Love Among the Single Classes Page 15

  ‘Lots of people buy my poems … well, lots: a few hundred, but I often wonder how many people actually read them. You did.’

  ‘Did the Antarctic cure you of Pammy?’

  ‘It certainly got me away from her. Icebergs really are blue, you know, it wasn’t just a figure of speech. And penguins have a great sense of humour. Dead pan. No. Yes, it did cure me of Pammy, of the relationship, if not its after-effects. From there I hitched a lift to America, and stayed on and worked in New York for more than ten years. Came back to London the complete media clone.’

  ‘You’re not.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  The conversation has become like Paracetamol for a headache. It takes away the pain, yet I know that somehow the pain is still there. When we have stopped talking, the image of Iwo with Joanna which waits, crystal-sharp, at the back of my mind, will scythe through these reminiscences and cut me down. So Andrew and I talk through and past midnight, pausing to open another bottle of champagne and wish one another better luck in the New Year, and I never feel awkward or reticent.

  Finally, I have to say, ‘Andrew, darling Andrew, you’ve got to let me go home. I’m dead. And pissed. Can you call a cab for me?’

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it. I’ll drive you home.’

  And so he does; and outside my door he folds me very gently in his arms and with great tenderness he kisses me. He takes my hands, and kisses them, and then lays his own hand against my lips. Then he drives away.

  I wrench my front door open and totter into the hall. I have had a good deal to drink. Iwo and Joanna. Shall I ring him and wish him a happy New Year? Then perhaps he’ll tell me about his friendly evening with Joanna and then everything will be all right and I shall be able to sleep. He might suggest that as it’s a Bank Holiday tomorrow we could meet. Even as I think the conversation I know it will never take place. He and Joanna are lovers. I have been a fool to kid myself. I once saw a motor cyclist die. It was in the days before crash-helmets were compulsory. The crash happened in less than five seconds, and the image was photographed with shocking clarity, to flash before my eyes for weeks afterwards. In the same way, the picture of Iwo with Joanna is by far the clearest I have of him. I recall to the fraction of an inch the precise angle of his body as he bent solicitously towards her to catch what she was saying, undoubtedly in their precious Polish. I recall his warm, tight grip on her arm – such a Continental gesture! – and the ease and confidence with which she smiled up into his face. Was there ever a time when I felt as sure of him as that?

  I have been made a fool of. I am angry. I will be indignant. The young motor cyclist jack-knifed off his bike into the air and his last living expression was one of utter surprise, before he hit the road and his head rolled under the wheels of the lorry.

  II

  The Polish Obsession

  12

  All happy Christmases resemble one another, each unhappy Christmas is unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy might have said. Last year I had an unhappy Christmas, alone among courteous acquaintances to whom I was a duty. This year I spent Christmas with a family, and shared in feelings of sentimentality and old customs and ceremonies fitting for this occasion. I ate and drank well; had one woman and could have had two, but I chose not to. I was not rejected.

  It has been a good, cold winter, and I miss my fur hat with the ear-muffs. The snow began to fall early in December, and my room was very cold. I spent many evenings alone in it, with a bottle of vodka for company. Vodka makes a better hot-water bottle than the beer which the youngsters downstairs are always drinking. I sometimes accept a can, to show friendliness, but vodka is too expensive to share. The three of them – or is it four? – would empty my bottle in ten minutes. But they bear me no grudge. Constance brings her own wine, and would not, I think, want vodka. When she is here I don’t need vodka to warm me. She always wants to be fucked.

  I have been trying to decide what to write to Katarzyna, who hinted in her last letter that if we are to get a divorce after all this time, she would like to get it over and done with. The vodka and I together have started many letters: ‘My dear wife, I have met a woman here in London who wants to marry me, and if I am to do this and thereby acquire permanent status as a citizen of this country, I shall need official divorce papers.’ Sometimes I write, ‘You will be relieved to know that I plan to marry a Polish girl, so that if one day you or the girls visit me, there will be no language problems in my home.’ But none of these letters is ever sent, because I have not made up my mind what I shall do. The third possibility, to go back home, looms larger all the time. I try not to think about it, because I know that the consequences would be unthinkable.

