Lonely Hearts

Twenty-Five

The white and red horizontal stripes of the Polish flag hung across the porch window, facing outwards onto the uneven paving of the drive. The house, a Victorian delight of turrets and arches, stood back from the road behind sixty feet of dark shrubs and rose bushes pruned almost to the roots. To the left of the porch was a trio of narrow stained-glass windows one above the other, predominantly blue and green. Above the cracking wood of the door, a larger panel of colored glass, rectangular, depicted the Annunciation. Lace, rich and yellowing, shielded the interior from casual sight.

Resnick pressed the smooth white circle of the bell and heard it sound, off-pitch and distant.

He didn’t think he had spoken to Marian Witczak for more than two years, probably hadn’t seen her in eighteen months. In the days of his marriage, Resnick’s wife had feigned at least a fondness for the dances which the Polish community organized regularly on a Saturday night. On his own, what was there to do other than join one of those tight male circles where one pair of arms, at least, was always within reach of the bar? Or stand eating smoked ham and pieroqi, pretending not to notice the church matrons pointing him out encouragingly to their stubbornly unmarriageable daughters. Besides, so much had changed: now a dance there was not so different from the Miners’ Welfare, the British Legion.

A key was turned, bolts were slid back, top and bottom, finally a chain was loosed. Marian looked at him in surprise, confusion, pleasure.

“I thought you were from the auction rooms. I am expecting…But, no, it is you.”

Resnick grinned a little self-consciously. They were the same age, Marian and himself, a matter of some months’ difference, yet she always made him feel like a small boy who had come cap in hand to beat the carpets, sweep the leaves.

“I do not read the newspaper, of course, but I have seen your picture. You are always descending steps, Charlie, after giving evidence against some dreadful man. You always look so sad and angry.”

“I don’t like having my photograph taken.”

“And this job that you do-do you like your job?”

“I remember you used to make good coffee, Marian.”

“Ah, this is why you are suddenly here?”

Resnick shook his head, smiled. “No.”

“Of course,” the muscles of her face tightened, “the knock on the door. I do not forget.”

“Marian, it’s a November morning in England. I’m not the Gestapo.”

“Oh, yes,” stepping back to let him enter. “The English way. What is it? An Inspector Calls?”

“That was a long time ago.”

She closed the door behind him. “Yes,” she said, turning the key in the lock, “now you have guns.”

Resnick turned and looked at her. “Marian, I suspect we always had guns.”

The fireplace was carved black marble, inset with deep pink and white, and more than six feet across, almost as tall. The center had been covered with tiles and a fifties’ gas fire burned low, frugal and utilitarian. Three armchairs and a chaise longue were covered in dark floral brocade and draped with antimacassars. An arrangement of dried flowers stood in a glass vase at the center of a low table. Around the walls, stained oak bookcases held a mixture of leather-bound books and old orange Penguins. Above these the walls were hung with photographs: General Sikorski, Cardinal Wysznski, a villa overlooking the Mazurian Lakes, a family group picnicking on the lawns in front of the Wilanow Palace.

Resnick didn’t need to walk over to the piano at the rear of the room to see that the music that was open there was Chopin, some polonaise or other, probably the A flat major, the only one he knew.

Marian came in with the coffee in a dented enamel pot, ardently polished; there were small white cups, bone china, sugar in a bowl with tongs. She was wearing a stiff green dress, belted tightly at the waist, flat shoes in soft green leather. She had quickly pulled her hair back and tied it with a length of white ribbon. Her eyes were dark, her cheekbones high and hard against her skin so that her cheeks seemed pinched and hollow. She was what would once have been called a handsome woman; maybe in her circle she still was.

“After the war,” she said, “only one thing changed. When they came in the night and hauled you from your beds, they were no longer German.”

“Marian,” Resnick said, “that was forty years ago.”

“When we were born, you and I.”

“Then how can you say you remember?”

For a moment she glanced at the walls. “We know these things, Charles, because they happened to our families, our people.” She smiled at him, indulgently. “Does it have to be with your own ears, your own eyes?”

Resnick looked away from her, down at the coffee, black in the cup. “I think, yes, it does.”

“They should, I think, have christened you Thomas.”

There was nothing he could say. Thomas the apostolic detective: give me the evidence, where’s the evidence? Dead without a body?

Marian spooned sugar into her cup, one, two, shiny silver spoonfuls.

“But your family had already left for this country and you, Charles, you have assimilated to perfection.” She balanced cup and saucer in the palm of one hand, stirring with care. “No longer Mass at the Polish church, communion; no longer the socials and the dances. You speak with no trace of accent, we are waiting only for you to change your name.”

Resnick tasted the coffee, thick like bitter treacle. Somewhere in the house a grandfather clock chimed, several seconds later another, and another.

“You’re not selling up, moving?”

“How could I ever?”

“You said you were expecting someone, something to do with an auction.”

“Oh, one or two pieces, nothing special; but the rooms upstairs, they are so rarely used. People used to come and stay, many people, and now…This is a large house to keep, there are many bills and I am alone.” She looked at him sharply. “You know what this is like.”

Resnick nodded. “The reason I came…”

“I know.”

He sat further back in the chair and waited.

“As I have said, the newspaper I will not read myself, but a friend, she told me, you are asking questions of those like me who are-the expression-lonely of heart.”

“I saw your name, on a list…”

“A list?” she said, a hint of alarm.

