Love Among the Single Classes (6 page)

Iwo had said something strange, as he arrived for lunch: Tt is so long since I have been in an ordinary room!'

At the time I was baffled; now, having seen the house and the room where he lives, I understand better. He had not praised my crowded, comfortable home, any more than he had praised my children or my cooking, nor had he apologized for his room or explained its austerity.

Despite this reticence, I remind myself that I had felt sure when we parted that he
would
telephone me. The happy feeling that everything will be all right fills me again, and I turn on the lights and start to prepare supper.

Two nights later, just as doubts are seriously undermining my confidence, he does ring.

‘Hello: Constance? This is Iwo. Zaluski.'

‘Iwo! Yes! Hello! How are you? I'm so glad you rang.'

‘Please, don't make me feel as if I should have rung before!'

‘No, no … of course you … I didn't mean that!'

‘I know, my dear, I am only teasing you. I want to go and see a film with you. Will you be free?'

‘Oh yes! How wonderful! Yes, when?'

It is arranged. This is Wednesday; we are to meet on Friday. I warn him that, as my children always say, my ideal film would be one made in black and white before 1940 with subtitles. He laughs.

‘And I, of course, am quite opposite. I like decadent Westerns and Hollywood movies, with much blood and rabbits.'
Rabbits?
Oh, robots.

‘It will be difficult to find a film that suits us both, Iwo.'

Then we may have to see two.'

I am brimming and foolish with joy. Only Kate is faintly sullen: it's clear she doesn't like Iwo, and I know I must be tactful; I must try not to talk about him all the time, must not persuade her how nice he is really, must understand that, to her, he is a tall, thin, laconic foreigner who has disrupted her mother's life.

‘Kate, my honey bunch, I'm going out on Friday.'

‘Yes. I know. With him.'

‘Yes darling, as you heard. Now listen, what will you do? Shall I ask Laura' – my sister, the children's favourite aunt –
‘to come over and cook you supper and spend the evening with you?'

‘For Christ's sake, Mummy, I'm not a baby any more. I can cook my own supper. Can I have some friends round?'

‘Who? Not Billy and Rocco and that girl … what's her name? The one who was so rude to me.'

‘Well I didn't think your Polishman was particularly polite to me.'

‘Sweetheart, he's got two daughters who he had to leave behind in Poland. He must miss them dreadfully. You probably reminded him of them and made him sad.'

Kate is mollified, and we negotiate our way towards a compromise. I am to ring up Suzie's mother, and Kate will spend the night there. We've had Suzie to stay here often enough: she won't mind.

Forty-eight hours until I see him again. I spend much of the time reading about Poland, realizing how little I actually know and how crude are my stereotypes of noble trade unionists, charismatic churchmen and patient, queuing women. When I'm not cramming chunks of Polish history I am fretting like a teenager about what to wear. My clothes, now that I examine them critically, seem chosen to make me look nondescript and sexless. Dusty-coloured shirts and sweaters, skirts that don't fit properly, trousers that are never very well cut, shoes that allow me to walk briskly rather than elegantly. For the first time I glimpse myself through Paul's eyes, and see what a dowdy figure I must have appeared to him and his colleagues. Poor Paul: his antennae perfectly tuned to every shift on the fashion wavelength, how depressing it must have been for him to partner me. Now that I have the promise of happiness I feel tender and guilty towards him.

On Friday evening, getting ready to meet Iwo, I indulge in narcissism for the first time in years. My vanity has only ever been focused upon my children or my husband. Now I pull clothes out of drawers and cupboards, try them on, reject them, ask Kate's advice, reject that. I can't remember when I last dressed with the conscious aim of pleasing a
man; presenting myself as an object of desire. Have I
ever
worn beautiful underwear? The girls' cotton pants and a couple of sensible bras had sufficed for years. Black lace made me feel timid and when Paul gave me bits of small frilly satin lingerie I had been too shy to parade them. Now I unwrap them after their years in tissue paper. Wearing them makes me walk differently. I tremble in the secret consciousness of my sexuality and the knowledge that, when I undress tonight, it will be in front of Iwo.