  I miss the family preparations for Christmas. I seem to remember my childhood Christmases better than more recent ones. Perhaps everybody does this. Here in England they don’t celebrate Saint Nicholas’s Day, but as it approaches I remembered the terror and excitement that I used to feel as a little boy. Mama said he only visited good children, and I knew I hadn’t been good all through the year. The question was, did Saint Nicholas know? Sometimes I would decide to confess all my sins in the hope that, being a saint, he would be merciful and forgive me, and give me presents just the same. In the end I always thought it best to keep quiet and hope he would be deceived, and it always worked. I learned very early on that, if you keep quiet, good people will think the best of you. In the years when we spent Christmas with my grandparents, Saint Nicholas would ride through the village in his red coat and hat on a sleigh, stopping at every house to distribute presents to us children and take a glass of vodka with our parents. In the magic of that arrival I would become a good little boy, and send up prayers promising to be good next year too. His bells could be heard ringing all down the street, and I would stand in the porch under the light dry-mouthed with anticipation as his sleigh rattled up the long drive lined with spruces. He would climb down out of the sleigh with a heavy sack slung over his shoulder, and swing it to the ground, and dig around in it, and pretend at first that there was nothing for me. Then he would say, ‘Has Iwo been a good, loving child all through the year? Does he say his prayers every night? Perhaps he has forgotten something he ought to tell me?’ And I would be dumbstruck with fear and doubt, and just as I was about to blurt out the sins I had committed, Mama would put her hands on my shoulders and say, ‘Dear Saint Nicholas, our Iwo is a good boy. Have another look in the sack … surely you have something for him there?’ And then when he had gone there was still Christmas to come.

  There have not been many events in my life as a man that brought the same shivering of excitement as that sound of sleigh bells down the road. It must have had something to do with the uncertainty of never being sure I would get a present. Uncertainty still makes me tremble with fear and pleasure today. I am a natural risk-taker. Many of the things which others called brave were done to recapture that suspense. At one level, they were just childish games. The women who have excited me most were always those who might refuse me. Katarzyna I never completely learnt to predict. After weeks of silence, she could walk into my room one night in her slip. I never felt jealous about any woman, except her.

  In the snow my feet are cold and wet. I cannot afford good boots and nobody in London wears galoshes. My shoes are thin, and they make my feet damp, which is bad for them. When I was a child I once had boots made of leather embroidered with flowers in many differently coloured wools. I was ashamed of them, because the town boys called me a sissy, but in the country all the peasant children wore them with their best suits and jackets, on feast days. These are the things I remember. I am not homesick. I don’t want to go back to the Poland I left, but to the Poland before that.

  The work I do here punishes my mind and my spirit. If I were doing it in Poland, well-wishers in the West would make me a cause-célèbre, write letters to the Ministry of Justice complaining that a distinguished economist should not have to work as a common packer in a postroom. But here in the West, it is
freedom. I am a free man in a capitalist country. I work for my food and drink and self-respect. That basement is killing my self-respect. The men with their talk of football or racing, television or women, the crude women spread over newspaper pictures, the noise from their radio that never stops. They mean to be kind.

  ‘Here, Monty, what you doing for Christmas? Going home for a little holiday, are you? See the family?’

  When I say no, I cannot do that, I shall be in London for Christmas, they are concerned.

  ‘Won’t be on your own, will you? Shocking thing, on your own at Christmas. Here, Monty, want me to have a word with my Missus? Can’t have you on your own, like.’

  No, I have told them, I shall be among friends from the Polish community. We will celebrate in our traditional way. They are relieved. One of them squats down and kicks his legs clumsily forward, roaring and toppling over, and the others laugh.

  ‘Be a drop of the old vodka going round, will there? What do you lot eat at Christmas? Turkey?’

  The carp … the roast carp of my childhood!

  ‘No, he eats fish don’t you Monty? Yeah, I knew a Swedish girl once … gawh! … She said they ate fish at Christmas. Some funny fish.’

  ‘Yes, mostly we had fish. When times were not too bad.’

