Love Among the Single Classes Read online

  In the war, when I was a youth, I saw people being killed, or being taken away to their deaths. I saw many corpses – habitually – they became ordinary to me. What must that do to a learning mind, such casual familiarity with death? It can make you into a necrophiliac. The only difference between me and most people is that I admit it. Death is not a taboo. It becomes a need. You miss it, and need to re-create it – if necessary, in yourself.

  My diary again:

  I have doubled the amount of time I spend at the gym. I now go there early in the mornings before work as well as in the evenings after work. My heart and lungs pound to bursting with the workload I impose on them. I can now run 1,500 metres in just under six minutes, and 5,000 metres in less than half an hour. I can do two sets of twenty press-ups and twenty chin-ups. This physical fitness makes me mentally calm and perfectly in control. I sleep better than ever. I have memorized my exercise routine, and could improvise much of it without equipment, if necessary, in a bare cell. It is concentration, counting, and repetition which matter. I now count my steps to the tube station from the gym, and at the other end, from the tube to work, and count stairs as I run, not walk, up and down them. The repetition of numbers is comforting and imposes a discipline. It also helps me to detach myself from what is going on around me. Kasia, you are all I have left now (one). My daughters are married and lost to me (two). My grandson, my posterity, is dead (zero). England has failed me; other women have failed me (three). But I still have my numbers and my wife. My wife, the one love in the world. Wife is life, life is love, love is lust, lust is lost, so – I must, I must come full circle.

  I shall sit

  immobile

  my eyes fixed

  upon the heart of things

  Not me, Kasia: that’s Zbigniew Herbert. He couldn’t stay in the West, either.

  III

  Dissolution

  16

  I am becoming addicted to humiliation. I can no longer persuade myself, even on good days, that Iwo will ever love me, let alone marry me. I don’t know by what definition I love him. We are more like strangers now than the first weekend we met. Since Christmas I have seen him precisely five times, and two of those times he didn’t even want to make love to me. And yet … I think about him more than ever and compulsively invent conversations with him in my head – they never take place, of course.

  One day, instead of going to the library, I take a very early tube – leaving Kate to see herself off to school – and wait outside his house to check if he still goes in to work. I hang around in the road, walk up and down, and eventually buttonhole the postman. If there are any letters for Mr Zaluski,’ I say, Tm just on my way to see him … I could take them!’

  The postman looks at me as though I were dotty and says, That’s all right, Missis, I’ll just put them through the letterbox, if it’s all the same to you.’

  In fact there is no letter for Iwo. By ten o’clock when he still hasn’t appeared, I bang on the front door, which is opened by a tousled young Australian. Iwo’s room is immaculate and empty.

  I shut the door firmly behind me, lock it, and stand in the middle of the floor with pounding heart. Now what do I do? For all I know, he’s just down the corridor in the bathroom. I have no desire to look through his private things, but I want to feel like him. I want to do what he does. I take my shoes off and stretch out on his taut white bed. Here his body rests at night. His head dents this pillow. His eyes see those trees. I am terrified that he will return, but I can’t hurry away. I turn my head and look across the room. At the far end, the white gauzy curtain is drawn across the cupboard where he keeps his things, and the chest of drawers in which he found the photographs of his family that he showed me the first time I came here. How confiding he was then, quick to explain, to draw me into his past and tell me its names. The curtain shimmers slightly, then flutters in a draught, and at the same time I hear steps on the stairs. I can feel myself going white. After the footsteps have passed I stand up, straighten the bed to its former perfection and leave the house.

  This episode gives me a new fantasy to work upon. I’ve always been better at expressing myself on paper than in speech, so I draft wonderful letters which I might have left behind for him. Sometimes they are flamboyant and metaphorical: why does this room look like midwinter when outside it’s warm and bursting with spring?; while other versions are confident and decisive: Iwo, your bedsitter days are over! I have decided to buy a new house, smaller but more central, and I want you to help me choose it and then ‘Come live with me, and be my love’ (English quotation!). I polish a number of variations on this letter to such a fine, artless elegance that it’s all I can do not to send one; but of course I don’t, and I always knew I wouldn’t. Yet the illusion of action gives me temporary relief from the pressure of frustrated energy stored and growing within me.

  My obsession with Iwo moves like a cloud across everyday life, blotting out more and more of it. In the library I have ceased to look interested and available for conversation or enquiries. I spend as much time as possible either doing my Polish exercises for Magda, and trying to memorize long columns of Polish words; or else reading Polish history, poetry, trade union affairs and the political broadsheets which I order from libraries all over London.

  ‘You doing an Open University course on Poland or what?’ asks Steve one morning during our coffee break.

  ‘Yeah,’ puts in Linda, yawning; ‘thought I might try one, too. Maybe something on the ancient Greeks? Stav bangs on about them all the time.’

  ‘Constance?’ repeats Steve.

  ‘No. Not exactly.’

  ‘That’s right, course you have, I’d forgotten … you’ve got this Polish fella, haven’t you?’ says Linda, perking up at the sniff of gossip. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Not very far, at a guess …’ I say, trying to look wry and offhand.

