‘Poor Andrew.’
‘Yes. Poor me. I say that not out of self-pity but quite objectively. I do think I was unlucky to get into the clutches of those two.’
‘Perhaps you wanted it?’
‘Constance, I don’t believe in all that psychological crap. No, I didn’t want it. But they were two powerfully manipulative women, and there’s no doubt their relationship with each other was sharpened by what they were doing to me. They weren’t going to let me get away.’
‘If it doesn’t sound too cold-blooded, I want to know how you did get away?’
‘Some other time. Tell me about yours.’
‘I am desperately in love with a man who doesn’t love me. That’s all.’
It is the first time I have stated it as a fact, even to myself. Iwo doesn’t love me. Everything is not going to be all right, not all right at all. Andrew pats the sofa beside him, but he is not Paul, and I feel no impulse to snuggle into his comforting circle. I shake my head and, hands clasped around my folded knees, I tell him as briefly as I can the story of me and Iwo. When I have finished he sits silent.
Eventually he says, ‘It’s very late. I’m very tired. I don’t think I can talk any more. I certainly can’t say anything helpful. But I would like to see you again. Now that we’ve started. Will you have dinner with me?’
‘Give me a ring. Yes, I’d like dinner, but I have to get Christmas out of the way.’
‘Ah, family Christmas?’
After he has gone, hugging me less spontaneously than at the beginning of the evening, I get undressed and think about him. Am I enmeshed in another version of the emotional coils that bind Andrew? But Pammy was wicked – or was she? Maybe she was just lonely and frustrated. Maybe the same is true of Iwo. He didn’t ask for love; why can’t I go to bed with him and shrug off the emotions? Could Andrew and I discover one another now, in the aftermath of what we have both learned? He, after all, is a man who knew me when I was young. He could love me. Never mind the speculation: look at the facts. I, now, here, thinking of these two men, am in bed alone. The sheets are cold. The clocks chime three.
10
Next morning Fred phones. I have been dreading this conversation, not least because I know I am too cowardly to meet him and tell him to his face that I shan’t come to his room again.
‘So when are you coming to collect your Christmas present?’ he starts.
‘Oh Fred … you haven’t? Christ, you haven’t got any money.’
‘I didn’t buy it. I wrote it.’
‘Look Fred, I can’t. You must have realized. We haven’t seen each other for months …’
‘Five, not counting the library …’
‘Fred, look I’ve fallen in love with someone.’
‘Oh.’
‘I couldn’t help it.’
‘No.’
‘Please don’t sound so hurt.’
‘Sorry.’
There is a long silence, down which his spoken and my unspoken ‘sorry’ reverberates. Then the pips go.
‘Do you want to ring me back? You can reverse the charges.’ I gabble in the ten seconds we have left.
‘No point. It wouldn’t have made any difference if I’d said I loved you.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sorry Fred.’
We are cut off.
Once or twice during the day I wonder if Fred’s ‘love’ can have resembled what I feel for Iwo; but Christmas is almost upon us, and cards and lists and arrangements soon push Fred out of my mind.
It is late on Sunday afternoon, and I am about to start on the long ritual of anointing myself for Iwo. My Christmas cards, which I have written and signed, ‘much love from Constance, Cordy, Max and’, have received their final flourish from Kate, and the envelopes are stacked in a pile on the hall table, to be posted when I set out. The Sunday papers are scattered over the carpet. In the grate, the first coal fire of the winter glows soporifically. The room is full of calm and contentment, and I go upstairs in a state of well-being.
The phone rings beside my bed, and Andrew’s voice says, ‘Constance? Paul gave me your number. I drove away with no idea of your address and not much memory of how I got you there last night.’
‘I directed you. I don’t know how you got home.’
‘I can’t believe we just shrugged off twenty-five years like that. It was extraordinary, wasn’t it?’
No. Extraordinary is our word.
‘Pretty incredible. I’m really sorry we lost touch for so many years.’
‘I was away.’
‘I’ve just been writing Christmas cards all over the world. That’s no excuse.’
‘Constance, will you have dinner with me? It’s not going to screw things up with this Polish fellow of yours?’
