Love Among the Single Classes Page 4

  I say to myself again, as the apple and cheese and cup of coffee burn in the brilliance of the sunlight that streams through the window, I am fathoms deep in love. And indeed I feel like a diver who has endured a change in atmospheric pressure. I can’t adjust to the lighter, airier freedom of the world on the surface. Deep down, in that new subaqueous zone into which I have plunged, I move with an overwhelming gravity of heart and mind, my body weighted with a new awareness. Love is the oxygen I breathe, love keeps me alive, fragile and sparkling like shoals of tiny spherical bubbles. Can Iwo be undergoing a similar ecstasy of awareness? I try to imagine him bent in concentration over his work, his fingers dotting glue into the crack in a violin, perhaps, and his mind swollen with thoughts of me: and I can’t, of course. If he were feeling as I do now he would telephone. Already my cheerful certainty that he is bound to ring is ebbing away. If only I can retain the confidence I had while we were together, that feeling that everything would be all right … I hurry back to the library, dispirited and late.

  As I return to the counter I see by the rack of periodicals the person I least want to face at this moment. It is Fred, poet, playwright and critic, unsuccessful at all three and passionately unemployed. Fred has the burning eyes of a starveling, yet he dreams, not of being rich or famous, but of being good. Meanwhile, he devotes himself humbly to what he calls ‘an apprenticeship in my chosen craft’. He told me once that he had analysed all thirty-seven of Shakespeare’s plays, drawing up graphs which divided each play into acts, then into scenes, and tracing with differently coloured lines the entry and exit of each character in each play. He had also blocked in, with appropriate colours, every major speech. He had symbols for themes. The thought of this immense and pointless task filled me with pity; so that when, one afternoon as the library was closing, he invited me to come to his room and see these great double sheets of graph paper pinned up around the walls to inspire him, I could not bring myself to refuse, even though I knew what the outcome would be. And so it was.

  In the two years since then, I had gone to Fred’s room only a few times, when the force of his unspoken need became impossible to resist. He never put any pressure on me to sleep with him. He despised emotional blackmail: Fred was ideologically very sound, but I was fairly sure he slept with no-one else. Fred was not repellent. He didn’t smell, he didn’t scratch, he didn’t live in chaos, although he had only one shabby room. He wasn’t even a bad lover. But his lack of talent as a writer would never be redeemed by diligence or determination or luck or good timing. Fred was doomed to be forever unpublished and unperformed. The only time he got into print was when he spotted advance notices of amateur theatricals by people like the John Lewis Drama Club or the London Transport Operatic Society. Then he would write to the director or producer, requesting tickets for the first, and often only night, and promising a review. These reviews could be relied upon to appear in the house magazine concerned, for Fred was fair and detailed in his apportioning of praise or, very rarely, blame.

  I hated sleeping with Fred because I felt so unbearably sorry for him. A writer’s style is his character, and Fred’s plays reflected his dogged small-scale hopelessness. I couldn’t bring myself to criticize or praise his writing; though I knew he hungered for textual analysis. This meant that I had to comment on his dedication, single-mindedness, refusal to compromise, lack of materialism. He didn’t know why his writing was bad, and believed obstinately that one day one of the fringe theatre managements to whom he sent his dog-eared typescripts would write back asking him to come in and discuss his play. Then, he had already decided, he would fight for the integrity of his work. ‘I won’t let them change a line,’ Fred would declare, ‘at least, not unless they can convince me their line is better. Which I doubt.’ It is hard to feel sexual desire for a man you pity, and the margin between pitying Fred and despising him was narrow.

  Seeing Fred in the library I know at once that I will never make love with him again: Iwo has accomplished that much for me already. I scribble a note, ‘I have to talk to you Fred: can you ring me later at home? Reverse the charges if you like,’ and feel irritated by the way his eyes light up. He smiles at me complicitly and leaves the library with an anthology of Kenneth Tynan’s reviews.

  There’s a lull in the early afternoon. The pensioners are dozing, mothers are still relaxing at home over coffee before the toddlers and children have to be collected, so not much is demanded of me. I sort through Saturday’s more esoteric requests, and ring round the other libraries to see if they have an early novel by James Hanley, an A level textbook on geology, or The Undergrowth of Literature. Thank God for books! The letters and words which crawl across the pages like flies or insects take off and soar into four dimensions when they are read. I always ask the children who come for readers’ tickets why they like books.

