Love Among the Single Classes Read online

  And now here, suddenly, is Iwo; no compromise at all. His poverty – he is poor, if his second-hand clothes are anything to go by – doesn’t bother me. What matters are his obvious qualities of grace and intelligence, and the fact that he wants to marry. Unless that was just a ploy to get women to answer his advertisement? I must know.

  ‘Iwo … were you serious in your advertisement? About wanting a wife? Your first marriage doesn’t sound very encouraging.’

  ‘I need to stay here in England. I cannot go back to Poland. Is very complicated, but … believe me, I cannot. Home Office may refuse my next extension of temporary permit. With English wife I could stay.’

  Bald, uncompromising, honest: like his original advertisement. I can hardly ask if I will do, whether any woman will do as long as she’s English. Is it just a marriage of convenience he’s after?

  My thoughts must show in my face, for he says, Tt is not absolutely as simple as this. Of course I hope for much more, not just British passport. I make relationships more slowly now, you will be patient with me? But I am hoping.’

  He looks at me and, defencelessly, he smiles. It is, I think, the last time we look at each other as equals.

  Already I find myself overawed by him. I have fallen in love so quickly, and without yet knowing what he feels, that I am inevitably at a disadvantage. Yet it is easier to talk openly now, before we have formed a definite relationship, than it may be later, when every word will become loaded. And so it happens that most of what I know about Iwo comes from this very first conversation, before my questions could seem like an intrusion or a threat. And just as I feel free to ask, so he, too, is free, even eager, to reveal himself. How lonely he must have been, I think, to be so anxious to make contact and sense an emotional response. Our conversation dips and swings like church bells, pealing the good news, and our sense of discovery is extraordinary, and mutual. I am sure it is mutual.

  We walk across the Heath for hours, filled with elation, talking, still not touching one another; but at each new discovery and every shared opinion my heart soars higher. I am breathless and triumphant with love. This is his first time on the Heath, so he hasn’t a clue where we are supposed to be going, and I have lost all sense of direction. I must have criss-crossed these walks dozens of times with Paul and the children. We’ve been coming here for birthday picnics and Bank Holiday Fairs for years, almost twenty years, and yet I’m utterly lost. In the end, because it’s dusk and the air is cooling and we’re both thirsty, we have to ask a passer-by for the way out. Twenty minutes later we are sitting in a Hampstead tea-room, looking at one another across a round table with an imitation lace tablecloth made of embossed paper. I feel that my eyes must be ravenously, comically wide, as they scour his face. The enormity of our emotion makes us feel powerful, important. The piped music annoys us, and so Iwo summons the waitress and asks her to turn it off, and she does. The roomful of chattering people seems silent, distant, foggy, beside the sparkling reality that surrounds the two of us.

  ‘Let me see your hands,’ he says, and although I have always thought they are ugly hands, I spread them before him across the table, clumsy and docile as a child who has just washed them.

  ‘They are good hands, working hands,’ he says kindly, and I withdraw them into fists. I look at my hard-working hands and he does too, and finally he extends one of his hands and places it over mine. We touch, drily, skin against skin. For several seconds we look at our two hands, and finally at each other. At last he says, This is … extraordinary.’

  And I echo, ‘It is, yes. Quite extraordinary.’

  Nobody interrupts us, no-one wants to share our table. Even the waitress stays away. It must be perfectly obvious that we are falling in love.

  By the time we leave it’s getting dark, and as we walk on to the street my legs buckle under me, so that I can no longer stride out, as I’ve been doing all afternoon. I stumble. He catches my elbow.

  ‘What is it?’ he asks.

  And I say, ‘It’s you.’

  I am in shock. Standing beside him is more than I can bear, and I think I almost faint. He grasps my arm and we walk along in silence, arm in arm, like a long-married couple at the end of their Saturday outing.

  I wish this were a short story, so that I could stop it here: a little abruptly, perhaps, leaving the reader to imagine various conclusions to this overheated beginning. Then I could move on to the next wry tale about something quite different. The reader needn’t ever think about it again, though a critic might find fault with its structure, its lack of symbolism, even its abrupt and unsatisfactory end. But my life is not a literary jeu d’esprit, my feelings are not anaesthetized by words, they are savage and untidy and way off the mark. I make mistakes: most of which come from simply thinking about him too much. I study Iwo the way a chess-player studies his opponent, anticipating every possible move and its consequences, trying to enter into his mind, trying, almost, to become him; until I am incapable of acting spontaneously.

  But I’m leaping ahead. This first afternoon, evening now, is still straightforward and happy. I am charged with the energy and optimism and sexual tension of new love. We take the bus down the hill, the trees now dark silhouettes against a slanting sky, and at our original bus stop we part. The people in the queue must take us for near-strangers. We are. We shake hands, thank each other gravely for a pleasant afternoon, and I head home leaving him to wait for his bus. Ah, but he has agreed to come for lunch tomorrow!