‘Why should it? I’d like dinner, though it’ll have to be after Christmas.’
‘I hate New Year’s Eve parties: if you’re not going to one, how about on New Year’s Eve? I could pick you up and cook you a meal here at my flat.’
‘That’s a thought. Yes. Let me scribble down your phone number in case …’
I mean, in case Iwo should invite me to something. ‘But yes, I think that’s a lovely idea. Are you going away for Christmas?’
‘Only to my sister’s in the country. It’ll be all right. Just a couple of days.’
‘Right. Well, have a happy time, and I’ll see you after that. Oh Andrew … it really was nice, last night!’
‘Me too. ‘Bye, Constance.’
I lie outstretched in my bath thinking, what a nice man he is, what a gentle, soft-voiced, dear man. So why has nobody ever married him? I must buy a book of his poems tomorrow: perhaps I’ll find the answer there. I can tell Iwo I met a poet at dinner. Get him to tell me about Polish poetry …
The phone rings again. I shout, ‘Katie! Telephone! Can you take it? If it’s for me, say I’m in the bath!’
I rest my foot on the tap and am soaping my leg when Kate looks round the door and says, ‘It’s him. Do you want to talk to him or what?’
‘Who: Iwo? Honestly? I’ll talk to him.’
Wet footmarks follow me to the bedside phone, and I pick up the receiver with beating heart.
His cool voice, brief and low as ever, says, ‘Constance? How are you? … Yes, yes, fine. I am sorry my dear but I have to ask you to postpone our meeting this evening. Do you mind? I am sorry to ring at such short notice, but one day later this week, perhaps …’
I cannot expostulate, or ask why, or sound even mildly annoyed. Laconic as he, I say, ‘No, that’s fine. Do you want to fix a day now or …?’
‘I’ll call you in a day or two, shall I? And again, my apologies.’
I put the receiver down and stand naked, wet, and rigid with shock beside the telephone. My fragile equilibrium has been rocked by an earthquake. My self-esteem is falling like debris all around me. Did I think I was stable; content; secure; normal? My heart is thudding nightmarishly fast; the rest of me is motionless. As the water dries on my body I start to feel cold. I walk to the bathroom, let the bathwater out, wrap myself in a towel, and lie down on my bed. I changed the sheets this morning, in case. On the other side of the bed my clean clothes are spread out ready, the underwear faintly scented from having been rinsed in perfumed water, my shoes side by side on the floor beneath. I pick up a book, put it down. Look at my watch, six o’clock. If I shut my eyes, will I sleep? Into my mind comes the recollection that Paul said Andrew’s first book of poems was called Journey to an Icy Land. Where is Iwo going? Who with? And why did I think, for two or three days anyway, that I was normal? Like a diver, I swim in a different element, down, down, down. The water is heavy and sluggish around my limbs, gloomy before my eyes. This exertion is not natural. It makes my heart burst. The thought wriggles through my mind again: Does Fred feel like this? He can’t.
During the week, my joy in Christmas has gone, but routine carries me through. Cordy’s term ends, and she comes hom
e: a marker buoy towards safe waters and firm realities. She spends hours talking to Ben on the phone beside the breakfast room, while I sit at the table wrapping presents or making decorations with Kate. Their conversations are funny, flirtatious, secure. I envy her that relaxation: not only because even at her age I could never have talked to Paul like that – being straightforward and open about love, work and sex. The only men with whom I could ever be really myself were those I didn’t love or feel desire for: men like Andrew; or, in the last weeks, Paul himself. The men who are my friends get the best of me: those whom I love, especially if they don’t love me, receive a distorted, unnatural version.
Paul and I talk on the phone about how best to combine our obligations to family and friends. In the end we make a deal. Paul will spend Christmas Eve at my house without Lulu but with Iwo. I will spend Christmas Day at his flat, with Lulu but without Iwo; and also with his father and my mother, who have nothing in common beyond the fact that they are widowed. This means that both Paul and I are with the children for both days of Christmas, and everyone sees everyone at least once. It seems the most satisfactory compromise: not least because Paul and Lulu will have responsibility for the most elaborate meal, Christmas lunch, when in the past both culinary and emotional crises have come to a head. It also means that I shall have the unsettling – no, intriguing – experience of seeing Paul and Iwo together at my dinner table. Now all I have to do is ring Iwo.
