The Paper Lovers

by Gerard Woodward

  GERARD WOODWARD

  The Paper Lovers

  PICADOR

  Contents

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Part Two

  Part One

  1

  They had bought a sewing machine for Evelyn’s seventh birthday realizing, only after she had unwrapped it, that it was too old for her. Although she herself had asked for one, when she was confronted with the reality, she fell into an embarrassed silence, almost as though a stern, elderly relative had entered the room. The sewing machine had been her main present of the day, and was the last to be opened, but the girl would not warm to it, and withdrew to the comfort of her other, lesser presents.

  Her parents realized their mistake. It had been a child’s version of the machine Evelyn had wanted, not the fullsize model they had given her. It must have felt like receiving a fully-grown, serious-looking dog when she’d been expecting an adorable puppy. What made matters worse was that neither parent knew how to operate the machine, and so couldn’t demonstrate its delights for her. They had unpacked it and had read the instruction manual, but without comprehension. They quickly came to regard the machine as an over-complicated, slightly dangerous piece of equipment, and they put it back in its box, and took it down to the cellar, where it stayed, untouched, for two years.

  Then one evening when Arnold came home from work he noticed, even before he entered the front door, that the house had changed. He didn’t know precisely in what way it had changed, and to every outward appearance the house was identical to the one he had left in the morning – a solid Victorian terrace with red-brick walls and a stained-glass front-door window. The fig tree in its tub, the wheelie bin half-hidden round the far side of the bay, the expensive circle of Zen pebbles – they were all as he remembered. Yet they were different. Inside, the sense of change seemed stronger, as if someone had redecorated but in the same colours, so that everything was fresher, brighter. There was a smell of flowers, and he looked around the hall carpet to see if there was any evidence – fallen petals or leaves, but there was none.

  In the lounge-diner, which he entered still carrying his work briefcase, he came upon a scene that he found puzzling at first. The room seemed full of women, though in fact there were only two – his wife and her friend Vera, whom he knew a little, and his daughter Evelyn, and Vera’s three children – he couldn’t remember their names, though one of the girls was the same age as Evelyn, and had recently become her best friend. And there was the household’s newly acquired kitten, as yet unnamed, also female, but black and spidery.

  They were all gathered at the far end of the living room, near the bay window, and sitting on the floor, around the coffee table. Vera was kneeling. Polly, his wife, was sitting on her haunches. Their daughter had draped herself across her mother’s shoulders, while Vera’s children were engrossed with something colourful and knotty. They were, all of them, absorbed and preoccupied to such an extent that no one noticed him enter the room.

  The smell here was overpowering, the waft of perfume that came from this huddle of females, though he realized almost immediately that it came from only one of them, Vera, that it was a scent she was wearing. He was drawn in by this scent, at the same time as he felt excluded from the group at the far end of the lounge-diner, indeed the room itself had become a space in which he didn’t properly belong.

  The object of their attention, around which they were all sitting, was the sewing machine. Arnold took a moment to remember it, and to understand what it was. He felt a pang of relief that this gathering was now so easily explained, and a certain sense of pleasure that the machine they had consigned to the cellar two years ago had been resurrected, and that it might have a use, and be appreciated, after all.

  Vera was leading the project to get the sewing machine working, the others were merely her attendants. Polly had the instruction manual and was reading from it when directed to do so by Vera. On the floor was a slew of packaging and haberdashery that the kitten was playing with. The women conferred over details of the instruction manual, and discussed how they could be applied to the machine itself. They were clicking and slotting things together, unjamming and unwinding things, and trying to thread cotton through hooks and eyes that they strained to see. It appeared that Vera, unlike Polly, knew about sewing machines, but even she was having trouble remembering exactly how they worked. For a moment it looked, to Arnold, that the task they were engaged in was something of far greater import than it actually was. They were like surgeons fighting for the life of a baby, or technicians defusing a bomb. There was something devotional and serious in what they were doing. But there was also tension. They seemed captured by the machine, as though they had woken an apparently gentle beast to find that it had many tentacles and was gripping them tightly. They were becoming impatient, and wanted to move on to other things.

  He felt he had been standing there for hours before anyone noticed him. Then Polly swung her head briefly in his direction and gave him a distracted smile. This prompted Vera to do the same thing, dutifully giving him a glance and the same smile (as though she had borrowed it from Polly), a slightly apologetic smile, he felt, as if to say, sorry for taking over your living room, Arnold.

  Although he didn’t know Vera well, and had only met her a small number of times, he understood that she had caused a stir among the circle of friends his wife had made since having a child. There had been a time when Polly and her group were always talking about her, just after she moved to the area. She had had problems at her children’s old school. One of the daughters had been bullied, he vaguely recalled. Polly and her friends were always thinking of ways they could help her, anxious that she should settle in and be made to feel at home (she was perhaps foreign? Arnold couldn’t remember). At times it seemed their anxiety was that they might lose her to one of the other tribes of mothers who centred on the school, and they were adamant that Vera belonged to them. So when their daughters formed a friendship, it felt as though Polly had won a coup, claiming Vera for herself and her friends.

