Love Among the Single Classes Read online

  ‘Not ill at all. I have been taking some time off. What day is it?’

  ‘Sunday. Have you eaten?’

  ‘Of course. Not today: but yesterday. Nothing is wrong with me.’

  ‘Everything looks wrong with you! I’ve been worried about you! At first I thought you might be staying with … your English friend …’

  ‘Constance? No.’

  ‘No: so then I rang Tadeusz, but he said they hadn’t seen you since Christmas. Oh Monty … Iwo, what’s the matter?’

  How beautiful she is! She has the colour and warmth of a brown egg, smooth and rounded. Her eyes are grey and anxious. The room is so cold that her breath lingers in the air after she has spoken. She lays her cheek against mine, and although she has come in from outdoors, it feels warmer than my face. I haven’t shaved.

  ‘Marina, you shame me! Hand me my shirt so that I can get up.’

  ‘Let’s go out and have lunch! Shall we go to the Ognisko? Or to the Polish Centre? I can’t take you to my place. But you must eat a proper meal: hot food. And while you do I can ask you about Peter.’

  ‘Why? Has anything happened?’

  ‘He is talking about marriage. Oh Iwo, it makes me miss Jerzy so!’

  ‘Yes, I know. I’m the same.’

  ‘Get up! I’ll go out, shall I? Can I get you some shopping? You ought to eat fruit in the winter. I’ll buy you some oranges. They’ll cheer the room up, too. You can put them on the windowsill.’

  Together we walk to the Ognisko. The day is white and blue. It is invigorating to walk briskly beside Marina. For a while the outside world becomes real to me again. In Marina’s healthy, normal company I realize how mad I have been for the last few days, and it frightens me. I didn’t know one could slip away so fast.

  ‘… February already, and Peter wants us to get married in the summer, June or July and…’

  What month did you say it was?’

  ‘February. What did you think?’

  ‘January.’

  ‘Monty!’

  ‘Marina, my dear, can the old joke lie down and die now? Will you call me Iwo all the time?’

  ‘Sorry – yes, if you want – but February! It’s bad enough not knowing the exact day of the week, but the month

  ‘I must have taken more time off work than I realized. I’ll go in tomorrow.’

  ‘What have you been doing for money?’

  ‘I don’t spend much. Bread, butter, sausage, coffee. Occasionally plum jam. Razors. Stamps.’

  ‘I’ll pay for this lunch.’

  ‘I am glad you came and rescued me.’ I couldn’t have faced anyone else.

  ‘People have been worried about you.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘They asked about you in the club, my one, I mean; I haven’t been to King Street. And Constance rang me. She said she hadn’t seen or heard of you for weeks.’

  ‘I took her to the cinema just the other day.’

  ‘She said it was January the 5th.’

  ‘Perhaps. What did you tell her?’

  ‘That I’d come and see you and ring her back.’

  ‘But she didn’t come and see me herself.’

  ‘She said she was … afraid to come. She was nervous of what you might say.’

  ‘Why should she be nervous? I’m not frightening.’

  ‘Well, you can be, sometimes. You’re important to her, and that makes people nervous.’

  ‘Are you nervous of me, Marina?’

  ‘Not any longer. But I’ve known you for years.’

  ‘Yes.’

  It is good to walk in the fresh air, Marina’s head bobbing along at my shoulder level, her hair sparkling in the sunshine. Her company fills me with well-being.

  ‘Here we are. Have you been here before?’

  ‘No.’

  The Ognisko turns out to be a substantial house – very English, with panelling and plasterwork ceilings, an elaborate fireplace in each room, and an imposing stairway leading up from the hall – filled with Poles all speaking Polish. Beautiful, formal, courteous Polish … No! Obsolete, irrelevant Polish, a language made pedantic by distance. It’s obvious from their intonation that some of them haven’t spoken it in their homeland for half a century. Their accents are stilted, almost foreign. Marina’s freshness makes them look as though they might crumble into dust at any moment, alone with their exquisite memories.

  ‘Well, my dear, this place brings out the old Marxist in me!’