  ‘You can get lost in them and the time just goes and you never even notice.’

  ‘It’s like living other people’s lives and lets you feel as though it’s you.’

  ‘Learn about things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘The olden days.’

  ‘The stars, I like looking at the stars. My Dad says he’ll give me a telescope next birthday.’

  ‘You’ve got to, haven’t you? For school.’

  ‘Would you otherwise?’

  ‘No fear. I’d rather watch telly.’

  Not many of them have ever said, ‘It’s for the words.’ Yet it is language that I love about books rather than the imaginary world to which the language conducts you.

  So I am happy in the library and have never wanted to aim for the rarefied jobs to which my degree is supposed to entitle me. I lack those qualities of ruthlessness and hypocrisy which success evidently demands, and I’m not very good at self-advertisement either. Those were Paul’s talents, though I didn’t know it when I married him, and I was more than content to let him push for both of us. I genuinely admired his energy, the vigour with which he drove through life, achieving a level of comfort and security for all of us that I would never have aspired to. Probably that was why I got left behind. First he was embarrassed by my indifference to our new trendy status, then irritated, and finally contemptuous.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Constance,’ he had said towards the end of our marriage, when I was at home engrossed in Kate, ‘can’t you at least get a decent haircut? I give you a clothes allowance, for crying out loud: what’s the matter with you? Do you want more? Ask me! Shall I get Madeleine’ (his secretary) ‘to take you out shopping one day? I could give her the afternoon off. She always looks great. You …’ His voice tailed off in despair. He didn’t dare spell out for either of us how dowdy I seemed beside the brilliant creatures with whom he worked.

  No, it wasn’t Madeleine who had ended our marriage. Perhaps he’d had an affair with her at some time; I really hadn’t thought about it. He was my husband and mine were his children and his house was our home and I looked after it and him and them: and that, I had thought, was that. The thought of bird of paradise Madeleine ‘taking me out shopping’ was terrifying. I imagined myself in the sort of colour combinations that suited her – green with purple; navy blue and yellow; black and grey and orange – and then thought of my own comfortable clothes. Soft shirts or sweaters with jeans for the day; red or black for evenings out. I used to think I looked quite nice. Other people occasionally thought so too. I remembered how once, towards the end of a dinner party, I had felt Ron Rendle’s hand close firmly over my thigh under the damask tablecloth. I had sat transfixed with shock, neither moving my leg nor his hand, nor flirting with Ron. I had not felt flattered, or sexy, or even indignant: just silly, as the hand grew hotter, squeezing my leg spasmodically from time to time. In the end Ron took it away. Ron had been Paul’s boss and I realized, looking back, that Paul might have been pleased that Ron had wanted to squeeze my thigh. Ron, with his whisky and cigarette breath, his expensively shapeless and crumpled clothes, his sloppy mid-Atlantic turn of ph
rase, epitomized everything I disliked about advertising, and I sent my red dress to be cleaned, asking them to do it particularly thoroughly.

  Before the after-school rush of children begins, I search in the microfiche and then along the shelves for books about Poland. The magic numbers are 943.8. There, amid more famous chunks of European history – the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Hungarian Revolution – stand a few books on modern Poland, with garish red covers and aggressive titles. The word ‘Solidarnosc’ with its bannered logo splashes like a bloodstain across the jacket of more than one. Avid to learn everything about Poland – when you fall in love with a foreigner you fall in love with his homeland, too – I ring up our central library.

  ‘Maggie? Constance. Listen, would you do me a favour? Send over the best you’ve got on modern Poland, would you? … No, it’s for me, personally … Oh, post-1940, I should think … Well, call it a sort of project I’m doing. Can you get it into tomorrow’s delivery? … You’re a love. You OK? … Yes, I’m fine, and more than fine.’

  The books are on their way.

  At the end of the day I take home the ones I’ve found on our own shelves, which have now become precious clues to the riddle of Iwo.

