Love Among the Single Classes by Angela Lambert Read Free Book Online

home engrossed in Kate, ‘can’t you at least get a decent haircut? I give you a clothes allowance, for crying out loud: what’s the matter with you? Do you want more? Ask me! Shall I get Madeleine’ (his secretary) ‘to take you out shopping one day? I could give her the afternoon off.
She
always looks great. You …’ His voice tailed off in despair. He didn’t dare spell out for either of us how dowdy I seemed beside the brilliant creatures with whom he worked.
    No, it wasn’t Madeleine who had ended our marriage. Perhaps he’d had an affair with her at some time; I really hadn’t thought about it. He was my husband and mine were his children and his house was our home and I looked after it and him and them: and that, I had thought, was that. The thought of bird of paradise Madeleine ‘taking me out shopping’ was terrifying. I imagined myself in the sort of colour combinations that suited her – green with purple; navy blue and yellow; black and grey and orange – and then thought of my own comfortable clothes. Soft shirts or sweaters with jeans for the day; red or black for evenings out. I used to think I looked quite nice. Other people occasionally thought so too. I remembered how once, towards the end of a dinner party, I had felt Ron Rendle’s hand close firmly over my thigh under the damask tablecloth. I had sat transfixed with shock, neither moving my leg nor his hand, nor flirting with Ron. I had not felt flattered, or sexy, or even indignant: just silly, as the hand grew hotter, squeezing my leg spasmodically from time to time. In the end Ron took it away. Ron had been Paul’s boss and I realized, looking back, that Paul might have been pleased that Ron had wanted to squeeze my thigh. Ron, with his whisky and cigarette breath, his expensively shapeless and crumpled clothes, his sloppy mid-Atlantic turn of phrase, epitomized everything I disliked about advertising, and I sent my red dress to be cleaned, asking them to do it particularly thoroughly.
    Before the after-school rush of children begins, I search in the microfiche and then along the shelves for booksabout Poland. The magic numbers are 943.8. There, amid more famous chunks of European history – the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Hungarian Revolution – stand a few books on modern Poland, with garish red covers and aggressive titles. The word
‘Solidarnosc’
with its bannered logo splashes like a bloodstain across the jacket of more than one. Avid to learn everything about Poland – when you fall in love with a foreigner you fall in love with his homeland, too – I ring up our central library.
    â€˜Maggie? Constance. Listen, would you do me a favour? Send over the best you’ve got on modern Poland, would you? … No, it’s for me, personally … Oh, post-1940, I should think … Well, call it a sort of project I’m doing. Can you get it into tomorrow’s delivery? … You’re a love. You OK? … Yes, I’m fine, and more than fine.’
    The books are on their way.
    At the end of the day I take home the ones I’ve found on our own shelves, which have now become precious clues to the riddle of Iwo.
    All my life I have tried to control events through books. When I was first pregnant with Max, even before he had become a moving bump, I was scouring bookshops for the best on pregnancy, birth and motherhood. As the months wore on, I read more and more compulsively, as though by knowing everything about natural childbirth, derived from Grantley Dick-Read, Pierre Lamaze, and other white-coated patrons of the labour ward, I could somehow earn gold stars towards my own initiation into that awesome temple. In the event, Max was a straightforward delivery. I breathed my way through the first stage just as I’d been taught, while Paul played the part of the dutiful father, sponging my dry lips and performing a