Love Among the Single Classes (24 page)

That evening I get back feeling better for having returned to normality. On the hall table, cluttered with unwanted mailings and printed cards from window-cleaners and minicab firms, is a thin envelope in Katarzyna's handwriting. I take it up to my room. I put it on the bed and go for a piss and wash my hands. I take a glass from underneath the napkin on my chest of drawers and pour myself a vodka and look at the envelope. It was posted ten days ago. It is dark outside, and raining. I fetch a knife and slit open the letter.

Dear Iwo,

Thank you for your letter and your New Year wishes. It
sounded as though you had celebrated the New Year a little too well! You are not usually so sentimental. Perhaps one of these other women has softened you up! It's more than I could ever do: have you forgotten that? Must I remind you that for the last five years that you lived here, we hardly spoke? By all means use your memories to keep you warm, but don't confuse them with the truth! I bear you no ill-will, but you must make up your own mind what to do. I shall go my own way, with or without legal permission, much as I always did! It won't hurt me, or the girls.

It is good of you to offer to send us more things, but you were very generous at Christmas. Some warm stockings, fine wool are best, would be welcome, and good baby clothes are hard to find. We are all knitting coats of many colours! Any shop will tell you what babies need. Don't be embarrassed to ask. But none of these things is essential.

I am glad to hear of your promotion. From violins to cellos? Perhaps one day they'll let you repair a double bass! Smile, Iwo, smile! You were always melancholy after Christmas.

The food situation is getting a bit better here. Things are still very expensive, and the queues are as long as ever, but we have supplies back in the shops. Whenever there's any fresh fruit to be had we all get it for Alina. She is blooming and we all need vitamin C!

Look after yourself, and tell me your final decision soon.

Your affectionate

Katarzyna

She is as capricious as ever, hot and cold by turns. Should I believe the cold tone of this letter, or the warmth of the last one? Although I have a non-existent marriage with an absent wife, she still torments me. Is she just playing games with me? What am I to believe? I am filled with lustful thoughts as if it were thirty years ago and we had only just met.

I have hired a television. It costs me nearly ten pounds a month, but it saves money on everything else. Now, if I feel like laughing I can watch the comedy shows; or music if I feel like music. There are nightly programmes about politics. In the postroom they talk about what's been on television the night before, and now that I have a set I can join in their conversations, which are mostly about snooker, or the plots and characters in soap operas. Their wives watch the soap operas and they watch sport. Sometimes they also talk about the news, criticizing the Prime Minister as though she, too, were a character in a soap opera. It never seems to occur to them that politics might be a struggle that involves them, nor even that the struggle has any importance. It's not – as I used to think – because they are wary of expressing political views in front of the foreman. They have no dialectical vocabulary.

The basement is airless and even when it rains I prefer to get out in the lunch hour. The flicker of the neon lights and the throbbing of the central heating pipes set up electrical currents in my head like the thickness in the air before a dry storm. I often go to Soho Square and sit on one of the benches there, or on a seat in the lee of the gardener's hut if it's very wet. The other day it was raining so hard scarcely anyone was about except a few people under umbrellas hurrying to lunch or the book shops. Yet a girl of about seventeen, dressed all in black, was walking slowly round and round the square, taking no notice of the rain and apparently weeping. Sometimes she stumbled with her head down, looking at her shoes, and then she would tip her head back, up into the rain, so that I could see her face
distorted by emotion, her eyes screwed up hard against the rain and her tears. After watching her for several minutes I became so distressed by her pain that I walked towards her and took her arm and led her firmly towards the shelter. She shook her head and moaned ‘Oh Christ!' but I ignored this and she did not resist. She seemed very young, with angular hair dyed crudely black and a black leather jacket that stank of cigarettes, even in the rain.

‘It's all right,' I said. I'm not a strange person and I won't hurt you. It's all right. You are so wet.'

She sat with drooping head watching the rain roll down from her hair and drip on to her knees. After a while she took out some cigarette papers and tobacco from her jacket pocket and with red, trembling hands rolled herself a cigarette.

