Love Among the Single Classes Read online

  ‘No,’ I answer flatly. ‘I have been in my room, writing letters.’

  She stares at me, disconcerted, and in the pause I add, ‘My wife wrote to tell me that our daughter’s child is dead.’

  ‘Oh Iwo! Not the baby? Oh God how terrible. I am … Why did it …?’

  Her face shows real pain, and yet she knows she can’t offer comfort.

  ‘It is all right, my dear. Do not concern yourself. There will be more children. Shall I call Kate down?’

  She moves stiffly back to the stove and without looking at me, says, ‘Just shout up to Katie, five minutes, will you?’

  On an impulse I climb the stairs to the top of the house where the girls’ bedrooms are, and knock on Kate’s door. The chatter from inside stops, and after several seconds her voice calls, ‘Come in!’ Four or five young girls are sitting on the floor or leaning against the bed. Pop music thumps from the gramophone, and from the smell in the air they have been smoking. Kate looks at me with hostility.

  ‘What does Mum want?’

  ‘She sent me to tell you that lunch will be ready in five minutes.’

  ‘Have I got to help?’

  ‘She didn’t say so. May I be introduced to your friends?’

  ‘Emma, Jo, Rachel, Suzie. OK? Tell her we’ll be down.’

  Why does she hate me so? I am not unkind to her mother. I have tried to be pleasant to her and the other two. I don’t threaten the relationship with their father. Christmas seemed a happy time. What is there about me that she can hate so much? I am not usually unsympathetic to young girls.

  The Heath that afternoon is a hubbub of noise and fairground music. Girls are screaming on the swings and dodgems, children shriek and cling to the roundabouts, mothers look anxious and fathers hand out coins and get irritable with everyone. Only the teenagers really enjoy themselves. Ostentatiously relaxed, they smoke and stroll through the crowd, their bright clothes dimmed beneath anoraks and leather jackets. Kate and her friends are on the look-out for boys, but offhand when they do catch their attention. I am astonished at their language. ‘Fuck off, stupid cunt,’ Kate will fling from the side of her mouth at some harmless youth whose looks or clothes displease her; and then all five giggle and look back at him contemptuously. Is this how the young flirt today?

  Constance says, ‘Katie, darling, I have asked you not to … I mean, it sounds so awful …’

  And Kate says, ‘Yeah, sorry Mum,’ until the next time.

  Yet Constance appears to be happy. She holds tightly to my arm – ‘We mustn’t lose each other in this crowd’ – and wants me to shoot for goldfish at the rifle range, or lob rings on to pegs. She looks into the faces of everyone and is buoyed up with vitality.

  ‘It’s really just like a Renoir or something, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Or … no, I know! … it’s like that marvellous ending to Les Enfants du Paradis, you know? When the crowd goes bobbing and dancing past regardless, with the balloons, and her in that carriage …’

  ‘I suppose all fairs are much the same,’ I reply; and cut her off before she can start on Brueghel. Her face becomes still for a moment.

  ‘Iwo, you don’t feel I’m being heartless, do you? I know you can’t be enjoying anything much. And yet … all the same … you can’t just stay in your room and brood, you know.’

  ‘No. I was aware of that.’

  ‘Shall we … leave the girls here at the fair and … walk across the Heath a bit? Perhaps to Kenwood? Would you prefer that?’

  ‘What is Kenwood?’

  ‘Oh darling, that house … you know … that house we …’

  ‘Just as you wish.’

  We leave the chaos and litter of the fair, the smoky hot dog smells and the dawdling families, and strike out across a rolling expanse of grass. Constance is quiet for a while, but not with an easy silence that allows each of us to pursue his own thoughts; rather a tense, frowning silence. It is a good ten minutes before she can bring out the question that has been preoccupying her.

  ‘Your … I suppose, it must be soon … don’t you have to renew your visa fairly soon now?’

  ‘I am only here on sufferance. I’ve always known that. Why do you think Marina is marrying Peter?’

  ‘Because he adores her, Iwo! And she, she says she’s very fond of him.’

  ‘But her original reason was to gain resident status.’

  The branches of the trees are encrusted with buds. The clouds are low, slate-grey.

  ‘If they … the Home Office … after all, you could always …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Iwo. Marry someone.’

