Love Among the Single Classes Read online

  As happens when I have recently seen him, I can think of Iwo quite sanely, even optimistically. He is like a drug to me. Only he is really in focus; the rest of the world grows hazy at his edges. This state of intensity lasts for a day or two after we have parted, but as time goes by, if he doesn’t phone, I begin to be gripped by anxiety. My perception of him becomes distorted. After several days of silence, my craving has become so urgent that I can think of nothing else. I am tormented by brief flashes of memory which present him to my mind’s eye: his walk; the angle of his head as he turns sideways to listen to me; the curious way he bares his teeth in a smile while he is talking, giving an air of humour or deprecating irony to his words. People in the library say constantly, ‘Cheer up!’ ‘Don’t look so worried!’ or, kindly, ‘Anything the matter, love?’ The moment he telephones, I am better – and he does, and asks me if I am free on Sunday.

  On Tuesday evening, as I’m about to leave for my regular twice a month visit to my mother, Cordy rings, sounding unusually agitated.

  ‘Mother? Can you meet me this evening? It’s urgent.’

  ‘Darling, what’s the matter? I can’t really: I’m just on my way out to see Granny.’

  ‘You can be late, for once. Ring her and say you’re going to be an hour late. I have to talk to you. Not me – it’s Max.’

  ‘Is he all right? Has anything happened?’

  ‘He and Judy have broken up … she walked out this afternoon. He called me just now. He sounds desperately upset.’

  We arrange to meet in a wine bar and by the time I arrive she’s there already, sitting hunched over a table with her hands curled round a glass of red wine. She tells me that things have been bad between Max and his girlfriend for several weeks now.

  ‘I ought to have told you sooner, but you were so involved with your new bloke, I sort of never got a chance. He came over a couple of times last week and slept on my floor because they’d been rowing so much. Then this evening he rang up – thank God I was in for a change! – and said he’d got back from work to find she’d moved all her stuff out and just gone. He cried on the phone, poor old Max.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘The other two in the house were going to take him out and get him pissed. I said I’d go round later.’

  ‘Oh Cordy, poor Max. God I feel awful. Do you think he’d come home for a few days?’

  ‘I doubt it Mother, quite honestly. You can try.’

  And where was I when he needed me? Engrossed in my own obsession, to the exclusion of everything else: even the needs of my children.

  As we share a bottle of red wine, Cordy fills in the details. Judy, a drama student, had dazzled Max by her flamboyance and intensity. He, slower and steadier, provided the anchor she needed. As time went on, be began to learn that her intensity could be deeply neurotic, and she started to blame him for anything that failed to go right in her life. Where once she had welcomed his imperturbability, recently she had begun to ridicule it. Max has never been good at losing his temper, and she mistook his calm for indifference. Cordy’s eyes are bright with indignation on behalf of her brother.

  ‘Jude’s been a real cow to him lately. She’s just left all the cooking and shopping and stuff to him – and Max is busy too, it’s not just her – and used him as a tame skivvy.’

  ‘Probably just as well she took herself off in that case,’ I say. ‘Will she be back, do you think?’

  ‘Max didn’t seem to think so. It sounds pretty final.’

  ‘He cried? Oh Cordy, did he really cry on the phone?’

  ‘I know, rotten, isn’t it? At least he’s got the other two. They’ll look after him.’

  ‘But what about me?’

  ‘Not a lot you can do at the moment. I just had to tell you.’ ‘Will it ruin his Christmas?’

  ‘Doubt it!’ she says, and grins suddenly. ‘It’s his first big heartbreak, but he’ll get over it.’

  ‘Are you and Ben OK?’

  ‘We’re fine. Great. Don’t worry about us.’

  ‘No point in phoning Max tonight, if he’s going out to get drunk. I’ll talk to him in the morning and see if I can persuade him to come home for the weekend.’

  ‘You do that.’

  Outside on the pavement she gives me a great generous hug as we go our separate ways.

