Love Among the Single Classes (9 page)

‘I am sorry about …'

‘It's all right. You can't help it. Did you have difficulty getting this room?'

‘I lived in a men's hostel for the first six months.'

‘Iwo … was it awful?'

‘Yes. But I was determined not to accept charity from any of the kind, well-meaning people who offered me a room in their houses. I couldn't bear to have to creep past their drawing rooms, hearing the family conversation, being invited to join them, knowing they preferred me to refuse.'

‘You sound as though you'd tried it.'

‘No, that is just my imagination. But we have a saying: Guests are like fish, they stink after three days.'

I laugh, but am shocked by his bitterness.

‘So: this room seemed like a haven. A man from the Polish Club was marrying an Englishwoman, and he told me about it, and persuaded the landlord to let me take it over from him. Luckily he'd been a good tenant.'

‘And you are too.'

‘The landlord was offended when he saw what I had done in here, but I assured him that when I left I would put everything back exactly as it was. I have learned to ignore the bathroom, and I never cook in the kitchen.'

‘And the other people in the house? Have you made friends?'

‘They are all transients. I have been here longer than anyone now, I think. The Australians come in, and have a lot of girls and a lot of parties, and get thrown out, and others come. I am the old man in this house.'

‘Iwo, don't be absurd! You're not an old man!'

‘I am to them. And to myself.'

‘Not to
me
. You are …'

How can I tell him? He is beautiful, his body attracts me like no other body since I was a student: perhaps not even then. I can't remember feeling this same magnetic pull towards Paul. We made love a lot, in the beginning, inexpertly but enthusiastically, sometimes several times a day. But Iwo's body is my North Pole. I cannot tell him that.

‘You must be fit.'

‘Yes. I swim a lot. Can we swim anywhere, at nine o'clock on a Saturday evening?'

‘I very much doubt it! I've brought my swimsuit, though.'

‘Constance … did you? Let me see you wear it.'

‘What, now?'

I am shy. He can see me naked, but to contort myself into my swimsuit here, in the middle of his room: I am shy.

‘Constance: put it on. I want to see you. My dear, please.'

That is as close as he will ever come to demonstrative affection, and so to please him I do as he asks. Self-consciously, I struggle and twist into the swimsuit, and stand in the middle of his floor, feeling foolish.

He smiles, and walks towards me, and enfolds me. ‘You are cold.'

‘Well, of course.'

‘Can you dive? Do you swim well?'

‘Quite.'

‘I want to see you dive.'

‘Not
here
.‘

‘No, of course not, but some other time. Now I will help you to take it off again.'

‘I could always simply put my clothes on over it.'

‘On the contrary. J am going to take my clothes off.'

‘For an old man, Iwo …'

‘Don't expect too much.'

As happens when a man is uncertain about his potency, patience and slowness prove far more exciting than urgent lust. With very great care he devotes himself to my pleasure. I move into another realm. My mind sways with images of Elizabethan embroidery, curling its tendrils like snakes through the silk. Small flowers clutch and sway, gracefully, dreamily, and long white-gloved fingers pick in and out of the soft white fabric. Time is immensely leisurely, my limbs seem stately and disembodied. He does at last lie down by me.

This time it is I who wake first, and looking at his face, relaxed by sleep into the downward lines of exhaustion, I know that I must get up and leave him. It goes against the instinctive yearning for bodily warmth and comfort during
sleep. It also deprives us of the murmured conversations that only happen in bed.
Then
I could ask him, as if jokingly, about the lovely Joanna. As it is, at lunch tomorrow among my children and friends we shall be almost as remote as strangers. Sweetest love, I do not go for weariness of thee.

Next day, Iwo is the last to arrive for lunch. We have all been sitting around laughing, gossiping, discreetly boasting about our children, under the guise of parental exasperation, and drinking wine, so that his upright, formal figure among our sprawling ones seems incongruous, almost an intrusion. I am aware of their puzzled curiosity as I introduce him. His face is a mask of politeness; it is I who am suddenly tense, my heart racing. It is his first encounter with my world, my friends, and I want them to approve of him. Fortunately Kate is spending the weekend with her father, so I don't have to hiss and frown at her black looks, while Max, knowing my predicament, will ease the situation for me. As I disappear towards the kitchen to scatter parsley over the soup, I hear him say disarmingly, ‘Iwo, has my mother warned you that
all
her friends are eccentric?' There is a shout of laughter and expostulation behind me and the noise rises to its former babble. Eccentric,
excentrique:
yes, he'll be able to manage that.

