters

  Part I: The Librarian’s Obsession

  Part II: The Polish Obsession

  Part III: Dissolution

  To Francesco Algarotti

  Turin, May 1741

  When I had a frantic passion for you the desire to please you (although I understood its entire impossibility) and the fear of boring you almost stifled my voice when I spoke to you, and all the more stopped my hand five hundred times a day when I took up my pen to write to you … I have studied you, and studied so well, that Sir Isaac Newton did not dissect the rays of the sun with more exactness than I have deciphered the sentiments of your soul. Your eyes served me as a prism to discern the ideas of your mind. I watched it with such great intensity that I almost went blind (for these prisms are very dazzling). I saw that your soul is filled with a thousand beautiful fancies but all together makes up only indifference … Because I am dull enough to arouse nothing better, and I see so clearly the nature of your soul that I am … much in despair of touching it…

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

  [Selected Letters edited by Robert Halsband)

  I

  The Librarian’s Obsession

  1

  I fell in love with him the moment I heard him on the telephone. I had no idea, then, what he looked like, so it can’t have been sexual chemistry – unless chemistry can work solely on the sound of a voice. He was Polish, and his English was stilted, with a heavy accent, so it wasn’t even an obviously attractive voice. Certainly it gave no clues about his age or status. Yet from the moment I first heard him speak I was in a fever of anticipation, counting the days to our meeting.

  It’s true that I have a susceptible heart – but then, we who are members of the single classes, unmarried and unattached, are always waiting to fall in love. We live in a state of emotional vulnerability. Every day and each encounter holds out the possibility of that momentous flash which will change everything. This is what makes us different from people who are already one of a couple. It doesn’t seem to matter how old we are or what we look like: our antennae probe constantly, tentatively, hopefully for that marvellous someone with whom to share an unknown future. It’s because women are more honest with themselves than men, and better able to admit their needs, that they are even more exposed to the tantalizing, invisible proximity of love.

  He rang me last Monday evening. Today is Saturday. We have arranged to spend the afternoon on Hampstead Heath, which is near to where I live. It’s one of those miraculous September days, when the sun and clouds ride clear and high and the trees combine the leafiness of summer with the colours of autumn.

  He said on the phone that his name was Monty Zaluski; but something about the way he said it made me wonder if perhaps he were lying, or concealing his real name from me until we had met and he felt he could trust me. Or perhaps he was a bit ashamed of it. ‘Monty’ is not a very distinguished name, though it could derive from some Polish Christian name I’ve never heard of. I know next to nothing about Poland, although in the few years since Solidarity raised its banner against the Soviets I have learned to feel a generalized admiration for the Polish people, dropped my fifty pence into their collecting boxes, and watched the shipyards on television news with anxious, ineffectual sympathy.

  Our first meeting takes place at a bus stop near my house. I too am wary, despite my impatience to see what he is like, and I know better than to give my address to a stranger. I recognize him at once, and my heart clenches like a fist inside my chest as I walk up to him and say, ‘Mr Zaluski? Hello. How nice of you to be punctual. My name is Constance Liddell.’ His face is high-boned and serious, his head most beautifully shaped, and he somehow looks intensely Polish – perhaps because of his clear, pale blue eyes: the eyes of that actor who used to play the tortured parts in the films of Andrzej Wajda that I saw at Oxford, more than twenty years ago.

  ‘I remember seeing Ashes and Diamonds, years ago …’ I say, to cover the awkwardness that follows our handshake.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I suppose it must have had a different title in Polish. The film made by Wajda.’

  This puzzles him too, until we work out that the name I am pronouncing ‘Wider’ sounds like ‘Voyda’ in his language. He smiles at me as the bus arrives. We sit side by side as the single-decker trundles its way through Highgate towards the Heath, jammed together like an old married couple out for their weekend breath of fresh air. This sudden closeness is overwhelming and I sit as still as the movement of the bus allows, in case he should think I am pressing up against him and being what my mother would call ‘fast’.

  ‘What is Monty short for?’ I ask, filling the conversational gap as usual, since I feel guilty about silence.