  All my life I have tried to control events through books. When I was first pregnant with Max, even before he had become a moving bump, I was scouring bookshops for the best on pregnancy, birth and motherhood. As the months wore on, I read more and more compulsively, as though by knowing everything about natural childbirth, derived from Grantley Dick-Read, Pierre Lamaze, and other white-coated patrons of the labour ward, I could somehow earn gold stars towards my own initiation into that awesome temple. In the event, Max was a straightforward delivery. I breathed my way through the first stage just as I’d been taught, while Paul played the part of the dutiful father, sponging my dry lips and performing a strange fluttering massage called ‘effleurage’ on my hugely inflated stomach. I panted through the second stage, proud of the midwife’s approval and of the fact that I wasn’t letting Paul down by needing drugs or gas and air; until suddenly, with unimaginable force and urgency, my new-born son was there.

  I discovered with my two subsequent babies that I possessed that most rare and practical female talent: instant birth. Our first daughter was born with such indecent haste that the midwife hadn’t even been summoned, let alone had time to reach us. Twenty minutes from first to last gasp, before she slid into Paul’s waiting hands. Textbook,’ said her father smugly; ‘total textbook.’

  I was a diligent pupil, eager to learn all that books could teach. Our shelves were a reflection of my various enthusiasms, some of them short-lived – Arthurian Britain, sixteenth-century Japan – and others prolonged over two decades. When Paul left me, and his absence turned into a definite separation, and then into a divorce, we agreed very simply that he should take the car, all the records and the stereo system, which I had used so seldom that I was still inclined to call it a gramophone, leaving me all the books.

  My walk back home from the library is another of the comforting rituals of my day. It’s only half a mile, but I can seldom resist going via the baker to buy treats for the children’s tea, even now; the Greek greengrocer, who loves to hear me say ‘Endaxi’ and ‘Malister’, as Stavros has taught me; the flowershop or postershop or stationers. These few hundred yards are my village; here I am known and recognized and greeted and safe. Shopkeepers and sometimes even parents consult me about how to persuade their children to read; yet when I say, ‘But do you read yourself, Mr Kyriakos? Are there books around the place?’ they look baffled or offended. The Indian lady in the stationery shop tells me in her staccato, tinkling voice that it’s disgraceful the way young schoolboys come in and snigger over the men’s magazines, which she calls ‘porny books’, and how thankful she is that her own sons are safely cloistered in a fee-paying school, away from such temptations.

  It’s getting dark by the time I reach home – this time yesterday and the day before, Iwo and I were together – and the house too is in darkness. Of course: Monday is Kate’s jazz practice session and she’ll be home late. The other two are away for the rest of the week. I have the house to myself, and more time to think about Iwo.

  Not an hour has passed all day long without my thinking about him, but those were hurried, incomplete thoughts. Now I have time to sit down and think about him in leisurely, languid detail. I start by toying with the temptation to ring him. Even though I know I won’t, nevertheless I imagine finding out his phone number: comparatively easy, now that I have his address, and then ringing the house, and asking for him, and his coming to the phone … and then what? My mind plays two possible conversations. One goes:

  ‘Hello, Iwo? This is Constance.’

  ‘Constance! My dear! How good! How much I have been thinking about you.’

  ‘Oh, Iwo, me too … Didn’t we have a wonderful weekend?’

  ‘Extraordinary.’ He would say ‘extraordinary’. It’s one of our key words.

  In counterpoint to this trusting little dialogue however there runs a more cryptic conversation.

  ‘Hello, Iwo? It’s Constance.’

  ‘Yes Constance, good evening.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘I am well, thank you. I am sorry I did not escort you home yesterday evening. I hope you arrived safe.’

  ‘Oh yes, heavens yes, yes of course I did. Thank you.’

  ‘So. You are well?’

  ‘Oh fine, yes, fine …’

  After which it peters out in humiliation and misery.

  I prefer to forgo the possible bliss of the first rather than risk the rebuff of the second, so although I pick the receiver up and put it down a couple of times, to reassure myself that the dialling tone is still there and the telephone will ring if prompted, I do nothing else.

