Love Among the Single Classes Read online

  Their clothes are acquired in the same haphazard way: by borrowing, swapping, rummaging in sales or charity shops, and the end result is a faded, pouchy, comfortable look. Only their hair is elaborately savage. I am touched by their skills in dressing and living – born of the necessity for economy, but carried off with great style. I envy their freedom from the constraints that bedevilled me at their age. My clothes, chosen by my mother, paid for by my father, were safe, dull and expensive – camel coats and leather gloves and Harris tweed skirts – proclaiming me a nice middle-class girl, safe, dull and expensive. Yet I didn’t feel myself to be any of those things, and I seethed under this false image.

  Over breakfast the children sort out their immediate needs.

  ‘Max, can I borrow your leather jacket for a couple of weeks?’ asks Cordy.

  ‘Yeah, great, and what am I supposed to wear?’

  ‘I’ll swap you for the Crombie.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had one.’

  It’s Ben’s, but he won’t mind.’

  ‘Hasn’t got much choice, has he? Yeah, OK. Give it back next time I see you.’

  ‘What time do you have to be at work?’

  ‘Half nine-ish.’

  ‘If you got there early we could all leave together,’ says Kate, pleadingly.

  ‘Get your skates on, then …’

  And in a hectic ten minutes they’re suddenly all gone. I should be hurrying too, but instead I pour myself another cup of tepid coffee and sit at the breakfast table, its cloth warmed by the sun pouring in through the breakfast room windows. The children had been tactful about my late return home last night, but I sensed their unspoken questions.

  Only Kate voiced her feelings directly. I thought he was very foreign,’ she had said, meaning, Am I going to be supplanted? Do you still love me? We don’t want him here.

  Cordy, voicing my own uncertainty, had asked, ‘Are you going to see him again?’

  ‘I don’t know yet, but I think so. I hope so. We didn’t exactly arrange anything but … well, yes, probably.’

  ‘Were we OK at lunch? Any mother would be proud of us, all that sort of stuff?’

  ‘Shut up Max. You were fine.’

  ‘Wait till he gets to know what we’re really like!’ said realistic Kate.

  I get to work eventually, a bit late, but nobody much comes into the library first thing on a Monday morning. A few old people, anxious for company after a solitary weekend; a few who’re unemployed, wanting to get to the ‘Situations Vacant’ first. There’s the odd school child playing truant, asking about books for some project. Or maybe not playing truant at all: sitting down in a quiet corner of the library and working out how to research something, being shown how to find the way through a zig-zag of indexes, bibliographies and back numbers, from encyclopaedia to microfiche and the orderly logic of the Dewey system. This must be at least as educational as sitting day-dreaming in a noisy classroom. One of my favourites comes in, bright-eyed, pigtailed Jackie.

  ‘Miss, we’re doing a project on servants in the olden days, like, Queen Victorian times. Have you got any books I can look at?’

  ‘Jackie, you ought to be in school. Why didn’t you come and ask me on Saturday?’

  ‘I had to help me Mum. She’s on nights at the moment and so I had to do the shopping ‘cause she doesn’t get home till nine most mornings and then she’s dead knackered.’

  ‘Oh Jackie … well, where does the school think you are?’

  ‘I told Carol to say I was poorly. Oh Miss, it’s only German and RE this morning and I went to church Sunday and I hate German …’.

  ‘Victorian servants then … let’s see. Have you got any ideas? Did your teacher suggest anything?’

  And we’re off, Jackie and I, engrossed in the hardships of scullery maids and ‘tweenies a century ago. Jackie herself would have been a ‘tweeny in those days: who says things haven’t improved?