  ‘Nothing. It is not my real name. Real name is Iwo. But the fellows at work think that is funny, “‘eave ’o!”, they say, so they call me Monty instead. They say I look like your General.’

  Not to me he doesn’t. He’s much too tall, for a start, and his elegant, patrician features are quite different from Monty’s stern little gnome face. But they were probably just making a friendly joke to try and show him that he was welcome, in spite of being a foreigner. ‘So your proper name is Iwo Zaluski?’

  He turns swiftly and smiles again, apparently surprised that I have remembered his difficult surname.

  Of course I have. I’ve had it written down like a talisman ever since Monday and have already searched for it in the London telephone directory. I wanted the reassurance of knowing his telephone number and address too, but he isn’t in the book. Probably he’s only just moved in.

  ‘Yes … Iwo Zaluski. That’s very good. Many English persons cannot remember it.’

  The bus slows down to climb the hill that leads up towards Kenwood. Already the trees look more intensely green and gold.

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Here, or in Poland? In Poland I was economics teacher at Lodz University.’

  I’ve never heard of anywhere called Woodge, but I can ask him about that later.

  We stroll – formal, apart – through the spacious Georgian rooms of Kenwood House. I point out the Gainsboroughs and he admires their haughty English faces. We look at the Adam library – already I am showing off, prattling about books – and the Rembrandt self-portrait. Outside the windows the lawn drops away from the gravelled terrace down to the ornamental lake. The brilliance of the afternoon puts me in mind of Traherne – The corn was orient and immortal wheat – and my mood of quivering expectancy heightens everything: the colours; the people; the landscaped view; above all, him. I have no way of telling if he feels the same. We leave the house and walk outside to where families are sitting on the grass and children rolling over and over down the incline, laughing. Couples stroll arm in arm or interlaced: young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange, seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street and playing were moving jewels. Traherne was in love with God, but I am in love with Iwo.

  This meeting is the result of a small ad which he had placed in the New Statesman. It said: ‘Polish gentleman, 50s, political refugee, seeks intellectual woman for marriage.’ I was attracted and touched by its economy and truthfulness. It contained no word of romance. He might have softened his request by describing himself as ‘handsome’, ‘tall’, ‘lonely’ or ‘cultivated’, or indeed any word that might strike a chord in some female heart. He could have requested a ‘kind’ or ‘attractive’ or ‘yo
unger’ woman. Most persuasively of all, he could have inserted ‘for love and’ before ‘marriage’. He did none of these things. All he asked was that she should be clever. Perhaps he simply didn’t care what she was like, provided she earned him the right, in the eyes of the Home Office, to remain in England. So he stated nothing beyond his bare need, and I could not resist the appeal that I assumed must lie behind those words. I didn’t seriously contemplate marrying this unknown, fiftyish Pole, but I thought I could befriend him, introduce him to people, give him a good Sunday lunch occasionally.

  As it turned out, his advertisement was so terse that mine was the only reply. This was just as well, since had the response been any larger he would surely never have followed up my letter. I had written, with self-deprecating embarrassment; surprised, really, to find myself answering at all:

  Dear Polish gentleman, [this after toying with ‘Dear Box 543’]

  For a start I must warn you that I’m no intellectual, although I did somehow manage to con the examiners at Oxford into giving me a First (in English). But that was many years ago, and since then marriage and children and a humdrum job as a librarian have softened the brain! However, [lest he take this too literally] I am still an avid reader and I also go as often as possible to the opera, theatre and cinema – meaning, as often as I can afford it! I have been divorced for six years and the scars are healing nicely. I have three children: two are grown up but the youngest still lives at home with me, but not in the usual state of armed neutrality common to most parents and adolescents. I’m lucky: we get on pretty well. I’ve also got lots of friends, many of them politically oriented, whom you might be interested to meet. I have a large house which I used to share with my husband but is now all mine, on the wilder shores of north London. I cook quite well and entertain quite a lot. If you think you’d like to meet, give me a ring and ask for Constance.

  PS I’m afraid I’ve never been to Poland.