  Now I am silenced. I owe her some explanation. I did – though it is some time since I remembered the source of our acquaintance – advertise for a wife; and Constance, in replying, was acknowledging her desire to be married. We haven’t alluded to it since. I have no intention of marrying her, surely she has realized that? Of course I am aware that she loves me. I can’t make any definite statement of intent, and until I have received Katarzyna’s letter, can’t announce my firm decision to go home. I’ve told nobody that; nor would I choose to tell her first. We walk for several minutes while I turn over in my mind what to say, and just as I am about to begin, Well, my dear, I didn’t think it needed putting into words but if it does, then … she herself breaks the silence.

  Turning to me with a false burst of energy she smiles and says, ‘I don’t know whether you’d gathered that Katie and Co. are going back to Jo’s house?’

  ‘No. I hadn’t.’

  ‘Why don’t we go home now and I could cook us supper and we can have a nice relaxed evening together? Or do you have …?’

  I had not planned to stay with her, but she has made me feel mildly guilty and so, matching her unreal smile, I agree.

  As it turns out, it isn’t such a bad idea. She cooks a decent meal; we eat together in the breakfast room and she produces a bottle of solid red wine and offers me vodka afterwards. The drink relaxes me and makes Constance talkative, and I am reminded of her pleasing intelligence and occasional wit. But I don’t want to spend the whole night at her house, in case there is a letter for me next morning; so when she bends down to pass me coffee I cradle her breast as her shirt swings forward.

  ‘Why don’t we leave all this and take our drinks upstairs?’ I murmur against her throat, and at once she picks up her glass and mine and leads the way. I watch her firm arse seesawing ahead of me as she climbs the steps, and rise in anticipation. In the bedroom she turns to face me, and I unbutton the top of her shirt and slip my hand inside. Empty mind, rigid cock, moaning woman, creaking bed, short sleep. Then I just make it to the tube station in time to catch the last train. Not, in the end, an unsuccessful day.

  The following morning there is still no letter. It is too soon, of course. Five days for my letter to reach Poland; a day or two for Kasia to reply; five days back … it won’t be till the end of this week, at the earliest. My own impetus is now so powerful that it’s hard for me to realize that practical matters like the post move at their usual pace. I can begin to make plans. Regardless of what the Home Office says, I shall go anyway; best to say that I am simply taking a holiday – relatives in East Germany, perhaps? – and then cross the border and, what? I can think about that later.

  Meanwhile my grandson is still dead.

  When I was a child and some bad thing happened – I was due to go to the dentist, or had to fight a boy at school that day – I used to wake up to a few seconds’ peace of mind; and then I would remember that some cloud hung over me. It’s the same now. I wake up clear-headed, and then like a shadow the memory blackens my consciousness: the boy is dead. There is no baby. As the days go by its death oppresses me more, not less, and the pain lies more heavily. It is an increasing struggle to be normal, get to work, exchange a few words with the others. I take to going to the gym every day, working myself so hard that I come off the floor after an hour red-faced, my singlet soaked in sweat. I run for longer and longer on th
e relentless treadmill, five minutes become ten, and the speed increases too. One day a young man comes up to me as I stand gasping for breath.

  ‘You don’t want to overdo it old son,’ he says. ‘No good pushing yourself too hard. You can get a fucking injury that way.’ I tell him I’m training for the London marathon, and he claps me on the shoulder. ‘Good for you! Bloody marvellous! Take it easy.’ Do I look so old? I sluice myself afterwards under a cold shower, gasping, punishing, numbing the mind and shocking the body.

  There is still no letter on Friday, and none on Saturday either. Somehow I have to get through a long empty Sunday. Why don’t I just go now, in a week or two? Why wait for a letter? There are two reasons: one, I have to save up for another few weeks before I have enough for the train fare; and two, I cannot leave before Marina’s wedding. On Monday there is no letter, and I stay at home to wait for the second post. None comes. After lunch, not that I eat lunch, the phone rings in the hall, so insistently that in the end I go downstairs to answer it. It is the fat, friendly guy from work.

  ‘God! Bloody good thing you’re there!’ he says. ‘Listen Monty me old mate, you’re in a spot of fucking trouble. Tom’s hopping mad. Says if you don’t come in tomorrow you’re for the chop. Shouldn’t push your luck, if I was you. Anything up? You poorly or what?’

