Love Among the Single Classes by Angela Lambert Page B

swim a lot. Can we swim anywhere, at nine o’clock on a Saturday evening?’
    â€˜I very much doubt it! I’ve brought my swimsuit, though.’
    â€˜Constance … did you? Let me see you wear it.’
    â€˜What, now?’
    I am shy. He can see me naked, but to contort myself into my swimsuit here, in the middle of his room: I am shy.
    â€˜Constance: put it on. I want to see you. My dear, please.’
    That is as close as he will ever come to demonstrative affection, and so to please him I do as he asks. Self-consciously, I struggle and twist into the swimsuit, and stand in the middle of his floor, feeling foolish.
    He smiles, and walks towards me, and enfolds me. ‘You are cold.’
    â€˜Well, of course.’
    â€˜Can you dive? Do you swim well?’
    â€˜Quite.’
    â€˜I want to see you dive.’
    â€˜Not
here
.‘
    â€˜No, of course not, but some other time. Now I will help you to take it off again.’
    â€˜I could always simply put my clothes on over it.’
    â€˜On the contrary. J am going to take my clothes off.’
    â€˜For an old man, Iwo …’
    â€˜Don’t expect too much.’
    As happens when a man is uncertain about his potency, patience and slowness prove far more exciting than urgent lust. With very great care he devotes himself to my pleasure. I move into another realm. My mind sways with images of Elizabethan embroidery, curling its tendrils like snakes through the silk. Small flowers clutch and sway, gracefully, dreamily, and long white-gloved fingers pick in and out of the soft white fabric. Time is immensely leisurely, my limbs seem stately and disembodied. He does at last lie down by me.
    This time it is I who wake first, and looking at his face, relaxed by sleep into the downward lines of exhaustion, I know that I must get up and leave him. It goes against the instinctive yearning for bodily warmth and comfort duringsleep. It also deprives us of the murmured conversations that only happen in bed.
Then
I could ask him, as if jokingly, about the lovely Joanna. As it is, at lunch tomorrow among my children and friends we shall be almost as remote as strangers. Sweetest love, I do not go for weariness of thee.

5
    Next day, Iwo is the last to arrive for lunch. We have all been sitting around laughing, gossiping, discreetly boasting about our children, under the guise of parental exasperation, and drinking wine, so that his upright, formal figure among our sprawling ones seems incongruous, almost an intrusion. I am aware of their puzzled curiosity as I introduce him. His face is a mask of politeness; it is I who am suddenly tense, my heart racing. It is his first encounter with my world, my friends, and I want them to approve of him. Fortunately Kate is spending the weekend with her father, so I don’t have to hiss and frown at her black looks, while Max, knowing my predicament, will ease the situation for me. As I disappear towards the kitchen to scatter parsley over the soup, I hear him say disarmingly, ‘Iwo, has my mother warned you that
all
her friends are eccentric?’ There is a shout of laughter and expostulation behind me and the noise rises to its former babble. Eccentric,
excentrique:
yes, he’ll be able to manage that.
    I can’t bear to have Iwo at the far end of the table, away from me, so I seat him beside me, and put French Eloise next to him. Eloise is tall and blonde with a slender, androgynous figure; an ardent feminist. She works as a librarian at the Institut Français.
    Both she and her husband Jack are active left-wingers, and the soup has hardly closed over his spoon before I hear Jack saying, deceptively soft-voiced, ‘So: is it no longer possible to live in Poland?’
    â€˜For me, no,’ says Iwo, and stops there.
    â€˜I wonder how distorted a view our media has been giving of events?’
    â€˜I am in your boat,’ Iwo says. ‘I have no other means of information.