Love Among the Single Classes Read online

  Telling Jack about Iwo’s aristocratic background won’t cut any ice so, mildly offended and more than mildly upset, I change the subject. They offer Cordy a lift back to her flat in Twickenham, and the three of them go, leaving me to pay belated attention to my son.

  Very much later that evening, as I’m preparing for bed, my mind languorously going over the same sequence with Iwo last night, the telephone rings.

  ‘Hello Constance. Iwo. Thank you for a pleasant afternoon. I am glad to have met some of your friends.’

  ‘Iwo, how lovely of you to ring! Did you really like them?’

  ‘They are nice people. Of course I liked them. And thank you for an excellent lunch. You never told me you could make red cabbage.’

  ‘Well of course I …’

  ‘Yes. You must have worked very hard. I must not keep you from your bed.’

  Oh Iwo, I wish I were in yours, or you in mine!

  ‘Sleep well, Constance.’

  ‘You too …’ How lame, how cowardly. Speak your thoughts. Ask him. When shall we meet? Will you think of me? Do you remember last night? I love you. ‘Good night.’

  Had Iwo spoken to me gently on the telephone I would have hugged my pillow and fallen smiling into sleep. Had he not rung, I might have done the same thing, for today’s lunch went well and my confidence is running high. But by ringing and being cold he condemns me to days and nights of introspection and the minute re-enactment of each hour we have spent together. Where did I go wrong? Was it Joanna? Was I too obviously jealous? Or was it the money I lent him … did that humiliate him in front of his friends? Perhaps it was the lunch today: should I have come to his rescue in the argument with Jack instead of walking away from it? Perhaps making love is not as good for him as it is for me. Or perhaps it’s just that my body is wrong, and I’m not his type. His wife has splendid breasts. I find fault with everything, and never know when I have hit upon the crucial inadequacy, or if there is anything wrong at all.

  6

  I’ve never been a remarkable woman. Bookish, competent, perhaps pretty: these are the sort of adjectives people use to describe me. Yet now I am fuelled with enough emotional energy to power Antigone, Héloïse or Lady Macbeth. If Iwo were to ask me to go to Poland and smuggle his family out, I could do it. But he seems to want nothing of me except, possibly, marriage. His cruelty and my torment come from the gulf between these two extremes.

  I can’t believe that he is being deliberately cruel. How can I steer him towards loving and marrying me? We have known each other for less than two weeks and made love half a dozen times, but he remains private, detached, fastidious: far more so now than at our extraordinary first meeting. He discourages any show of intimacy or affection, let alone love. Since I must do something, I shall use this emotional energy to find out.

  Seeking clues to his enigmatic personality, I spend hours in the library and at home looking for characters or stereotypes with one or two features in common with him, from whose fragmentary identity I can perhaps assemble a composite, sharply-defined Iwo. He becomes the focus of everything I read as well as most of my thoughts. Can anyone ever have studied him so conscientiously? My task is now to meditate on him, on him: he is the book, the library on which I look.

  With no first-hand evidence of his past life and the people who figured in it – apart from what he chooses to tell me, and I have to assume he isn’t lying – my task is like recreating a whole dinosaur from a single, long thigh-bone. Random clues provide ambiguous fragments which I can start to reconstruct. Here the French governess lies in a corner, a modest heap of honeycombed bones. Over there is a double section of curving rib-cage, his wife’s, big and deep. The partially assembled skeleton has his own broad, high forehead and beautifully oval skull, but there is no life yet in these bones. He is, in reality as in my imagination, like a man waiting for his life to start up again, in a state of suspended animation. Suddenly, with a guilty grin, I remember overhearing Kate on the phone to Cordelia, calling him The Undead’. ‘Mother’s still haunted by the Undead!’ she had said, and they giggled together, defusing his power over me by mocking him.

