Love Among the Single Classes (25 page)

‘I was thinking how different your life has been from mine. It's like the men where I work. They have no concept of struggle, it seems to me.'

‘I don't know: look at the miners. Some of them were probably quite complacent until a year ago. Now look at them.'

‘In Poland we have seen the earth shake. For the last twenty years, thirty, more, for as long as I can remember, the struggle has been constant. Ordinary things are hard all the time. Buying things is hard. Teaching is hard. Talking with friends is hard. A knock on your door is hard. I think I have come to need that, that tribulation.'

‘Your life doesn't seem exactly easy now. Not even mine is entirely without its problems …'

‘My dear: look at us. You have arranged the evening and taken care of me: and I don't have to wonder why; if you can be trusted; if I should guard my tongue, or whether you will start to question me about one of my students or friends. Here, on this menu, we can have whatever we choose. There are no shortages. The other people eating here … they're nothing to be afraid of. They can overhear us and it doesn't matter. No-one wonders why we are speaking in French …'

‘Iwo! I meant to tell you: I've been learning Polish! With your dictionary; and with an old lady who sometimes comes into the library.'

She makes me feel guilty: she must be doing this for me.

‘Good day my name is Constance and I lives in England,' she says painstakingly in my mother tongue. ‘I have three children, two is girls and one is boy. What is your name?'

Suddenly I am tired and bored and I feel a great longing to catch the tube from my usual stop and let it carry me home to bed. The film and the food have relaxed me and I know I could sleep now, without thoughts or dreams. But the wine has made Constance skittish.

‘Shall we go? Shall I get the bill? It's nearly midnight. Are we going to my house or what?'

You go to your house and I'll go to mine, I want to say; but the most I can manage is, ‘I'd rather go to my room.'

‘All right then. I warned Katie I might not be back. She's got a friend staying the night. Iwo, how was my accent?'

Appalling. ‘Not bad at all.'

‘Really? It's a terribly difficult language.'

‘I hope you aren't learning it on my account.'

‘No, I'm enjoying it. And the old lady – her name's Magda, she's wonderful – she really enjoys teaching me.'

‘I may not be here all that much longer. Don't learn for me.'

In the silence she signs for the bill and smiles glassily at the waiter, who fetches our coats. We leave the deep plush warmth of the restaurant and swing open the doors into a cold night.

‘Where are you going? Is it for long?'

‘I don't know. I might not. I'm still thinking about it.'

‘I see. Well. What does Joanna think?'

‘I've no idea. I haven't discussed it with her. I told you, haven't decided anything yet. I shouldn't have mentioned it.'

She is silent at that, and silent on the tube, and silent as far as the front door of the house. Then she says, ‘I can always catch a taxi home … I don't have to …'

‘What nonsense! You will stay, I hope,' I have to say, and of course she does.

But as I sit on my bed and watch her undress, a longing for human contact takes me by surprise. It is weeks since I held a woman's body in my arms, in my bed, and Constance smells sweet and her flesh is warm.

‘I'll warm your side …' she whispers, as she slides between the cold sheets and shivers. As I undress, the prospect of being welcomed into bed makes me glad of her presence. I kiss her to stop her talking; her breath tastes of wine. Her body arches towards me, and I find that the old mechanisms work, they still work, the flag is hoisted up the flagpole to the sound of a solitary trumpet.

Towards the end of February snow falls hard for several days, making the streets first clean and then mucky. Waking up one morning to find a snowstorm whirling down from a high white sky, I lie in bed watching the crystallized trees and black, huddled birds, and sink deeply back into childhood. Each morning they would begin with the
announcement of the temperature. ‘Minus fifteen Celsius' the grown-ups would say, and sometimes, with bated breath, ‘Minus twenty degrees Celsius' and, very rarely, ‘Minus
twenty-five
degrees Celsius! Iwo, mind your nose doesn't drop off!' ‘It can't, it's impossible,' I would insist, but they'd wag their heads and with long faces tell stories of children whose noses had got frostbitten without their even realizing it, and dropped off, leaving them for the rest of their lives with faces like lepers. Fingers and thumbs and even toes were liable to the same disfigurement if I didn't wear my warm scarf, my warm gloves, my galoshes, drink my warm milk and come in when I was called. With threats and blackmail they controlled my days, cutting short my play and using my ignorance to fill me with fears. Why do people tell lies and talk nonsense to children? What they didn't know was that I disobeyed most of their commands – took off the gloves and scarf and defiantly exposed myself to Jack Frost. My fingers turned first blue and then yellowish-white with cold and stung with pain, but I didn't become a leper, so their bluff was called.