  They drink their tea and stub out their fags and turn their attention away from me to a young woman dispatch rider who has come down to pick up a Red Star parcel. They will spend two minutes talking to her and ten minutes after she has gone speculating about her. The general view is that women who take jobs like dispatch rider or bus driver are lesbians. This belief doesn’t stop them propositioning her.

  I make the hours pass by burrowing deep into my memory and recreating days in great detail. I may decide to recall a December day of ten years ago. I start by remembering my morning routine: what time exactly I needed to get up; how long it took to shave; what clothes I could select; what we would all have for breakfast; and then the walk to the bus stop. I remember the news-stand where I bought a paper; the shops I passed, the names above the shops, the faces of the shopkeepers. Sometimes I manage to recall the faces of regulars in the bus queue. I retrace the route to Narntowicza Street and the university; then walk in, past the porter’s cubby hole, past the message board, past the crowd of students. I pause to remember some of them, and on a clear day I can wipe out Marina’s London face and replace it with her rounder, softer face of ten years ago. If I am left alone to concentrate, I can follow my own path through the day till I am almost hallucinating. Once I even answered in Polish when one of the men spoke to me. This skill is the same that prisoners use, and it may be invaluable to me one day, even more so than now.

  The streets of Lodz are dingy compared to those of London, the shop windows drab, with old-fashioned lettering, often painted with gold outlines on glass and unchanged for fifty years or more. I miss my fur hat, the one with the earmuffs. I had not realized how much colder the wind blows on a head of thinning hair.

  These fantasies have the drawback of all fantasy. They give me the power to edit my past. I have tried to imagine a day when I argued with Alina or, more likely, Henryka, but I find I can’t do it. The thought, I wish I had been less hard, keeps breaking in and will not allow me to play out the argument accurately. Because of these hours in which I control events I find the present less satisfactory. I can’t make a real effort with Constance after a day filled with thoughts of Katarzyna. My Katarzyna. My wife. I miss you more than my hat!

  They look at me, so probably I have a face. Of all the faces known I remember least my own. Here I live in a world of strangers. I have no family friends, no neighbours. The shopkeepers and newspaper sellers do not know me. But then, I no longer buy a daily paper. I am invisible, a citizen of nowhere except Poland: and not the real Poland, but the Poland inside my head. It is growing like a tumour. It fills my head and swells my brain cells. Perhaps it is a malignant growth? It may be. I will live inside my head. My food is bought in the shops at Lodz, even if it means queuing for an hour or more. It is cooked by my wife, so that I can eat stuffed cabbage with beetroot pickle, or apple and cinnamon cake. Being invisible and anonymous makes me wicked. If nobody notices me or talks about me, if I have no face to maintain among my colleagues and neighbourhood, there is nothing to stop me from doing as I please: in real life, just as in my fantasies. Here in London I have no conscience. My only constraints are those of energy and money. I walk the streets like an invisible man in an American movie, passing spectrally through the crowds. No head turns to recognize me, nobody smiles. I am powerless and lonely. In Lodz, a network of gossip surrounded me. People I didn’t even know noticed me: comrades of Katarzyna; schoolfriends of the girls; students from my classes. A thousand, maybe five thousand, sets of eyes monitored my progress. Necessity kept me faithful, on the whole, to my wife. The risks, when I dared them, were all the sweeter. One late afternoon in the classroom, the sun slanting across the wall and over the wooden battens pinned on to the wall, and on the floor between the desks, the labouring young body of Anna, or Kika, who frowned in just the same way whether it was over her work or my orgasm. In Lodz I paid for my pleasures with danger, itself a pleasure. Here, who cares? I squander half my wages in Soho and who gives a damn? I take Constance to bed one night, and Joanna the next, and no-one is any the wiser. Exile makes me wicked, but wrong-doing without risk or guilt loses its sting. My clothes don’t matter any more, as long as they’re clean and comfortable. In Poland, where what most people wear – of necessity – is shabbily uniform, I took pride in being smart, but here where everyone except the tramps is smart, I am shabby. Why waste money on clothes for strangers? Where is my self-respect, my grandmother would ask; and the cheeky boy who still lurks inside this grown man would reply, not in the cut of my shirt and trousers! Would that make her laugh, or would she clip me round the ear for it?