  In the library, pretending to return books to the shelves or look for readers’ requests, I search for references to men of his type, his age, with his background, from his country: anything that can help me crack the code. I look through art books, finding in a Bellini Pope here, an Otto Dix or Christian Schad portrait there, those same marble features and impassive expression. Just as one sometimes comes across a new word and suddenly finds it everywhere, so now with Iwo I wonder how I can have failed to encounter his type before. He is omnipresent, above all in my mind.

  Yet when I do see him, these spectral images seem irrelevant and misguided. The real Iwo is flesh and blood. He smiles, occasionally laughs, has corporeal appetites for food and drink and me. Mere happiness could not enslave me as thoroughly as this alternation of happiness and pain: invariable cruelty would not enslave me at all. I am not a masochist, thank God! It’s the method used by torturers down the ages, which renders the victim helpless by never allowing him to be certain of anything. Since I can never anticipate what will come next, I live in a state of highly-strung nervous tension.

  And the worst thing of all is that I never know whether this torture is deliberate on his part, or self-inflicted. Is he sadistically playing on my vulnerability, amused by my desperate attempts to hide the pain? Or am I inventing the whole torture chamber? J never know.

  As the late autumn hardens into winter we spend more nights in my room and my bed, for his is bitterly cold, its ashen whiteness nearly as chilling as the cold sky outside. The streets gleam like black rubber under the slanting rain and street lights; the wind is blustery and stings our faces. But my house is centrally heated, the front door opens on to welcoming warmth, and my bedroom is cocooned with eiderdowns and pillows and fat lined curtains to keep out draughts. In the deep darkness of my bed during the small hours, when we can’t see one another’s faces, occasionally we talk with the openness of our first, rapturous meeting. Only then do I risk asking questions.

  ‘Iwo, what do you miss most about Poland?’

  ‘Poland.’

  ‘Not your family, your daughters, or friends, or students, or …?’

  ‘No: Poland.’

  ‘What do you mean by Poland?’

  ‘My country. My nationality. My history. Poland.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘It may live – Poland may be free one day – but I couldn’t stay to see it.’

  There is a long silence. I lie very still, not daring to touch him. My muscles become locked and I am uncomfortable.

  ‘How did it affect you?’

  ‘I was one of those who opposed the government. Have you heard of KOR?’

  ‘Yes.’ I have read the papers, studied Polish history books. ‘But you explain it to me.’

  ‘KOR was originally a committee to defend workers from the factories who had protested against the government in 1976. They took to the streets in their thousands and rioted and set fire to buildings. They were punished, often brutally. Most lost their jobs, some were sent to prison. A few months later the intellectuals – writers, university teachers – started to help. That’s when KOR was founded. I was a member from the beginning.’

  ‘Was it dangerous?’

  ‘Not really: there were so many of us, the government was scared. But from then on I knew I was watched; that a dossier was being kept on me, and that one day they would find an excuse to arrest me.’

  ‘And then?’

  Then? Then? How do I know? It never happened.’

  ‘Iwo: what might have happened? I mean … is it like Russia? Would they have tortured you, or sent you to a mental hospital and given you drugs? Would they have sent you to a prison camp? Put you on trial? What?’

  ‘Perhaps all of these things, perhaps none of them. I told you, my daughters are married to good Party stalwarts; members of what we call the nomenkla
tura, which is a bit like what you call the Establishment. They might have been able to help me, or might not.’

  ‘What did you do wrong?’

  ‘I was an economist: we are always the avant-garde of Communist revolutions. In Poland, economists are more of an elite than historians or philosophers. We are the prophets of the future, along with poets and writers. I was not prudent in my teaching; I didn’t care who heard me, and as time went on I took fewer and fewer precautions. They knew I corresponded with academics in the West.’

  ‘Weren’t you always afraid, Iwo?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Partly because I had a great sense of fatalism. Partly because many university people, students as well as teachers, were doing the same thing. Partly because it never seemed quite real.’

  ‘Some people must have been afraid.’

  ‘I will tell you about a student of mine. A girl. She was very highly-strung, even melodramatic; very clever. Her parents were factory workers in a textile mill: ordinary, solid people. She was quite different. She had imagination.’

  ‘So? What happened to her?’