  ‘How funny, me too! That’s why I don’t come here a lot. They’re charming and lovely but they’re like puppets aren’t they? Look at their painted wooden faces and jointed arms! But never mind: you’ll get an excellent lunch here. Better than my place. Real barszcz!’

  ‘For that I can put up with a few pretensions. Do they have zywiec too?’

  ‘They do!’

  ‘Marina, you are wonderful. Now, why are you thinking about marriage?’

  The waitress, also Polish, brings me the beer, and then our soup and a hot, nourishing stew. I eat ravenously, looking at my food so as to concentrate on Marina’s words without being distracted by her face.

  ‘I want to stay here in England. I like it here. I feel free. But you know the constant feeling we have to live with. Will the Home Office renew my visa? If I want to go on holiday, will immigration let me back in? I’ve had enough of all that. I’m sick of drama and adventure and uncertainty and living on the edge – sick of it!’

  ‘It’s easier to lead a dangerous life against a familiar background. An ordinary life that might end next week, that’s got no glamour, but it’s harder. Sorry … Why – what’s it got to do with your marriage?’

  ‘I want a home. You’ve never seen my room, have you?’

  ‘No …’

  ‘Well, it’s a bit better than yours: at least I have somewhere to cook, and a carpet on the floor. Look, I’m almost thirty. First I lived in my parents’ home. Then, briefly, with Jerzy …’

  Marina and Jerzy. Gilded youth. He was dark and angular as a stork, either shouting at her or kissing her. He was never one of my students: he was studying film, but he would come to parties with her, or pick her up after class. Reckless with brilliance, he behaved as though he would live for ever. But not even a crazily idealistic youth of twenty can get away with open defiance; not even if he has Marina drumming up support for him. In the end they were the most prominent pair of students at Lodz. He hanged himself on his tenth night in prison. After that they let her cross the border. They probably thought she was broken. Perhaps they were right.

  ‘Iwo, I never thought I’d hear myself say it: but I want to be ordinary. I want to live somewhere comfortable, somewhere I can invite my friends to, give parties.’

  ‘Do you take it for granted yet, living without fear? I don’t. I am still compelled to orderliness. I am terrified at the thought of what the boss may say tomorrow. I’m the one that’s broken. Marina – tell me about Peter.’

  ‘Professor Zaluski, you know about Peter. Yes, he is what he seems. Don’t you hear what I’m saying? I want to be married. Married.’

  ‘To Peter.’

  ‘Why do you force me to say it? All right: I know he’s not brilliant. He’s not a romantic figure. But he’ll never die in a prison cell!’

  ‘My dear … I am sorry. I understand. You are braver than me.’

  ‘I know I don’t love him like I loved … Jerzy. But I’m a homeless person in his country, and that makes us equals. I need him. And he really loves me. Where’s your well-known cynicism, Professor? You should be telling me we make a perfect match!’

  ‘I mean it. I admire your courage. But it also makes me sad.’

  ‘You get nostalgic about your past; now you’re getting nostalgic about mine! Iwo, look, you’re the only person in London who knew me in my other life …’

  ‘You don’t need my permission to marry.’

  ‘No. But I should like your blessing.’

  ‘You will miss Poland
.’

  ‘No! That’s where you’re quite wrong! In fact if I can help it, I won’t ever speak Polish again once I’m married, let alone teach it to my children. What’s the point of all this …’ She waves a hand at the ancien régime eating cheese pancakes all round us. ‘… neither English nor Polish, one thing nor the other? What do they want, why are they wasting their lives? It won’t bring back their youth, and that’s what they’re nostalgic for: for being young again. I’ve been young, and it was terrible. I want to be middle-aged, ordinary and busy. I don’t want to be a desiccated spinster sitting here in fifty years’ time, remembering the glorious 1970s.’

  ‘You’re very hard on us.’

  ‘Not us: them! You don’t have to get like that either. Get married, make a new home, enter a family, get a job – oh of course you could! Teach mathematics or economics or languages; write articles, do a book – anything.’

  ‘Such energy!’