“We have been checking everyone who has placed advertisements, responded; checking and cross-checking…I didn’t want to send a stranger to see you.”

“You are kind.”

“I was surprised…”

“That I would do this?”

“That you would look outside the community.”

Her face broke into a gentle smile and he realized, not for the first time, that she could be beautiful. “Oh, Charles, you understand how well-known I am. For me to approach somebody else, a man, a man who is…” She regarded him for a moment, pointedly. “…unattached, this is so difficult. I am too well-known here among people whose ways are not perhaps the ways of this world. Oh, there are men who have said things to me behind their hands when their wives are out of the room, propositions, Charles, but not proposals.”

She set down her cup and sat perfectly still. Resnick continued to watch, wait.

“It was a little over a year ago, I was feeling, perhaps you will recognize this, so alone I could no longer believe the sound of my own breath as it left my body. For three whole weeks I shut myself in the house; I went through piles of old letters, read diaries I had kept ever since I was a child in my country. I stared into the faces of old photographs until they almost became my own. For the last five days I did not eat, I drank nothing but water. If the telephone rang, I did not hear it.”

She reached out for his hand and he took her fingers between his own. How could she be so cold?

“One morning in the bedroom I saw a face in the glass and it frightened me. I had seen it before, faces like it after the flesh has fallen away and only the eyes seem alive, the way they are staring. You know where I have seen such faces.”

After a little time she withdrew her hand, straightened her back. “You would like more coffee?”

“Please.”

When it was poured, she continued. “The advertisement I sent, it was discreet without telling a lie. I told the truth about my age, about the kind of friend I am seeking-educated, a gentleman, ‘with fine tastes and intellectual pursuits,’ I said this.” She sighed. “Even so, of the few replies I received, you would not believe…perhaps now you would. But there was one, the only one worthy of reply; a professor at the university, Doria.” Smiling, she angled her head towards the light from the window. “A renaissance man. Truly, that is what he is.”

“So you met him?”

“Yes, but not immediately. You have to understand, I was now uncertain of what I was doing. Did I want to meet this man, no matter how charming his letters, how erudite? I felt vulnerable and I am not used to this. So for a time there was a correspondence, nothing more.”

“And he was satisfied with this?”

“Perfectly.”

“Yet you did meet him?”

“He was a clever man, he knew by now my interests. I have, he wrote, a pair of excellent tickets for the Polish National Symphony Orchestra, here in the city. Chopin, naturally. Eisner, Lutoslawski. Everyone I know is there. It is wonderful, all wonderful. Flowers are thrown on to the stage. The audience is on its feet, cheering. There are three encores. Doria-he is charming, he has brought for me a small corsage. He smiles at my friends and shakes their hands, stands a little behind me and to the side. When we walk back to our seats after the interval, he takes, for a moment, my arm. After the concert we go for supper, a few glasses of wine.” She laughed, remembering. “Vodka!”

“A success, then?”

“Ah, that depends.”

“You had found your man with fine tastes.”

“Oh, yes.”

Marian stood up and moved across the room in the direction of the piano.

“You saw him again?” Resnick asked.

“The next day, the day after that,” Marian replied, “the telephone it was ringing constantly. All the friends who had forgotten me when I had been so lonely. What a wonderful man, such a charmer, who is he, where did you meet him, you lucky woman, what a catch!” She folded her arms across her chest, switched them behind her back, fingers linked.

“The catch was this-amongst all those telephone calls, there was not one from him. Nor was there a letter. Only, the next morning there had been a card, thanking me for being such a good companion and suggesting that perhaps we might go together again, one suitable evening, to a concert.” She paused. “Evidently, no such evening has proved suitable.”

After a while Resnick asked, “You’ve had no further contact with him?”

Marian shook her head.

“And you’ve made no attempt to contact him?”

“Of course not,” she said sharply.

“Nor would you?”

“No.”

“But if he had called, you would have seen him again?”

“Yes, I think so. After all, wasn’t he, as you say, what I had been looking for?”

“Really?” Resnick asked, shifted forward in the chair.

“What do you mean?”

“All the charm, the knowledge, you thought it was real?”

“As far as I knew.”

“Sincere?”

“Certainly.”

“And yet he never wrote or phoned? Doesn’t that call all that sincerity into question?”

“Charles, he was honest with me, this man. I think so. He did not make a secret of the fact that this was the way he met women, a number of women. He liked, he said, the excitement of meeting someone for the first time, getting to know them in that way. He was not looking for something more permanent than that suggests.”

Resnick stood up. “I’m grateful, Marian. For what you’ve told me as well as the coffee.”

“You are not suspicious of him…these awful crimes?”

“I don’t think so.”

He took his overcoat from her in the hall; wound his scarf about his neck. “Did you find him attractive?”

Something seemed to pass across her face, across her mind.

“Oh, Charles, be sure of this, he is an attractive man. To women, I think so.”

“He’s good-looking?”

“He listens; he makes you think that you are important. That you matter.”

Resnick hesitated: he wanted to ask Marian if anything had taken place between them, anything sexual. She stood there, like a governess, watching him as he put on his gloves. He couldn’t ask her.

“Charles,” she said when he was out on the step, “at the end of the evening he took my hand, he kissed it, so quick I barely felt it. That was all.”

Resnick nodded, wondering if he were really blushing. “Goodbye, Marian.”

“Next time,” she said after him, “come only for the coffee.”

At the gate he raised a hand and walked quickly from sight, leaving her standing there, alongside the flag.