After that I skated and sledged for as long as I wanted, especially during that magical time towards sunset when the blue winter dusk wiped out all shadows and made the snow-covered ground look perfectly smooth. My sledge would skim this glittering surface and for those fifteen or twenty minutes – the brief time between whiteness and darkness – each bump that went shuddering up through my backside along my spine came as a shock, because my eyes hadn't anticipated it. Tense with bravado, I went faster and more recklessly than usual, dashing into danger,
wanting
to fall off and break a limb. I never got more than bruises. My mother used to bathe them with witch-hazel, and its pure, healing smell is the perfume I associate with her. She wore scent in the evenings, but I preferred her in witch-hazel. She had to anoint me secretly, because my father and grandmother accused her of coddling me and making a fuss. The secrecy made the smell enticing. Grand'mère I associate with bitter aloes, which she painted on my fingertips to
make me stop biting my nails, and eau-de-Cologne, with which she washed her ears. Her house smelt of beeswax and the lemon water which the servants used for whitening marble, and logs for the fire. Smell is the most primitive of the senses and snow one of my earliest memories. It wafts me backwards in time. A little boy lies here in bed, cosseted in plump starched sheets and feather pillows, a night-light beside him, watching the snow.

Jack Frost gets me in the end: thanks to the London winter. Being without a warm scarf and gloves, I develop a genuine bout of flu and am forced to stay in my room. I lie in bed for days, sick and self-pitying, haunted by unresolved events from my all-too-present past. How can I help being in thrall to my childhood? Raw perceptions were branded on my senses, while my emotions were exposed to a complicated rhythm of pleasure alternating with pain. The love of the grown-ups around me was pleasure; their disapproval was pain. Love and disapproval seemed meted out at random. Had those years been all misery they might at least have given me the tough hide of a realist, which is to say, a cynic. As it was, my heart was cramped by the timidity or harshness of the people who ruled my boyhood.

I began by fearing and obeying my father. Next I hated him, because he tyrannized us all in the sacred names of discipline and duty. Finally, I despised him, realizing that he was a bully, a cowardly man behind the erect façade. He was contemptuous of tenderness, which he called sloppiness, and love, which he called sentimentality. Today at last I understand why: the tiny, tyrannical figure of his mother, my exquisite Grand'mère, was reason enough. I wish I could forgive him for the harm he did me … especially now, when I am becoming like him in so many ways.

As for the settings against which these dramas took place: far from being timeless drawing rooms they turned out to be as flimsy as plywood. In one decade the family house and hierarchy collapsed. By the end of the war my grandparents were dead – luckily for them – my ineffectual mother was frail in health, and my father reduced to being a worker
among fellow-workers in the publishing house he had once headed, which now became a conveyor belt for shoddy propaganda.

The lesson I learned in these crucial years was: do what you want and confide in nobody. Yet in spite of myself the search for harmony and kindness still goes on, and still occasionally seems to have found its happy ending. A complete cynic doesn't believe in happiness, and therefore doesn't bother to pursue it. I am still capable of yearning for Marina, or detecting in Constance, for a while at least, that same intelligent heart which as a small boy I treasured in my mother. I am half a lifetime away from closing my eyes and calling out for my mother. I am an ageing man in a strange house and this flu is making me ache. To hell with self-pity! To hell with the past, and with all phantoms and shadows and silhouettes and ghosts!