  Grand’mère was kinder to her little dog than she was to me. The dog would sit on her lap, and her pearls would fall and mingle with his smelly fur, as his curly tongue stretched up to lick her face. But if ever I tried to give her a hug, apart from the formal salute at morning and bedtime, she would push me off sternly. Two! Be a little gentleman!’ she would say, and then perhaps extend one small grey hand at arm’s length for me to kiss. That fragile tyrant. She would die of mortification to see me packing in this basement disguised as Monty.

  Mortification will not kill me, but it gnaws all the same.

  Another Ewa wrote:

  Be careful of your thoughts

  Which will leave you suddenly

  Catapulting from the burning surface of your brain.

  My brain burns, my thoughts leapfrog. Am I still normal? What would Alina say? Father, you have changed. You seem more savage and more inward than before. That would be astute. The animal in me hunts alone. The human mind in me thinks in silence more often than it speaks. I summon up pictures of myself as the focal point of a white lecture hall, rows of students before me taking notes, rapt with admiration at my audacity. How nimbly I leapt from theory to demonstrative fact! Did I? Were they?

  Christmas is coming, and the fellows at work say, ‘Coming for a booze-up down the pub tonight, Monty? Celebrate the festive season?’ The management, our benevolent employers, put an extra ten pounds into this week’s wage packet, with a note saying, The management of Fordyce Music wishes all its staff the compliments of the season. December 23rd-26th inclusive may be taken as public holidays. Please report for work punctually on all other days.’ I spend my Christmas bonus at the pub with the other post-room workers, and a couple of trim typists from upstairs. They giggle and flirt, and tease young Kevin, the postroom junior, who does weight-lifting at the gym in his lunch hours. I could tell them that they are wasting their time. We stay until the pub closes. Two of the lads have spent the last half hour with their arms round the waists of the typists, hands brushing their breasts as they leaned across the bar towards the next drink, and these four leave together, triumph
ant. Tomorrow the whole day will be spent exaggerating, or denigrating, the outcome. I walk more rigidly than usual to the tube station. In the morning my head aches. An ordinary hangover is almost a relief.

  Katarzyna writes to say that my Christmas parcel has arrived safely. Three years and 900 miles apart, my wife and I are thinking along the same lines, for she writes:

  Iwo, my dear husband,

  You would smile wryly to yourself if you knew how I miss you. This will be a surprise to you, as indeed it is to me. Even an old enemy can be preferable to a new friend! Well, this is a harsh way to begin a letter of thanks for your generosity. The woollen things which you sent are very welcome, and their Western elegance is much admired! The food also arrived intact, I think. Good that you put an itemized list with your letter: I am sure it stops the customs officials from stealing. The girls are both well. I see them nearly every week. Alina’s pregnancy is well advanced and I still can’t get used to the sight of her, swollen with motherhood. She still seems like our teenage daughter to me, and I wish you were here to tell me this is nonsense. She must take care not to over-exert herself, so we shall have Christmas with Henryka and Stanislaw. We will toast you and hope you are celebrating among friends. If you have time, I wish you would consider the future. This letter is in no way meant to dissuade you from your desire to formalize the end of our marriage. Yet I would not want you to believe that I think of you coldly. I often think back over the years and wish I had been warmer to you. Well, the past is the past. May the Infant Jesus and His Holy Mother bless you at this time. From your Kasia.

  I have brooded over this letter. Kasia, a proud woman, is telling me that she still loves me and would like me to return. This after two years with almost no letters, and years before that when we were unwilling prisoners in the same cell. Is it because she is older and needs company? But if she were lonely she could go and live with one of the girls. Does she want a man to warm her bed, and will settle for me if I’m all she can get? I wish I could know. If it is truly me she wants I will return. What will they do to me, if I go back? I am not afraid of risk, but of boredom. Are Katarzyna and I now both so old that we will settle for grumbling at one another until we die?