  ‘Don’t smile at me like that. Do it! We have to live, Iwo, as best we can: that’s the one essential thing. You’re not living. Oh Christ. Sorry. Only I do mean it.’

  I smile again and take her hand, which tenses and then relaxes under mine.

  ‘Marina, I have to let you pay because I have only a few coins left. Then let’s go and look round the museum here. There are some embroideries you would like, and a tiger. You are right. Get married. If you do it in church, I will be there.’

  ‘We will invite you.’

  We leave the Victoria and Albert Museum at closing time. The streets are quite dark, and I dread going back to my room and diary. Although I’m almost sure she will refuse, I can’t help asking Marina if she will come back with me. Whatever excuse I give, the reason is that I long to hold her in my arms. I remember hair, remember the shadow of a cheek, fragile fingers and the weight of a sleeping hand.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘I’m going over to Peter’s for supper.’

  She leaves me at the front door of the house where I live, and I watch her back as she walks down the street towards the tube station, under the street lamps. I was mad when she came this morning, and in spite of everything she has left me sane: at least temporarily.

  People nourish themselves in order to live, I was repeating to myself; human life has great importance. The value of life surpasses the value of all the objects which man has made. Man is a great treasure, I was repeating stubbornly. This is water, I was saying. I was stroking the waves with my hand and conversing with the river. Water – I said – good water: this is I.

  I experienced ecstasy once in my life. It was one summer when I was a boy of about nine and we were spending a month with my grandparents in the country. One hot day we all picnicked in the shade beside a stream. I had just learned to swim. After lunch the grown-ups wandered off or fell asleep, and I took my clothes off and slipped into the water, which was quite shallow and very cold. Trees hung low over the stream and the sun flickered through their leaves and shimmered on the surface of the water. I swam with a slow, strong breast-stroke, rhythmical as a rower, cleaving the water with my hands, shrugging it aside and pulling my body forward with the outward curve of my arms. Cleave, pull, glide … point the fingers; cleave, pull, glide. The afternoon was coiled and still, the only movement that of the water parting around me as the warm sun on my shoulders alternated with cool gloom beneath the overhanging trees.

  The stream turned a corner and when it became too shallow I stood up and looked at the quiet fields on either side of me. Then I turned round and swam back. Nobody noticed I’d been away. That was my ecstasy – the only ecstasy in my life.

  Next day I go back to work, and have a hard time convincing the fellow in charge of the postroom that I have been ill for over three weeks. In the end I have to talk him into ringing Marina, and she pretends to be my landlady and talks convincingly of how worried she’s been about her poor Monty. Old Tom scowls and curses but can’t quite bring himself to sack me. He threatens to do so if I don’t bring a sick note next day; but the local doctor is an easy-going fellow and that can be arranged.

  That evening I get back feeling better for having returned to normality. On the hall table, cluttered with unwanted mailings and printed cards from window-cleaners and minicab firms, is a thin envelope in Katarzyna’s handwriting. I take it up to my room. I put it on the bed and go for a piss and wash my hands. I take a glass from underneath the napkin on my chest of drawers and pour myself a vodka and look at the envelope. It was posted ten days ago. It is dark outside, and raining. I fetch a knife and slit open the letter.

  Dear Iwo,

  Thank you for your letter and your New Year wishes. It sounded as though you had celebrated the New Year a little too well! You are not usually so sentimental. Perhaps one of these other women has softened you up! It’s more than I could ever do: have you forgotten that? Must I remind you that for the last five years that you lived here, we hardly spoke? By all means use your memories to keep you warm, but don’t confuse them with the truth! I bear you no ill-will, but you must make up your own mind what to do. I shall go my own way, with or without legal permission, much as I always did! It won’t hurt me, or the girls.

  It is good of you to offer to send us more things, but you were very generous at Christmas. Some warm stockings, fine wool are best, would be welcome, and good baby clothes are hard to find. We are all knitting coats of many colours! Any shop will tell you what babies need. Don’t be embarrassed to ask. But none of these things is essential.