  I arrive at my mother’s for a belated supper, and have to try to conceal my anxiety from her, for she couldn’t begin to understand Max’s situation. The last thing I need is a lecture on the virtues of the old-fashioned ways. I watch her as she fusses about, blaming me for our spoilt meal, and wonder whether she finds old age any easier to cope with than I do middle age, or Max youth, or Kate adolescence. Her life has followed the pattern that could have been predicted almost when she was born: she must feel a certain satisfaction in having conformed to all those expectations. Whereas here am I, her daughter: a middle-aged woman with deepening lines and greying hair, yet ludicrously in love. How can a man love a woman unless he knew her when she was young? Women in their twenties have clear, confident faces nowadays, without the diffidence of earlier generations. In their late thirties they wonder how the years will reward them, but we in our forties begin to panic. Iwo has made me aware of my own mortality. Never, before I met him, had I examined my physical deterioration so ruthlessly, and seen that it was all I had feared. Yet his elegant skull is like a death’s head, death itself.

  ‘How’s that new gentleman friend of yours?’ enquires my mother brightly.

  Cordy had guessed rightly that Max wouldn’t want to come home, but he has agreed to drop in one evening: more, I suspect, for my sake than because he needs to see me. Meanwhile, there is Paul’s dinner. Preparing to dress for that, I look through my wardrobe and am surprised to see how many clothes that he would recognize are still hanging there. For a moment I am tempted to wear the red dress which had inflamed the passions of Ron Rendle, Paul’s former boss; but the memory of that fat, predatory hand along my thigh so put me off the dress that I have hardly worn it since. Might as well give it to the Oxfam shop. There is a floaty, crinkly black cotton number that Linda passed on to me, because it was too short for her. I still have nice legs; if I dress it up with shiny black tights and Cordy’s jewellery I can probably get away with it. In half the time it takes me to get ready for Iwo, I set out for Paul’s Hampstead flat. Silvery cones of snowflakes are eddying under the street lamps as I walk towards the bus stop, their weightlessness making a mockery of the squat blobs of cotton wool glued to shop windows. For once I don’t spend the bus journey engrossed in my book, but gaze out of the window at the black outlines of trees receding through flurries of snow. By the time I ring Paul’s doorbell my cheeks are icy and my best black shoes are wet, but my mood is ebullient.

  ‘Constance!’ Ah: no ‘Conce’ then, this evening. ‘You made it! Terrific! Meet Lulu. Lu: Constance. Now don’t you two spend the evening talking to each other or you’ll make me nervous.’

  Lulu looks apprehensive, but she smiles at me and her face mirrors the curiosity on mine. It’s the first time we’ve met; and the children had not prepared me for her youth. She can’t be out of her twenties. She’s dressed like a sharp and chic little punk, her hair dyed black and cut short and angular around her pale, smooth face. She has large dark eyes and wears no make-up except bright red lipstick. In her sleeveless top and narrow black trousers, she is touchingly young. Together they shepherd me through to the drawing room – I am the first guest – where Paul hands me a stiff whisky. This is no moment to remind him that, as he perfectly well knows, I never drink anything other than red wine.

  ‘Lulu, do you work with Paul?’

  She does.

  ‘Have you known each other long?’

  Just over a year.

  ‘Do you like the agency?’

  Oh yes, she does.

  Dear heavens, I think, give me a bit of help.

  ‘I love your haircut! Where do you have it done?’

  We are i
n the middle of a discussion about London’s hairdressers when the doorbell rings again and it’s Andrew.

  It is a shock seeing him after more than twenty years. His thick hair, which I remember smoothing across his forehead one evening when we sat in his rooms confiding in one another, now starts from the top of his head, above a high expanse of shining, domed skull. Yet he still looks like a poet: the problem is to discern the advertising man.

  Whatever his thoughts on seeing me, his reaction is warm and generous. He puts his arms round me and gives me a real, enveloping hug, far removed from the usual chill social pecks on adjacent cheeks. He always was a dear man, even if, then as now, his clothes smelt faintly acrid with perspiration.

