Love Among the Single Classes (2 page)

There is a long pause. I count the seconds. One and two and three and, ‘And?'

‘It is a young man's dream. When I began to be grown up man I see that this is not possible.'

‘Do you want me to call you Iwo or Monty?'

‘Iwo is my name.'

‘All right then: Iwo. How old are you now?'

‘Fifty-four.'

‘Well, I am forty-four. I was married for fifteen years. And I still believe it
is
possible. Perhaps not like you imagined when you were young, or I did, but it is the
only
thing I have ever really wanted out of life. More than to be successful or beautiful or rich or powerful or whatever the things are that
people want, I would rather be
truly
happily married. And Iwo, you do occasionally see people like that. Middle-aged, even old people who really seem to talk to each other still, who hate to be parted, who
love
each other, with a real strong love. Oh Iwo, you mustn't think a good marriage is impossible!'

‘No?'

‘But you do?'

‘I hope not, but I think so.'

I am eager to discover as much as possible, and take for granted that he must feel the same about me. So I ask him bold questions, like: ‘Obviously you can quarrel and still love each other. But do you think people can be unfaithful and still be happily married?'

‘Taking another person to bed is not the worst thing. Boredom is worst. Not to care, not to listen, not to look at wife or husband, not to see when he changes. That is worse.'

They can be astonishing, these conversations between two people who have only just met, yet who sense vistas unfolding before them. Filled with hope and freshness, one says things that even one's best friends might be surprised to hear. I have never admitted to my women friends that this desire for a good man and a good marriage is still the most powerful dream of my life. We rejoice in our candid, necessary friendship and yet I keep this secret from them all.

Iwo and I reach the crest of the Heath and gaze at the views across London. We watch the children fly their kites, the young parents pushing babies in prams (already they have stopped holding hands), the couples who kiss and bicker. We look at one another and smile and draw breath carefully, slowly, in case something goes wrong. The autumn sunshine throbs with fading brilliance. There is one particular beech tree that, by some trick of the light, stands out in three-dimensional clarity from all the others, its foliage a burning orange that reflects the sun like fragments of gold leaf. I think, I shall remember that tree until the day I die.
Eternity was manifest in the light of the day, and something infinite beyond everything appeared: which talked
with my expectation and moved my desire
.

I feel that I have never in my life had such a momentous meeting, and that it will alter me for ever. Life
is
, after all, kind and good. You endure trials in preparation for its key moment; but then it comes, and everything is all right. Yet I am not naïve. I have lived through a complicated marriage and seen it disintegrate against my will. I have brought up three children, which is not a simple matter. I have had a number of affairs and relationships since I got divorced, some of which have put me on my guard. Yet this afternoon with Iwo I feel overwhelmingly certain that he is my heart's desire, and life will grant it. Why? Partly it must be his extreme physical beauty. He does not look young and not every woman would find him attractive: his face is not striking enough; the colour of his skin and eyes and hair is pale and subtle, rather than masculine and emphatic. But the curves and angles of skin across bone, the energy and grace with which he moves – these are perfect. Not in some aesthetic, passionless sense. He is overwhelmingly erotic. I shiver with the desire to see his naked body and touch his smooth skin and feel the hardness of his muscles as they tense. It is usually the physical that first blinds me, so that I stumble and fall into love.

Something else is important, too. He wants – needs, at least – to marry. In the six years since my divorce, eight since Paul, my husband, left me, I have seen my chances of becoming a wife again diminishing fast. The brave ideals of feminism, which I discovered and embraced wholeheartedly as a single woman, can't alter the ageing process, or the bitter truth that very few men consider women over forty to be desirable. Younger men are an exception but they have their own reasons and none of them are to do with marriage. Of course women in their twenties and thirties are firmer and tauter in face and body: but can that make up for the lack of parallel experience? I grew up with Hungary and Aldermaston and the Beatles; the deaths of Marilyn Monroe, President Kennedy and Winston Churchill. These were my formative public events. How, then, can one overcome the
time-slip with someone whose teenage passion was
The Rocky Horror Show
, whose first political memory was the massacre at the Munich Games or the Watergate scandal? Evidently this is unimportant to men. Nowadays, if they're my own age they seem to regard me as an older woman – and why not, when the pool of younger women grows all the time?