  ‘She was arrested for knowing the names on a secret list of people in the Soviet Union – not in Poland – Poland would have been all right – in the Soviet Union, to whom she was to send copies of one of the new, in theory uncensored, but still secretly printed journals of political and economic ideas. At police headquarters they prepared to question her. Maybe nothing would have happened, she could have denied it, and been believed, and been released. But she thought she would be tortured, and did not know if she could keep quiet. She was young, only twenty-one. She asked for a glass of water. When they brought it to her, she smashed the glass, and slashed her jugular vein. She died. Of course people were afraid.’

  There is nothing I can say, so I lie in silence, and after a little while realize that Iwo has fallen asleep. I am wondering who gave her the list of Russian names.

  Stories like these make me more afraid of Iwo. He has areas of experience which my life has never begun to approach. I lost a girlfriend once, when I was much younger, in a motorbike accident, and one or two more of my friends have died since, but my life is as balmy and innocent as that of a child by comparison with the events he describes.

  Another night I say, ‘Was your wife a member of KOR as well?’

  ‘Yes, certainly, but in a different group from mine.’

  ‘Did you talk about it?’

  ‘We had separate lives, Constance. I have tried to explain to you. We shared the same apartment, because in Poland we do not have the luxury of being able to find another one when it suits us. After the two girls had both got married, she moved into the bedroom they used to share. She conducted her separate life and I, in what had been our bedroom, did my work.’

  ‘So you didn’t ever speak to each other?’

  ‘It was not as clear-cut as that. She might say, “You have used my sugar”, or “my milk”; I might ask her for a stamp, or some ink. She might even tell me she had seen the girls. We did not live in a passionate silence, but in occasional banalities.’

  ‘How long were you married?’

  ‘Thirty years.’

  Thirty years. He cannot feel as indifferent towards her as he pretends: after all, I am not indifferent to Paul. Paul can scarcely hurt me any longer, but I can’t think of him without emotion.

  ‘Why didn’t you divorce?’

  ‘What for? Neither of us wanted, then, to get married again; we are both in some sense Catholics. And it might have distressed our daughters.’

  ‘Then’, he had said: then. Does he want a divorce now? Is he thinking about marriage? ‘Polish gentleman seeks intellectual to marry’: we never talk about that.

  We get into the habit, when we meet, of eating mainly at my house. It doesn’t cost him money, and is easy for me, and more than easy: a relief to be able to discharge some of my pent-up energies in preparing a meal, setting the table, behaving ordinarily. It means Kate eats with us, usually hostile, occasionally mollified if he talks to her about jazz or helps with her maths homework. Sometimes one of the other children joins us, but as time goes on they like Iwo less, not more, and become blatantly ill at ease. Once when Kate is with Paul for the weekend I try to arrange the table ‘romantically’, with candles and starched table napkins, but as Iwo walks into the room he says involuntarily, ‘What’s this nonsense? Why candles?’ and I feel such a fool I never do it again.

  Later, that same weekend, however, he insists that I come over to Earls Court so that he can take me out for a meal. I spend the late afternoon going through the ritual preparation that provides some outlet for my inexpressible emotion. First I lay out my clothes on the bed; then immerse myself, eyes shut, in a warm scented bath, trying to make my body quite limp and free from tension. By the time I have washed and dried my hair, dressed, made up, stared at my reflection, changed a few things, stared again, added scent and jewellery, and finally smiled, the whole process takes nearly two hours. It becomes increasingly necessary to me, as a counterweight to Iwo’s overwhelming attraction. It is always in vain. He rarely makes any comment about my appearance, and if he does, it’s totally non-committal. He has a genius for remarking on my clothes in words that avoid any hint of personal judgement. That hat will keep your ears warm!’ for example, or, ‘Have I seen that dress before?’ Yes, I could say; or, a confession, No. It never occurs to me to say, How should I know? or, I don’t remember; because I do, I remember everything.

  He meets me at the tube station and we walk round the corner, in the opposite direction from his house into one of the dignified Victorian squares behind Earls Court Road. He stops in front of a red brick building and we go in.

