Love Among the Single Classes Read online

  On Friday evening, getting ready to meet Iwo, I indulge in narcissism for the first time in years. My vanity has only ever been focused upon my children or my husband. Now I pull clothes out of drawers and cupboards, try them on, reject them, ask Kate’s advice, reject that. I can’t remember when I last dressed with the conscious aim of pleasing a man; presenting myself as an object of desire. Have I ever worn beautiful underwear? The girls’ cotton pants and a couple of sensible bras had sufficed for years. Black lace made me feel timid and when Paul gave me bits of small frilly satin lingerie I had been too shy to parade them. Now I unwrap them after their years in tissue paper. Wearing them makes me walk differently. I tremble in the secret consciousness of my sexuality and the knowledge that, when I undress tonight, it will be in front of Iwo.

  Do I ever stop to consider that the violence and suddenness of my emotional commitment is unbalanced, even abnormal, or that my response is out of all proportion to anything Iwo is or could be? Am I sometimes calm, objective, cautious, sceptical? No, not for a moment. I pitch headlong into love. And yet from the very beginning I fear that I’m wrong. Love is fanned into a blaze by insecurity, and Iwo never allows me to feel sure of anything. It is not that he deliberately lies or misleads me, but he is … equivocal, evasive, tantalizing. He is the unicorn, alien and wary, and I the improbable virgin who may succeed in taming him. He has, after all, talked about his great longing for intimacy and trust. Alone in England, with a long lost past that he can’t go back to, his vulnerability is obvious.

  In the darkness of the cinema we both sprawl in our seats, almost lying rather than sitting, close but not touching. My right side burns with the imminence of contact. If I move just half an inch I could feel his shoulder, arm, wrist … hand … fingers? If I shift my leg fractionally it would rest against his. The sensation is so close that my own blood pulses faster, as though from contact with his; yet still we do not touch. He seems absorbed in the film. What stops me from simply taking his hand, or slipping my arm through his and snuggling up to him? It is, again, my sexual modesty. Indoctrinated since my teens with the belief that ‘no girl ever cheapens herself by running after a man’, and further intimidated by Paul’s physical indifference to me, it is impossible for me to initiate any contact, however slight. At parties or dinners I used to watch enviously as other women hinted and promised and dazzled with almost invisible movements of eyes, mouth or hands. It was a wonderful female skill and I never risked it.

  Iwo takes my arm. Easily, naturally, quite suddenly he turns and smiles at me in the dark and draws me closer. My heart leaps and I could sigh with joy. Instead, I frown at the film in pretended concentration.

  Afterwards we have a pizza and two glasses of wine and take the underground to Earls Court and lie once again side by side, naked, cold; above and below, pulsating, warm, in his bed, under the pale London night sky.

  In the sweet exhaustion and tenderness that comes just after making love, as we lie still locked together in our last grasp, returning gradually to our separate selves, I finally relax. In these few moments I can articulate my love: not as love, but delight in our mutual pleasure. Iwo is silent; not, I know, through disappointment, but because his form of sexual shyness is not physical but verbal. Perhaps he lacks an English vocabulary of tenderness and eroticism. I hope so. It would mean he had not slept with many other English women: maybe I am the first.

  I always mistrusted men who had to lash themselves into sexual activity with a string of dirty words – ‘I want to suck you and fuck you and lick you and prick you’ – a ritual incantation that had nothing to do with me but was all about naughty nights at prep, school when smutty schoolboys would shock and thrill each other with all the taboo words; so Iwo’s reticence does not disturb me. Yet when, half an hour later, we make love again, I am self-conscious about my gasps and high cries, which seem very loud in his labouring silence. Will the other lodgers hear? Will they pause outside his door, nudging one another as they listen to me? I decide that next time we make love, it will be in my bed. Also, I very much want us to spend a whole night together. He is drifting into sleep and so am I, and it is an effort to leave his warm body and slide my legs out of bed into the cold air and my feet on to the bare floor. I pick up my clothes from their stations around the room. Later I shall lovingly recall how they got there … here, just inside the door, he took me in his arms and pulled the dress high over my head; there, moving towards the bed, I kicked my shoes off; next, standing here by the curtain he unhooked my bra with one practised hand while the other curled around my breast; and right here beside the bed I pulled off this fragile slip and these tiny triangular pants … He lies in bed smiling as he watches me reverse the process.