This discovery fills me with angry resentment; but it also saps my confidence. I used to be pretty, at any rate, prettyish, and I took my looks for granted and never stopped to think that it would make any great difference when they began to desert me. I didn't need to. I was married, wasn't I? The other thing I took for granted was that my marriage would last for ever. Now I realize that as I develop lines in my face and grey hairs, the prospect ahead grows worse. I will have to compromise, if I want to marry again, and settle for a man perhaps a decade or two older than me, and to hell with contemporaneity. The chances are that he'll be pompous or cynical; drink too much or smoke too much or both; think all feminists are lesbian bra-burners; and assume that my job is to look after him and iron his shirts in return for the housekeeping and a spot of pocket-money. He won't even understand why the prospect appals me.

So? The obvious solution is not to re-marry, to stay a member of the single classes and take love and sex wherever I can find them: one or the other, seldom both. But I want to marry again; and that means both. Whatever I may say to the children or my friends, I can't deceive myself. I am afraid of future loneliness. Kate is the last of my children still living at home with me. The other two have virtually gone, to live independent lives, and gone too is the caravanserai of au pairs and mother's helps who accompanied the family over the years. When Kate leaves home I will no longer be able to justify keeping our rambling, shabby, beloved family house. Paul bought it for us all when he got his first big promotion in a new advertising agency that quickly became rich and successful, making him so at the same time. When we parted he offered me a choice: maintenance for myself and the
children, or the house and all its contents outright, and nothing else. I chose the house. Losing it would have felt like a second divorce, and I didn't want to deprive the children of its security at an insecure time. Our standard of living fell sharply, from two dozen free-range eggs, size two, to one dozen battery farmed, size four, per week, for instance, but the house was what mattered. It had seen me young and the children small. Fairly soon I shall have to sell it and shrink into a cramped, spotless flat with a spare room for the children's visits, and there I will spend my time surrounded by books and cats … The children have made a joke of it; yet it's not so far from the way my mother lives, now that she's a widow. One hopes it will turn out to be a caricature. All too often it doesn't.

And now here, suddenly, is Iwo; no compromise at all. His poverty – he
is
poor, if his second-hand clothes are anything to go by – doesn't bother me. What matters are his obvious qualities of grace and intelligence, and the fact that he wants to marry. Unless that was just a ploy to get women to answer his advertisement? I must know.

‘Iwo … were you serious in your advertisement? About wanting a wife? Your first marriage doesn't sound very encouraging.'

‘I need to stay here in England. I cannot go back to Poland. Is very complicated, but … believe me, I cannot. Home Office may refuse my next extension of temporary permit. With English wife I could stay.'

Bald, uncompromising, honest: like his original advertisement. I can hardly ask if I will do, whether any woman will do as long as she's English. Is it just a marriage of convenience he's after?

My thoughts must show in my face, for he says, Tt is not absolutely as simple as this. Of course I hope for much more, not just British passport. I make relationships more slowly now, you will be patient with me? But I am hoping.'

He looks at me and, defencelessly, he smiles. It is, I think, the last time we look at each other as equals.

Already I find myself overawed by him. I have fallen in
love so quickly, and without yet knowing what he feels, that I am inevitably at a disadvantage. Yet it is easier to talk openly now, before we have formed a definite relationship, than it may be later, when every word will become loaded. And so it happens that most of what I know about Iwo comes from this very first conversation, before my questions could seem like an intrusion or a threat. And just as I feel free to ask, so he, too, is free, even eager, to reveal himself. How lonely he must have been, I think, to be so anxious to make contact and sense an emotional response. Our conversation dips and swings like church bells, pealing the good news, and our sense of discovery is extraordinary, and mutual. I am sure it is mutual.