  I am glad to hear of your promotion. From violins to cellos? Perhaps one day they’ll let you repair a double bass! Smile, Iwo, smile! You were always melancholy after Christmas.

  The food situation is getting a bit better here. Things are still very expensive, and the queues are as long as ever, but we have supplies back in the shops. Whenever there’s any fresh fruit to be had we all get it for Alina. She is blooming and we all need vitamin C!

  Look after yourself, and tell me your final decision soon.

  Your affectionate

  Katarzyna

  She is as capricious as ever, hot and cold by turns. Should I believe the cold tone of this letter, or the warmth of the last one? Although I have a non-existent marriage with an absent wife, she still torments me. Is she just playing games with me? What am I to believe? I am filled with lustful thoughts as if it were thirty years ago and we had only just met.

  14

  I have hired a television. It costs me nearly ten pounds a month, but it saves money on everything else. Now, if I feel like laughing I can watch the comedy shows; or music if I feel like music. There are nightly programmes about politics. In the postroom they talk about what’s been on television the night before, and now that I have a set I can join in their conversations, which are mostly about snooker, or the plots and characters in soap operas. Their wives watch the soap operas and they watch sport. Sometimes they also talk about the news, criticizing the Prime Minister as though she, too, were a character in a soap opera. It never seems to occur to them that politics might be a struggle that involves them, nor even that the struggle has any importance. It’s not – as I used to think – because they are wary of expressing political views in front of the foreman. They have no dialectical vocabulary.

  The basement is airless and even when it rains I prefer to get out in the lunch hour. The flicker of the neon lights and the throbbing of the central heating pipes set up electrical currents in my head like the thickness in the air before a dry storm. I often go to Soho Square and sit on one of the benches there, or on a seat in the lee of the gardener’s hut if it’s very wet. The other day it was raining so hard scarcely anyone was about except a few people under umbrellas hurrying to lunch or the book shops. Yet a girl of about seventeen, dressed all in black, was walking slowly round and round the square, taking no notice of the rain and apparently weeping. Sometimes she stumbled with her head down, looking at her shoes, and then she would tip her head back, up into the rain, so that I could see her face distorte
d by emotion, her eyes screwed up hard against the rain and her tears. After watching her for several minutes I became so distressed by her pain that I walked towards her and took her arm and led her firmly towards the shelter. She shook her head and moaned ‘Oh Christ!’ but I ignored this and she did not resist. She seemed very young, with angular hair dyed crudely black and a black leather jacket that stank of cigarettes, even in the rain.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. I’m not a strange person and I won’t hurt you. It’s all right. You are so wet.’

  She sat with drooping head watching the rain roll down from her hair and drip on to her knees. After a while she took out some cigarette papers and tobacco from her jacket pocket and with red, trembling hands rolled herself a cigarette.

  ‘Your hands are very cold,’ I said, and although she didn’t answer, she jerked the skimpy little cigarette towards me.

  ‘No thank you, I don’t smoke. Would you like a cup of hot coffee to go with that? Shall I buy you a coffee?’

  She shook her head again and said indistinctly, ‘Never take sweeties from strangers,’ and lit the cigarette. She inhaled deeply, occasionally giving a hiccuping shudder like a child who has been crying for hours.

  ‘I’m Polish,’ I told her. ‘In my country I was an economics lecturer. Are you at school still? Or have you a job?’

  ‘Sixth form college,’ she said, and stopped again.

  ‘I have a wife and two daughters at home,’ I said to her bent head. Her hair made starry spikes where she had run her fingers through it, and her scalp showed whitely through.

  ‘My daughters are grown up and married. Have you got a family? Brothers and sisters?’

  ‘Sods,’ said the girl, and started to cry again.

  ‘My name is Monty. Really my name is Iwo but English people call me Monty. Do you want to tell me what you’re crying about? My lunch hour is over soon and I must go back in ten minutes so you could talk to me for that little time. I am sad too. Perhaps we will both feel better. I am sad because I don’t know whether I want to go back to Poland or stay here and I can’t decide. It depends if I love my wife and I don’t know. I have perhaps never loved anyone …’