Love Among the Single Classes (3 page)

He locks the door from the inside.

‘Will you drink coffee? I am sorry I have no wine for you.' He draws back the curtain at the far end, plugs in an electric kettle that is already full of water, and brews real coffee for us: black and strong. I sit on the bed – there is nowhere else – and watch him until he brings it over and comes to sit beside me. I wonder for the first time whether perhaps he is nervous, too. All his movements, especially here on his own territory, are so pared-down, so perfectly controlled, that it is impossible to tell. He doesn't give himself away by being clumsy or flippant, he makes no excuses for the lack of milk or sugar or chairs. When I have drunk the coffee he takes my cup and places it under the bed beside his own, turns off the light, and, at last, oh men and angels, at last, he kisses me.

His bed is crisp and white, its clean sheets suggesting that he hoped to bring me back here and make love. Later it becomes hot and seamed with creases made by our rolling bodies. At first the cold, and my shyness, keep us covered up with bedclothes, but by the end we are glistening with sweat and naked and I don't give a damn about modesty. I think to myself, rapturously, Oh
everything
is going to be all right! and my tenderness towards him is almost more than I can contain.

‘Iwo, you are … wonderful… you're amazing … I wish I could, just… oh, I don't know!'

I wish I could unpack my heart's excess of words. I wish I could flower into extravagant prose, praising him and glorying in this extraordinary discovery, opening my heart about the new possibilities that stretch ahead of us. I do not dare.

He pulls the covers across us and hugs me and murmurs only, ‘Relax, relax …' and the wild words remain unspoken.

Instead I ask the question that throbs like a bad tooth: ‘Are you still married?'

‘Yes.'

This is such a blow that it is several minutes before I risk the next question: ‘So where is your wife?'

There is a recoil, so slight that if I were not lying naked with my body pressed along the length of his I would not have noticed how he shrinks from my question. There is a long silence, and I have to fight my polite English impulse to fill it by swerving off tactfully on to some safer topic. But I have to know what has happened to her, so I keep quiet, and eventually he says, Tf she is not dead then she has divorced me.'

‘But wouldn't you
know?'

‘My dear, you cannot understand. You say you know nothing of my country. I am a dangerous non-person. I do not exist, and yet any contact with me will… infect? make bad?'

‘Contaminate.'

‘Perhaps. So, I can send money to my daughters' – he has daughters, too? – ‘but I cannot know whether they receive it or whether it is stolen in the post office. Even to write to me they put themselves into danger.'

‘It must be very … hard … for you.'

‘Daughters, yes; wife, no. Wife and I were separate people many years ago. If she is sensible she has divorced me. If not, if she is still good wife, she has probably been vanished.'

‘And your daughters? How many? How old are they?'

‘Grown up. Married. To good Party workers, one a journalist, one an official. I hope they are all right.'

He sounds so bleak that I turn and cling to him, kissing the fluent, throbbing line of his jaw – his pulse like a soft drum – and bury my head in the hollow curve of his shoulder.

‘Iwo, it's dreadful. I am so sorry. Oh God, I can't imagine …'

Quite melted into tears for thee.

He is touched that I should cry for three women I have never seen. He gets out of bed, walks naked across the room and, drawing aside the far curtain, reaches into the chest of
drawers. He climbs back into bed beside me, holding a couple of curled photographs.

‘Here you have my daughters. Henryka, Alina. Now twenty-nine. Twenty-six.'

They are both tall, slim, very dark, and even in this cheap colour photograph it is clear that they are beauties. They stand on either side of a Christmas tree. In front of them on the table, in the centre of a lacy table-mat, is a home-made Nativity scene with candles burning around it.

‘Are you Catholics, your family?'

‘Not I, but their mother.'

‘Then she won't divorce you, surely?'

‘Not
that
Catholic!'

I look again more closely at the two girls, smiling obediently for the camera. How strange, what a quirk of fate, that some four or five years later
I
should be scrutinizing these private family faces. I search for clues about them. Their hair-styles are unsophisticated but becoming; their clothes look cheap, made of poor material and assembled without much sense of colour or style, let alone fashion. Most important, can I detect a likeness to him? The older daughter seems to have inherited his fine bone-structure. ‘This one looks rather like you, doesn't she?'

