Love Among the Single Classes (15 page)

‘Where?'

‘Not here, don't worry, at Amanda's house. Her mum's already said we can. We were making out a guest list. We'll do the food and get everyone to bring a bottle …'

‘A
bottle?
Darling, you're a bit young for a bottle party: are you sure Amanda's mother doesn't mind? I'd better give her a ring …'

‘It's all
right
Mother. Oh Christ, you'll only go and spoil it and make her think it's going to be really wild and it
won't
be …'

‘Will they be there? Her parents?'

‘Course they will. I mean, we'll organize everything, we've got it all planned. Her brother'll do the disco and …'

‘What time did you get to bed?'

‘It wasn't late, Mother, honestly.'

‘To sleep then?'

‘Well, round about midnight, something like that.'

That means small hours. She'll get crotchety with tiredness soon. ‘Darling, I must sit down and think about my Christmas present list. Why don't you start on your homework while I'm doing that? Then we'll have supper. Call me if you need help.'

Kate goes off to spread her school books in a messy semicircle over the dining room table. I make myself coffee and sit down to think about Iwo, and my Christmas list.

The phone rings and I leap to answer it.

‘Hello? … Paul! How're things? Listen, you were really nice the other evening. I'm sorry I …'

‘No problem. You OK? Seen him lately? Any better?'

‘Yes, last night. I'm getting to understand him a bit, I think. It's all this business of being Polish that screws things up. Anyway, some other time … What about you? Are you seeing the children this weekend?'

‘Not this one. Lulu and I thought we'd take off for a quiet weekend in the country before the countdown to Christmas starts. Soon everyone'll be getting drunk at agency parties.
There's a great place in the Cotswolds I know …'

‘Yeah, I remember …'

‘Not that one. Another one. Don't be so spiky. I'm ringing to ask you to dinner, but I could always change my mind.'

Dinner. He hasn't asked me for dinner before. I've been to his flat for Sunday lunch sometimes with the children or drinks on my ex-father-in-law's birthday: awkward, dutiful occasions when we all tried to make believe that in spite of the divorce we were still a close and caring family. It never worked. But I'd had the impression up till now that Paul's social life was more a matter of cocktails at the media clubs than dinner parties at his place. I hadn't realized Lulu was so entrenched. It's nice of him to ask me. I must have worried him.

‘What dinner? When?'

‘Saturday week. Be about eight of us, some you know, some you don't. Remember Andrew Lloyd-Simpson, from Oxford? Christ Church man?'

‘Andrew? Good heavens … yes, I do remember him. What's he been up to all these years? Gosh, he was nice. He used to have poems in
Isis
, do you remember?'

‘He still writes poetry. Published a slim volume last year. Faber and Faber.'

Good old Paul, never forgets a brand name. ‘What's he doing nowadays?'

‘Advertising.'

‘Well, I'll manage to forgive him. Can I bring Iwo? Actually I'm curious for you to meet him. See what you think of him …'

‘Certainly
not
Whole point of this is to get you away from him, at least for one evening.' ‘Oh Paul, I don't see him often.'

‘Listen, are you coming? Saturday week? About eightish?'

‘Christ, what'll I wear? Your friends are bound to be deadly chic.'

‘Something red or black. Anything.'

‘OK. Thank Lulu. I look forward to it.'

‘Good. Seeya kiddo.'

Do I look forward to it? Lulu will probably be intimidatingly efficient, cook some wonderful nouvelle cuisine dinner, and I shall have very mixed feelings about seeing her act as my husband's partner and hostess. I go into the kitchen and prepare onion, bacon and potato hotpot for me and Katie, with plenty left over to warm up at the weekend if Cordy or Max drop in.