  The greatest surprise comes on Sunday evening when he takes me to see where he lives. All he has told me is that it’s in Earls Court. I don’t ask whether it’s a flat or a house; whether he lives alone or with friends. I know by now that he works in a repair shop for musical instruments; that he earns very little, so that the DHSS pays his rent.

  As it turns out, he lives in a single room in a large, dilapidated Victorian house in one of those shabby streets behind the tube station. From the outside it looks like the sort of house where prostitutes might take their clients, for twenty minutes and twenty-five pounds a time. In fact it’s one step up from that: a rooming house for travellers; a first base from which to find a proper place to live. His room is large, perhaps seventeen feet long, with two tall sash windows looking out over a bedraggled patch of grass and some mature trees. The room looks even larger because he has pushed all the furniture except the bed to one end, and concealed it behind a white curtain hanging from a ceiling track the width of the room. This is drawn across, so that through its pale, quivering fold one can just make out the shapes of the cheap chest of drawers and wardrobe behind it. The effect is eccentric, surprising, and beautiful. At the other end of the room, beside the window, stands his bed, very squarely and tidily made and covered with a clean double sheet. The windows are uncurtained, but sparkling clean. He has partitioned off the bed as well, with another pale, loosely-woven curtain which is drawn back towards the bedhead. The walls are painted white, and the bare expanse of floor is sanded and stained a creamy colour and sealed with varnish. This austere room, when I see it for the first time on the evening of our second day together, is the first thing that makes me apprehensive about Iwo.

  He locks the door from the inside.

  ‘Will you drink coffee? I am sorry I have no wine for you.’ He draws back the curtain at the far end, plugs in an electric kettle that is already full of water, and brews real coffee for us: black and strong. I sit on the bed – there is nowhere else – and watch him until he brings it over and comes to sit beside me. I wonder for the first time whether perhaps he is nervous, too. All his movements, especially here on his own territory, are so pared-down, so perfectly controlled, that it is impossible to tell. He doesn’t give himself away by being clumsy or flippant, he makes no excuses for the lack of milk or sugar or chairs. When I have drunk the coffee he takes my cup and places it under the bed beside his own, turns off the light, and, at last, oh men and angels, at last, he kisses me.

  His bed is crisp and white,
its clean sheets suggesting that he hoped to bring me back here and make love. Later it becomes hot and seamed with creases made by our rolling bodies. At first the cold, and my shyness, keep us covered up with bedclothes, but by the end we are glistening with sweat and naked and I don’t give a damn about modesty. I think to myself, rapturously, Oh everything is going to be all right! and my tenderness towards him is almost more than I can contain.

  ‘Iwo, you are … wonderful… you’re amazing … I wish I could, just… oh, I don’t know!’

  I wish I could unpack my heart’s excess of words. I wish I could flower into extravagant prose, praising him and glorying in this extraordinary discovery, opening my heart about the new possibilities that stretch ahead of us. I do not dare.

  He pulls the covers across us and hugs me and murmurs only, ‘Relax, relax …’ and the wild words remain unspoken.

  Instead I ask the question that throbs like a bad tooth: ‘Are you still married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  This is such a blow that it is several minutes before I risk the next question: ‘So where is your wife?’

  There is a recoil, so slight that if I were not lying naked with my body pressed along the length of his I would not have noticed how he shrinks from my question. There is a long silence, and I have to fight my polite English impulse to fill it by swerving off tactfully on to some safer topic. But I have to know what has happened to her, so I keep quiet, and eventually he says, Tf she is not dead then she has divorced me.’

  ‘But wouldn’t you know?’

  ‘My dear, you cannot understand. You say you know nothing of my country. I am a dangerous non-person. I do not exist, and yet any contact with me will… infect? make bad?’

  ‘Contaminate.’

  ‘Perhaps. So, I can send money to my daughters’ – he has daughters, too? – ‘but I cannot know whether they receive it or whether it is stolen in the post office. Even to write to me they put themselves into danger.’

  ‘It must be very … hard … for you.’

  ‘Daughters, yes; wife, no. Wife and I were separate people many years ago. If she is sensible she has divorced me. If not, if she is still good wife, she has probably been vanished.’

  ‘And your daughters? How many? How old are they?’

  ‘Grown up. Married. To good Party workers, one a journalist, one an official. I hope they are all right.’

  He sounds so bleak that I turn and cling to him, kissing the fluent, throbbing line of his jaw – his pulse like a soft drum – and bury my head in the hollow curve of his shoulder.

  ‘Iwo, it’s dreadful. I am so sorry. Oh God, I can’t imagine …’

  Quite melted into tears for thee.

  He is touched that I should cry for three women I have never seen. He gets out of bed, walks naked across the room and, drawing aside the far curtain, reaches into the chest of drawers. He climbs back into bed beside me, holding a couple of curled photographs.