Do I ever stop to consider that the violence and suddenness of my emotional commitment is unbalanced, even abnormal, or that my response is out of all proportion to anything Iwo is or could be? Am I sometimes calm, objective, cautious, sceptical? No, not for a moment. I pitch headlong into love. And yet from the very beginning I fear that I'm wrong. Love is fanned into a blaze by insecurity, and Iwo never allows me to feel sure of anything. It is not that he deliberately lies or misleads me, but he is … equivocal, evasive, tantalizing. He is the unicorn, alien and wary, and I the improbable virgin who may succeed in taming him. He has, after all, talked about his great longing for intimacy and trust. Alone in England, with a long lost past that he can't go back to, his vulnerability is obvious.

In the darkness of the cinema we both sprawl in our seats, almost lying rather than sitting, close but not touching. My right side burns with the imminence of contact. If I move just half an inch I could feel his shoulder, arm, wrist … hand … fingers? If I shift my leg fractionally it would rest against his. The sensation is so close that my own blood pulses faster, as though from contact with his; yet still we do not touch. He seems absorbed in the film. What stops me from simply taking his hand, or slipping my arm through his and snuggling up to him? It is, again, my sexual modesty. Indoctrinated since my teens with the belief that ‘no girl ever cheapens herself by running after a man', and further intimidated by Paul's physical indifference to me, it is impossible for me to initiate any contact, however slight. At parties or dinners I used to watch enviously as other women
hinted and promised and dazzled with almost invisible movements of eyes, mouth or hands. It was a wonderful female skill and I never risked it.

Iwo takes my arm. Easily, naturally, quite suddenly he turns and smiles at me in the dark and draws me closer. My heart leaps and I could sigh with joy. Instead, I frown at the film in pretended concentration.

Afterwards we have a pizza and two glasses of wine and take the underground to Earls Court and lie once again side by side, naked, cold; above and below, pulsating, warm, in his bed, under the pale London night sky.

In the sweet exhaustion and tenderness that comes just after making love, as we lie still locked together in our last grasp, returning gradually to our separate selves, I finally relax. In these few moments I can articulate my love: not as
love
, but delight in our mutual pleasure. Iwo is silent; not, I know, through disappointment, but because his form of sexual shyness is not physical but verbal. Perhaps he lacks an English vocabulary of tenderness and eroticism. I hope so. It would mean he had not slept with many other English women: maybe I am the first.

I always mistrusted men who had to lash themselves into sexual activity with a string of dirty words – ‘I want to suck you and fuck you and lick you and prick you' – a ritual incantation that had nothing to do with me but was all about naughty nights at prep, school when smutty schoolboys would shock and thrill each other with all the taboo words; so Iwo's reticence does not disturb me. Yet when, half an hour later, we make love again, I am self-conscious about my gasps and high cries, which seem very loud in his labouring silence. Will the other lodgers hear? Will they pause outside his door, nudging one another as they listen to me? I decide that next time we make love, it will be in my bed. Also, I very much want us to spend a whole night together. He is drifting into sleep and so am I, and it is an effort to leave his warm body and slide my legs out of bed into the cold air and my feet on to the bare floor. I pick up my clothes from their stations around the room. Later I shall lovingly recall how
they got there … here, just inside the door, he took me in his arms and pulled the dress high over my head; there, moving towards the bed, I kicked my shoes off; next, standing here by the curtain he unhooked my bra with one practised hand while the other curled around my breast; and right here beside the bed I pulled off this fragile slip and these tiny triangular pants … He lies in bed smiling as he watches me reverse the process.

‘I could take you home …' he says.

‘Iwo, you have no intention of taking me home!'

‘No. But I will, if you want me to.'

‘I do want you to. But I want even more to leave this room with that image of you lying there in bed, so that I can picture you here as I sit on the tube going home.'

I kneel on the floor and enfold his head and shoulders in my arms, printing kisses upon his cheek, the curve below his ear, the concave arch under his lifted chin. Now I could say it, now would be all right. Perdition catch my soul! But I do love thee, and when I love thee not, chaos is come again.