  Now Arnold was beginning to feel he understood the fascination. As she knelt before the sewing machine, directing the operations, he noticed her as though through the refracting lens of her scent. The gorgeousness of her smell seemed to give her a halo, to make her shine, radiate. Indeed the scene before him was like a religious image, a depiction of an epiphany, The Adoration of the Sewing Maidens, as painted by El Greco.

  He took a step closer, not quite sure of what to say or how to react. He was surprised by their indifference to him. He guessed that half an hour ago they had been full of playful excitement at what they were doing, that had since been overtaken by a sense of duty. The machine had convinced them that it was not a mere toy but that it was a serious, practical device. It had won their respect, and they were treating it accordingly. But he was surprised by the fact that they had assumed that he, as a man, would not be interested in their project. The sewing machine had not only won their respect, it had revived their long-rejected notions of gender-based labour divisions.

  ‘I’ll give you your family back in a moment, Arnold,’ said Vera, without looking up.

  ‘We can’t let it win,’ said Polly, also without looking up, ‘not at this stage.’

  Realizing he wasn’t going to be asked to help, Arnold offered to make tea instead, and went into the kitchen.

  Once there he rested his hands on the worktop and leant on them, taking deep breaths. He looked u
p and saw himself reflected in the glass doors of the kitchen cabinets. He looked sweaty and dishevelled. Drunk. He wiped his face with a tea towel, then called through to the living room for tea preferences. Polly always drank Earl Grey, very weak, with a half-spoon of sugar. No milk. Vera, he wasn’t surprised to learn, was equally particular. She asked first for peppermint, then seemed surprised when told they had none. What about camomile? No, none of that either. Arnold fingered through the small library of infusions that filled one of the shelves, boxes of teabags that he riffled through like card indexes – blackcurrant, sage and sunflower, honey and chrysanthemum. There was everything but peppermint and camomile.

  ‘What about lemon and ginger?’ he called.

  ‘You know what, I’ll just have a glass of water.’

  Bitch! Arnold said to himself as he poured boiling water onto a frail bag of Earl Grey. Then immediately he wondered where that sudden little spurt of anger had come from. He gnashed his teeth together. He clenched his fist and brought it down on the counter, and disguised the noise by slamming the cutlery drawer. Through the door he could just see Polly turn her head in a puzzled way. The anger had passed, although it wasn’t anger, but a little thrust of adrenaline or testosterone that had surged through his body, and which he’d dissipated with a sudden release of energy, for saying that she would rather drink plain water than any of the teas they had. Surely that was a kind of insult. Who did she think she was, taking over his family, reviving that pointless machine, frustrating his wife and children, making a mess, causing disruption, spoiling his evening routine, filling the house with that gorgeous smell?

  ‘How’s your eyesight, Arnold?’ Vera called to him.

  It took him a moment to understand that he had been addressed. She had turned her attention, her thoughts, towards him. He poked at the teabags as they lay slumped in the hot water, puffed up with air like the anoraks of drowned trainspotters. ‘Oh, you know, gradually deteriorating.’

  Both Polly and Vera wore glasses, and it was partly their poor eyesight that was causing them problems with the sewing machine. That was why it was on the coffee table, so that it could be near the light from the bay window. They had brought over a small table lamp and had angled it to shine on the machine. As it had grown darker outside this had increased the sense that the women were involved in some sort of devotional activity – they seemed to be working on something that was glowing.

  Arnold tried to remember what else he knew about Vera. She had been, like him, a lecturer at the university, though before his time, and in a different department. He had seen her at children’s birthday parties, whenever it was his turn to collect or deliver Evelyn. She had been at a library storytelling event, where they had had a short and friendly but entirely forgettable chat. On the few occasions he dropped off or picked up Evelyn from school, he had seen her there. He once noticed her for the amount of time she spent waving to her daughter as the little one departed into her classroom. She waved far more than the other parents waved. And there was real feeling in her wave. It expressed both love and amusement at this particular expression of love. He watched her leaving the playground, walking half backwards, waving all the way, and smiling. The image stayed with Arnold, because it was such a charming expression of motherly affection. To be on the receiving end of that wave, as a child – what would that be like?

  There was one other thing he knew about Vera – that she was religious. As Arnold made the tea he tried to remember how he knew this fact. Polly must have mentioned it in passing. She had said something like – Vera told me that someone in her church had had her car stolen, but the conversation had probably followed the car-theft route rather than the church route, and Vera’s religiousness had not been discussed any further. At the back of his mind the news had disappointed him. He could not, he believed, have any sort of meaningful friendship with a practising Christian. He had had religious friends before and everything was fine up to a certain point, and then the cloud of their faith would descend and a common ground of communication be lost.

  As he delivered the drinks, he realized Vera’s religiousness had touched everything he’d seen and felt that evening, from the moment he smelt the overpowering scent of her perfume, to the epiphany-like scene of adoration around the sewing machine. It wasn’t the feminization of the living room that had so disconcerted him, but its desecularization. She had raised a little chapel in the heart of his own home.

  The arrival of the drinks caused a small amount of panic, because there was nowhere to put the steaming mugs that didn’t risk upsetting all the work that had been done so far. He placed them on the nearby dresser out of harm’s way, aware that they would be forgotten about and turn cold unsipped.