  The next one in is another regular, Mr Southgate. A tiny little man, scarcely bigger than a ten-year-old boy, he’s a pensioner who has fought in two wars, though God knows how he ever passed his medical for either of them, let alone survived. Endlessly cheerful, cracking the same old jokes – ‘Ask me how old I am? I’m twenty-one next birthday!’ – he is a tribute to the best that harsh discipline and a sense of place can produce. Mr Southgate still lives in the house he was born into, eighty-three years ago, though his parents and his sister and his wife, with whom he shared it once, are all long dead. Now he takes in lodgers, and because he has never really caught up with the value of money today, let alone decimalization, he undercharges and is ruthlessly exploited by rascally drunken single men. He tells me his stories of cleaning up the stairs on Friday nights in a tone of respectable indignation that is nonetheless quite without self-pity. I have sometimes tried to suggest he should ask a social worker to help him to extract the rent that’s long overdue, but he says, regardless of the irony, ‘No, thank you; I’d rather keep myself to myself. So long as I still have my strength I’ll keep the house clean without help from anyone, thank you very much all the same. Though what my dear wife would have said, if she could have seen the stairs Saturday night, after that man on the top floor had come home, I don’t know. He’d had a skinful, I tell you …’

  Mr Southgate comes in to talk to me and to read the papers. He reads the Express and the Mirror, as he has done all his life, and doesn’t seem to notice the changes that have transformed them over the years. The scandalous goings-on of ‘Dynasty’ stars are as remote to him as stories from behind the scenes on the great transatlantic liners. Apart from his brief and violent forays out of England for the wars, his world has been bounded by the same few streets for eighty years, and everything beyond them is fabulous to him. Joan Collins, Gertie Lawrence, Mrs Simpson, Princess Di … they’re all more or less mythical beings, who wear their heads upon their shoulders.

  ‘You’re looking nice this morning,’ he says kindly. ‘You look as if you got a nice rosy glow at the weekend. Go up to the Heath did you, with the kiddies?’

  ‘Yes … yes. I had a lovely walk on the Heath.’

  ‘I thought so. Does them good to have a bit of fresh air, doesn’t it? I like to see a family enjoying themselves together, out of doors. Lovely day, Saturday?’

  ‘Yes … lovely day,’ I say.

  Lovely day, lovely day, the corn was orient and immortal wheat… O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem!

  ‘And what about you, Mr Southgate? What did you do?’

  ‘Got up to mischief of course, dear, like I always do!’

  ‘Now then, were you looking for any particular book?’

  I think I’m a good librarian. I love books, and the people who read them, and if that makes me intolerant of the video and computer age, it doesn’t much matter in here. Paul was embarrassed by my job. It didn’t fit in with his Creative Director image at dinner parties. He’d rather I had either stayed at home, and then he could continue to make jokes about me being the last housewife in captivity; or else that I had found some trendy, highly-paid job in the media. When I pointed out that I did work in the media, it just wasn’t very highly paid, he would look pained.

  I’ve always been addicted to the printed word. A former headmistress once said, ‘If Constance had nothing else to read, she’d read the label on a jam jar!’

  She meant to be scathing, and the other girls tittered sycophantically, but I thought she was being silly. You could learn a lot from the labels on jam jars … and besides, the other girls would only gaze into space and moon. Was that supposed to be better?

  So my first thought, when Kate started school and I decided I could now take a job with a clear conscience, was something to involve me with books. I would have been quite happy in a bookshop, but the humiliation of having his wife working as a shop assistant was more than Paul could contemplate. I tried to argue that all advertising is only selling. I’d heard him propound the argument often enough at dinner pa
rties, when smart young women fresh out of university and burning to write had asked him if it wasn’t an awful come-down, when you’d got a First in English, to wind up working in advertising? The moment he heard that contemptuous stress on the first syllable, advertising, adman, Paul would assume his patient, sophisticated smile and take them through his catechism about selling. But evidently the same didn’t apply to me and bookshops.

  ‘Not even Hatchards?’ I’d said. ‘Then I’d be near your office and we could meet for lunch sometimes. That would be nice …’

  ‘My dear girl, you wouldn’t stand a chance of getting a job in Hatchards!’ Paul had answered.