‘Your hands are very cold,' I said, and although she didn't answer, she jerked the skimpy little cigarette towards me.

‘No thank you, I don't smoke. Would you like a cup of hot coffee to go with that? Shall I buy you a coffee?'

She shook her head again and said indistinctly, ‘Never take sweeties from strangers,' and lit the cigarette. She inhaled deeply, occasionally giving a hiccuping shudder like a child who has been crying for hours.

‘I'm Polish,' I told her. ‘In my country I was an economics lecturer. Are you at school still? Or have you a job?'

‘Sixth form college,' she said, and stopped again.

‘I have a wife and two daughters at home,' I said to her bent head. Her hair made starry spikes where she had run her fingers through it, and her scalp showed whitely through.

‘My daughters are grown up and married. Have you got a family? Brothers and sisters?'

‘Sods,' said the girl, and started to cry again.

‘My name is Monty. Really my name is Iwo but English people call me Monty. Do you want to tell me what you're crying about? My lunch hour is over soon and I must go back in ten minutes so you could talk to me for that little time. I am sad too. Perhaps we will both feel better. I am sad
because I don't know whether I want to go back to Poland or stay here and I can't decide. It depends if I love my wife and I don't know. I have perhaps never loved anyone …'

‘I love someone, he's called Martyn, he's very handsome, his face is all bony and he's got this really thick hair …' the girl started and a shudder ran through her again.

‘I've never been in love before, but with him I fell in love the moment I saw him. I only met him a few weeks ago. He started at the college this term. He'd been thrown out of public school, he said, and he's come to the college to do his A Levels like me. He's really, you know, laid back, he doesn't fool about like most boys and he really knows about things like jazz and French films and stuff like that. All the girls were after him as soon as he arrived and he's got this really posh accent. I'm not a snob. He's tall and he wears ever such nice clothes and his parents have got a lot of money only he doesn't get on with them so he's got his own place. He has this flat, right? And after we'd been going out a few times he asked me to move in with him, that was two weeks ago.'

She stopped and seemed about to cry again, so I asked, ‘And did you? And what did your parents say?'

‘Not my parents, my dad, I live with him. He was mad. He was fucking mad and he said if I went I needn't ever bother to come back so I went. That was two weeks ago.'

There was another silence while she relit her cigarette.

‘My wife didn't throw me out, I left of my own wish, I fled from Poland, after December the thirteenth. But we had been living like strangers under the same roof for years. We shared the same flat but we slept in separate rooms. The girls had left home by then.'

‘So anyway I moved in with Martyn and it was lovely. He has this really nice flat because like his parents have got pots of money. Course I've been with lots of blokes before, I started when I was thirteen, but never like this. I really love him. I got frightened of him because I loved him so much, and so I couldn't be a laugh or anything like I usually am,
and I got dead jealous if he didn't come back with me after college. Three times last week he didn't and once he came in after midnight and I gave him real hell, and then on Monday he did it again and I'd spent the whole evening on my own in his place crying, and I didn't even know who to ring and ask, and I couldn't do my work either. Then when he did get back he didn't want to like, go with me, you know? I mean he slept with me, he had to there's only this one bed, but he wouldn't…' She started to cry again.

‘I have to go in a minute,' I said. ‘My lunch hour is supposed to end at half past one.'

‘Yeah. I don't care. What the fuck anyway?'

‘So you had a row …?'

‘Row? All night long. We made it up in the morning, I thought, but since then he hasn't you know, and this morning when I was doing his coffee he said perhaps I ought to go. And I can't. My dad'll never have me back and I love Martyn just so much, and I've got tickets for this jazz concert next week because it's his birthday and I love him, I really really do, I really do.' She got up and lurched away from me into the rain and walked out of the square on to the street. I didn't run after her. I let her walk away. After a minute or two I also got up and walked back to Fordyce Music and that basement.

