Love Among the Single Classes Read online

  Iwo is waiting for me even though I’m five minutes early. He takes my arm and guides me down the Earls Court Road, through jostling groups of young, mainly foreign young, for Earls Court, not Soho, is London’s bazaar. We skirt Iranians urgently pleading their political cause to anyone who’ll break step to listen; Australians, tall and gregarious, arguing about where to get the best exchange rates; and passing decorously through this minefield of male glances, the black-eyed women – inscrutable behind beaks and veils – whom Allah will protect from defilement. The only English people seem to be sullenly handsome young gays displaying their wares in studded black leather, registering every bleep of warning or interest emitted by other passing males.

  Iwo says, This evening we have to talk, don’t you think? So shall we find somewhere to eat?’

  ‘Fine,’ I say breathlessly. ‘Great. Yes. Anywhere.’

  ‘There’s a new Italian place just down the road from here, round the corner. It’s said to be good. Shall we try there?’

  As he pushes open the glass door the noise hits me like a wall of Babel. Some interior designer with an eye on Milan has devised the restaurant as though deliberately to hinder the activities of everyone using it. The white tiled floor is easy to slip on and difficult to clean, and does nothing to blanket the sound of fifty or more people talking in a confined space. The walls are roughly plastered and scrape like a grater. The tables are glass, with multi-coloured tubular legs, matched by the tubular arms and perforated seats of the chairs. It would have been hard to think up more ways to frustrate and inconvenience both waiters and diners. In spite of this there is a queue of people just inside the door, which we join. To communicate with Iwo I have to lean towards him and practically shout.

  ‘Looks promising! Always go to busy restaurant says old tourist proverb!’

  He smiles and nods. What a crass remark, I think. What an awful place. Why don’t I simply suggest we try somewhere else? Impossible. He chose it.

  Eventually we follow a waiter who pilots us narrowly between tables to share with another couple. It is a further ten minutes before the menu, our order, and the wine arrive. We can only hear each other by leaning right forward. It’s privacy of a sort. In any case, the couple next to us is American and when they hear Iwo ordering in his foreign accent, and then the two of us speaking French – ‘Alors, écoute, c’est difficile mais …’ Iwo begins – they evidently assume that we can’t understand English.

  ‘Will y a take a look at that guy?’ says the man sotto voce, that is, in a modified shout, as he slides his eyes across Iwo’s shabbiness, and I frown at him angrily, in Iwo’s defence.

  ‘Honey, I said, d’you like my hair?’ says his wife. ‘These British hairdressers …’

  Hear me, feel me, my mind sings to itself, touch me, heal me …

  Iwo leans closer. I wish I hadn’t chosen spaghetti alia vongole. The banality of life’s crucial moments.

  ‘When we met we were both very honest,’ he says. ‘We met because we both wanted to be married. I hope I was quite straightforward with you about my reason?’

  ‘Your visa.’

  ‘Yes. Also I told you that I was still technically married.’

  ‘But that it was unimportant. I remember you saying that your marriage had been dead for many years. You and your wife lived side by side like strangers.’

  ‘Is that how I put it?’

  ‘That’s what you said, yes. That you stayed together because in Lodz it was difficult to find a flat. You told me that sometimes all she said in a week would be, “Have you used my milk?’”

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes, Iwo, you did. Why? Isn’t it true?’

  ‘You seem to remember word for word, so I suppose I must have said it.’

  The American next to us is stentorian and confident, master of the world. Have they ever felt uncertain? A graduation ring, a credit card, and that’ll do nicely? Iwo eats in silence. I jab my fork into a can of worms.

  ‘Why’re we eating Italian in Britain when we’ll be in Florence tomorrow?’ says the woman with the youthful hairstyle.

  ‘Venice, honey. That’s what our schedule says. Venice, Italy.’

  ‘So long as it’s got the Michelangelo. The David and Goliath.’

  ‘Sure, sure.’

