Love Among the Single Classes (16 page)

Oh yes, she does.

Dear heavens, I think, give me a
bit
of help.

‘I love your haircut! Where do you have it done?'

We are in the middle of a discussion about London's hairdressers when the doorbell rings again and it's Andrew.

It is a shock seeing him after more than twenty years. His thick hair, which I remember smoothing across his forehead one evening when we sat in his rooms confiding in one another, now starts from the top of his head, above a high expanse of shining, domed skull. Yet he still looks like a poet: the problem is to discern the advertising man.

Whatever his thoughts on seeing me, his reaction is warm and generous. He puts his arms round me and gives me a real, enveloping hug, far removed from the usual chill social pecks on adjacent cheeks. He always was a dear man, even if, then as now, his clothes smelt faintly acrid with perspiration.

The dinner is well cooked and, like good guests, we eat it and praise it, conversing together first this side, then that. I play my part conscientiously because I know Paul is anxious for Lulu's sake that the evening should be a success. So I make social small talk … plans for Christmas? Going away? Miles and I decided we'd go skiing this year. Well of course it's different when you have children to think about. You
did
keep the children, didn't you? Yes, Miles's ex-wife got his. He misses them terribly of course but it does mean we're much freer. We have them for the odd weekend. I adore them. You work? In a library, really? What, something like the British Library or the London Library or something? Oh, oh I see … well it's a marvellous thing, isn't it, that anyone can read all those books absolutely free.
Do
they much, nowadays? From this I turn gratefully to Andrew, but even while I talk to him I am preoccupied with Iwo. Iwo's laconic manner, the austerity of his room, seem like cold water in contrast to the cloying liqueur we are now being offered.

I thought I was nodding and becking and smiling in a
convincing way, so I'm startled to hear Andrew say in an undertone that no one else can hear, ‘What is it? What are you thinking?'

‘Me? Nothing. Don't be silly. Go on.'

‘You're miles away. Tell me.'

‘When we were at Oxford, Andrew, and I used to come round to your rooms and pour out my heart about
him
there, what were you thinking?'

‘I used to wish it was me.'

‘Dear Andrew … how kind you are. No, seriously.'

‘I am serious. I envied him.'

‘No but did you think I loved him?'

‘You said you did. It wasn't like my sort of love.'

‘Wait … yes, it's coming back to me. Ann, wasn't she called?'

‘That's right. Good memory. That nurse I'd met while I was doing my National Service.'

‘What did it feel like?'

He pauses, and says slowly, ‘As though I were Saint Sebastian, bleeding from a hundred arrow wounds. I felt like a laboratory monkey or the screaming Pope. I felt pain.'

‘Why didn't she love you?'

‘I never knew. Sometimes she'd be flirtatious and cuddle up to me and we'd talk about the future, and other times she'd be cold, but in a pert, flippant way, high-stepping and mane flowing, so that I was driven mad with longing.'

‘Did she mean to torment you, do you think?'

‘I didn't know at the time and I still don't. To think, I never went to bed with her!'

‘It wasn't nearly so automatic, then, was it? Lots of people didn't. Paul and I took quite a while to get round to it.'

‘I wrote a lot of poetry about her, of course. That helped.'

‘I wish I could.'

‘Could what?'

‘Write poetry. Now.'

‘Oh Constance … Still? Is it Paul?'

‘Will you drive me home? Have you got a car here?'

‘Yes.'

‘Good. OK. Now we'd better be sociable.'

Time to change partners again.

The evening has relaxed. People are sprawled like dragonflies. Miles's second wife, fun-loving Meredith, is confiding her secret longing for a baby. Covertly, I observe Lulu, now that her dinner and the worst are over. What must she think of Paul's collection of sixties records: The Stones and King Crimson and other psychedelic musicmongers from our early married life? Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious must be more her style.

Noticing me watching her, Lulu comes across to Meredith and me and says, ‘You know it's Paul's birthday soon? I thought of taking him to Covent Garden …'

‘I'm sure he'd love it, but would
you?'

‘That is a problem, right. He likes good solid stuff, doesn't he? – Wagner and the Russians,
Khovanschina
, that sort of thing – and I'm far more into the nineteenth-century Italians, Bellini.'