Yet I don't. I can't speak.

Early next morning, as I dawdle over coffee and oranges, he rings me. ‘Constance?'

‘Iwo! How are you? Did you sleep well?
Thank you
for last night.'

‘My dear, I am a very guilty man. I should not have let you go out alone, so late. Next time I will stay with you.'

Next time! Oh joyful leap of the heart, oh promised bliss!

‘I agree. Definitely. Oh Iwo, have you seen what a beautiful morning it is?'

‘Of course. I have been up for long. I have been planning to take you a churn eye with me.'

‘A
what?'

‘Churn eye. Train churn eye.'

‘Oh good. I love trains. Have you thought about where?'

‘I will explain when I see you. I plan to go to Newark. Are you free tomorrow? Or have you family obligations?'

Iwo, Iwo, have you no idea how I feel? You don't realize
that nothing would get in the way of the chance to see you.

‘Newark? Whyever Newark?'

‘Can I tell you when we meet? Tomorrow is Sunday. Are you free?'

‘All right, yes, I am.'

We arrange that he will come over here this evening for supper. I am left to puzzle over Newark. Relatives? A friend? A musical instrument to collect or deliver? What matters is that we are going there together.

The night is our third together, and the first time we wake up in the same bed. I watch him wake, and doze, and wake again, and pretend to doze, for as long as I dare, and then go down to make our breakfast, leaving him to the uninterrupted solitude of a bath. We get to the station early and at the bookstall I make one of my most important discoveries yet about Iwo. I buy a Sunday paper, and a French magazine.

‘Why do you read that?' he asks.

‘To keep my French in good working order and my idioms up to date,' I tell him. ‘And also because it has wonderful photographs.'

‘So: you speak French?'

‘Yes. Well, more or less. No: yes, I do.'

And thus I discover that Iwo's French is perfect, much better than mine, his accent polished and scholarly, his vocabulary so flexible that he can express the nuances that escape him in English. After this we always speak French together, and it transforms our conversations. It is like fine-tuning a radio and finally getting the voice clear of static.

‘My mother's family,' he explains, Tike many Poles at the turn of the century, had a resident French mademoiselle, and children were brought up to speak French at dinner with their parents, and during lessons in the schoolroom. Their Polish was fluent, too, of course: but French was the language of civilized conversation. So when I was born my mother was determined that I should be bi-lingual in French and Polish. As well as speaking it with me, she made me read the French classics, Molière, Racine, Pascal's
Pensées
.
Which is why my French may sound old-fashioned and formal to you.'

That had not occurred to me; but I do notice – more and more as I become familiar with the colour and music of his French – that in it I can hear echoes of his childhood. In French, he is more tender, relaxed, and childlike than he is able to be in English, a language he learned first for academic purposes and then, here in London, for survival.

During the two-hour train journey the paper and
Marie-Claire
lie unopened on the formica table as we cross barriers of thought and feeling in our new language. Iwo's freedom with words makes him expansive and he tells me anecdotes about a family background that I had not begun to suspect. His parents, I realize, though he does not spell it out, were clearly upper-class; landowners, perhaps even aristocrats. By the time he was born their world was rapidly being destroyed, yet was still close enough to have formed the framework which influenced him most.

‘My great-uncle', he says, ‘used to send his laundry to Paris because he said no-one in Warsaw had the right kind of starch!' Nowadays Iwo is able to laugh at such absurd fastidiousness and recollect with some guilt the poignant figure of his mother's French governess. ‘She was forever trying, like the duchesses at Louis XIV's court, to achieve tiny privileges which would bring her status closer to that of a member of the family and further from the servants; and forever being rebuffed. My grandmother was proud, snobbish, selfish, and must have been cruel because – my mother used to say – she would turn a blind eye for days to these minuscule social advances, such as the governess instructing the servant to lay a linen napkin at her place instead of the cotton ones which the children used… and then suddenly she would ridicule poor Mam'selle in front of the whole family, in exquisite, cutting French. It was like a perpetual game of grandmother's footsteps: only the governess never reached the front.'