Christmas makes me understand my parents better. When I was a child, our Christmas rituals were rooted in their rituals, when they were children. They handed down the family words for things, the special family ways of doing things, often with an anecdote that was retold every year. They hated the way that, as my sister and I grew older, these observances became an obligation and a source of embarrassment to us, which we performed grudgingly and self-consciously, if at all. Only now can I see that re-enacting the same ceremonies in exactly the same way recreates the magic feelings of one’s own childhood, as well as affirming continuity with those generations of children past.
When I was five or six years old I saw Father Christmas and his reindeer sweep across the sky – saw them, really and truly saw them. I felt a sense of wonder and Tightness – so, everything is all right and just as it ought to be. I used to feel the same when my children were small, watching their eyes and faces reflecting the bright candles on the Christmas tree. But nowadays, when the rituals are played out and the hallowed responses called for, it is their turn to make resigned faces and join in awkwardly. Yet none of us would want to dispense altogether with the ritual, and simply eat, drink, and be generous. Nevertheless, each year the trappings become more lavish. Gifts are more gorgeously wrapped, more numerous, and more expensive. Food and drink are plentiful, rich, stultifying. I spend hours adorning the house with evergreen and ribbons and candles and bright groups of fruit and berries, till it looks like the frame for a Victorian Christmas card. Yet it is beautiful, and the care with which I have created the illusion does succeed in conjuring some of the Christmas spirit. The children ask when we’re going to decorate the tree, ‘Christmas Eve, like we always do’, and try to guess what presents they’re getting. Slowly I crank up the magic, slowly the calliope starts to turn. One evening, just before Christmas, uncertain flurries of snow swivel through the darkness, and Kate decides on the spur of the moment to go carol singing around the neighbouring streets. A few phone calls, a few friends turn up, and, self-deprecating and pessimistic, they set off to sing for charity. Well over an hour later, when the snow has thickened and the house is filled with the spicy smell of hot mince pies, they are back, shaking coins on to the table from a rackety Ovaltine tin, crowding round to count them, marvelling at the unexpected generosity of some, the parsimony of others.
‘Was Fred in?’ I ask apprehensively, dreading the answer.
‘Don’t know … Who is he?’
‘That very tall thin man who I occasionally point out. The one who’s often in the library.’
‘Don’t know him,’ says Kate flatly, and I sigh with relief.
Cordy was right when she predicted that Max would get over Judy fairly quickly. I was prepared to find him pale and subdued, but the round of pre-Christmas parties has picked him up and whirled him along through late nights and dazzling young women, and he shows no sign of bitterness or depression. The young have an infinite choice of new partners. I don’t think he’s putting on a brave face, though I’m touched to hear that he plans to give Judy her Christmas present all the same. He chose it back in the autumn and has been paying a jeweller weekly for a slender brooch of Victorian jet which he knew would suit her dark, intense face. How generous he is! Most young men would have kept it and simply given it to the next girlfriend. I’m quite relieved that he’s unattached once more. The four of them in their squat had moved so rapidly into domesticity that I had wondered how easy Max would find it to disengage himself.
‘When I decide to get married it’ll be quite different,’ he says, ‘but I don’t suppose that’ll happen for years.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Partly you and Dad … getting married so young … Partly me. I just know I don’t want to settle down for a while. But that doesn’t mean I can’t take relationships seriously. It was good living with Jude till it went wrong. Much better than just meeting a couple of evenings a week. We had a great time. Only in the end she felt hemmed in and I didn’t.’
‘Are you going to see her again?’
‘Once at least. We’re having a drink before she goes down to spend Christmas with her parents.’
‘And that’s when you plan to give her the brooch?’
‘Yeah. It’s nice, isn’t it?’
‘Anyone else looming?’
‘Mother! Give me a chance! No, not really.’