I can't bear to have Iwo at the far end of the table, away from me, so I seat him beside me, and put French Eloise next to him. Eloise is tall and blonde with a slender, androgynous figure; an ardent feminist. She works as a librarian at the Institut Français.

Both she and her husband Jack are active left-wingers, and the soup has hardly closed over his spoon before I hear Jack saying, deceptively soft-voiced, ‘So: is it no longer possible to live in Poland?'

‘For me, no,' says Iwo, and stops there.

‘I wonder how distorted a view our media has been giving of events?'

‘I am in your boat,' Iwo says. ‘I have no other means of information. I read your papers, watch your television sometimes, and hear stories of other people's families from my Polish friends.'

‘What about your own family? Did you have to leave them behind?' asks Eloise.

‘Yes, all. They chose to remain,' answers Iwo, but only I know him well enough to detect the edge in his voice.

‘Can't be that bad, then,' states Jack, who seems to have decided already that he doesn't like Iwo, and is looking for an ideological argument.

I touch Iwo's arm in a brief gesture of support. ‘Jack, I am afraid, has been very hard to convince ever since he went to Moscow. He says he got his interpreter drunk on the first night and had no trouble seeing whatever he wanted after that!'

Jack grins at the oft-told tale and prepares to embellish it, but Iwo says unsmilingly, ‘In that case he is lying.'

Eloise and I exchange anxious glances as the two men square up to each other, ready to launch into argument, and I try to create a diversion by getting up and clearing the soup plates. When I come back, carrying the joint on a huge serving plate, Jack stands up and, without pausing in his flow, prepares to wield the carving knife.

‘You say you were a lecturer, right? In economics, right? And that you were able to correspond with your opposite numbers in universities here in England … yes? Hardly sounds like total intellectual suppression to me. Or didn't the authorities know what you were up to? Letters and learned articles smuggled out by visiting Westerners, thrilled at the chance to hoodwink the oppressors?'

‘Constance, what is “hoodwink”?'

‘Tromper?'
I say, and Eloise nods.

‘They were not hoodwunk,' says Iwo.

But before he can go on Jack's shout of laughter breaks the rising tension. ‘Hoodwunk!' he bellows. ‘Hoodwunk! Oh I like hoodwunk! Hoodwink, hoodwank, hoodwunk. That's it from now on folks: the party line says hoodwunk …' and he
laughs again, with such gusto that Iwo has to join in.

The plates of roast pork and red cabbage circulate; Max hands round the gravy, Cordy tops up the wine, and everyone concentrates on eating. Eloise engages Iwo in conversation in French and I steer Jack into calmer waters with his neighbour at table, my old schoolfriend Sally. Sally is what New Yorkers in the sixties would have called a ‘kook' and that's where she learned her scatter-brained manner and scatological humour. Jack is agreeably shocked by her language, since like most northern Socialists he is a puritan where women are concerned.

‘Talking to your friend is like trying to have an intellectual discussion with a blue-bottomed monkey,' he says to me, grinning.

Propelled by wine and food, the lunch has gathered momentum and will roll forward without any help from me. I am free to watch Iwo covertly as he in turn observes my friends. What does he make of them? Spoiled, complacent left-wingers, ignorant of the realities of life beyond their privileged circle? Does he mistake Jack's energy and political commitment for naivety, Sally's zany clothes for decadence, her husband's serious, slow speech for pomposity? Well, maybe they are all these things: yet I long for him to see that they are also good, caring, sensitive people, troubled by the lives beyond their own Western comforts. Even more, I want them to like him: not just patronize him, as a member of some rare species, the expatriate from behind the Iron Curtain. I want them to perceive the anguish beneath his refusal to explain or pretend, the poignant dignity of his ill-fitting, second-hand clothes. As it is, they are trying too ostentatiously to include him, and I sense Iwo's recoil.