  So sure about everything, and I’m so unsure. I wanna be loved by you, just you and you alone … Someone once told me that the songs we hum or hear in our heads unconsciously reflect our inner fears. Could it be true, or is it just psycho-babble?

  Iwo says, ‘What I told you was true, as I then believed it. But I have learned that the truth can be hidden very deep. We often get it wrong.’

  What is he going to say? I was happier cleaning my house. To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

  ‘It didn’t seem like that at the time. I remember thinking how honest we could be with each other. About our childhood and feelings and…’ Oh Iwo, remember that moment when you first stretched out and took my hand? My voice trails away. Already I know I have lost. A fine romance, sings my mind, with no kisses …

  ‘It is true that I hoped to be able to love you, Constance, or at least marry you. I needed to, and you offered, most generously, to let me enter your life …’

  Is there sauce round my mouth or parsley between my teeth? I look directly at him, desperate for the suspense to end.

  ‘Iwo, for God’s sake come to the point.’

  ‘I cannot love you, I cannot even marry you, because I have realized how much I love my wife.’

  ‘So? She’s in Poland. Or are you going to try to get her out?’

  ‘I am going back to Poland.’

  Thud. Like an express train crashing, there is a ghastly clatter and scrunch as one impossible oncoming event collides with another. Crash, shudder, whirr, silence.

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you, Constance. You never told me what you felt.’

  From sprawling disorder a cry of pain emerges.

  ‘And what did you feel? What in the name of blazes did you ever feel, Iwo? Tell me!’

  ‘Hope. Gratitude. Perhaps affection.’

  ‘Affection? Gratitude? Jesus Christ, I’ve been insanely in love with you since the day we met.’

  ‘Yes. If I’m honest I suppose I have to admit that I knew that. You didn’t hide it. I tried to pretend I didn’t know because I didn’t want it to be true.’

  My love, then, was always absurd and unwanted. And, if I’m honest, I always knew that.

  We look at each other bleakly, in silence – or as near to silence as this hell-hole allows.

  ‘Coffee?’ he says. ‘Or shall I get the bill?’

  ‘The bill.’

  ‘There is coffee at my place.’

  Hope flares, and is immediately quenched.

  ‘I think probably I’d rather just go home.’

  He pays the bill, for once I let him, in pound coins and lots of small change. As we get up to leave a new crowd of chattering young immediately takes our place.

  Outside in the street I gulp down the fresh air. I am shaking. My legs are trembling. He takes my arm. Just like the first time we met. It is less than ten minutes’ walk to the tube station, and yet I can hardly bring myself to speak. Finally I ask, ‘When are you planning to go back to Poland?’

  ‘I thought, immediately after Marina’s wedding.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘In about three weeks’ time, yes.’

  We shall never make love again. Nor in bed fright thy nurse with midnight startings, crying out, Oh! oh, Nurse, oh my love is slain …

  ‘Constance, will you believe me, I am truly sorry I have made you unhappy.’

  ‘Of course I believe you. It’s my fault, too. I should have told you long ago, I suppose.’

  ‘No. I always knew. I would have liked to be able to love you.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you?’

  We stop outside the tube station, still thronged with people.

  ‘It has been
a curse over my life. I have never made any woman happy.’

  Dance, dance, dance, little lady, dance, dance, dance, little lady…

  ‘What will happen to you in Poland?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I saw him, I, assailed, fight, taken, stabbed, bleed, fall and die.

  ‘Will your wife take you back?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I hope so.’

  ‘Will I see you again?’

  ‘Of course. At Marina’s wedding.’

  ‘I mean, apart from that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I must go. Ring me.’

  In the tube there is a drunk, or perhaps he’s just mad, released from a mental home under Mrs Thatcher’s policy to live in the caring community. He comes and straphangs above me, looking, grinning, peering, roaring, performing, hiccuping. I sit locked up tight and nothing he does startles me into action or forces me to change my seat. In the end he shambles off to loom over someone else and I just sit. Were it a month, a year, or ten, I would thy exile live till then; and all that space my mirth adjourn, so thou wouldst promise to return.