  ‘This is so ridiculous,’ said Polly, ‘my eyes can’t be that bad. I haven’t threaded a needle since I was fourteen, but it has no right to be this difficult.’

  He was closer to the women now than he had been since he first came in the room. He was standing right next to them. As they crouched on the floor he towered above them. All he could see of them was the crowns of their heads, both golden and spiralled. Polly and Vera, both blonde, slim, slight and bespectacled, looked, at times, like bookish twins.

  ‘I’ll bet Arnold’s eyesight is better than both of ours put together,’ said Vera, suddenly looking up at towering Arnold, and being visibly shocked at his nearness and toweringness. Her eyes moved quickly the length of his body, up and down, in that comical, who do you think you are? way. It delighted him. His presence had amused her.

  The children by now had lost all interest in the sewing machine and were playing a game which involved stuffing the kitten into Evelyn’s Georgian dolls’ house. Arnold, at last called upon to assist, and more aware of the perfume than ever, his eyes almost watering with it, entered the sacred space, and knelt down. Vera was wearing a dark blue T-shirt and an unbuttoned cardigan over her shoulders. Her neck was immediately noticeable, the strong length of her throat, the way it seemed to shine in its own theatre, created by the curtain of golden hair that enclosed it on three sides. In their stooping and kneeling and rearranging they were thrown into sudden and unusual physical intimacy. His face was brought within an inch of the back of her head when she turned to rise and give him space, and he was startled by the clean, pine smell of it. She smiled at him and offered him the thread, the end dampened to a straightness with her spit. He was the surgeon who would make the one life-saving stitch that was beyond the dexterity of his fellows. He bent down and to his astonishment, threaded the eye of the needle, which he could hardly see, in one go.

  ‘That’s bloody ridiculous,’ said Polly.

  ‘See how it takes a man to do a woman’s job,’ said Vera.

  ‘You are the most impractical man I have ever met, and yet you thread the needle in one go.’

  ‘Poets must have a good eye,’ said Vera, ‘a good eye and a steady hand.’

  It thrilled him that she remembered he was a poet.

  ‘Well, poets do like games of precision. They like golf, and darts, and they make good carpenters,’ said Arnold.

  ‘OK, you can go now. You’ve impressed us enough.’

  ‘My grandmother had a sideboard made by T. S. Eliot.’

  The women ignored him, having turned their attention back to the machine After some more clicking together of plastic parts, Polly pressed a pedal and it purred with life, the busy sound of mechanical stitching, and a sudden burst of energy from what Vera had called the ‘business end’ of the machine. The little girls looked up from the dolls’ house as the kitten escaped from a bedroom window, as if from a house on fire. It was the first time in their lives they had heard the sound of a sewing machine and they found it unexpectedly beautiful. They had not anticipated such a vigorous, mechanical and scientific noise to come from the device. It put the machine in the same realm as motorbikes and chainsaws, of things that possessed tremendous power, that could be controlled by the lightest of touches. And it made them a little a
fraid of it as well, as though it might start suddenly dashing around the room. But it seemed to call them, as if it was singing. They were drawn to it, as Arnold had been to the scene in its entirety. And Arnold himself felt pushed away again, and retreated to the distance, observing the females at their work, not knowing quite what he should do. All attention was on the machine again, and its possibilities.

  He imagined that, having got the machine to work, there would be an end of it. It was nearly dinner time. It was not that Arnold expected his meal on the table at a certain hour, or that he had any outmoded views on the wifely role, but the rhythms of the household had fallen by chance into a pattern that reflected exactly those views, so that an outsider might think that it was a household run on Victorian values. But in any case, this archaic routine had been disrupted by one of even greater archaism, patriarchy had been trumped by matriarchy, and the sewing maidens had taken control of the house. Vera began directing operations again, ordering Polly to go and get material that they could work on, and Polly obediently went in search of fabric, returning with a bundle of throws, sheets, tablecloths and curtains that had long been folded away somewhere. The operations became tense and urgent, because both women knew their games had overrun, and that Vera needed to get back home as well to (Arnold supposed) get her family’s dinner ready. It was as though it had taken the sewing machine to make them realize how little they had developed, after all, in this liberated age. And Arnold pondered the irony with an inward chuckle, as he stood there helpless, with a well-stocked kitchen behind him.

  Scissors were produced, thick fabric was snipped through, stitching was unpicked, hems were torn open. Then the machine was put to work. Now that it was set up, Vera was able to demonstrate her skills. It was no longer a puzzle, she had command of it. The others sat around her enthralled at the wonderful busy sound of the machine as it jiggered through the material, making a munching sound as it went. Arnold crept closer again, to observe. He marvelled at how the machine seemed to travel through the fabric, yet stayed still. Cut squares of random textiles were stitched together. In just a few minutes Vera had made something new out of the old materials, a patchwork quilt, a little landscape emerging from the busy needle, the children gasped with delight. ‘Look, Daddy,’ Evelyn was saying, acknowledging him for the first time, ‘look what Irina’s mum’s made.’