  In the kitchen I feed the clamorous, undulating cats and take a couple of pork chops out of the fridge to reach room temperature. These, with yesterday’s leftover roast potatoes and vegetables made into bubble and squeak, will be supper for Kate and me. Then I carry my Polish books through to the drawing room and sit on the sofa by the window in the steeply falling darkness. The room is shadowy and placid, its surfaces cluttered with trinkets and trophies of twenty years. Paul’s mother’s collection of enamel boxes had left with Paul, and I wasn’t sorry to see them go. I prefer the random assortment of objects which I have gathered … a saucerless cup of piercing turquoise, its porcelain so fine that each finger is outlined against the blue when looked at from the other side. A plain jug, eight-sided, with a most satisfying shape. A bonbonnière of a strange greeny-yellow cut crystal. Few of these bits and pieces have any value, yet they, like my local shops, define who I am and the small daily choices I make.

  Iwo had said something strange, as he arrived for lunch: Tt is so long since I have been in an ordinary room!’

  At the time I was baffled; now, having seen the house and the room where he lives, I understand better. He had not praised my crowded, comfortable home, any more than he had praised my children or my cooking, nor had he apologized for his room or explained its austerity.

  Despite this reticence, I remind myself that I had felt sure when we parted that he would telephone me. The happy feeling that everything will be all right fills me again, and I turn on the lights and start to prepare supper.

  3

  Two nights later, just as doubts are seriously undermining my confidence, he does ring.

  ‘Hello: Constance? This is Iwo. Zaluski.’

  ‘Iwo! Yes! Hello! How are you? I’m so glad you rang.’

  ‘Please, don’t make me feel as if I should have rung before!’

  ‘No, no … of course you … I didn’t mean that!’

  ‘I know, my dear, I am only teasing you. I want to go and see a film with you. Will you be free?’

  ‘Oh yes! How wonderful! Yes, when?’

  It is arranged. This is Wednesday; we are to meet on Friday. I warn him that, as my
children always say, my ideal film would be one made in black and white before 1940 with subtitles. He laughs.

  ‘And I, of course, am quite opposite. I like decadent Westerns and Hollywood movies, with much blood and rabbits.’ Rabbits? Oh, robots.

  ‘It will be difficult to find a film that suits us both, Iwo.’

  Then we may have to see two.’

  I am brimming and foolish with joy. Only Kate is faintly sullen: it’s clear she doesn’t like Iwo, and I know I must be tactful; I must try not to talk about him all the time, must not persuade her how nice he is really, must understand that, to her, he is a tall, thin, laconic foreigner who has disrupted her mother’s life.

  ‘Kate, my honey bunch, I’m going out on Friday.’

  ‘Yes. I know. With him.’

  ‘Yes darling, as you heard. Now listen, what will you do? Shall I ask Laura’ – my sister, the children’s favourite aunt – ‘to come over and cook you supper and spend the evening with you?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Mummy, I’m not a baby any more. I can cook my own supper. Can I have some friends round?’

  ‘Who? Not Billy and Rocco and that girl … what’s her name? The one who was so rude to me.’

  ‘Well I didn’t think your Polishman was particularly polite to me.’

  ‘Sweetheart, he’s got two daughters who he had to leave behind in Poland. He must miss them dreadfully. You probably reminded him of them and made him sad.’

  Kate is mollified, and we negotiate our way towards a compromise. I am to ring up Suzie’s mother, and Kate will spend the night there. We’ve had Suzie to stay here often enough: she won’t mind.

  Forty-eight hours until I see him again. I spend much of the time reading about Poland, realizing how little I actually know and how crude are my stereotypes of noble trade unionists, charismatic churchmen and patient, queuing women. When I’m not cramming chunks of Polish history I am fretting like a teenager about what to wear. My clothes, now that I examine them critically, seem chosen to make me look nondescript and sexless. Dusty-coloured shirts and sweaters, skirts that don’t fit properly, trousers that are never very well cut, shoes that allow me to walk briskly rather than elegantly. For the first time I glimpse myself through Paul’s eyes, and see what a dowdy figure I must have appeared to him and his colleagues. Poor Paul: his antennae perfectly tuned to every shift on the fashion wavelength, how depressing it must have been for him to partner me. Now that I have the promise of happiness I feel tender and guilty towards him.