YOU HAVE THE BODY OF A GODDESS,” the Polish Count used to say, in moments of contemplative passion. (Did he rehearse?)
“Do I have the head of one too?” I replied once, archly.
“Do not make such jokes,” he said. “You must believe me. Why do you refuse to believe in your own beauty?”
But which goddess did he mean? There was more than one, I knew. The one on the Venus pencil package, for instance, with no arms and all covered with cracks. Some goddesses didn’t have bodies at all; there was one in the museum, three heads on top of a pillar, like a fire hydrant. Many were shaped like vases, many like stones. I found his compliment ambiguous.
The Polish Count was an accident. I met him first when I fell off a double-decker bus near Trafalgar Square. Luckily I didn’t fall from the upper deck; I had one foot halfway to the ground, but I wasn’t used to having the bus start before people were safely off it and it leapt from under me, sending me sprawling onto the sidewalk. The Polish Count happened to be passing by, and he picked me up.
At the time I was living in a damp bed-sitter in Willesden Green. I found it through Canada House, which was the first place I went when I got to London. I was homesick already. I knew no one, I had nowhere to stay, and I was disappointed by what I’d seen of England on the bus from the airport. So far it was too much like what I had left, except that everything looked as though two giant hands had compressed each object and then shoved them all closer together. The cars were smaller, the houses were crowded, the people were shorter; only the trees were bigger. And things were not as old as I’d expected them to be. I wanted castles and princesses, the Lady of Shalott floating down a winding river in a boat, as in Narrative Poems for Juniors, which I studied in Grade Nine. I’d looked up shalott, fatally, in the dictionary: shallot, kind of small onion. The spelling was different but not different enough.
I am half-sick of shadows, said
The Lady of Small Onion.
Then there was that other line, which caused much tittering among the boys and embarrassment among the girls:
The curse is come upon me, cried
The Lady of Shalott
Why did boys think blood running down a girl’s leg was funny? Or was it terror that made them laugh? But none of it put me off, I was a romantic despite myself, and I really wanted, then, to have someone, anyone, say that I had a lovely face, even if I had to turn into a corpse in a barge-bottom first.
Instead of the castles and ladies, though, there was only a lot of traffic and a large number of squat people with bad teeth.
Canada House, when I got there, was a marble mausoleum, impressive but silent. A woman behind a dark wooden counter in a cavernous, dimly lit room, in which a few dour Canadians were reading week-old Toronto newspapers and collecting their mail, handed me a list of rooms to let. Since I knew nothing about the topography of London I took the first one I could get. Unfortunately it was an hour’s ride from the center via the underground, which was like a travelling front parlor lined in purple plush; I kept expecting to see footstools and potted palms. Toronto’s new subway, on the other hand, with its pastel tiles and smell of Dust-Bane, was more like a travelling bathroom. Already I was feeling provincial.
When I came up from the underground, I walked along a street lined with tiny shops; an unhealthy number of them were candy stores. The woman at Canada House had drawn me a rough map; she had also advised me to purchase a small Maple Leaf and wear it on my lapel, so as not to be mistaken for an American.
The house was a Tudor cottage, the same as all the others on the street, fake Tudor, fake cottage, with a walled front garden. The landlord was a surly man in shirtsleeves and braces who seemed to be afraid I would have orgiastic parties and skip without paying the rent. The room itself was on the ground floor and smelled of rotting wood; it was so damp that the furniture actually was rotting, though very slowly. As I lay in my clammy bed the first night, wondering if I had taken off so much weight and come so far for nothing, a black man climbed in through the front window. But all he said was, “Wrong window, sorry,” and climbed out again. I could hear faint sounds of a lively party going on farther down the street. I was disgustingly lonely. I was already thinking about moving somewhere else, a flat would be better, I would have more space; but this room was inexpensive and I wanted Aunt Lou’s money to last as long as possible. When it was gone I would have to make a decision, choose what I was going to do, get a job (I could touch-type) or go back to school (perhaps I could be an archeologist after all), but I wasn’t ready yet, I wasn’t adjusted. I’d spent all my life learning to be one person and now I was a different one. I had been an exception, with the limitations that imposed; now I was average, and I was far from used to it.
I wasn’t supposed to cook in my room—the landlord felt his tenants were conspiring to set his house on fire, though this would have been difficult as it was so damp—but I was permitted to boil a kettle on the single gas ring. I took to drinking tea and eating Peek Frean biscuits, in bed, with all the covers pulled up around me. It was the end of October and piercingly chilly, and the heat in my room was controlled by shillings in the slot. So was the hot water in the shared bathroom; I took few baths. I began to understand why people on the underground smelled the way they did: not dirty exactly, but cooped-up. Aside from the tea and biscuits, I ate in cheap restaurants and soon learned to avoid the things I would ordinarily have eaten. “Hot dog,” I found out, meant a reddish, thin object fried in lamb fat. “Hamburger” was a square, sawdusty-beige thing between two halves of a hard bun, and “milk shakes” tasted like chalk. I ate fish and chips, or eggs, peas and chips, or sausage and mash. I bought an undershirt.