  So I did a year’s course in librarianship, and started work within a month of completing it. There aren’t that many librarians with a First from Oxford, and although I didn’t tell my colleagues, it showed up on my c.v. and must have impressed the selection committee. They probably thought I wouldn’t stay, but I have spent nearly nine years now in the same public library. It helped to tide me over the utter disorientation I felt when Paul left me, and my raging sense of pain and injustice over the divorce. My incredulity at the distortion of our marriage as expressed in solicitors’ letters, and later my fury over the court proceedings, were tamed and made bearable by the sweet unvarying routine of the Dewey system and the old ladies, the truanting children and the coffee breaks.

  ‘Have a good weekend, Constance?’ says young Steve, the assistant. ‘Get up to any no good?’

  ‘Yes,’ I tell him; Tots of no good. Absolutely no good at all.’

  ‘Good for you. About time.’

  ‘You serious?’ asks little Linda. ‘You mean someone took you out?’

  I laugh at the frank disbelief in anyone of twenty-two that somebody twice her age could possibly be engaged in the same process of nodding and smiling, becking and advancing that she pursues so avidly through the pubs and discos of north London.

  ‘Hey …’ says Steve chivalrously. ‘Constance isn’t exactly tombstone material just yet.’

  ‘Sorry … I didn’t mean … actually you are looking good,’ says Linda belatedly, as she puckers her eyes through the cigarette smoke and looks at me properly for the first time.

  ‘What about you, Lind?’ I ask. ‘Give us the next instalment. How goes passion and poverty in Kentish Town?’

  ‘Well!’ says Linda, in a great thump of remembered indignation, like a gas heater igniting from the pilot light; and Steve and I stir our Nescafe and listen to her wonderful Thousand and One Nights with Stavros, the unemployed Greek with whom she lives. Stavros is male chauvinist pig incarnate; an overweight, sleepy-eyed figure who sometimes shambles into the library to ‘borrow’ a couple of pounds from Linda so that he can sit in the Greek café over Greek newspapers with his Greek friends … all of whom strenuously resist the idea of ever going back to Athens.

  Very soon I switch my ‘Really?’ and ‘So you…?’ on to automatic, so that I can think about Iwo. He was reluctant to talk about Poland, yet I sensed that it was tremendously important to him, and still exerted a magnetic pull. I knew little about Polish politics, or history – though I shall go home laden with the best the library can offer and start remedying that – and anyway I was much more interested in learning about his personal history.

  He had come to England as a political refugee, he said, at the beginning of 1982. He knew that opinion in the West was sympathetic to what was happening in Poland, and felt he had the best chance then, not only of being granted political asylum, but also of finding a post in some English university. ‘Why England? Why not America?’ I had asked, meaning, What miracle has brought you over here, within my reach, from the unimaginably distant and foreign country where you spent the first half of your life? He felt that Europe would be more congenial than America; that it would offer more of the culture that was his by inheritance. His image of English people – it was hardly more than that, he’d met so few – was preferable to his image of Americans. Also, he’d had some correspondence with academics in English universities. Not much, he would have cultivated them a great deal more had he known how crucially he was to need them one day; but at any rate he had a few names of people who he hoped would be helpful. In the event, they offered sympathy, but precious little else. A lecture or two to start with, perhaps: ‘Totalitarianism and the Road to Serfdom’; ‘Solidarity and the new Socialist Economies’, that sort of thing. Well received by idealistic young students, or coldly received by Marxist-Leninist students, it made little difference, since after one or two visits, rewarded with fifty pounds and expenses, he was not asked to go back.

  ‘Is it my English, you think?’ he had enquired; and certainly his English was stilted and his accent harsh.

  But he was able to put over his ideas perfectly clearly so, ‘No,’ I said, I didn’t think that was likely to be the real reason.

  ‘So then what?’

  How could I say, we are simple, over here in England, and we are ignorant. We think in crude stereotypes and, to put it most crudely, you do not look like Lech Walesa, or like a shipyard worker. You are not a man of the people: bluff, powerful, passionate, with a strong face and charismatic eyes. You look more like an English civil servant. You look aloof, composed, superior, secret: not the sort of exile to whom we extend our charity and a welcome. You intimidate us. Had you been a refugee from the ancien reǵime, that might have been different. Then your aristocratic appearance would have fitted in with our expectations.