  ‘No,’ I tell him, and thank him for warning me. I’ll be in next day. I’ll make an excuse about the Home Office.

  Next morning, before I leave, the letter comes. I tear open the envelope. There is one sheet of paper inside. Katarzyna’s bold writing covers barely half a page: its message could be contained in a sentence. She does not want me back. I have been imagining things. All she ever said was that she missed me, and I have built castles of fantasy on this polite banality. The girls have their own lives now; my return would only complicate matters for all of them. She does not want me back. ‘I have set in motion the formalities for a divorce. Marry one of those women there in England who want you.’ To ram the point home she signs her maiden name: Katarzyna Slowik.

  The letter needs no reply and I do not send one. But as the days pass I realize, almost joyfully, that it makes no difference. My intention is set. How could I expect her to understand from my stilted letters that everything between us is just as it was thirty years ago? I shall never pin her down and so will never get bored with her; none of this has changed. I keep referring to the Christmas photograph taken six years ago, but it is not the stout, middle-aged woman who reminds me most of my wife, but Alina. My daughter was twenty when that picture was taken; Kasia when I first met her was twenty-three; but young women looked younger in those days. They were girls then until at least eighteen, clumsy and boisterous, with bouncing plaits. I was her first man. She had kissed other men, but I was the first to make love to her. Make love … we made love like carpenters make furniture! We created love with our hands. When we began she was just another conquest to me. But her sexual surrender was the least of our achievements. Making love together was the literal building of love. We put it together, laboriously at first, improved it, constructed it, and finally accomplished it. Love was there; we had made it. Through fucking her I knew her and, by knowing, came to love her. I never understood this before. How simple and accurate language is. How obvious: we made love. I’ve fucked plenty of women, but my wife is the only woman with whom I have ever made love.

  I will remind her, when I’m back, of our days in the countryside that first summer. We used to meet early on Sunday mornings and bicycle away from the rubble of the town, the boarded up and bombed out houses. We might be stopped and asked to show our identity cards to the military police, and then I’d wink and make a conspiratorial gesture, and they’d let us go. We’d pedal along the pot-holed roads until they became country lanes and finally grassy paths. Dropping our bicycles at the edge of some deep meadow, we would fall into the long grass. We made love in the open air, sometimes in the rain, and in the late dusk we cycled home with our hair full of grass seeds and our clothes stuck with burrs, and spent the rest of the week scratching mosquito bites. Kasia, her plump body flattening the stalks, would complain that it wasn’t fair, the woman had to put up with roughness against her skin while the man was cushioned by her body and didn’t suffer. In time I taught her that there are other positions, and most of them are hard on a man’s knees.

  After Kasia’s letter very little changes, except that I no longer want to fuck. This gets me into trouble with Joanna who voices her resentment, and with Constance, who expresses careful, elliptical concern. I’m not worried. The gym burns up a lot of physical energy; I sleep better at night and without the need for vodka, which saves me money; and I am leaner and harder than I have been for years. I start to make detailed plans for my return home. I write to both the girls, but not my wife, telling them when I am coming, and that I shall take the train. In my letter to Henryka I confess, ‘so that there will be no lies between us when I see you again’, my part in the deaths of Kika and Jerzy. I tell her that I gave Kika the list of addresses for dissidents in Russia, and did nothing to try to save her when she was arrested. Also – this one is more difficult, since it is just possible that she might send news of it back to Marina – I admit that I was indirectly responsible for Jerzy’s suicide. She must make what she will of that.

  When my daughters were little girls at school, who was there who could tell them the truth about their country and its past? Even the teachers didn’t know the truth; it wasn’t their fault. So children grew up under the great lie. I shall change that, and they will at least have the choice: take it or leave it. Believe me, or the powers that be. If I begin with this truth about myself, they may believe that all the other things I tell them are also true. What more can I do for them?

  I have no idea how Henryka and Stanislaw will respond to this, but one thing is certain: it will alert the authorities, who do of course read my letters, and they can work out for themselves at which point I shall cross the border. From East Berlin there’s only one place: Frankfurt an der Oder … unless I go south, to Dresden, and from there to Wroclaw … I pore over a map, murmuring the Polish names. I shall have hardly any luggage. Most of what I need is waiting for me at home. It will be good to wear my old clothes again.