  Iwo told me many weeks later that he had found most of this letter incomprehensible, because it used so many idioms that were quite unknown to him. He thought I had gained my degree by cheating. The wilder shores of north London’ led him to believe that I lived on the edge of a lake. He had also assumed that my husband beat me and this was why I had divorced him. However, what had appealed was my failure to mention either my age or what I looked like. He had read between the lines, and been touched that I seemed ready to offer him my home, my friends, and my cooking.

  On this fragile web of allusion and implication, spoken and unspoken need, distanced on both sides by pride, on this unlikely basis we met.

  Outside in the crisp blue sunshine our feet sink into the spongy tussocks as we walk steeply downhill. Already I lean towards him, so as to be as close as possible, though without daring to touch him or take his arm. His face is immobile, his movements taut. His skin is hardly lined, though he must be over fifty, he said so in the advertisement, so I assume that he is always self-contained, his face always this smooth and expressionless. I on the other hand am filled with emotion, galvanized with energy; and, because he is already so important to me, nervous in case I am asking too many direct questions. I get round it by asking him about his advertisement, and whether he has ever been married before.

  ‘Yes, once. We were happy for a short time, maybe three, four years. Then I learned that we hoped for much different things from marriage.’

  ‘What did you hope for?’

  ‘I was young and the young have big ideals, so: everything. I wanted from one person all my needs. Love, sex, another mind to talk with, nice home, happy family, good friends to come to our house … everything! I even wanted her to like same ideas and books as I do; also to have thoughts and visions same as mine, so you see I was very young! But we … she … I am sorry’, he sighs, and slumps his shoulders,’ … I could say better in Polish. My English is no good. But, I wanted to be interested in her more than any person in my whole life. And to be the same for her.’

  There is a long pause. I count the seconds. One and two and three and, ‘And?’

  ‘It is a young man’s dream. When I began to be grown up man I see that this is not possible.’

  ‘Do you want me to call you Iwo or Monty?’

  ‘Iwo is my name.’

  ‘All right then: Iwo. How old are you now?’

  ‘Fifty-four.’

  ‘Well, I am forty-four. I was married for fifteen years. And I still believe it is possible. Perhaps not like you imagined when you were young, or I did, but it is the only thing I have ever really wanted out of life. More than to be successful or beautiful or rich or powerful or whatever the things are that people want, I would rather be truly happily married. And Iwo, you do occasionally see people like that. Middle-aged, even old people who really seem to talk to each other still, who hate to be parted, who love each other, with a real strong love. Oh Iwo, you mustn’t think a good marriage is impossible!’

  ‘No?’

  ‘But you do?’

  ‘I hope not, but I think so.’

  I am eager to discover as much as possible, and take for granted that he must feel the same about me. So I ask him bold questions, like: ‘Obviously you can quarrel and still love each other. But do you think people can be unfaithful and still be happily married?’

  ‘Taking another person to bed is not the worst thing. Boredom is worst. Not to care, not to listen, not to look at wife or husband, not to see when he changes. That is worse.’

  They can be astonishing, these conversations between two people who have only just met, yet who sense vistas unfolding before them. Filled with hope and freshness, one says things that even one’s best friends might be surprised to hear. I have never admitted to my women friends that this desire for a good man and a good marriage is still the most powerful dream of my life. We rejoice in our candid, necessary friendship and yet I keep this secret from them all.

  Iwo and I reach the crest of the Heath and gaze at the views across London. We watch the children fly their kites, the young parents pushing babies in prams (already they have stopped holding hands), the couples who kiss and bicker. We look at one another and smile and draw breath carefully, slowly, in case something goes wrong. The autumn sunshine throbs with fading brilliance. There is one particular beech tree that, by some trick of the light, stands out in three-dimensional clarity from all the others, its foliage a burning orange that reflects the sun like fragments of gold leaf. I think, I shall remember that tree until the day I die. Eternity was manifest in the light of the day, and something infinite beyond everything appeared: which talked with my expectation and moved my desire.