‘Cordy, if everyone's done with the salad can you help me clear?'

In the kitchen she puts a hand firmly on my shoulder.

‘Mother, stand still for a moment. Relax. Listen, it's going OK. Stop worrying about him. He can fend for himself.'

‘Oh darling, he can't. In English? With a crowd of
strangers? Who he thinks are interrogating him?'

‘Presumably he's been doing it for the last three years or whatever. Mostly with people a good deal less sympathetic than this lot. Now relax: you'll only make everyone tense for you. Sit down in here while I clear and bring in the pudding. Just sit.'

So I do; and when I go back in to the dining room I find that someone, Max, presumably, has handed Iwo the corkscrew and a new bottle of wine, and that while he deals with it he is talking to Eloise in French. They are discussing
Les enfants du Paradis
. Iwo has seen it three times and, overjoyed at this discovery of a mutual passion, I chime in, and Jack talks to Sally, and Cordy serves the pudding, and my panic is over.

By the time lunch and coffee are finished the afternoon is far advanced, and turns into a long, leisurely winding-down of the weekend. The room grows shadowy, and nobody stands up to put the light on. The table has been unobtrusively cleared; the dishwasher's gentle background roar has subsided, and I find myself sitting on the floor at Iwo's feet, watching and listening to my friends. Jack has warmed to Iwo, perhaps encouraged by his wife's evident approval, and the two of them are engaged in a discussion of the Polish economy: an area where Iwo's English is at its best. He talks gravely and knowledgeably and Jack stops trying to score points and pays attention.

Sally crosses the room and motions me towards the kitchen. Out of earshot she says, ‘Constance he's amazing! However did you meet?'

This is a problem I had anticipated. I can't possibly admit that I found him in the columns of the
New Statesman
.

‘At the Royal Festival Hall. Max was supposed to be coming with me to a concert and then he let me down at the last moment so rather than waste two tickets I went on my own and in the interval Iwo and I were standing next to each other and just started talking.'

This nebulous, uncheckable explanation is obviously plausible, for she says, ‘How wonderfully romantic! He's
sort of impressive isn't he? Sort of terrifying, too.'

‘How so?'

‘He's so controlled. Look at the rest of us … all over the place. He doesn't move a muscle. He's so damn dignified, in spite of those – sorry love, but they
are
– frightful clothes.'

‘Sally he's dirt poor. He hasn't got a bean. He buys his clothes at Oxfam.'

‘Don't we all? Look at me.'

I look at Sally. She is wearing a wispy black mini-dress below which she wears yellow tights and red ballet pumps, with red satin ribbons cross-gartered around her legs up to the knee. Over the dress float two or three brilliant chiffon scarves. Yet the language of her clothes is perfectly decipherable to all of us: a bit of Greenwich Village, the black; a bit of 1960s hippiedom, the psychedelic scarves; a Shakespearian reference, the motley tights. And so the statement they make about her is not random at all, but individual and witty and charming. Iwo's clothes say only one thing: that he is poor.

‘You'll have to take him in hand.'

‘What does it matter! It's who he
is
that matters!'

‘Constance, you're in love, I perceive …'

‘Sal don't joke … it's deadly serious. It's agonizing. I
am.'

‘Well bully for you. Don't look so miserable then … or doesn't he fancy you?'

‘He seems to fancy me all right, but apart from that I've no idea what he thinks. He's the most inscrutable man I've ever met. And it tortures me. I lie awake wondering about him: what does he want, where has he been, how long will he stay, what's going to happen to us?'

‘Stupid cow. No wonder you're miserable. Just enjoy. Is he OK in bed?'

‘He's … incredible. Just absolutely … I've never … I have not
ever

‘Spare me the details or I might start trying them out on Richard. Just keep yourself under control, if you can.'

‘You're as bad as Max. He keeps telling me, “Cool it, Mother”.'

‘He's probably jealous.'

‘He can't be jealous. He's living with that girl in Clapham, happy and domesticated: why should he be jealous?'