Free Love Among the Single Classes by Angela Lambert

number and ring him. I must concentrate on the things which filled my life quite satisfactorily before I met him. If I wait, he will – surely he will? – ring me again. Doing nothing is the hardest of all.
    After the highly-strung emotions of the weekend, the ordinariness of the week calms me down. I make a special effort to concentrate on Kate. We do homework together, go and see a film together, I hear her while she endlessly rehearses her Grade V violin pieces. I invite friends over for lunch on Sunday, and persuade Cordy and Max to come as well, to ensure that I have something to fill my weekend even if he doesn’t phone. The attempt to appear normal actually succeeds. I realize that I was lashing myself into paroxysms of emotion and melodrama which distanced me from my real feelings. Looked at coolly – ‘Stay cool, mother’ – what are they? Iwo and I shared a remarkable intimacy at our first meeting, reinforced since then by the happy discovery that we both speak French. We seem to be compatible, in bed and out of it, so there is no logical reason to suppose that he is not also delighted with our relationship. He has every reason to want to continue it, at least for the time being. There is no other woman in his life; no man in mine – Fred doesn’t count.
    Meanwhile I give myself a crash course in Polish history. Out goes the Hollywood stereotype of Chopin and Liszt,long-haired, fine-fingered heroes of the keyboard giving passionate expression to the tortured soul of the Polish nation. In comes a harsh and sober grasp of what drove Iwo away from the country where he was born and lived for fifty-odd years. I learn of the horrors inflicted by the Germans, who murdered some three million Polish Jews and half-starved the rest of the population. I learn about the post-war years of austerity and repression by the Russians, the bleak, blank, black and white and above all grey years of bad housing, bad food, no money and no freedom. It is impossible to picture Iwo in such a society.
    On Friday evening he telephones.
    â€˜Constance: how are you? Shall we meet this weekend? Let’s do something cheerful and irresponsible … what do you think? Have you any plans?’
    â€˜On Sunday I have people coming to lunch … you are welcome too. You’d like them. Saturday I’m free.’
    â€˜Can one be irresponsible cheaply in London?’
    â€˜With difficulty. But … yes. We could go for a swim. Dance. We could ice-skate. We could …’
    â€˜Then let us start with coffee and Polish cakes, they are delicious, tomorrow at two o’clock. There is a café just by South Kensington station. The Daquise. Can you meet me there?’
    On Friday night I have my first uninterrupted stretch of eight hours’ sleep since meeting him, and wake looking five years younger.
    I dress in the jeans and big sloppy sweater and bright scarf in which I feel most comfortable, and stuff a swimsuit into my handbag just in case. My mood is almost manically light-hearted, and I swing along to the bus stop with a step that is nearly a dance.
    At first sight, the Polish café he takes me to is disappointing. It is dimly lit and dingy, in need of redecoration. Yet it is also instantly, obviously foreign – or is it just my imagination that invests it with an air of
mittel
-European seediness? What
is
mittel
-European seediness anyway,except for a few half-remembered black and white films seen with Paul in the friendly darkness of the Academy or the Scala for ls.6d. when we were undergraduates?
    On the wall an oil-painting – by Feliks Topolski, at a guess – shows the Horse Guards on parade, high-stepping, plumes flying: a perfect symbol of the ambiguity of this place, a Polish enclave in a foreign city. Although my first assumption is that everyone here is Polish, I realize that in fact only about a third, at most, of the people seated at banquettes against the walls