I began to feel I should be doing something besides watching my stash of traveler’s checks dwindle. Travel was supposed to be broadening; why did I feel narrower? So I bought a map of England and picked out names that sounded familiar from high school, like York, or names that intrigued me, like Ripon. I would go to these places on the British Railway, stay overnight in a second-rate inn or a bed-and-breakfast, and come back the next day. I looked at historic buildings. I inspected churches and collected the pamphlets they had on racks with a slot for a sixpence, which I didn’t always contribute. I learned what a “clerestory” was, and bought postcards, which made me feel I had been somewhere. These postcards I sent to my father, addressed to the hospital, with cryptic notes on them like, “Big Ben’s not so big,” and, “Why do they call it the Lake District? They should call it the Puddle District, ha ha.” I began to feel that England was a message in code which I didn’t know how to decipher, and that I would have to read a lot of books in order to understand it
I’d been in England about six weeks when I fell off the bus. The Polish Count helped me up, and I thanked him. It was a simple enough beginning.
He was slightly shorter than I was, with wispy light-brown hair receding from his forehead, sloping shoulders, and rimless spectacles, which were not fashionable at the time. He was wearing a navy-blue overcoat, a little frayed and shiny, and carrying a briefcase. In order to help me up he set down the briefcase, placed a hand under each of my armpits, and gave a gallant heave. I almost toppled him over but we regained our balance, and he picked up his briefcase.
“Are you all right?” he asked, in a vaguely English accent. If I had been English I might have been able to tell he was a Polish Count; as it was, I could not.
“Thank you very much,” I said. I had ripped a stocking and scraped my knee, and my ankle was badly twisted.
“You must sit down,” he said. He steered me across the road and into a restaurant called, as I remember, The Golden Egg, and brought me some tea and a black-currant tart, slightly squashed. His manner was warm but patronizing, as if I were an unusually inept child. “There,” he said, beaming. I noticed that he had an aquiline nose, though it didn’t achieve its potential due to his height. “This tea is the English remedy for everything. They are a strange people.”
“Aren’t you English?” I asked.
His eyes—which were greenish-gray, or perhaps grayish-green—clouded over behind his spectacles, as if I’d asked a rude personal question. “No,” he said. “But in these days, one must adapt. You, of course, are American.”
I explained that I wasn’t, and he seemed disappointed. He asked me if I liked to ski, and I replied that I had never learned. “I owe my life to skis,” he said enigmatically. “All Canadians ski. How else would one get around, over the snow?”
“Some of us use toboggans,” I said. The word puzzled him, and I explained.
I finished my tea. This was the moment, I felt, when I should thank him graciously for his kindness and leave. Otherwise we would have to exchange the stories of our lives and I was too depressed about mine to want to do that. So I thanked him and stood up. Then I sat back down again. My ankle had swollen and I could barely walk.
He insisted on taking me all the way back to Willesden Green, supporting me as I hobbled to the underground station and along the street past the candy stores.
“But this is appalling,” he said when he saw my rooming house. “You can’t live here. Nobody lives here.” Then he volunteered to wrap my ankle in towels wrung out in cold water. He was doing this, kneeling in front of me while I sat on the bed, when the landlord appeared and gave me a week’s notice. The Polish Count informed him that the lady had sprained her ankle. The landlord replied that he didn’t care what I had sprained, I was out come Thursday, as he couldn’t have that kind of carryings-on in his house. It was the sight of my naked, tumescent foot that had offended him.
When he had gone, the Polish Count shrugged. “They are a small-minded people, the English,” he said. “A nation of shopkeepers.” I didn’t know this was a quotation and thought it was very clever of him. I had been shocked to find Stonehenge surrounded by a fence, with a gate in it for taking tickets. “You have seen the Tower of London?” he asked. I hadn’t “We will go there tomorrow.”
“But I can’t walk!”
“We will go in a taxi, and by boat.” He had not asked me, he had told me, so I didn’t think of saying no. Also, he seemed old to me; in fact he was forty-one, but I put him in the category of aged and therefore harmless men.
On this excursion, he told me the story of his life. He requested mine first, as politeness demands. I said I’d come to London to study art at the art school, but I’d decided I had no talent. He sighed. “You are a wise girl,” he said, “to have made this discovery so early in life. You will not delude yourself with false hopes. I myself once wished to be a writer, I wished to be like Tolstoy, you understand; but now I am exiled from my own language, and this one is fit for nothing but to make hoardings with. It has no music, it does not sing, it is always trying to sell you something.”
I didn’t know who Tolstoy was; I nodded and smiled. He went on to relate his personal history. His family had belonged to the upper class, before the war; he wasn’t a Count exactly, but he was something or other, and he showed me a signet ring he wore on his little finger. It was a mythical bird, a griffin or a phoenix, I forget which. The family had scrabbled along under the Germans, but when the Russians invaded he knew he had to get out or be shot.
“Why?” I said. “You hadn’t done anything.”
He gave me a pitying look. “It is not what you do,” he said, “but who you are.”