  ‘I could take you home …’ he says.

  ‘Iwo, you have no intention of taking me home!’

  ‘No. But I will, if you want me to.’

  ‘I do want you to. But I want even more to leave this room with that image of you lying there in bed, so that I can picture you here as I sit on the tube going home.’

  I kneel on the floor and enfold his head and shoulders in my arms, printing kisses upon his cheek, the curve below his ear, the concave arch under his lifted chin. Now I could say it, now would be all right. Perdition catch my soul! But I do love thee, and when I love thee not, chaos is come again.

  Yet I don’t. I can’t speak.

  Early next morning, as I dawdle over coffee and oranges, he rings me. ‘Constance?’

  ‘Iwo! How are you? Did you sleep well? Thank you for last night.’

  ‘My dear, I am a very guilty man. I should not have let you go out alone, so late. Next time I will stay with you.’

  Next time! Oh joyful leap of the heart, oh promised bliss!

  ‘I agree. Definitely. Oh Iwo, have you seen what a beautiful morning it is?’

  ‘Of course. I have been up for long. I have been planning to take you a churn eye with me.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Churn eye. Train churn eye.’

  ‘Oh good. I love trains. Have you thought about where?’

  ‘I will explain when I see you. I plan to go to Newark. Are you free tomorrow? Or have you family obligations?’

  Iwo, Iwo, have you no idea how I feel? You don’t realize that nothing would get in the way of the chance to see you.

  ‘Newark? Whyever Newark?’

  ‘Can I tell you when we meet? Tomorrow is Sunday. Are you free?’

  ‘All right, yes, I am.’

  We arrange that he will come over here this evening for supper. I am left to puzzle over Newark. Relatives? A friend? A musical instrument to collect or deliver? What matters is that we are going there together.

  The night is our third together, and the first time we wake up in the same bed. I watch him wake, and doze, and wake again, and pretend to doze, for as long as I dare, and then go down to make our breakfast, leaving him to the uninterrupted solitude of a bath. We get to the station early and at the bookstall I make one of my most important discoveries yet about Iwo. I buy a Sunday paper, and a French magazine.

  ‘Why do you read that?’ he asks.

  ‘To keep my French in good working order and my idioms up to date,’ I tell him. ‘And also because it has wonderful photographs.’

  ‘So: you speak French?’

  ‘Yes. Well, more or less. No: yes, I do.’

  And thus I discover that Iwo’s French is perfect, much better than mine, his accent polished and scholarly, his vocabulary so flexible that he can express the nuances that escape him in English. After this we always speak French together, and it transforms our conversations. It is like fine-tuning a radio and finally getting the voice clear of static.

  ‘My mother’s family,’ he explains, Tike many Poles at the turn of the century, had a resident French mademoiselle, and children were brought up to speak French at dinner with their parents, and during lessons in the schoolroom. Their Polish was fluent, too, of course: but French was the language of c
ivilized conversation. So when I was born my mother was determined that I should be bi-lingual in French and Polish. As well as speaking it with me, she made me read the French classics, Molière, Racine, Pascal’s Pensées. Which is why my French may sound old-fashioned and formal to you.’

  That had not occurred to me; but I do notice – more and more as I become familiar with the colour and music of his French – that in it I can hear echoes of his childhood. In French, he is more tender, relaxed, and childlike than he is able to be in English, a language he learned first for academic purposes and then, here in London, for survival.