  Unconsciously I stretch and close my eyes as I recollect the sexual well-being of only twelve hours ago. The gesture is momentary, but it catches Steve’s eye and he smiles at me, and says, nothing. How damning a silence can be, or how companionable!

  Back in the library, the rest of the morning deteriorates. I am obsessed by the thought that Iwo is trying to ring me, and it becomes more and more impossible to concentrate. I decide that the earliest time at which I can say, casually, ‘Anyone mind if I pop off home for a quick lunch?’ is twelve fifteen. This means I watch the clock, and every five minutes slipping by, scrupulous in holding to my self-imposed deadline. Just after ten past twelve I am forced to delay, since I am singled out by a deaf and dumb woman to interpret her urgent reading needs. ‘M’ha B’hahine!’ it sounds like, and she aims these explosive syllables at me ever more loudly, like anybody speaking their own clear language to a wilfully stupid foreigner, while I smile helplessly and try every possible interpretation. I am sympathetic; I can imagine all too clearly that this simple encounter – let alone any social occasion – must be an ordeal. But try as I may, her sharply expelled barks make no sense, and in the end I have to resort to paper and pencil, knowing that this means she has failed, and must be infuriating.

  ‘I am sorry to be so stupid,’ I write, ‘I have a headache and I can’t quite follow you. Could you write it down please?’ It turns out she wants a book on marathon running, but at least the library stocks plenty of those, so we stand grinning and jerking our eyebrows up and down over a selection until eventually she leaves satisfied.

  It is early to take a lunch-break, but my need to be at home for Iwo’s phone call becomes overwhelming. I leave the counter and hurry out into another brilliant autumn day. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world.

  I sit in my breakfast room at home once again, revelling in the luxury of being alone. I look at the telephone as though looking will make it ring. Needing to discharge this pent-up energy in some action, however trivial, I write a note which I sellotape firmly beside the phone, instructing Kate to: ‘Ask for Iwo’s phone number if he rings (and don’t tell him I said so!)’

  I need to recall, as far as possible, his exact words. His unique voice is a help, for it gives rhythm and tune to what he says, as well as words. Ah, now, here it comes: the most important and beautiful thing he said during the weekend. On Sunday afternoon, after lunch had been eaten and cleared away and the children had dispersed to their rooms t
o work, meaning, I knew, to compare notes about him, he had been sitting beside me on the sofa and we were talking desultorily.

  Suddenly he said, in a phrase of beautiful tenderness and eroticism, ‘I should like you to stay with me tonight, for we can talk to each other differently when you have seen how I live and I have held you in my arms.’ The avoidance of sexual statement, his concentration on the protective tenderness of holding me in his arms, was devastating. It was also uncannily perceptive, for as well as wanting him to make love to me, my wish to be enclosed within his arms was hallucinatingly vivid.

  What else, what else? There had been moments, during the hours we spent talking over the weekend, when statements that might almost have sounded eccentric had struck a deep reciprocal echo. It was he, for instance, who had tried to express his strange, strong feeling that inwardly he was the same person at fifty-four as he had been as a small boy, and I could hardly let him finish, so deeply did I share that conviction.

  ‘Yes! Yes! I must have been about ten, or even less, anyhow still quite a little girl, when I first felt the central core of myself as something distinct and secret from others, and that grasp of who I am has never changed! I know exactly what you mean!’ This odd sense of self, its lifelong unchanging integrity, is common to most people I dare say: but no-one had ever expressed it to me before, and Iwo and I had clasped hands at that moment and looked at each other in astonished discovery and wonder. We were speechless. It was one of the most profound and moving exchanges of my life … why?

  Impossible to say. I had passed beyond words into images and the image was of a diver plunging down, down, down through sheets of darkening water. What came to the surface was the phrase, ‘I am fathoms deep in love’, which I understood for the first time. My heart was beating violently so that it reverberated in my chest, and I said to him, ‘My heart beats so hard it almost hurts.’