Free Love Among the Single Classes by Angela Lambert Page A

are speaking Polish. A very beautiful, black-haired young woman, chic in a moiré-patterned black raincoat, sweeps in and whirls past. Her hair is cut to curve sharply around her jaw. I ask Iwo, Ts she Polish? Is she typical?’
    He laughs. ‘My dear, a girl like that is not typical in any country!’
    I feel snubbed, though he doesn’t mean to be unkind. I invest him with endless old-world sophistication, although his clothes are the oddments he arrived with, or has bought cheaply in second-hand shops, and his room of course betrays only a kind of pride in possessing nothing.
    The people at the next table are speaking Polish: soft and yet guttural. An old man with an angular face – Iwo will look like that in twenty years’ time – sits with folded arms opposite two women. Their conversation is intense, oblivious to my stares.
    â€˜What are they talking about?’ I whisper in French to Iwo.
    â€˜The past,’ he says, resignedly.
    The food they are eating looks substantial, and everything smells of red cabbage or sauerkraut. Chunks of smoked meat or sausage are much in evidence. The Polish cakes we eat with our coffee are, as he had promised, delicious.
    â€˜Is it proper Polish cooking?’ I ask Iwo. He looks at me incredulously.
    â€˜We haven’t eaten like this in Poland for fifty years,’ he says.
    I am ashamed of my stupid lack of tact. Why would he be here, in London, with me, if the old Poland still existed? Hisvery presence is a measure of despair with the country that has made him, and all the Poles here, exiles.
    A tall, distinguished-looking man in a camel coat and old-fashioned beige Homburg enters. He greets Iwo gravely, in Polish. Iwo introduces me in French, and the three of us converse in that language. The other man, Tadeusz, is also fluent.
    â€˜We met at the Polish Club,’ Iwo tells me.
    Tadeusz says, ‘I have lived in England for over forty years, yet I still behave like a Pole!’
    Moments later we are joined by his daughter. She is slender, her face quite clear of make-up although she must be in her mid-thirties. She evidently knows Iwo already, and as he rises to greet her they kiss formally on both cheeks. As we are being introduced, my mind races. She wears no wedding ring. Have they a more than friendly relationship? In the past? Still? Am I imagining the intimacy in her voice as she addresses him in Polish?
    â€˜Il faut que nous parlons français,’
says Iwo to her after a while;
‘Madame Liddell ne parle pas polonais.’
    â€˜In that case,’ she says easily, ‘we shall have to speak English. My French never got beyond school standard.’
    She is relaxed, confident, charming. I am smitten with the hammer-blows of jealousy. It has not occurred to me for a moment that Iwo might know other women here in London, or even other Poles. I suppose I thought he had been living in a vacuum, except for the workshop. I thought him mine exclusively. New avenues of torture stretch before me, peopled with Polish women as sophisticated as he: elegant, old-world, yet belonging here.
    Joanna’s auburn hair falls over her forehead as she leans earnestly across the table towards Iwo, speaking in a mixture of perfect English interspersed with rapid explanatory Polish. How foreign she looks! How European, in contrast to my over-anxious, over-made-up Englishness! I dare not look at Iwo or catch his eye, for fear I should see that he’s as mesmerized by her as I am. I bleed. Suddenly the café fills up with a group of chattering English students, and I amgrateful for their intrusion. They too are relaxed; they too are charming and vivacious, just like the Poles.
    Iwo and Joanna have now lapsed completely into Polish, and he seems even more forthcoming in his native tongue than with me in our new-found French. Precise, metallic, flexible, the incomprehensible words ricochet across the table between them. I suffer. Does it