  Back here in England I wake up happy one morning and realize that it is the first of May. I am happy because of a dream I had last night. I was in the garden of a house that my parents had lived in long ago, before the war, so I must have been a very small boy. In my dream it is recognizably the same garden, but filled with flowers of such brilliant colours that they shimmer in the air. There are several animals as well, an oddly assorted bunch – a hippo, and a couple of ordinary farmyard pigs, and lots of chickens, and a fox – but they are all serene and harmonious. The garden is filled with a celestial humming sound, rhythmical and pulsating, which flows from the mouth of a nun. She is at the top of the garden swaying and smiling in her black and white habit. Above her head a goldfish is flickering through the air, more like a humming-bird than a fish, making figures of eight in time to the music. Its scales gleam as they catch the light. This gentle scene throbs with sweetness. It fills me with such contentment that I wake up and find myself smiling. I used to have dreams like that in my childhood. I take this dream to be a good omen.

  Tadeusz invites me for an evening at the Polish Centre, and I listen while everyone talks of fresh arrests and imprisonments. The authorities are playing cat and mouse with the supporters of Solidarnosc, academics and dissident writers. They put them in prison and then, apparently at random, let them out again, using some phoney amnesty as a pretext. It’s the usual tactic – good policeman, bad policeman – keep them guessing and you produce such insecurity that even good actions make the victim suffer. So, for the benefit of the West, some people are arbitrarily released while days later others, just as arbitrarily, are arrested.

  Tadeusz and his cronies are greatly exercised about this, and my indifference seems callous. But I ca
n hardly tell them about my dream, let alone that I am about to return to Poland. Tadeusz still has hopes of me for Joanna. To please him, I agree to partner her at Marina’s wedding. It will give us the appearance of a couple, but she needs that status and it doesn’t make any difference to me. A few days after that I shall be on my way back to my wife.

  I haven’t told anyone at the postroom that I am leaving, either, in case the foreman uses it as an excuse to dismiss me, but I no longer bother to make myself pleasant to them. Only the fat fellow still tries to talk to me. He says I should look after myself better, or go and see a doctor, or, best of all, find a woman to take care of me, but anyway I should stop counting under my breath as it’s driving the others mad. I ignore his platitudes and in due course he too gives up and leaves me in peace. Sometimes in my lunch hour I walk up to the square and look for the black-haired girl who cried once, in the rain, but I never see her. She’ll be back with either her father or her boyfriend. Fd like to satisfy my curiosity and know which.

  I prefer to write in my diary rather than talk to people. I shall take it home with me, to show Kasia she had no reason to be jealous. It has become, recently, an extended love-letter to her, and a recollection of our love. Much of it is erotic. The thought of her waiting excites me very much.

  You have black curly hair on your head and under your arms and around your nipples, and it makes a line down your belly and flowers between your legs, and I will kiss all of it and watch it darken and become damp with sweat as we make love. You give off a strong, feral smell when you lose control and become female under my hands. I shall lick you into shape. I shall be starved for sex, like a man who has been in prison for four years. We will shut ourselves up inside our flat and fuck until we are too sore to fuck any more.

  What could the authorities charge me with? Conspiring to overthrow the state by force? That would be a joke. I haven’t even been to look at the Castle – though I shall go before I leave, so that I can tell my compatriots how our esteemed government in exile is housed. They can’t think those dreamy old men have anything to do with modern Poland? Most of them probably, in their hearts, dislike Solidarnosc as much as Moscow itself! Maybe the authorities will decide I have been in England to raise funds for the workers’ struggle? That’s a laugh too. What do the English know about Poland’s struggle? The liberal sympathies of the West have turned out to be a sour joke that has curdled in my mind. They’ll have difficulty claiming that I must have been in touch with the Underground. After those two deaths in prison – both suicides, both students close to me – the Underground has little love for me. They mistrust coincidences. So what can the authorities get me for? Ah, how ironic! I see that four years in England have left their mark. I am beginning to think like an Englishman. They don’t need facts. They will invent, search my flat, plant papers, question my wife, my daughters, my former colleagues … and, of course, me.