  On Tuesday I go to visit my mother. She lives in one of those scruffy squares on the fringes of South Kensington where everyone is either going down or coming up, and the former derive comfort from despising the latter. Mother lives in a basement flat, forever quoting the words of the estate agent who called it Tight and airy’, as though that were nearer the truth than her own daily experience of it as cramped and sunless. Even so, she lives better than some of her friends, ex-pats with leathery faces now sitting in one room hemmed in by brass and cane and memories. My father’s modest legacy, the fruit of a lifetime of prudence, has at least saved her from that. Empty McDonald’s boxes bowl along the gutters and into the area steps, but nothing more threatening happens than the attempted rape of one Pekinese by another. Anyway, Mother doesn’t keep Pekes. She has cats. And it is SW7.

  ‘When Daddy died, tell me, how did you get over it?’

  She is startled. The question seems almost indecent.

  ‘Well, darling, we’d known it was coming for a long time. We were … prepared.’

  ‘I don’t mean before, when you were together, I mean afterwards, when you were alone.’

  But woe is me! The longest date too narrow is to calculate these empty hopes.

  ‘One … mourns … naturally …’

  She pronounces it ‘moorns’; oh, the dreadful gentility of grief!

  ‘I know that, but how did you go on?’

  ‘Darling, whatever is the matter?’

  To her astonishment and mine I burst into tears, gasping and retching, trying to turn my face away and mutter, ‘Sorry’ and ‘Don’t know’, and eventually she comes across to the armchair where I am sitting and kneels beside me and puts her arms awkwardly round my knees, waist, anything she can reach, murmuring, ‘There, there’ and ‘Never mind’, till I judder to a halt. She goes and gets me a clean handkerchief and when we have both settled back into our separate armchairs I say, ‘I’m sorry. I had no idea that was going to happen. I never cry. Daddy stopped me, years ago.’

  ‘Daddy did?’

  ‘Yes. It was the only way I could get the better of him. He was so strong. The one thing I could do was refuse to let him see me cry.’

  ‘Your father, strong?’

  ‘Of course. Terrifyingly so.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Oh Mummy, do stop repeating yourself!’

  ‘You amaze me, Constance. Your father, God bless him, was the weakest man I ever knew. He couldn’t say boo to a goose!’

  ‘Well then why was he forever saying it to me?’

  ‘I used to tell him what he had to say to you when you’d been … rude and naughty …’

  ‘Why didn’t you say it yourself?’

  ‘That was his job. After all, I did everything else. Cooked for you, looked after you, made sure your clothes were clean and ironed – this was well before the days of your “Women’s Lib”, you know – I did everything for you and Stella. His job was to punish you. Tell you off. Discipline you.’

  ‘Come to think of it, he wasn’t much good at it. He usually sat on the end of my bed and said nothing. But it made me feel so guilty, imagining he knew all the things I’d done wrong …’

  ‘Typical! That’s just like Daddy. I used to tell him exactly what he must say and now you tell me he just used to sit there in silence! That’s absolutely typical.’

  My poor father, not an ogre at all, but nearly as fearful as I had been myself.

  ‘Well, what about his views on sex then? He was appallingly strict with us both. All that stuff about going virgin to the altar, making boys respect you … Why did he dish out all that rubbish?’

  ‘Constance, dear, it isn’t rubbish. It’s quite right and very important. It never did you any harm.’

  I sigh. How can I begin to explain to her now, after all these years, the unspeakable harm it did?

  ‘Oh yes, Mother, I think it did quite a lot of damage. But don’t let’s talk about all that now. It’s far too late.’

  ‘It’s only just five. You’re being absurd to get so upset. Is it your new friend, that Polish gentleman or whatever he is? You haven’t talked much about him lately: how is he? How’s it… going?’