  ‘Here you have my daughters. Henryka, Alina. Now twenty-nine. Twenty-six.’

  They are both tall, slim, very dark, and even in this cheap colour photograph it is clear that they are beauties. They stand on either side of a Christmas tree. In front of them on the table, in the centre of a lacy table-mat, is a home-made Nativity scene with candles burning around it.

  ‘Are you Catholics, your family?’

  ‘Not I, but their mother.’

  ‘Then she won’t divorce you, surely?’

  ‘Not that Catholic!’

  I look again more closely at the two girls, smiling obediently for the camera. How strange, what a quirk of fate, that some four or five years later I should be scrutinizing these private family faces. I search for clues about them. Their hair-styles are unsophisticated but becoming; their clothes look cheap, made of poor material and assembled without much sense of colour or style, let alone fashion. Most important, can I detect a likeness to him? The older daughter seems to have inherited his fine bone-structure. ‘This one looks rather like you, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Henryka. Yes.’

  Enough. A man’s love for his daughters is a minefield. He forestalls me in any case by showing me the other photograph. ‘My … wife.’ She is a handsome woman, though almost comically Slav with her strong, square face, severe hairstyle and broad shoulders. I try to discern her breasts under the shapeless dress and flowered shawl. Large, soft, deep, a fine figure of a woman. Not like me. Iwo’s hand reaches across my bare shoulder and takes the pictures from me. He leans behind him to put them on the floor under the bed. Then he folds his arm, and the blankets, around me.

  ‘I shall have to get used to your warmth in my bed.’

  I analyse those words, examining them for every shade of meaning from I am uncomfortable with you in this bed, to Now we sleep together as a couple in future. Why can’t I take them at face value, as a declaration of intent, a commitment to many nights together, and respond with some generous word or gesture? It must be because I am afraid. It is so long since my desire for a man has been reciprocated. Either lame dogs fall in love with me – they seem to think I must be a strong woman; or I am fucked after a party by someone I have just met and may never see again, using and being used. With Iwo, now, I hesitate in case I jump to the wrong conclusion, and find myself rebuffed. The sexual humiliation of having been rejected for a younger woman cuts deeper than anyone knows. I was the complacent wife in her mid-thirties who never stopped to think about taking care of her looks until it was too late. After many years of sexual neglect, as Paul’s moments of physical need or tenderness for me became less and less frequent, I had almost succeeded in persuading myself that sex was no longer anything to do with me. And so now I take it for granted that the surge of lust that I feel for Iwo is one-sided, and don’t dare to believe in the first delicate tendrils of hope and affection that he extends towards me. The moment passes. But we do make love again.

  2

  When I wake up in my own bed my first thought is of Iwo, just as it was my last before I finally fell asleep. But I can only lie in bed for a few moments – long enough to wonder if he will telephone me today – because it’s already after half past seven, and I must launch the children into their week. He didn’t say when we parted that he would ring, but, as I tiptoed out of his room hoping not to wake him, he suddenly spoke from the bed.

  ‘Constance. That was a lovely day with you. The most happy day since I came to England.’

  I turned back to the bed, and his long naked arms reached up. He held my face in between his two hands and smiled at me and said, Thank you.’

  I can still feel the touch of that gesture against my skin.

  I always love breakfast time, particularly when my children are around. I love the simple responsibilities it demands, the ritual of laying out bowls and cereal packets and jars of marmalade, timing eggs and not burning toast while at the same time doing Kate’s school lunch box. When they were young and all still living at home I used to love the cross, preoccupied faces and morning smells of my children at breakfast. Paul would come down first and make a pot of coffee, gulp down a cup himself and hurry off to work, leaving me to drink the rest as I wove through the habitual dance from table to dishwasher to airing cupboard. The children too wove in and out looking for Sellotape, one glove, a lost gymshoe, or homework; later on borrowing make-up or money. It was a safe hour in my day, knowing myself to be needed and efficient.

  This Monday morning all three of them are once again sitting round the breakfast table, since both Cordelia and Max have been home for the weekend, as much to catch up on one another’s news as to see me. Cordy, in her final year at university, lives in a student house near college and Max, who has a job, lives with his current girlfriend in a squat. At first I hated this idea. The very word ‘squat’ was repellent and seemed to conjure up a squalid, lavatorial image. When I eventually visited them I found to my surprise that they lived in a perfectly ordinary terraced house which they shared with another couple. All four ha
d spent a good deal of time and care on repairing and decorating the house, and had persuaded the council to reconnect the electricity and water in return. They proudly pointed out items of furniture rescued from skips or kitchen things picked up for less than a pound at local bazaars and jumble sales. I realized then for the first time that my children attached a very different importance to their possessions. They didn’t care about inherited furniture, ‘good’ furniture, and thought it even more absurd to spend money on buying things new. On the contrary, they were proud of the fact that they had equipped the whole house for less than £500. It would have been tactless to point out how many bits and pieces of my own I recognized about the place.