I'm sick of being sick. Flu is at its worst, not in the days when one is most ill – those pass in a haze of sweat and boredom, and are hardly different from standing in a queue for hours on a hot summer's day – no, the worst of flu comes afterwards, with the depression and weakness. In this state I have no resistance to nightmares. Those maudlin daydreams about my childhood were infinitely preferable to these images from my adolescence. In old churches in the country, frescoes with black visions of hell-fire and purgatory have sometimes survived for centuries: maleficent demons grimacing at their victims, who are twisted into caricatures of pain. These images, I learned, are exact, not melodramatic. We have no need of hell when this world does its job quite satisfactorily. The hurts inflicted by my family, which distorted me for life, were good training: they helped me to survive what I witnessed later. I did not believe I could become a man, after what I had seen as an adolescent, and yet I did. One does, unless one happened to be Jewish.

That's as much as I can manage now. I'll have to talk about something banal. But I'll come back to the nightmares – I have no choice, since they always come back to me.

It's only my thoughts that burn. Outwardly I am not warm. People have sometimes called me enigmatic or inscrutable, which fills me with a mixture of incredulity (me? Iwo, the small boy who craves approval, enigmatic?) and satisfaction, since I know that inscrutability is a baffling and attractive quality. Women like a man to seem unfathomable.

Marina phoned me yesterday and asked me to stop by the club, as she had something to tell me. I knew what it would be, and of course I was right: she has definitely decided to marry that oaf, Peter. She even has a flashy engagement ring, which she shows me with bravado.

‘My dear, it is a beautiful ring,' I say. ‘Now everyone who sees you will know that you belong to some generous man.' I know that will gall her.

‘It's not new,' she says, ‘it belonged to his mother. She gave it to him for me. It's her way of saying that she approves of me, I suppose: though after having had him to herself for so long she must dread him going. So it was generous of them both.'

She is clever, and I smile at her in recognition of the fact.

‘Will your fiancé allow me a congratulatory kiss?'

‘He's allowed all the others … one more can't make any difference.'

My lovely and defiant little Pole, you're going to be wasted, I think, as I kiss her smooth brown cheek.

‘Has Constance spoken to you?' she asks.

‘Not for a week or two … whenever I saw her last.'

‘She's giving a small party for us, to celebrate our engagement. I know she's going to invite you. Iwo, you will come, won't you?'

Constance is giving a party for Marina? I'm astonished. But then, who else is there? Me, I suppose: and she knows I couldn't do it. The club might have organized a party for her: but then it would be impossible to keep all the elderly Polish airmen away, and an engagement party of veterans would be depressing. So … yes, Constance. She is kind – and she must be closer to Marina than I had realized.

The party is on a Saturday evening. It is strange to arrive
at Constance's cosy English house and find it full of the intense babble of Polish voices.

Constance herself greets me in Polish, with a sentence that has been carefully rehearsed: ‘Welcome to our celebration of the betrothal of our dear friend Marina.' Its archaism must be due to the age of her teacher, but I manage to bite back a smile.

I take her hand and kiss it, saying very slowly, Thank you. It is an honour to be here.'

She smiles vaguely. I presume she understands.

At the same moment her forbidding younger daughter comes and pushes a glass of wine into my hand saying, ‘Well? Aren't you even going to come and say hello to them?'

Marina looks like a young Polish peasant woman, ruddy from fresh air and farm food, her eyes sparkling and her movements full of vigour and candour. I can hardly bear to turn from her to the pinched face of the fellow who stands beside her, complacently accepting the congratulations of her friends.

‘My dear Peter, you are a very lucky chap indeed,' I tell him.

‘I know that. I hope Marina is considered lucky as well?'

Ignoring this arrogant remark, to which the only honest reply would be, Certainly not! I ask instead if he plans to learn some Polish.

‘Like Constance, you mean? No, we've decided that our household will be a proper English one. Marina's English is pretty good already, you wouldn't know, probably, but it is, and it will get better the more she has to speak it. For the time being I plan to have her go on working, but as soon as we start a family she can give up waitressing and devote herself full-time to me and our children.'