Love Among the Single Classes (19 page)

‘Now I'm serious, Constance: I won't have you ruin this evening. Drink that and shut your mind to Iwo and
concentrate on seeing the New Year in with me. Music? What do you like?'

‘Anything.'

‘No, not anything. You can have jazz, opera, Haydn or Bach; Beethoven, Sibelius, or sixties rock. You can have Edith Piaf …'

‘Mozart. Not opera: something religious.'

‘Requiem, Coronation Mass?'

‘Oh the
Coronation Mass
… yes … that!'

‘In the Colin Davis version or … ah! Garbo laughs, but Constance smiles. Right?'

‘Andrew, you're lovely. I have stopped thinking about Iwo.' For the moment. ‘Now, dinner. Do you need help?'

‘Watch!'

At the far end of the room is a long white roller blind. He pulls it up, and there is a miniaturized kitchen with a microwave oven. From the fridge he takes out a salad whose shades of green owe more to avocados and kiwi fruit than lettuce; and a bottle of champagne which he places on the dining table. I begin to feel apprehensive. What does he expect of me?

‘Constance, do you realize I have become a fairly rich and rather lonely middle-aged bachelor? I have laid on this performance for quite a number of women whom afterwards I hoped never to see again. Give me the pleasure of doing it for you, and just enjoy, will you?'

Over dinner we plumb layers of news, gossip, and recollection. Andrew summons up images of us at Oxford, punting, jiving, arguing, celebrating in subfusc after Schools were over. Everything can be told, no questions barred. We quarry through folded seams of memory. He remembers me and Paul as happy young lovers more vividly than I do, since in my case those images are overlaid with our subsequent disillusion and parting.

‘Why did you two break up?' he asks. ‘I was in New York when it happened.'

I can be flippant, after all these years. ‘Andrew, we were babies, Paul and I, when we got married. And then, right
away, we
had
babies. Max and Cordy were born before we were twenty-five. So there I was, smelling of milk and babyshit; and there was he, all pert in his sharp little sixties suits with striped shirts and floral ties, and the next thing he noticed was that he had this secretary. Well, more of a typist. And she smelt a lot more enticing than me. Wasn't difficult. After that he was away. As the French say, it's the first one that counts. When you've been unfaithful once, there seems no real reason to stop. I never had a first one. Not till quite a long time after he left me.'

‘Poor young Constance.'

‘Not so young by then. I was, hang on, thirty-seven when he finally went.'

I stand beside Andrew as he makes coffee in his galley of a kitchen. It looks complete; yet it's not. There are no stores, no ordinary supplies like flour and jam and tins. No half-used jars of anything. The fridge is full of bottles – white wine and champagne and Perrier water – not leftovers like mine, or ingredients for the rest of the week. It is bleak in a different way from Iwo's disciplined bleakness, and it moves me more. We sit down, on the same sofa now, and I ask, ‘What about you? What was Pammy's secret?'

‘Very simple. She taught me about sex and
guilt
. Plus: do you remember me telling you about my mother? Probably not: long time ago now. She was widowed in the war, too, and brought up me and Rosemary by herself. We were genteelly poor: the worst kind of poverty, because it usually means that those around you are rich. So my grandparents sent me to public school, but in the holidays I never went abroad or skiing like everyone else: just home to Berkshire and the bridge parties and the Young Conservatives. No, wait, it's relevant. You know what's lethal about all that? Those women get status by manipulating men, though they actually despise them. My mother's friends used to sidle up to me and pretend to believe that I must have dozens of girlfriends. We were the most sexless household I ever knew. My mother, I'm willing to bet, never slept with a man from the day my father went off to get killed, when she must have
been, what, twenty-six? My sister was a tennis club virgin. And me. I finally lost my virginity to Pammy.'

‘Andrew! What a killer! How did you survive?'

‘Well have I? Look at me. I can only relate to women in two ways. Either I love them and suffer – that's thanks to my mother and Pammy. Or I distrust and exploit them – my revenge on the bridge club harpies. The only women I have ever felt comfortable with are the very, very few who are my friends. That's why I'm so glad to have met you again.'