  During the two-hour train journey the paper and Marie-Claire lie unopened on the formica table as we cross barriers of thought and feeling in our new language. Iwo’s freedom with words makes him expansive and he tells me anecdotes about a family background that I had not begun to suspect. His parents, I realize, though he does not spell it out, were clearly upper-class; landowners, perhaps even aristocrats. By the time he was born their world was rapidly being destroyed, yet was still close enough to have formed the framework which influenced him most.

  ‘My great-uncle’, he says, ‘used to send his laundry to Paris because he said no-one in Warsaw had the right kind of starch!’ Nowadays Iwo is able to laugh at such absurd fastidiousness and recollect with some guilt the poignant figure of his mother’s French governess. ‘She was forever trying, like the duchesses at Louis XIV’s court, to achieve tiny privileges which would bring her status closer to that of a member of the family and further from the servants; and forever being rebuffed. My grandmother was proud, snobbish, selfish, and must have been cruel because – my mother used to say – she would turn a blind eye for days to these minuscule social advances, such as the governess instructing the servant to lay a linen napkin at her place instead of the cotton ones which the children used… and then suddenly she would ridicule poor Mam’selle in front of the whole family, in exquisite, cutting French. It was like a perpetual game of grandmother’s footsteps: only the governess never reached the front.’

  Yet I sense that, beneath his contemporary perspective, deeper than he can acknowledge, Iwo is nostalgic for this lost world. His room, stark and immaculate amid the surrounding chaos he can neither control nor reject, is evidence of that. I wonder what his own home was like, and try to frame a tactful enquiry.

  ‘And your wife … was she proud and fastidious too?’

  ‘Good heavens no! Quite the reverse. She despised housework and home-making and the women who made it their life. My wife was a fantasist: a fighter in every impossible cause, a dreamer of every hopeless dream. A true, dedicated, idealistic Communist, even when it was perfectly obvious that Communism was as corrupt as any other political creed. My wife harangued meetings and distributed leaflets.’

  Dare I risk the next question? I take a deep breath. ‘Then why did you marry her?’

  ‘My dear Constance, have you forgotten the force of lust when one is twenty?’

  Forgotten it? Iwo, I am in thrall to it, and I’m forty-four! ‘Yes, I suppose I had overlooked that.’

  He smiles wryly. Did you love her very much Iwo? Or did she love you, that spare, self-possessed elegance which obsesses me? Did she use those female wiles of tantalizing and then withdrawing, blowing hot and cold, those skills of artifice that are beyond me? I dare not ask. He smiles again, this time not at the memory of her but at me.

  ‘I am so glad we have discovered French. Now we need only speak English with your children.’

  ‘And my friends … if you ever get to meet them.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ says Iwo enigmatically.

  At Newark station Iwo tells the taxi driver to go to the Polish war cemetery. On the way he explains that some hundreds of Polish airmen are buried here; the men who died fighting in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. I am surprised that he should make this pilgrimage, and even more surprised that he should want to bring me. None of the dead airmen was related to him or even known to him; it seems a strange journey for a man who has repudiated his country for ever.

  Yet Paul, like so many English public schoolboys, had been fascinated by the First World War. He knew the most esoteric details about its battles and recited with gloomy accuracy the casualties from the first day of the Somme; the battle of Passchendaele – endless figures, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and finally, numbingly, eight and a half million young men killed in the trenches of northern France. On our way to some sunny holiday destination, he would insist on making the detour to walk the children over one of the battlefields or cemeteries. The mere sight of those smooth English gardens of perfectly trimmed grass, sprouting rows and rows of small headstones, reduced me to tears. The identical crosses marked ‘Known Unto God’ were the most distressing of all. Somewhere I supposed that a mother, hundreds, thousands of mothers, had waited with inextinguishable hope. Miracles might happen, had happened. Amnesia; a prison camp; even a disgraced son, finally coming back after years of lonely guilt to confess that he had deserted – anything, if only the young man who had once set off for France would return. These cemeteries were a dreaded prelude to our holidays, but Paul seemed to feel they were a necessary penance; after which the brightness of the sun and the south were more vivid.

