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Mam’selle in front of the whole family, in exquisite, cutting French. It was like a perpetual game of grandmother’s footsteps: only the governess never reached the front.’
    Yet I sense that, beneath his contemporary perspective, deeper than he can acknowledge, Iwo is nostalgic for thislost world. His room, stark and immaculate amid the surrounding chaos he can neither control nor reject, is evidence of that. I wonder what his own home was like, and try to frame a tactful enquiry.
    â€˜And your wife … was she proud and fastidious too?’
    â€˜Good heavens no! Quite the reverse. She despised housework and home-making and the women who made it their life. My wife was a fantasist: a fighter in every impossible cause, a dreamer of every hopeless dream. A true, dedicated, idealistic Communist, even when it was perfectly obvious that Communism was as corrupt as any other political creed. My wife harangued meetings and distributed leaflets.’
    Dare I risk the next question? I take a deep breath. ‘Then why did you marry her?’
    â€˜My dear Constance, have you forgotten the force of lust when one is twenty?’
    Forgotten it? Iwo, I am in thrall to it, and I’m forty-four! ‘Yes, I suppose I had overlooked that.’
    He smiles wryly. Did you love her very much Iwo? Or did she love you, that spare, self-possessed elegance which obsesses me? Did she use those female wiles of tantalizing and then withdrawing, blowing hot and cold, those skills of artifice that are beyond me? I dare not ask. He smiles again, this time not at the memory of her but at me.
    â€˜I am so glad we have discovered French. Now we need only speak English with your children.’
    â€˜And my friends … if you ever get to meet them.’
    â€˜Perhaps,’ says Iwo enigmatically.
    At Newark station Iwo tells the taxi driver to go to the Polish war cemetery. On the way he explains that some hundreds of Polish airmen are buried here; the men who died fighting in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. I am surprised that he should make this pilgrimage, and even more surprised that he should want to bring me. None of the dead airmen was related to him or even known to him; it seems a strange journey for a man who has repudiated his country for ever.
    Yet Paul, like so many English public schoolboys, hadbeen fascinated by the First World War. He knew the most esoteric details about its battles and recited with gloomy accuracy the casualties from the first day of the Somme; the battle of Passchendaele – endless figures, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and finally, numbingly, eight and a half million young men killed in the trenches of northern France. On our way to some sunny holiday destination, he would insist on making the detour to walk the children over one of the battlefields or cemeteries. The mere sight of those smooth English gardens of perfectly trimmed grass, sprouting rows and rows of small headstones, reduced me to tears. The identical crosses marked ‘Known Unto God’ were the most distressing of all. Somewhere I supposed that a mother, hundreds, thousands of mothers, had waited with inextinguishable hope. Miracles might happen, had happened. Amnesia; a prison camp; even a disgraced son, finally coming back after years of lonely guilt to confess that he had deserted – anything, if only the young man who had once set off for France would return. These cemeteries were a dreaded prelude to our holidays, but Paul seemed to feel they were a necessary penance; after which the brightness of the sun and the south were more vivid.
    Today, with Iwo, my reaction is the same. At the sight of the gaunt memorial to Polish airmen and the neat rows of graves, the tears fall down my face leaving dry prickling streaks at the corners of my eyes. My face is cold and pinched. The wind chills us both. Iwo just stands there. He doesn’t pray; he doesn’t speak;