I spend the next few days in high spirits. I still love Christmas: not just for the children's sake, not just for the feasting and presents. I love the carols, the secrecy and planning, the lift that it gives to the mid-winter doldrums. Katie's school has a carol service and, although she pretends to find it all a great bore, I hear the high, clear notes of ‘Oh Little Town of Bethlehem' or the lower register of ‘Good King Wenceslas' drifting down from her room. I think about this year's decorations. We have always prided ourselves on not having to resort to twisted Woolworth's streamers or paper chains. Last year we decorated the house using a dozen rolls of silver paper, twisting it round the backs of chairs, smoothed glitteringly across the table and mantelpiece, adorned with ice-white satin ribbon and candles everywhere. This year I shall have to try to improve on that. Red and green would be nice, but how? Apples and holly and ivy and branches of fir? With green and red candles this time? Yards and yards of satin ribbon twining round the banisters, green and red again, and Christmas tree candles stuck into cored apples … yes. It takes days to decorate the whole house, but we never have a single fairy light anywhere, everything is lit by candles, with their mysterious old-fashioned smell and soft circles of guttering light. Lovely, oh it'll be
lovely!

Then there's the children's presents to think about. Cordy will know what Kate wants; Kate will know what Cordy wants. Max will tell me himself. I scribble lists in the back of my diary. And Iwo? The excitement stops abruptly. I long to buy him special things: a warm, soft, expensive sweater; a thick duvet for his cold bed; a book about Vermeer, my favourite artist. I want to be extravagant: I want
to be intimate. The problem is, how not to embarrass him? He has so little money; if he buys me anything at all it can only be a token.

As happens when I have recently seen him, I can think of Iwo quite sanely, even optimistically. He is like a drug to me. Only
he
is really in focus; the rest of the world grows hazy at his edges. This state of intensity lasts for a day or two after we have parted, but as time goes by, if he doesn't phone, I begin to be gripped by anxiety. My perception of him becomes distorted. After several days of silence, my craving has become so urgent that I can think of nothing else. I am tormented by brief flashes of memory which present him to my mind's eye: his walk; the angle of his head as he turns sideways to listen to me; the curious way he bares his teeth in a smile while he is talking, giving an air of humour or deprecating irony to his words. People in the library say constantly, ‘Cheer up!' ‘Don't look so worried!' or, kindly, ‘Anything the matter, love?' The moment he telephones, I am better – and he does, and asks me if I am free on Sunday.

On Tuesday evening, as I'm about to leave for my regular twice a month visit to my mother, Cordy rings, sounding unusually agitated.

‘Mother? Can you meet me this evening? It's urgent.'

‘Darling, what's the matter? I can't really: I'm just on my way out to see Granny.'

‘You can be late, for once. Ring her and say you're going to be an hour late. I have to talk to you. Not me – it's Max.'

‘Is he all right? Has anything happened?'

‘He and Judy have broken up … she walked out this afternoon. He called me just now. He sounds desperately upset.'

We arrange to meet in a wine bar and by the time I arrive she's there already, sitting hunched over a table with her hands curled round a glass of red wine. She tells me that things have been bad between Max and his girlfriend for several weeks now.

‘I ought to have told you sooner, but you were so involved with your new bloke, I sort of never got a chance. He came over a couple of times last week and slept on my floor
because they'd been rowing so much. Then this evening he rang up – thank God I was
in
for a change! – and said he'd got back from work to find she'd moved all her stuff out and just gone. He cried on the phone, poor old Max.'

‘Where is he now?'

‘The other two in the house were going to take him out and get him pissed. I said I'd go round later.'

‘Oh Cordy,
poor
Max. God I feel awful. Do you think he'd come home for a few days?'

‘I doubt it Mother, quite honestly. You can try.'

And where was I when he needed me? Engrossed in my own obsession, to the exclusion of everything else: even the needs of my children.

As we share a bottle of red wine, Cordy fills in the details. Judy, a drama student, had dazzled Max by her flamboyance and intensity. He, slower and steadier, provided the anchor she needed. As time went on, be began to learn that her intensity could be deeply neurotic, and she started to blame him for anything that failed to go right in her life. Where once she had welcomed his imperturbability, recently she had begun to ridicule it. Max has never been good at losing his temper, and she mistook his calm for indifference. Cordy's eyes are bright with indignation on behalf of her brother.

‘Jude's been a real
cow
to him lately. She's just left all the cooking and shopping and stuff to him – and Max is busy too, it's not just her – and used him as a tame skivvy.'