He tops up our glasses in silence: wine for me, another large brandy for him. The atmosphere grows tense with his pain and need.

‘Tell me how you got away from Pammy.'

‘I went on an expedition to Antarctica.'

‘You
what?'

‘I know: bit extreme. I had been swinging from Ann to Pammy and back for years … until I was nearly thirty. And then my mother died, quite young: thank God. It meant Rosemary could get away from home and marry, and now she at least is normal. Our house was sold and we took half each and I put my half into an expedition to the South Pole.'

‘Was it wonderful?'

‘In many ways, yes. We were there for seven months.'

‘Wait, I've got it now! “Great stone boulders are not here/ Clear blue mountains shape this land, steer my ship … “I thought all that was metaphorical. I didn't realize you'd actually been.'

‘Constance! You don't know what a compliment that is!'

‘I could quote you more: “Beloved Gorgon, kindest of torturers …” Paul said you had published some poetry, so I went out and found
Journey to an Icy Land.'

‘Lots of people buy my poems … well, lots: a few hundred, but I often wonder how many people actually read them. You did.'

‘Did the Antarctic cure you of Pammy?'

‘It certainly got me away from her. Icebergs really are blue, you know, it wasn't just a figure of speech. And penguins have a great sense of humour. Dead pan. No. Yes, it did cure
me of Pammy, of the relationship, if not its after-effects. From there I hitched a lift to America, and stayed on and worked in New York for more than ten years. Came back to London the complete media clone.'

‘You're not.'

‘No, I'm not.'

The conversation has become like Paracetamol for a headache. It takes away the pain, yet I know that somehow the pain is still there. When we have stopped talking, the image of Iwo with Joanna which waits, crystal-sharp, at the back of my mind, will scythe through these reminiscences and cut me down. So Andrew and I talk through and past midnight, pausing to open another bottle of champagne and wish one another better luck in the New Year, and I never feel awkward or reticent.

Finally, I have to say, ‘Andrew, darling Andrew, you've got to let me go home. I'm dead. And pissed. Can you call a cab for me?'

‘Wouldn't dream of it. I'll drive you home.'

And so he does; and outside my door he folds me very gently in his arms and with great tenderness he kisses me. He takes my hands, and kisses them, and then lays his own hand against my lips. Then he drives away.

I wrench my front door open and totter into the hall. I have had a good deal to drink. Iwo and Joanna. Shall I ring him and wish him a happy New Year? Then perhaps he'll tell me about his friendly evening with Joanna and then everything will be all right and I shall be able to sleep. He might suggest that as it's a Bank Holiday tomorrow we could meet. Even as I think the conversation I know it will never take place. He and Joanna are lovers. I have been a fool to kid myself. I once saw a motor cyclist die. It was in the days before crash-helmets were compulsory. The crash happened in less than five seconds, and the image was photographed with shocking clarity, to flash before my eyes for weeks afterwards. In the same way, the picture of Iwo with Joanna is by far the clearest I have of him. I recall to the fraction of an inch the precise angle of his body as he bent solicitously
towards her to catch what she was saying, undoubtedly in their precious Polish. I recall his warm, tight grip on her arm – such a Continental gesture! – and the ease and confidence with which she smiled up into his face. Was there ever a time when I felt as sure of him as that?

I have been made a fool of. I am angry. I will be indignant. The young motor cyclist jack-knifed off his bike into the air and his last living expression was one of utter surprise, before he hit the road and his head rolled under the wheels of the lorry.

All happy Christmases resemble one another, each unhappy Christmas is unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy might have said. Last year I had an unhappy Christmas, alone among courteous acquaintances to whom I was a duty. This year I spent Christmas with a family, and shared in feelings of sentimentality and old customs and ceremonies fitting for this occasion. I ate and drank well; had one woman and could have had two, but I chose not to. I was not rejected.