  Today, with Iwo, my reaction is the same. At the sight of the gaunt memorial to Polish airmen and the neat rows of graves, the tears fall down my face leaving dry prickling streaks at the corners of my eyes. My face is cold and pinched. The wind chills us both. Iwo just stands there. He doesn’t pray; he doesn’t speak; he doesn’t approach any of the other people – the handful of, presumably, Poles placing stiff Cellophane bunches of flowers at the foot of the memorial, or in one case on a particular grave. There is nothing I can say, and in any case my weeping becomes so violent that I can’t speak. I am crying, not for these dead airmen but because I am overwhelmed by the passions that Iwo has called forth.

  We leave at the same time as an elderly couple heading towards a small car. Iwo speaks to them in Polish, asking for a lift to the station. In the car I hear him speak his mother tongue for the first time. It is rapid, abrasive, unsmiling. He makes no attempt to introduce me, which is a relief since I am plunged into ugly, frowning despair. It is not that I share his grief, he has shown no grief, but because ten days ago I was moving safely through my small accustomed world. Now it has been transformed into one of vulnerability and terror by my passion for him: this outsider, this exile.

  In the train we begin to do ordinary things again. He buys a sandwich and two plastic cups of tea. I read the paper, and look at the pictures in Marie-Claire. He dozes and I close my eyes but soon, as the train flashes across the East Anglian flatlands, I open them to watch Iwo’s sleeping face. I wish I dared take out my notebook and draw him. His expression is cloudless, his body relaxed. He shows no sign of the tension that has prevented me from sleeping ever since we met. My mind overflows with questions: why did he say he was an ‘unperson’, or ‘nonperson’, and what does it mean? Is he trying to tell me that he is a dissident under sentence of death, and, if so, why not just say so outright? I study his face: is he victim, or, no, torturer? I try to imagine what he might have done but can only conjure up visions of cells and pain.

  We have both been subdued ever since we stood together at the foot of the war memorial. Also, of course, we are both tired. We’ve made love several times this week, after which, instead of curling up together into natural, animal sleep, I have had to leave his bed and travel home charged with energy. Even last night, which he spent in my bed, I was still awake when the birds began singing in the dawn. By now I am in an almost trancelike state; my perceptions abnormally acute but my body sluggish with exhaustion, dragging itself towards sleep, kept awake by an overactive mind. For Iwo it’s so simple. He’s tired: he sleeps. I lean against the headrest, my eyelids fall, I doze. At King’s Cross we separate, going in opposite directions on the tube. I still don’t know the telephone number of th
e house in which he lives. He might never ring me again.

  When I get home I am astonished to find that it is still only late afternoon, and all three children are having tea. It is unusual for Max and Cordy to be home on two successive weekends, so I assume Kate must have phoned and asked them to come over, to keep her company, or perhaps for a family conference: What shall we do about mother? Although the other two smile, Kate looks sullen if not positively hostile. Oh Lord, please not … I haven’t the energy to cope with one of her moods.

  ‘Darlings, listen, I’m dead tired: I think I’ll go and lie down for a couple of hours. Wake me just before seven and I’ll make supper.’

  ‘Do you want us to do it?’ asks Cordelia, but I feel guilty already at having been away all day. The least I can do is cook for them.

  Later, over supper, I relax a little thanks to their warmth and normality.

  ‘Drop your shoulders Mother …’ says Max, and as I turn to him and laugh and do an exaggerated slump I realize that he is right, my whole body is tensed and rigid. ‘What’s up?’ he asks.

  How do I explain to my children, who have perceived me for years as a comfortable asexual figure, that I am spinning in a maelstrom of love? ‘Why? Do I seem …?’

  ‘Peculiar? Yes. You’ve been a bit peculiar ever since you got in.’

  ‘She’s been peculiar all week,’ says Kate glumly. ‘It’s that bloody Polishman. Eeeevoh.’

  ‘Kate,’ I say automatically, ‘don’t swear please.’