‘Probably just as well she took herself off in that case,' I say. ‘Will she be back, do you think?'

‘Max didn't seem to think so. It sounds pretty final.'

‘He cried? Oh Cordy, did he really cry on the phone?'

‘I know, rotten, isn't it? At least he's got the other two. They'll look after him.'

‘But what about me?'

‘Not a lot you can do at the moment. I just had to tell you.' ‘Will it ruin his Christmas?'

‘Doubt it!' she says, and grins suddenly. ‘It's his first big heartbreak, but he'll get over it.'

‘Are you and Ben OK?'

‘We're
fine
. Great. Don't worry about us.'

‘No point in phoning Max tonight, if he's going out to get drunk. I'll talk to him in the morning and see if I can persuade him to come home for the weekend.'

‘You do that.'

Outside on the pavement she gives me a great generous hug as we go our separate ways.

I arrive at my mother's for a belated supper, and have to try to conceal my anxiety from her, for she couldn't begin to understand Max's situation. The last thing I need is a lecture on the virtues of the old-fashioned ways. I watch her as she fusses about, blaming me for our spoilt meal, and wonder whether she finds old age any easier to cope with than I do middle age, or Max youth, or Kate adolescence. Her life has followed the pattern that could have been predicted almost when she was born: she must feel a certain satisfaction in having conformed to all those expectations. Whereas here am I, her daughter: a middle-aged woman with deepening lines and greying hair, yet ludicrously in love. How can a man love a woman unless he knew her when she was young? Women in their twenties have clear, confident faces nowadays, without the diffidence of earlier generations. In their late thirties they wonder how the years will reward them, but we in our forties begin to panic. Iwo has made me aware of my own mortality. Never, before I met him, had I examined my physical deterioration so ruthlessly, and seen that it was all I had feared. Yet his elegant skull is like a death's head, death itself.

‘How's that new gentleman friend of yours?' enquires my mother brightly.

Cordy had guessed rightly that Max wouldn't want to come home, but he has agreed to drop in one evening: more, I suspect, for my sake than because he needs to see me. Meanwhile, there is Paul's dinner. Preparing to dress for that, I look through my wardrobe and am surprised to see how many clothes that he would recognize are still hanging
there. For a moment I am tempted to wear the red dress which had inflamed the passions of Ron Rendle, Paul's former boss; but the memory of that fat, predatory hand along my thigh so put me off the dress that I have hardly worn it since. Might as well give it to the Oxfam shop. There is a floaty, crinkly black cotton number that Linda passed on to me, because it was too short for her. I still have nice legs; if I dress it up with shiny black tights and Cordy's jewellery I can probably get away with it. In half the time it takes me to get ready for Iwo, I set out for Paul's Hampstead flat. Silvery cones of snowflakes are eddying under the street lamps as I walk towards the bus stop, their weightlessness making a mockery of the squat blobs of cotton wool glued to shop windows. For once I don't spend the bus journey engrossed in my book, but gaze out of the window at the black outlines of trees receding through flurries of snow. By the time I ring Paul's doorbell my cheeks are icy and my best black shoes are wet, but my mood is ebullient.

‘Constance!' Ah: no ‘Conce' then, this evening. ‘You made it! Terrific! Meet Lulu. Lu: Constance. Now don't you two spend the evening talking to each other or you'll make me nervous.'

Lulu looks apprehensive, but she smiles at me and her face mirrors the curiosity on mine. It's the first time we've met; and the children had not prepared me for her youth. She can't be out of her twenties. She's dressed like a sharp and chic little punk, her hair dyed black and cut short and angular around her pale, smooth face. She has large dark eyes and wears no make-up except bright red lipstick. In her sleeveless top and narrow black trousers, she is touchingly young. Together they shepherd me through to the drawing room – I am the first guest – where Paul hands me a stiff whisky. This is no moment to remind him that, as he perfectly well knows, I never drink anything other than red wine.

‘Lulu, do you work with Paul?'

She does.

‘Have you known each other long?'

Just over a year.

‘Do you like the agency?'