We walk across the Heath for hours, filled with elation, talking, still not touching one another; but at each new discovery and every shared opinion my heart soars higher. I am breathless and triumphant with love. This is his first time on the Heath, so he hasn't a clue where we are supposed to be going, and I have lost all sense of direction. I must have criss-crossed these walks dozens of times with Paul and the children. We've been coming here for birthday picnics and Bank Holiday Fairs for years, almost twenty years, and yet I'm utterly lost. In the end, because it's dusk and the air is cooling and we're both thirsty, we have to ask a passer-by for the way out. Twenty minutes later we are sitting in a Hampstead tea-room, looking at one another across a round table with an imitation lace tablecloth made of embossed paper. I feel that my eyes must be ravenously, comically wide, as they scour his face. The enormity of our emotion makes us feel powerful, important. The piped music annoys us, and so Iwo summons the waitress and asks her to turn it off, and she does. The roomful of chattering people seems silent, distant, foggy, beside the sparkling reality that surrounds the two of us.

‘Let me see your hands,' he says, and although I have always thought they are ugly hands, I spread them before him across the table, clumsy and docile as a child who has just washed them.

‘They are good hands, working hands,' he says kindly, and I withdraw them into fists. I look at my hard-working hands and he does too, and finally he extends one of his hands and places it over mine. We touch, drily, skin against skin. For several seconds we look at our two hands, and finally at each other. At last he says, This is … extraordinary.'

And I echo, ‘It is, yes. Quite extraordinary.'

Nobody interrupts us, no-one wants to share our table. Even the waitress stays away. It must be perfectly obvious that we are falling in love.

By the time we leave it's getting dark, and as we walk on to the street my legs buckle under me, so that I can no longer stride out, as I've been doing all afternoon. I stumble. He catches my elbow.

‘What is it?' he asks.

And I say, ‘It's you.'

I am in shock. Standing beside him is more than I can bear, and I think I almost faint. He grasps my arm and we walk along in silence, arm in arm, like a long-married couple at the end of their Saturday outing.

I wish this were a short story, so that I could stop it
here:
a little abruptly, perhaps, leaving the reader to imagine various conclusions to this overheated beginning. Then I could move on to the next wry tale about something quite different. The reader needn't ever think about it again, though a critic might find fault with its structure, its lack of symbolism, even its abrupt and unsatisfactory end. But my life is not a literary
jeu d'esprit
, my feelings are not anaesthetized by words, they are savage and untidy and way off the mark. I make mistakes: most of which come from simply thinking about him too much. I study Iwo the way a chess-player studies his opponent, anticipating every possible move and its consequences, trying to enter into his mind, trying, almost, to
become
him; until I am incapable of acting spontaneously.

But I'm leaping ahead. This first afternoon, evening now, is still straightforward and happy. I am charged with the
energy and optimism and sexual tension of new love. We take the bus down the hill, the trees now dark silhouettes against a slanting sky, and at our original bus stop we part. The people in the queue must take us for near-strangers. We are. We shake hands, thank each other gravely for a pleasant afternoon, and I head home leaving him to wait for his bus. Ah, but he has agreed to come for lunch tomorrow!

The greatest surprise comes on Sunday evening when he takes me to see where he lives. All he has told me is that it's in Earls Court. I don't ask whether it's a flat or a house; whether he lives alone or with friends. I know by now that he works in a repair shop for musical instruments; that he earns very little, so that the DHSS pays his rent.

As it turns out, he lives in a single room in a large, dilapidated Victorian house in one of those shabby streets behind the tube station. From the outside it looks like the sort of house where prostitutes might take their clients, for twenty minutes and twenty-five pounds a time. In fact it's one step up from that: a rooming house for travellers; a first base from which to find a proper place to live. His room is large, perhaps seventeen feet long, with two tall sash windows looking out over a bedraggled patch of grass and some mature trees. The room looks even larger because he has pushed all the furniture except the bed to one end, and concealed it behind a white curtain hanging from a ceiling track the width of the room. This is drawn across, so that through its pale, quivering fold one can just make out the shapes of the cheap chest of drawers and wardrobe behind it. The effect is eccentric, surprising, and beautiful. At the other end of the room, beside the window, stands his bed, very squarely and tidily made and covered with a clean double sheet. The windows are uncurtained, but sparkling clean. He has partitioned off the bed as well, with another pale, loosely-woven curtain which is drawn back towards the bedhead. The walls are painted white, and the bare expanse of floor is sanded and stained a creamy colour and sealed with varnish. This austere room, when I see it for the first
time on the evening of our second day together, is the first thing that makes me apprehensive about Iwo.