In the evenings I watch more and more television. It has become a sort of hibernation, and means that I go out even less than I did. News pictures of the miners' wives shouting furiously in support of their husbands remind me of Katarzyna, my wife. How splendidly she spoke at rallies, reckless and single-minded, without a fragment of doubt. She always remained convinced that the doctrines of Communism were inviolable; it was the leaders who were flawed. A government of Katarzynas, a party of Katarzynas, would indeed have produced a Utopia! She is incapable of hypocrisy or self-interest. Belatedly I recognize her nobility. The miners' wives shout or shake their fists into the camera, spit their defiance at the police, and all those wives are one wife: my own. How is it possible that I never recognized her
qualities while I lived beside her? As though her lovers reduced the largeness of her spirit! Besides, did I really care? I was jealous – but did I care? My pride was clipped but I never asked myself why she needed to take other men to her bed. Now at last I want her in her entirety: but even if I can convince her of that, will it make any difference? There are television programmes about Poland; re-creations of the events at the Gdansk shipyard, interviews with Walesa, and during all of them my eyes dart like frantic little fish across the screen, searching the crowd for the face of my wife. Often I think I see her, and then I pay attention to the commentary and find the film was shot in some place where she couldn't possibly have been. I fear the return of the tumour. Thoughts of Poland are insidious, and draw me into daydreams that overwhelm my waking hours.

Constance telephones, and I agree to meet her. It is a long time since I saw her, and I have almost forgotten her existence. I tell her blatantly that I have no money; that I have just sent a parcel of food and clothes to my family, which is true, but she assures me that this is unimportant; she will pay.

Down in the underground there are more miners than ever, shaking their plastic buckets covered with stickers that say ‘Coal Not Dole'. They respond cheerfully to those who throw coins in with a word of encouragement, and equally cheerfully to those who spit, sometimes in tones of extraordinary malevolence, ‘Fucking Scargill! Ought to be bloody locked up!' But few people challenge them directly. In the rhythm of my head I sense a slow crescendo. I feel it in the miners, too: they are accelerating towards what will be an astounding victory or a crushing defeat. The strike has lost its timeless feeling; events are moving towards a conclusion. I have the same sense about my own affairs; I have resolved my dilemma without consciously knowing how I have resolved it or what I am going to do. Now I must wait and let the decision rise to the surface of my mind, and then wait again to see how it translates itself into action. I move passively with the momentum of events, not really
thinking, waiting for them to engulf me.

Constance is vibrant with energy. She looks bright-eyed and vivid, but her voice is nervous.

‘Iwo! Don't you look
well?
Marina thought you'd lost weight but you haven't! Isn't this weather foul? How are you? Gosh, it's ages since we saw each other … must be, what, over a month?'

‘Perhaps it is. You too look very well, Constance: the winter suits you.' She glows with pleasure and I am touched to see her made happy so easily, and draw her arm into the crook of mine and let her guide me to the cinema where she has booked tickets.

‘I would have come over to see you when you were ill, Iwo, but Marina said you'd specially asked not to be visited, so I didn't. But I would have done otherwise. Did you have plenty to read? I actually enquired at our library about some Polish books for you but then of course I had no idea what you'd have read or which authors were any good so I …'

She tails off anxiously, so eager to please, so ineffectual.

‘My dear, I have been a recluse, but now I have emerged, all the better for my retreat. Tell me something about this film, before we get there.'

She knows everything about it: the career of the director; the private lives of the stars; she will tell me the plot if I want her to. She has chosen an American film for us, which is a pleasant surprise, and I prepare to surrender to some other man's patriotic fantasies.

In the restaurant afterwards, a stone's throw from my position in Soho Square, she softens with the warmth of the food and thick red wine.

‘Have you ever been hungry, Constance?'

‘Only when I've been trying to diet. I've never
had
to miss a meal because I couldn't buy the food. Oh Iwo, have you been eating properly? You must eat properly, it's terribly important, especially in the cold.'