  ‘Bloody foreigners! Don’t know why we bother with them! Yes I do.’ She turns to Steve, who is wearing his concerned male feminist expression indicating discreet but non-aggressive sympathy.

  ‘… It’s because you lot are such wallies nowadays! You “my-turn-to-do-the-nappies” brigade: you’re hopeless! A right turn-off!’

  ‘Linda, it’s not fair to drag Steve into it. Just because you think men with big muscles and tiny minds are macho …’

  The conversation is steered safely away from Iwo. Linda and Steve will argue the merits of old sexism versus new, improved equality, till the cows come home.

  One great consolation is that nowadays Cordy is around more often than usual. She’s cramming for her finals and it’s easier for her to work from the comparative peace and quiet of her bedroom here than in the communal chaos of the house near college that she shares with four or five other students. Sometimes she’ll walk through the breakfast room to put the kettle on for yet another cup of sweet Nescafé and find me hunched up on the sofa.

  ‘How’s it going? On schedule?’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, doing OK. Coffee? You’re not, by the look of you. Not bloody Iwo again …?’

  All three of them are now openly splenetic about Iwo: heaven knows what they must say among themselves.

  ‘Cordy, a, it’s no business of yours; b, I’m sorry but I love him; and c, I can’t help it. Don’t call him that …’

  ‘Sometimes I think I’m forty-four and you’re the one that’s twenty-one,’ she says.

  While we wait for the kettle to boil she tells me about her Ben. She sounds secure, happy in their mutual, uncomplicated love. They meet mostly at weekends, Take in’ a film or two, perhaps a party, spend a couple of nights together and go their separate ways on Monday to work during the week for their coming examinations. I look at her as she stands looking at me, her face reflecting concern for her suddenly mad mother, though her mind is still on her revision notes. She is barefoot; her strong, slightly grubby feet planted firmly on the black and white floor. She always loved going barefoot and, as a child, the first thing she did
on coming home from school was to tear off her shoes and socks and leave them in a wrinkled heap by the doormat. In consequence her feet are wide and her toes splayed, but they are good, healthy feet. She is a good, healthy young woman, more sane and balanced than I have ever been, except briefly, during the child-bearing years of my marriage, when I thought I was doing what women are meant to do.

  Oh my lovely, four-square, casual daughter: have I managed to spare you that emotional and sexual baggage that has lumbered me and led me to this state of ludicrous anguish; those outdated, irrelevant trappings of sexual puritanism, social class and female marriageability that I have lugged about all my life, outwardly denying they matter, inwardly strait-jacketed? Do you make love without guilt, claiming your due of pleasure and giving it in turn without modesty or shame? Can you meet a man without covertly checking up on his marital status, and becoming arch if he’s ‘free’? The long shadow of my parents looms over me still. Ts he a nice boy darling? What does his father do? Well, if you don’t know you must find out.’ They couldn’t quite bring themselves to ask whether the hapless youth ‘respected’ me, but I knew the question was always there. When my father learned that I had lost my virginity a few months before I married Paul, but with Paul, of course, he erupted with indignation. ‘I would rather have heard that you’d committed murder!’ he said; and I knew that he meant it. Had I been a murderess they would have stood by me, loyally convinced of my innocence; sat white-faced and brave throughout my trial, and confronted the cameramen outside the court tight-lipped, wan, no comment. But the loss of my chief female asset was a far greater disaster, and my father felt as though he’d been robbed.

  I have tried not to burden Cordy with any of this, and looking at her now it seems possible that I have succeeded. Beside her stands the spectral figure of myself at the same age: rigid, self-conscious, signalling correctly with Braemar twinset and real pearls, meticulous accent and deferential manner. Cordy, by comparison, is relaxed, her clothes falling shapelessly around her soft, uncorseted body, all her limbs at ease. Her face, though, is bright, alert, individual – in vivid contrast to my useless, middle-class, all-purpose smile.

  And now here I am half a lifetime later, still playing a part: this time that of the operatic heroine overcome with grief and unrequited love. Yet however unreal it may look, and worse than unreal, absurd, the pain is as acute as though I were suffering from a perforated ulcer. At best I am gnawed by a soft, searching ache; at worst, great flashes of lightning stab me with new humiliations.

  One of these occurs when Marina phones me to talk about her wedding and reveals – deliberately, but with great tact – that Iwo will be partnering Joanna.

  My first instinct is to say petulantly, Well it’s clearly going to be a very Polish event, you won’t want me intruding, but I manage to suppress this childish reaction. ‘Why her?’ I ask.

  ‘Constance, you mustn’t take it to heart. He’s just saving Tadeusz’s face, hers too, of course, by not letting their Polish friends see that she hasn’t got a man to escort her. Whereas you … everyone knows you’ve been married and got children and so on.’

  ‘I daresay he’s been seeing her a lot lately. He certainly hasn’t been seeing me,’ I complain.