  ‘The Polish Air Force Club,’ he says. ‘It is a good place to eat and I can hear the radio in Polish. I’ve made many friends since I started coming here.’

  The walls are hung with old photographs of aeroplanes and sketches of square-jawed, dashing young air-crews from the Second World War, looking exactly like illustrations for a Biggies adventure story. Just beyond the hallway there is a bar, around which a number of elderly men sit talking in Polish. They look up and swing welcoming arms towards Iwo, halting the gesture in mid-air as they see me. Iwo says something in Polish, and then, for my benefit, in the awkward English that has become unfamiliar to me since we discovered the joys of speaking French together: ‘Can I present to you Mrs Liddell?’

  The old men bow and take my hand; one lifts it to his lips; another insists on buying us a drink. They explain the origins of the club to me, and I tell them that I have visited the memorial at Newark and been much moved. Iwo explains that we are going to eat, and we leave their warm, friendly circle and go downstairs.

  He precedes me, and at the foot of the stairs is greeted by a young woman, one of the most unusually lovely women I have ever seen. Her face is all curves and softness. Its contours are round and full, her skin and hair seem corn-coloured, though her complexion is golden-olive and her thick pony-tailed hair is golden-brown. She looks like Primavera. Her expression, when she sees Iwo, is one of surprise, her eyebrows arching above her wide eyes; followed by a puzzled frown when she catches sight of me. She is quite without artifice, and even to my jealous gaze, captivating.

  ‘Monty!’ she exclaims, in astonishment and delight. I stand like Lot’s wife, wondering who she is, why she calls him Monty, and, most urgently of all, whether they are lovers.

  He turns round to me. ‘Constance, this is my very good friend Marina, who saved me from starvation many a time!’

  She is evidently the waitress here: but no ordinary waitress. Iwo is smiling at her so broadly that he’s almost unrecognizable. He has never smiled at me like that. I exchange polite greetings with Marina and after we sit down I ask why she too calls him Monty.

  ‘One evening, soon after I had managed to find at last a job, I brought a couple of fellows from the workshop here: to be friendly, show them that I, too, am a person. And of course they ca
lled me Monty, so …’

  ‘… to put them at their ease,’ Marina continues, ‘he explained to me that he was known as Monty: and ever since then it is our joke!’

  Bully for you, lady, I think: that, and how many other little private jokes? Yet I don’t feel the sharp agony that Joanna had provoked. Beside the sumptuous beauty and open friendliness of this young woman I am quite defenceless. Indeed, it would be odd if Iwo were not enchanted by her. In the basement dining room with its garish orange paint and splashy mural across the end wall, she glows with warmth, and Iwo responds by relaxing and stretching his long legs and entering into a conspiracy with her about what I should eat – for this is my first Polish meal. Together they devise the best that the menu can offer. She brings us a bottle of wine, betrays no sign of flirtatiousness towards him, and smiles at me. She seems pleased that Iwo is with a woman, so surely she can’t …? I will think about it later. Marina leaves us alone to eat and Iwo explains that the club had been a sanctuary during his early days in London, as poverty and disillusionment set in: for him, and for many other Poles. They can gather here, exchange information, eat cheaply, and talk about the country they have all lost. In between eating and listening I watch Marina. She is an expert waitress, attentive without being obsequious, and it’s clear that the old men love her, and doubtless see in her the daughter they never had, or had and never saw again. Finally, over coffee, Iwo persuades her to join us.

  ‘Did you come to England at the same time as Iwo?’ I ask.

  ‘No: a few years earlier. I came in 1977. But, as you see, I haven’t really left Poland yet! All Poles are the same. We simply make London an extension of our homeland, establish our little havens of Polishness here and there, and behave as though we had never left. Some people haven’t learned English after forty years!’

  ‘Can I ask … why did you come?’

  ‘I came because my fiancé died. And because it was possible. I didn’t know how soon they might clamp down again, and I felt I had no reason to stay, so I went.’