  The dinner is well cooked and, like good guests, we eat it and praise it, conversing together first this side, then that. I play my part conscientiously because I know Paul is anxious for Lulu’s sake that the evening should be a success. So I make social small talk … plans for Christmas? Going away? Miles and I decided we’d go skiing this year. Well of course it’s different when you have children to think about. You did keep the children, didn’t you? Yes, Miles’s ex-wife got his. He misses them terribly of course but it does mean we’re much freer. We have them for the odd weekend. I adore them. You work? In a library, really? What, something like the British Library or the London Library or something? Oh, oh I see … well it’s a marvellous thing, isn’t it, that anyone can read all those books absolutely free. Do they much, nowadays? From this I turn gratefully to Andrew, but even while I talk to him I am preoccupied with Iwo. Iwo’s laconic manner, the austerity of his room, seem like cold water in contrast to the cloying liqueur we are now being offered.

  I thought I was nodding and becking and smiling in a convincing way, so I’m startled to hear Andrew say in an undertone that no one else can hear, ‘What is it? What are you thinking?’

  ‘Me? Nothing. Don’t be silly. Go on.’

  ‘You’re miles away. Tell me.’

  ‘When we were at Oxford, Andrew, and I used to come round to your rooms and pour out my heart about him there, what were you thinking?’

  ‘I used to wish it was me.’

  ‘Dear Andrew … how kind you are. No, seriously.’

  ‘I am serious. I envied him.’

  ‘No but did you think I loved him?’

  ‘You said you did. It wasn’t like my sort of love.’

  ‘Wait … yes, it’s coming back to me. Ann, wasn’t she called?’

  ‘That’s right. Good memory. That nurse I’d met while I was doing my National Service.’

  ‘What did it feel like?’

  He pauses, and says slowly, ‘As though I were Saint Sebastian, bleeding from a hundred arrow wounds. I felt like a laboratory monkey or the screaming Pope. I felt pain.’

  ‘Why didn’t she love you?’

  ‘I never knew. Sometimes she’d be flirtatious and cuddle up to me and we’d talk about the future, and other times she’d be cold, but in a pert, flippant way, high-stepping and mane flowing, so that I was driven mad with longing.’

  ‘Did she mean to torment you, do you think?’

  ‘I didn’t know at the time and I still don’t. To think, I never went to bed with her!’

  ‘It wasn’t nearly so automatic, then, was it? Lots of people didn’t. Paul and I took quite a while to get round to it.’

  ‘I wrote a lot of poetry about her, of course. That helped.’

  ‘I wish I could.’

  ‘Could what?’

  ‘Write poetry. Now.’

  ‘Oh Constance … Still? Is it Paul?’

  ‘Will you drive me home? Have you got a car here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. OK. Now we’d better be sociable.’

  Time to change partners again.

  The evening has relaxed. People are sprawled like dragonflies. Miles’s second wife, fun-loving Meredith, is confiding her secret longing for a baby. Covertly, I observe Lulu, now that her dinner and the worst are over. What must she think of Paul’s collection of sixties records: The Stones and King Crimson and other psychedelic musicmongers from our early married life? Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious must be more her style.

  Noticing me watching her, Lulu comes across to Meredith and me and says, ‘You know it’s Paul’s birthday soon? I thought of taking him to Covent Garden …’

  ‘I’m sure he’d love it, but would you?’

  ‘That is a problem, right. He likes good solid stuff, doesn’t he? – Wagner and the Russians, Khovanschina, that sort of thing – and I’m far more into the nineteenth-century Italians, Bellini.’

  ‘Do you sing or anything?’

  ‘Soprano.’

  ‘What, professionally?’

  ‘Well, I once thought I might, but it’s terribly competitive. Nowadays I just sing for fun, and for the discipline of it. The exercises.’

  She has put me down so subtly that Meredith hasn’t noticed.

  ‘Well as it’s Paul’s birthday treat you ought to book something he’ll like. But since you obviously know more about music, I’d suggest something you like!’

  ‘Would Cordelia and Max like to come too, do you think?’

  ‘You’d better ask them.’

  ‘Yes, I think I will, if that’s OK by you.’

  Paul comes and joins us, taking Lulu’s hand, and says, ‘What did I tell you two? No plotting!’

  ‘You and Andrew were plotting too, looked like,’ says Lulu.