‘Do you sing or anything?'

‘Soprano.'

‘What, professionally?'

‘Well, I once thought I might, but it's terribly competitive. Nowadays I just sing for fun, and for the discipline of it. The exercises.'

She has put me down so subtly that Meredith hasn't noticed.

‘Well as it's Paul's birthday treat you ought to book something he'll like. But since you obviously know more about music, I'd suggest something
you
like!'

‘Would Cordelia and Max like to come too, do you think?'

‘You'd better ask them.'

‘Yes, I think I will, if that's OK by you.'

Paul comes and joins us, taking Lulu's hand, and says, ‘What did I tell you two? No plotting!'

‘You and Andrew were plotting too, looked like,' says Lulu.

I ask Paul if Andrew has changed since our Oxford years, since he struck me as being exactly the same.

‘He's a bloody good advertising man nowadays. Creative director of Plumtree Roland Mathieson is worth a few K.'

Andrew drives me home. He's never been to this house before, the setting for my life. He sits in one corner of my sofa, his face like an over-restored portrait: time and texture obscuring the original. Behind it I see the smooth face of a fresher Andrew. Hearing him talk, watching his hands curved around a mug of coffee, is so powerfully evocative that I feel surrounded by his room in college where we used to sit. I would perch on the wooden window seat from which I could look down into the quad, and back into the darkening room at his pained face. I conjure up his table, piled with books and file paper; his shelves, books spilling out of them over the floor in untidy columns. Why were we in love with other people, and yet so close to each other? Ours was an entirely platonic relationship. I never touched him, except to comfort him, nor felt any nudgings of desire from him. Now, though in all common sense he would be a better man for me than my sad knight, Iwo, I feel only nostalgia.

‘And what happened with Ann finally? Did it fizzle out?'

‘It went on for years, even though we always seemed to be in different places. She in London, me in Oxford; and then when I came down to London to start work, she moved to a hospital in Birmingham. It was never simple. And then after a while it got really extraordinary.'

‘Mmm?'

‘Well, it's still not easy to talk about. I wrote some poems at the time, and later published one or two, and luckily everyone assumed they were allegorical.'

‘Mmmm.'

‘Constance, this will shock you. It ought to. It was shocking. It was very destructive. I think it did me a great deal of harm.'

‘Mmmm? Don't talk about it, if it makes things worse.'

‘How come I can talk to you like this when we haven't met for over twenty years, about the most painful episode in my life?'

‘Because we're back in Peck, on a warm summer's evening, with people calling to each other across the quad. That's how
I
feel.'

‘Ann's mother seduced me. To make up for Ann or something. One weekend when I was staying with them she came to my room and got into my bed. It was the middle of the night, and Ann was asleep just a couple of doors down. She might easily have woken up and heard us.'

‘Do you think that was the whole point?'

‘I think Pammy, her mother, was a bit baffled by me, probably wondered if I were gay. She herself had been widowed in the war, never remarried, she was still only in her mid-forties when I came along, didn't have a man in her life, fancied me … took me to bed.'

‘How did you feel?'

‘Guilty. Flattered. Shocked. We slept together regularly after that first weekend and it went on for ages, alongside my relationship with Ann. I was in love with the daughter and fucking the mother. Sounds like a young man's wet dream, but it was a nightmare. Damaged me a lot. Look at me, still not married …'

‘But not because of that: those two?'

‘Don't know why. Fact is, I still haven't married.'

He looks ungainly and neglected. Throughout the evening I've been intermittently aware of his sour smell: the smell of a man whose clothes aren't clean, rather than his body, in defiance of all the deodorized canons of advertising.

‘Why did you feel so damaged? Is it necessarily wrong for women to sleep with men half their age?'

He laughs.

‘Constance …?'

‘No, not me. I just don't happen to care for younger men all that much. Anyhow, today's young men aren't guileless and innocent: which I presume was the main attraction.'