  ‘He comes alone to the club about once a week. I haven’t seen them together since Christmas. I get the impression he’s become very solitary. He looks very fit, but his mind is somewhere else. Not on Joanna.’

  There is a pause, during which I wait for her to supply more details but she says nothing, so I gather up the shabby cloak of my good manners and say, ‘But how are you, Marina? Looking forward to the wedding, being married, all that?’

  Another pause, longer this time. Then she begins to speak, in slow, disjointed sentences.

  ‘Oh Constance. I don’t know if I want to marry Peter. It will mean that I have given up hope. Solidarity, you know, offered us hope for a new, free Poland. Those were very important, very beautiful feelings. Life in Poland was harsh, we spent many hours queuing, and what we could buy was poor. We didn’t have your choices, but Polish women, especially the young women, were becoming equal. Whoever got home first did what needed doing. Sometimes I cooked or washed for Jerzy, sometimes he did it for me. There was an excitement, a newness in life that made up for the harshness. And we had our writers. Polish literature has always stood guard over human rights and our national pride. Now … I wrote to my mother, you know, and told her I was marrying an Englishman. It was hard to describe Peter in words that would convince her I loved him. Then, when I sent her a letter with the date of our wedding, she wrote back and said, “I shall think of it as your marriage to Jerzy”. Oh Constance … I am losing so much!’

  ‘Is your mother coming over?’

  ‘No. I can’t afford to pay her fare – even if she could get a visa – and Peter hasn’t offered.’

  ‘Ask him.’

  ‘I can’t. He is spending all his savings on furniture for our flat, on equipping a wonderful kitchen for me, on our honeymoon – he won’t tell me where we’re going, says it’s a secret – I can’t ask him for yet more money. He wouldn’t even be able to talk to her. She doesn’t speak more than a few words of English, and he can’t speak any other language.’

  ‘I’ll pay her fare, Marina, if you like.’

  ‘Dear Constance. You are very generous, but no. Iwo will represent my past and that’s all I want. Is it a bad sign, do you think?’

  ‘You’ve never been as proud of Peter as he is of you. It was always him pushing for the marriage.’

  ‘I have tried …’

  ‘We ought to meet, Marina. Do you have a free evening soon?’

  ‘This week I’m off on Thursday.’

  We meet at a place she suggests: a Polish club in Kensington called the Ognisko. It has not been easy for her to see me alone. Peter is accustomed to sharing her evenings off, and Marina has to promise that he can join us for coffee at half past nine, so we hurry through our meal and our conversation. Concentrating on her, I hardly take in the people around me, who are mainly Polish, with the fine, elegant bones I have come to love. Their voices are sibilant with emotion, in contrast to their faces, which tend to be dignified and static. Poles do not smile easily.

  I sense that the trap has closed around Marina since I last saw her. Peter is asserting ownership as though fearful that she might elude him, even now, a month before their wedding. He must be regretting that it was booked so far in advance; but they are marrying at the Church of Our Lady of the Dolours in the Fulham Road, and summer weekend dates are not easy to secure. She has lost weight since the evening of our party and the soft curves of her cheeks and chin have become more angular. She looks as beautiful as ever, but older.

  ‘I keep asking myself why I was so keen to marry him. Suddenly I can think of far more reasons why I should not.’

  ‘Well, let me give you some reasons why you might want to, and then you can tell me why you don’t. He is a good, honourable, decent man. He will not hurt you, abandon you, cheat you, or let you down. He will give you a home: a house, with rooms, with objects that will make your life more comfortable and spacious. Above all, he will give you children.’

  ‘I can’t have children.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I had an abortion, in Poland, when I was seventeen, and then after Jerzy died, another. I saw a gynaecologist the other day, and she told me she had her doubts. I had a test. It’s most unlikely I shall ever have children.’

  ‘Have you told Peter?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t think he was all that sorry. He is very possessive. I think he would rather have me all to himself.’

  ‘Do you mind very much?’

  ‘Yes. Very much. Very much.’

  She begins to cry, tactfully, with restraint, so as not to embarrass anyone in this crowded, ornate dining room. Her eyes glisten and sparkle with tears, which she wipes away.

  ‘Never mind, Constance. Let’s talk about you. You don’t look hap
py, I have to tell you.’

  ‘I never see Iwo. That’s why. And when I do, he’s so changed, he’s quite different from when we first met.’

  ‘Yes, I find him changed, too. He’s very abstracted. His mind doesn’t seem to be in the same place as his feet.’

  ‘It isn’t just me, then?’

  ‘Oh Constance … of course it isn’t you! I suspect he’s ill with homesickness. A lot of us go through it. He’ll get over it. Be patient with him. When I’m married I’ll ask you both to dinner. Often.’

  ‘So you think you will marry Peter?’

  ‘I have to, don’t I? I know that really. I am just playing with the idea that I could get out of it. He is everything you say, and I ought to have realized that perfect happiness with the perfect man is a fairy tale. And even if it weren’t, what would my perfect man be doing chatting up a waitress in the basement of the Polish Airmen’s Club, huh?’

  ‘You met Peter at church.’