  I ask Paul if Andrew has changed since our Oxford years, since he struck me as being exactly the same.

  ‘He’s a bloody good advertising man nowadays. Creative director of Plumtree Roland Mathieson is worth a few K.’

  Andrew drives me home. He’s never been to this house before, the setting for my life. He sits in one corner of my sofa, his face like an over-restored portrait: time and texture obscuring the original. Behind it I see the smooth face of a fresher Andrew. Hearing him talk, watching his hands curved around a mug of coffee, is so powerfully evocative that I feel surrounded by his room in college where we used to sit. I would perch on the wooden window seat from which I could look down into the quad, and back into the darkening room at his pained face. I conjure up his table, piled with books and file paper; his shelves, books spilling out of them over the floor in untidy columns. Why were we in love with other people, and yet so close to each other? Ours was an entirely platonic relationship. I never touched him, except to comfort him, nor felt any nudgings of desire from him. Now, though in all common sense he would be a better man for me than my sad knight, Iwo, I feel only nostalgia.

  ‘And what happened with Ann finally? Did it fizzle out?’

  ‘It went on for years, even though we always seemed to be in different places. She in London, me in Oxford; and then when I came down to London to start work, she moved to a hospital in Birmingham. It was never simple. And then after a while it got really extraordinary.’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Well, it’s still not easy to talk about. I wrote some poems at the time, and later published one or two, and luckily everyone assumed they were allegorical.’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘Constance, this will shock you. It ought to. It was shocking. It was very destructive. I think it did me a great deal of harm.’

  ‘Mmmm? Don’t talk about it, if it makes things worse.’

  ‘How come I can talk to you like this when we haven’t met for over twenty years, about the most painful episode in my life?’

  ‘Because we’re back in Peck, on a warm summer’s evening, with people calling to each other across the quad. That’s how I feel.’

  ‘Ann’s mother seduced me. To make up for Ann or something. One weekend when I was staying with them she came to my room and got into my bed. It was the middle of the night, and Ann was asleep just a couple of doors down. She might easily have woken up and heard us.’

  ‘Do you think that was the whole point?’

  ‘I think Pammy, her mother
, was a bit baffled by me, probably wondered if I were gay. She herself had been widowed in the war, never remarried, she was still only in her mid-forties when I came along, didn’t have a man in her life, fancied me … took me to bed.’

  ‘How did you feel?’

  ‘Guilty. Flattered. Shocked. We slept together regularly after that first weekend and it went on for ages, alongside my relationship with Ann. I was in love with the daughter and fucking the mother. Sounds like a young man’s wet dream, but it was a nightmare. Damaged me a lot. Look at me, still not married …’

  ‘But not because of that: those two?’

  ‘Don’t know why. Fact is, I still haven’t married.’

  He looks ungainly and neglected. Throughout the evening I’ve been intermittently aware of his sour smell: the smell of a man whose clothes aren’t clean, rather than his body, in defiance of all the deodorized canons of advertising.

  ‘Why did you feel so damaged? Is it necessarily wrong for women to sleep with men half their age?’

  He laughs.

  ‘Constance …?’

  ‘No, not me. I just don’t happen to care for younger men all that much. Anyhow, today’s young men aren’t guileless and innocent: which I presume was the main attraction.’

  ‘Yes, it is wrong for women to sleep with young men in love with their daughters. And Pammy knew how I felt about Ann. She put me into a double bind, so that I had not one but two of them to deal with, which meant, to get away from. So there I was, starting out in advertising, chatting up the secretaries in the pub at lunchtime, sharing a flat in South Ken with three others, outwardly the swinging sixties man, making trends like follow-my-leader; and what no-one else knew was that I was utterly hooked on these two Medusas. Ann soon knew I was sleeping with her mother, I’m sure of that. It was like incest: we never discussed it. The whole relationship was about evading the truth, but I bet she knew.’

  ‘Would she have cared?’

  ‘To care she would have had to love me, or her mother. I don’t think she loved either of us. I think they both enjoyed watching me twisting like a fish on a hook, wrenching my guts out in the effort to escape.’