  ‘Look: I brought some petits fours as a treat. Shall we sit down and have tea?’

  ‘What a good idea! You know, Cordelia rang me the other day …’

  She is on safe ground, as she chatters away proudly about her grandchildren, enabling me to observe how skilfully they edit their lives so as to present her with a version that she will find acceptable. She has edited my life. The Authorized Constance. But unfortunately for her, more unfortunately for me, I became a woman in the decade of the Revised Version; woman according to Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett and Betty Friedan and Jane Fonda. To me they were names to conjure with, but my mother hadn’t even come to grips with Doctors Freud and Spock. I was reared according to the strict principles of Doctor Truby King: meaning that, from babyhood onwards, being ‘good’ was equated with punctuality – regular meals, bowel movements, and bedtime. There was only one flaw in this tidy routine, summed up in the lines girls used to write in autograph books when I was at school: ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.’ For I was clever, there was no denying it, and however hard I tried to be good the cleverness would out. Instead of playing with dolls and helping Mummy in the kitchen and keeping my room and my clothes and face and hands nice and clean, I would be crunched in a corner absorbed in a book. My mother tried her best. She urged me to go our, go for a walk, join the pony club, the tennis club, the Young Conservatives; she tried to teach me the proper way to make pastry and gravy and my bed; she bought me pastel twinsets and tweed skirts; she made me wear gloves and an elasticated corset called a roll-on; she instructed me never to buy cheap shoes or handbags because ‘you can always tell a lady by her shoes’. But in spite of her best efforts I remained more interested in Jane Eyre or Becky Sharp or Héloïse and Abélard.

  All these precepts I threw over when it came to bringing up my own daughters, but not all the cleverness in the world could save me from my early conditioning and so I grew up into a conventional rebel. The guiding emotion of my first twenty years was guilt, and its counterpart, secrecy. I rebelled by sleeping with my boyfriend and conformed by marrying him. I rebelled by marrying a man who was lower-class, by my parents’ lights, and conformed by staying at home to look after him. And then, just as I was turning into a good wife and mother, he rebelled by leaving me and asking for a divorce. After that, feminism got the upper hand – it had to; I had to earn a living. Paying bills is very liberating. Even then I became a ‘good’ feminist, wearing boilersuits and Oxfam clothes and rejecting make-up for a year or two until my outrageously, gloriously punk teenagers taught me that you could be brash and glittery with fake everything without compromising on liberation.

&nb
sp; That’s why the gulf between me and my mother now yawns so wide that as we sit facing each other across the damask-covered tea table with its Spode tea service and real silver, our only safe topic of conversation is cats. We compare notes on flea-collars and tinned cat food and my turbulent burst of crying is not referred to. Yet she needs to be needed. She worries about me. She must also, surely, be curious about Iwo: for I had hinted, early on in the relationship, that I had met a man whom I might marry. This would be a great relief to her. She has never come to terms with my divorced state and longs to be able to tell her Kensington friends that ‘Constance is getting married again … yes, such a nice man …’ Instead, we talk about the cats. But as I stand outside her front door and just as I am about to climb the stone steps to pavement level, she says, ‘I do miss him, you know, Daddy. I often talk to him.’

  ‘Do you, Mother?’ I say, astonished, for they never talked much while he was alive.

  ‘Yes. When I have my little drink at six, I tell him what I’ve been doing during the day. Silly, isn’t it? Well darling, off you go, or you’ll be late with the children’s supper.’

  Off I go. She is growing old and she is alone and nobody touches her except by accident. It will happen to me as well.

  17

  Marina’s wedding is less than two weeks away. I have offered my house for their wedding reception, but I live too far from Fulham for this to be practicable and, in any case, the members of the Polish Airforce Club where she works have insisted that she should hold it there. Peter has accepted this – after all, it’s the last time she will appear in a Polish setting – and has also agreed that Iwo and I should be in loco parentis for the day. In preparation for this I now spend an hour five times a week taking Polish lessons with Magda.