  I feel that I have never in my life had such a momentous meeting, and that it will alter me for ever. Life is, after all, kind and good. You endure trials in preparation for its key moment; but then it comes, and everything is all right. Yet I am not naïve. I have lived through a complicated marriage and seen it disintegrate against my will. I have brought up three children, which is not a simple matter. I have had a number of affairs and relationships since I got divorced, some of which have put me on my guard. Yet this afternoon with Iwo I feel overwhelmingly certain that he is my heart’s desire, and life will grant it. Why? Partly it must be his extreme physical beauty. He does not look young and not every woman would find him attractive: his face is not striking enough; the colour of his skin and eyes and hair is pale and subtle, rather than masculine and emphatic. But the curves and angles of skin across bone, the energy and grace with which he moves – these are perfect. Not in some aesthetic, passionless sense. He is overwhelmingly erotic. I shiver with the desire to see his naked body and touch his smooth skin and feel the hardness of his muscles as they tense. It is usually the physical that first blinds me, so that I stumble and fall into love.

  Something else is important, too. He wants – needs, at least – to marry. In the six years since my divorce, eight since Paul, my husband, left me, I have seen my chances of becoming a wife again diminishing fast. The brav
e ideals of feminism, which I discovered and embraced wholeheartedly as a single woman, can’t alter the ageing process, or the bitter truth that very few men consider women over forty to be desirable. Younger men are an exception but they have their own reasons and none of them are to do with marriage. Of course women in their twenties and thirties are firmer and tauter in face and body: but can that make up for the lack of parallel experience? I grew up with Hungary and Aldermaston and the Beatles; the deaths of Marilyn Monroe, President Kennedy and Winston Churchill. These were my formative public events. How, then, can one overcome the time-slip with someone whose teenage passion was The Rocky Horror Show, whose first political memory was the massacre at the Munich Games or the Watergate scandal? Evidently this is unimportant to men. Nowadays, if they’re my own age they seem to regard me as an older woman – and why not, when the pool of younger women grows all the time?

  This discovery fills me with angry resentment; but it also saps my confidence. I used to be pretty, at any rate, prettyish, and I took my looks for granted and never stopped to think that it would make any great difference when they began to desert me. I didn’t need to. I was married, wasn’t I? The other thing I took for granted was that my marriage would last for ever. Now I realize that as I develop lines in my face and grey hairs, the prospect ahead grows worse. I will have to compromise, if I want to marry again, and settle for a man perhaps a decade or two older than me, and to hell with contemporaneity. The chances are that he’ll be pompous or cynical; drink too much or smoke too much or both; think all feminists are lesbian bra-burners; and assume that my job is to look after him and iron his shirts in return for the housekeeping and a spot of pocket-money. He won’t even understand why the prospect appals me.

  So? The obvious solution is not to re-marry, to stay a member of the single classes and take love and sex wherever I can find them: one or the other, seldom both. But I want to marry again; and that means both. Whatever I may say to the children or my friends, I can’t deceive myself. I am afraid of future loneliness. Kate is the last of my children still living at home with me. The other two have virtually gone, to live independent lives, and gone too is the caravanserai of au pairs and mother’s helps who accompanied the family over the years. When Kate leaves home I will no longer be able to justify keeping our rambling, shabby, beloved family house. Paul bought it for us all when he got his first big promotion in a new advertising agency that quickly became rich and successful, making him so at the same time. When we parted he offered me a choice: maintenance for myself and the children, or the house and all its contents outright, and nothing else. I chose the house. Losing it would have felt like a second divorce, and I didn’t want to deprive the children of its security at an insecure time. Our standard of living fell sharply, from two dozen free-range eggs, size two, to one dozen battery farmed, size four, per week, for instance, but the house was what mattered. It had seen me young and the children small. Fairly soon I shall have to sell it and shrink into a cramped, spotless flat with a spare room for the children’s visits, and there I will spend my time surrounded by books and cats … The children have made a joke of it; yet it’s not so far from the way my mother lives, now that she’s a widow. One hopes it will turn out to be a caricature. All too often it doesn’t.