‘You could always come and live here for a bit…’
‘I’m all right’
I can’t forget that he cried on the phone – my stolid Max. Meanwhile I only have a few days left in which to find a present for Iwo. On the telephone he had tried to decline my invitation for Christmas Eve, but for once I was bold, swept aside his objections, insisted that he should come. In the end it was probably his curiosity about Paul that made him acquiesce. Paul was equally curious about Iwo. Each knew a good deal about the other, but only from my perspective. The impression they created in the flesh would contradict much of what I had said. I want to give Iwo everything: but his present must be small and look inexpensive. At the last minute I decide on the classic dark green French café set: octagonal cup and saucer with gold rim; matching coffee pot and milk jug. He won’t even know their origin; but to me they promise a holiday abroad together, and that means future happiness. I am giving him my dream.
On Christmas Eve I drink too many glasses of wine in the first hour, and after that the evening flashes past like a series of images in a ViewMaster … Paul arriving with a cardboard box brimming with packages; the girls greeting him with huge happy smiles, Iwo and Paul shaking hands, eyeing each other, drinking together, relaxing, animated. The evening is lit by the small flames of dozens of candles which give a swaying glow to the room, shadowy in the corners, golden around the focal points where candles are grouped … and Iwo, as I have never seen him, laughing and happy, talkative, approachable, ordinary. Once the meal is over I sit dazed with relief and tiredness, watching as the people I love most enjoy the celebration. Firelight and candlelight, silver strands shimmering on the tree, music, everyone dancing and in my memory – which is blurring past and present – the image of a grave little girl reading from the Bible. Is it my daughter, myself, or my mother? The child stumbles over the archaic rhythm and I catch my breath and glance across the room at Iwo who, in a moment of stillness, looking at me, smiles. Really it’s all so simple: I shall, at last, sit down by thee.
After this, Christmas Day at Paul’s was bound to be an anti-climax: but the anti-climax is a relief after the high-pitched emotions of the
last few weeks. I surrender myself completely to their hospitality and the children’s love. Paul’s father and my mother are touching in their anxious dignity; anxious to be important, to do the right thing; anxious to be reassured that they are loved; anxious not to seem old. What must they make of Lulu? Does Paul’s father envy him the sexual freedom to renew his potency with a younger woman and still keep the affection and respect of his children? My mother cannot understand that Paul and I can be divorced yet apparently friendly and relaxed. Does she share Katie’s dream, that we will somehow get together again and remarry? Do I, in all honesty: do I?
From Buck’s Fizz we move on to pheasant consommé; then to smoked salmon. Lulu is like a young acrobat on the high wire, performing miracles, winning applause for her skill and vulnerability. She is performing only for Paul, but to win him she needs us on her side, too. So, I think: she wants marriage. Behind that white-faced, black-haired mask is a woman who wants a husband and babies. It is the undoing of us all.
After lunch the older generation disappear for what Paul’s father calls ‘a little zizz’, and my mother ‘putting a new face on’. I too am dopey with wine and port. I loll back in the sofa and watch my husband with his young mistress. Why doesn’t he marry her tomorrow? The answer must be that he still thinks he may do better, find someone richer, perhaps, from a better family? How choosy men in their mid-forties can be! But for now the two of them are happy. Paul has given her a gold chain whose links are made up of the letters L and U endlessly repeated: a charming, intimate present. He has given me a set of beautiful bookplates, mock eighteenth century, with urns and flourishes.
It is pointless brooding about Paul; I will brood about Iwo instead. He is at the Polish Centre, with Tadeusz and Joanna and Marina and dozens of other Poles whom he knows and I don’t; and by now they are probably all awash with nostalgia, maudlin and maundering, singing hoarse patriotic songs and clapping one another on the shoulder or brushing away elderly tears with the edge of a cuff. Iwo will have gone to mass this morning, since he missed it last night – surely even lapsed Catholics go to mass at Christmas? – and will be feeling sentimental and guilty about his family. Does he have a grandchild yet? I must ask him. Perhaps he is gazing wistfully at a photograph of some tiny black-haired infant, trying to discern in its features some trace of his own. Has the Zaluski line come to this?
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