‘Henryka. Yes.'

Enough. A man's love for his daughters is a minefield. He forestalls me in any case by showing me the other photograph. ‘My … wife.' She is a handsome woman, though almost comically Slav with her strong, square face, severe hairstyle and broad shoulders. I try to discern her breasts under the shapeless dress and flowered shawl. Large, soft, deep, a fine figure of a woman. Not like me. Iwo's hand reaches across my bare shoulder and takes the pictures from me. He leans behind him to put them on the floor under the bed. Then he folds his arm, and the blankets, around me.

‘I shall have to get used to your warmth in my bed.'

I analyse those words, examining them for every shade of meaning from I am uncomfortable with you in this bed, to Now we sleep together as a couple in future. Why can't
I take them at face value, as a declaration of intent, a commitment to many nights together, and respond with some generous word or gesture? It must be because I am afraid. It is so long since my desire for a man has been reciprocated. Either lame dogs fall in love with me – they seem to think I must be a strong woman; or I am fucked after a party by someone I have just met and may never see again, using and being used. With Iwo, now, I hesitate in case I jump to the wrong conclusion, and find myself rebuffed. The sexual humiliation of having been rejected for a younger woman cuts deeper than anyone knows. I was the complacent wife in her mid-thirties who never stopped to think about taking care of her looks until it was too late. After many years of sexual neglect, as Paul's moments of physical need or tenderness for me became less and less frequent, I had almost succeeded in persuading myself that sex was no longer anything to do with me. And so now I take it for granted that the surge of lust that I feel for Iwo is one-sided, and don't dare to believe in the first delicate tendrils of hope and affection that he extends towards me. The moment passes. But we do make love again.

When I wake up in my own bed my first thought is of Iwo, just as it was my last before I finally fell asleep. But I can only lie in bed for a few moments – long enough to wonder if he will telephone me today – because it's already after half past seven, and I must launch the children into their week. He didn't say when we parted that he would ring, but, as I tiptoed out of his room hoping not to wake him, he suddenly spoke from the bed.

‘Constance. That was a lovely day with you. The most happy day since I came to England.'

I turned back to the bed, and his long naked arms reached up. He held my face in between his two hands and smiled at me and said, Thank you.'

I can still feel the touch of that gesture against my skin.

I always love breakfast time, particularly when my children are around. I love the simple responsibilities it demands, the ritual of laying out bowls and cereal packets and jars of marmalade, timing eggs and not burning toast while at the same time doing Kate's school lunch box. When they were young and all still living at home I used to love the cross, preoccupied faces and morning smells of my children at breakfast. Paul would come down first and make a pot of coffee, gulp down a cup himself and hurry off to work, leaving me to drink the rest as I wove through the habitual dance from table to dishwasher to airing cupboard. The children too wove in and out looking for Sellotape, one glove, a lost gymshoe, or homework; later on borrowing make-up or money. It was a safe hour in my day, knowing myself to be needed and efficient.

This Monday morning all three of them are once again
sitting round the breakfast table, since both Cordelia and Max have been home for the weekend, as much to catch up on one another's news as to see me. Cordy, in her final year at university, lives in a student house near college and Max, who has a job, lives with his current girlfriend in a squat. At first I hated this idea. The very word ‘squat' was repellent and seemed to conjure up a squalid, lavatorial image. When I eventually visited them I found to my surprise that they lived in a perfectly ordinary terraced house which they shared with another couple. All four had spent a good deal of time and care on repairing and decorating the house, and had persuaded the council to reconnect the electricity and water in return. They proudly pointed out items of furniture rescued from skips or kitchen things picked up for less than a pound at local bazaars and jumble sales. I realized then for the first time that my children attached a very different importance to their possessions. They didn't care about inherited furniture, ‘good' furniture, and thought it even more absurd to spend money on buying things new. On the contrary, they were proud of the fact that they had equipped the whole house for less than £500. It would have been tactless to point out how many bits and pieces of my own I recognized about the place.

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 …'