‘Yes, it is wrong for women to sleep with young men in love with their daughters. And Pammy knew how I felt about Ann. She put me into a double bind, so that I had not one but two of them to deal with, which meant, to get away
from. So there I was, starting out in advertising, chatting up the secretaries in the pub at lunchtime, sharing a flat in South Ken with three others, outwardly the swinging sixties man, making trends like follow-my-leader; and what no-one else knew was that I was utterly hooked on these two Medusas. Ann soon knew I was sleeping with her mother, I'm sure of that. It was like incest: we never discussed it. The whole relationship was about evading the truth, but I bet she knew.'

‘Would she have cared?'

‘To care she would have had to love me, or her mother. I don't think she loved either of us. I think they both enjoyed watching me twisting like a fish on a hook, wrenching my guts out in the effort to escape.'

‘Poor Andrew.'

‘Yes. Poor me. I say that not out of self-pity but quite objectively. I do think I was unlucky to get into the clutches of those two.'

‘Perhaps you wanted it?'

‘Constance, I don't believe in all that psychological crap. No, I didn't want it. But they were two powerfully manipulative women, and there's no doubt their relationship with each other was sharpened by what they were doing to me. They weren't going to let me get away.'

‘If it doesn't sound too cold-blooded, I want to know how you did get away?'

‘Some other time. Tell me about yours.'

‘I am desperately in love with a man who doesn't love me. That's all.'

It is the first time I have stated it as a fact, even to myself. Iwo doesn't love me. Everything is not going to be all right, not all right at all. Andrew pats the sofa beside him, but he is not Paul, and I feel no impulse to snuggle into his comforting circle. I shake my head and, hands clasped around my folded knees, I tell him as briefly as I can the story of me and Iwo. When I have finished he sits silent.

Eventually he says, ‘It's very late. I'm very tired. I don't think I can talk any more. I certainly can't say anything
helpful. But I would like to see you again. Now that we've started. Will you have dinner with me?'

‘Give me a ring. Yes, I'd like dinner, but I have to get Christmas out of the way.'

‘Ah, family Christmas?'

After he has gone, hugging me less spontaneously than at the beginning of the evening, I get undressed and think about him. Am I enmeshed in another version of the emotional coils that bind Andrew? But Pammy was wicked – or was she? Maybe she was just lonely and frustrated. Maybe the same is true of Iwo. He didn't ask for love; why can't I go to bed with him and shrug off the emotions? Could Andrew and I discover one another now, in the aftermath of what we have both learned? He, after all, is a man who knew me when I was young. He could love me. Never mind the speculation: look at the facts. I, now, here, thinking of these two men, am in bed alone. The sheets are cold. The clocks chime three.

Next morning Fred phones. I have been dreading this conversation, not least because I know I am too cowardly to meet him and tell him to his face that I shan't come to his room again.

‘So when are you coming to collect your Christmas present?' he starts.

‘Oh Fred … you haven't? Christ, you haven't got any money.'

‘I didn't buy it. I wrote it.'

‘Look Fred, I can't. You must have realized. We haven't seen each other for months …'

‘Five, not counting the library …'

‘Fred, look I've fallen in love with someone.'

‘Oh.'

‘I couldn't help it.'

‘No.'

‘Please don't sound so hurt.'

‘Sorry.'

There is a long silence, down which his spoken and my unspoken ‘sorry' reverberates. Then the pips go.

‘Do you want to ring me back? You can reverse the charges.' I gabble in the ten seconds we have left.

‘No point. It wouldn't have made any difference if I'd said I loved you.'

‘Did you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Sorry Fred.'

We are cut off.

Once or twice during the day I wonder if Fred's ‘love' can have resembled what I feel for Iwo; but Christmas is almost
upon us, and cards and lists and arrangements soon push Fred out of my mind.

It is late on Sunday afternoon, and I am about to start on the long ritual of anointing myself for Iwo. My Christmas cards, which I have written and signed, ‘much love from Constance, Cordy, Max and', have received their final flourish from Kate, and the envelopes are stacked in a pile on the hall table, to be posted when I set out. The Sunday papers are scattered over the carpet. In the grate, the first coal fire of the winter glows soporifically. The room is full of calm and contentment, and I go upstairs in a state of well-being.