He and a party of six others had skied to the border, where a guide was to meet them and take them across. But he became ill. He insisted the others go on without him, and crawled into a cave, certain he would die. The others were caught at the border and executed. He recovered and made his own way across, travelling at night and taking the direction from the stars. When he first arrived in England, he washed dishes in Soho restaurants to make a living; but once he had learned enough English, he obtained a position as a clerk in a bank, working in the foreign exchange department. “I am the last,” he said, “of a dying race. The last of the Mohicans.” In fact he had a daughter back in Poland, as well as a mother; but he had no son, and this weighed on him.
My first reaction to this story was that I had met a liar as compulsive and romantic as myself. But my usual impulse was to believe everything I was told, as I myself wished to be believed, and in this case it was the right impulse, since his story was essentially true. I was very impressed. He seemed to belong to a vanished and preferable era, when courage was possible. I limped through the Tower of London on his rather stringy arm with a mixture of emotions new to me: I felt sorry for him because of the sufferings he had undergone, I admired his daring, I was flattered by the attention he was paying to me and grateful for it, and especially I was pleased to be thought wise. I later found that almost anyone would tell you you were wise if you confessed you had no talent.
That was a Sunday. On Monday he had to work at the bank in the daytime, but in the evening he took me to dinner at a club for Polish expatriates, which was full of one-eyed Generals and other Polish Counts. “We are the few that are left,” he said. “The Russians killed off the others.”
“But weren’t you both against the Germans?” I asked. He laughed gently and explained, at some length.
My own ignorance amazed me. All sorts of things had been happening behind my back, it appeared: treacheries and famines, diplomatic coups, ideological murders and doomed heroic exploits. Why had no one told me? They had, perhaps, but I hadn’t been listening. I had been worrying about my weight.
On Tuesday he took me to a chamber music concert, a benefit for some Polish political organization I had never heard of. I mentioned that I hadn’t yet found another room.
“But you will live with me!” he exclaimed. “I have a nice place, very nice, very charming, with lots of room. Of course you must do this.” He had the entire second floor of a house in Kensington, which was owned by a nonagenarian English Lord who was usually in a nursing home. The third floor was occupied by three working girls, but of a good class, he assured me: they worked in offices.
I thought it was very considerate and kind of him to offer to share his apartment with me. As he had never touched me, except to help me across the street or along it, because of my ankle, and had never made any suggestive remarks, I was quite surprised when, after I had brushed my teeth and was about to climb into bed (wearing, I believe, a heavy sack-shaped flannel gown I’d bought at Marks & Spencer’s the week before), there was a discreet knock at my door and this man, whose first name I didn’t even know, appeared in the doorway, dressed in a pair of blue-and-white-striped pajamas. He understood that he was getting into bed with me, and he understood that I understood this also.
The story I told Arthur later, about being seduced under a pine tree at the age of sixteen, by a summer camp sailing instructor from Montreal, was a lie. I was not seduced at all. I was a victim of the Miss Flegg syndrome: if you find yourself trapped in a situation you can’t get out of gracefully, you might as well pretend you chose it. Otherwise you will look ridiculous. Innocence has its hazards, and in my case one of them was that the Polish Count couldn’t conceive of anyone being as simpleminded as I was. If you ask a woman to move into your apartment and she consents, naturally she is consenting to be your mistress. It’s an odd term, “mistress,” but that was how he thought of me, these were the categories into which his sexual life was arranged: wives and mistresses. I was not the first mistress. For him there was no such thing as a female lover.
When describing the episode with the Montreal sailing instructor to Arthur, I took care to include some salacious details. I added a few convincing small touches as well, the pine needles sticking into my bum, his Jockey undershorts, the smell of Brylcreem; I was good at things like that. Of course I never went to summer camp in my life. My mother wanted me to, but it meant being shut up for two months with a pack of sadistic overgrown Brownies, with no escape. So I spent the summers lying about the house, eating and reading trashy books, some of which had salacious details. It was these I used in the story of my life; I had to borrow, because the first experience with the Polish Count was not at all erotic. My ankle hurt, the pajamas turned me off, and he looked weird without his spectacles. Also it was painful; and although he was patient and instructive later, though inclined to give performance points—it was almost like taking tap-dancing lessons—he wasn’t on this occasion.
When he discovered I wasn’t the easygoing art student manquée he’d thought I was—when he realized he had deprived me of my virginity—the Polish Count was filled with remorse. “What have I done?” he said mournfully. “My poor child. Why didn’t you say something?” But anything I could have said would have been implausible. This was the reason I fabricated my life, time after time: the truth was not convincing.
So I said nothing, and he patted my shoulder anxiously. He felt he’d injured my chances for a good marriage. He wanted to make it up to me and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t more upset. I was sitting up in bed, pulling my flannel gown back on (for it was just as cold and damp in his flat as it had been in mine) and watching his long, melancholy face with the green-gray eyes slightly askew. I was glad it had happened. It proved to me finally that I was normal, that my halo of flesh had disappeared and I was no longer among the untouchables.