Love Among the Single Classes Read Online Free

at last, he kisses me.
    His bed is crisp and white, its clean sheets suggesting that he hoped to bring me back here and make love. Later it becomes hot and seamed with creases made by our rolling bodies. At first the cold, and my shyness, keep us covered up with bedclothes, but by the end we are glistening with sweat and naked and I don’t give a damn about modesty. I think to myself, rapturously, Oh
everything
is going to be all right! and my tenderness towards him is almost more than I can contain.
    â€˜Iwo, you are … wonderful… you’re amazing … I wish I could, just… oh, I don’t know!’
    I wish I could unpack my heart’s excess of words. I wish I could flower into extravagant prose, praising him and glorying in this extraordinary discovery, opening my heart about the new possibilities that stretch ahead of us. I do not dare.
    He pulls the covers across us and hugs me and murmurs only, ‘Relax, relax …’ and the wild words remain unspoken.
    Instead I ask the question that throbs like a bad tooth: ‘Are you still married?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    This is such a blow that it is several minutes before I risk the next question: ‘So where is your wife?’
    There is a recoil, so slight that if I were not lying naked with my body pressed along the length of his I would not have noticed how he shrinks from my question. There is a long silence, and I have to fight my polite English impulse to fill it by swerving off tactfully on to some safer topic. But I have to know what has happened to her, so I keep quiet, and eventually he says, Tf she is not dead then she has divorced me.’
    â€˜But wouldn’t you
know?’
    â€˜My dear, you cannot understand. You say you know nothing of my country. I am a dangerous non-person. I do not exist, and yet any contact with me will… infect? make bad?’
    â€˜Contaminate.’
    â€˜Perhaps. So, I can send money to my daughters’ – he has daughters, too? – ‘but I cannot know whether they receive it or whether it is stolen in the post office. Even to write to me they put themselves into danger.’
    â€˜It must be very … hard … for you.’
    â€˜Daughters, yes; wife, no. Wife and I were separate people many years ago. If she is sensible she has divorced me. If not, if she is still good wife, she has probably been vanished.’
    â€˜And your daughters? How many? How old are they?’
    â€˜Grown up. Married. To good Party workers, one a journalist, one an official. I hope they are all right.’
    He sounds so bleak that I turn and cling to him, kissing the fluent, throbbing line of his jaw – his pulse like a soft drum – and bury my head in the hollow curve of his shoulder.
    â€˜Iwo, it’s dreadful. I am so sorry. Oh God, I can’t imagine …’
    Quite melted into tears for thee.
    He is touched that I should cry for three women I have never seen. He gets out of bed, walks naked across the room and, drawing aside the far curtain, reaches into the chest ofdrawers. He climbs back into bed beside me, holding a couple of curled photographs.
    â€˜Here you have my daughters. Henryka, Alina. Now twenty-nine. Twenty-six.’
    They are both tall, slim, very dark, and even in this cheap colour photograph it is clear that they are beauties. They stand on either side of a Christmas tree. In front of them on the table, in the centre of a lacy table-mat, is a home-made Nativity scene with candles burning around it.
    â€˜Are you Catholics, your family?’
    â€˜Not I, but their mother.’
    â€˜Then she won’t divorce you, surely?’
    â€˜Not
that
Catholic!’
    I look again more closely at the two girls, smiling obediently for the camera. How strange, what a quirk of fate, that some four or five years later
I
should be scrutinizing these private family faces. I search for clues about them. Their hair-styles are unsophisticated but