It has been a good, cold winter, and I miss my fur hat with the ear-muffs. The snow began to fall early in December, and my room was very cold. I spent many evenings alone in it, with a bottle of vodka for company. Vodka makes a better hot-water bottle than the beer which the youngsters downstairs are always drinking. I sometimes accept a can, to show friendliness, but vodka is too expensive to share. The three of them – or is it four? – would empty my bottle in ten minutes. But they bear me no grudge. Constance brings her own wine, and would not, I think, want vodka. When she is here I don't need vodka to warm me. She always wants to be fucked.

I have been trying to decide what to write to Katarzyna, who hinted in her last letter that if we are to get a divorce after all this time, she would like to get it over and done with. The vodka and I together have started many letters: ‘My dear wife, I have met a woman here in London who wants to marry me, and if I am to do this and thereby acquire permanent status as a citizen of this country, I shall need official divorce papers.' Sometimes I write, ‘You will be relieved to know that I plan to marry a Polish girl, so that if one day you or the girls visit me, there will be no language
problems in my home.' But none of these letters is ever sent, because I have not made up my mind what I shall do. The third possibility, to go back home, looms larger all the time. I try not to think about it, because I know that the consequences would be unthinkable.

I miss the family preparations for Christmas. I seem to remember my childhood Christmases better than more recent ones. Perhaps everybody does this. Here in England they don't celebrate Saint Nicholas's Day, but as it approaches I remembered the terror and excitement that I used to feel as a little boy. Mama said he only visited good children, and I knew I hadn't been good all through the year. The question was, did Saint Nicholas know? Sometimes I would decide to confess all my sins in the hope that, being a saint, he would be merciful and forgive me, and give me presents just the same. In the end I always thought it best to keep quiet and hope he would be deceived, and it always worked. I learned very early on that, if you keep quiet, good people will think the best of you. In the years when we spent Christmas with my grandparents, Saint Nicholas would ride through the village in his red coat and hat on a sleigh, stopping at every house to distribute presents to us children and take a glass of vodka with our parents. In the magic of that arrival I would become a good little boy, and send up prayers promising to be good next year too. His bells could be heard ringing all down the street, and I would stand in the porch under the light dry-mouthed with anticipation as his sleigh rattled up the long drive lined with spruces. He would climb down out of the sleigh with a heavy sack slung over his shoulder, and swing it to the ground, and dig around in it, and pretend at first that there was nothing for me. Then he would say, ‘Has Iwo been a good, loving child all through the year? Does he say his prayers every night? Perhaps he has forgotten something he ought to tell me?' And I would be dumbstruck with fear and doubt, and just as I was about to blurt out the sins I had committed, Mama would put her hands on my shoulders and say, ‘Dear Saint Nicholas, our Iwo is a good boy. Have another look in the
sack … surely you have something for him there?' And then when he had gone there was still Christmas to come.

There have not been many events in my life as a man that brought the same shivering of excitement as that sound of sleigh bells down the road. It must have had something to do with the uncertainty of never being sure I would get a present. Uncertainty still makes me tremble with fear and pleasure today. I am a natural risk-taker. Many of the things which others called brave were done to recapture that suspense. At one level, they were just childish games. The women who have excited me most were always those who might refuse me. Katarzyna I never completely learnt to predict. After weeks of silence, she could walk into my room one night in her slip. I never felt jealous about any woman, except her.

In the snow my feet are cold and wet. I cannot afford good boots and nobody in London wears galoshes. My shoes are thin, and they make my feet damp, which is bad for them. When I was a child I once had boots made of leather embroidered with flowers in many differently coloured wools. I was ashamed of them, because the town boys called me a sissy, but in the country all the peasant children wore them with their best suits and jackets, on feast days. These are the things I remember. I am not homesick. I don't want to go back to the Poland I left, but to the Poland before that.

The work I do here punishes my mind and my spirit. If I were doing it in Poland, well-wishers in the West would make me a
cause-célèbre
, write letters to the Ministry of Justice complaining that a distinguished economist should not have to work as a common packer in a postroom. But here in the West, it is freedom. I am a free man in a capitalist country. I work for my food and drink and self-respect. That basement is killing my self-respect. The men with their talk of football or racing, television or women, the crude women spread over newspaper pictures, the noise from their radio that never stops. They mean to be kind.