The Paper Lovers

by Gerard Woodward

  But these thoughts were going on at the back of his mind, below the surface of his conscious, moral self, which maintained, so far, respect for those around him, and to whom he had responsibilities and obligations.

  It was a few weeks before anything that could be called a friendship developed between them. Sometimes he found that they were the first of their group to arrive in the playground and so had a few minutes of conversation, or otherwise after the bell had gone they found themselves taking the same route out of the playground gates towards their cars, this again giving them a few minutes of private chat. At these times the talk would remain on the well-worn topics, the safe ground of children and schooling. Arnold laughed when she told him that she had been in their children’s classroom and had heard a teaching assistant telling them how to spell the word Zebra, ‘And she said it was spelt Z-E-D-B-R-A, but I couldn’t correct her, not in front of the class.’ And immediately Arnold realized he shouldn’t have laughed, because this wasn’t funny. And they agreed that something terrible was happening in the school, teaching assistants were being used increasingly – untrained, sometimes not very well educated – and teachers were allowing them to run whole lessons. ‘And Irina thinks it’s all right to say “he was sat on the chair”, because that’s exactly what Mrs Dalrymple, the teaching assistant, taught them was correct. We should do something about it. The government are getting away with murder. Handing over our kids’ education to cheap, untrained labour.’ Arnold agreed, knowing how the teaching assistants often came from a background of low-grade office jobs. ‘And they bring their small-minded, office-dogsbody mentalities into the classroom.’ They were both chilled by the thought that their children were being taught by fools.

  But Arnold felt uncomfortable talking about their children. They were the common ground between them, but they were also the constant reminder that their lives belonged to other people, within the closed circles of different families. Sometimes, on the way out of the school, if they happened to be the last parents to leave, he felt momentarily free of that sense of belonging elsewhere, and that he and Vera could talk like two carefree and unattached friends. At such times he would try and steer the conversation away from subjects related to parenting and children.

  He tried talking to her about the coincidence of them both having connections with the university, and he learnt that she had left academia with some bad feelings. She felt she had been pushed out of her job, was overburdened with teaching, given no chance to do research, then punished with a heavier workload for having such a poor research profile. It was a vicious spiral Arnold knew well, and was himself having to struggle with.

  He had published nothing but a single collection of poems, Macroscopia, more than a decade ago. He had started working on a second but the flow of poetry had been slow since the success of his book. Macroscopia had won a major prize, and had been widely praised. For a year or two he had been famous in the small world of poetry and poetry studies. Following up on the success of the first book had been harder than he’d imagined. Although he had now accumulated enough finished poems for him to think about assembling them into a collection and offering them to his publisher, he balked at the thought of it, deeply worried that the new poems did not live up to the promise of the old. He feared that he had been in the grip of something very muse-like, that had enabled him to find poetry in anything, and he feared that that moment had passed. He struggled now to find poetry in things that had once seemed bedecked with it.

  He didn’t like to talk about his work as a poet, and she, it seemed, didn’t like to talk about her life as an academic. He tried probing what she had wanted to research, but given that she had been an academic in the department of religious studies, he didn’t want to steer her into talking about religion for fear that her moral consciousness might be unduly exercised, that she might suddenly awaken to the darker side of the intentions he barely acknowledged to himself that he had.

  So they talked about mundanities. Things they’d seen on television, newsy gossip. There were some trashy TV programmes they both secretly liked. He was delighted that he seemed to be able to make her laugh very easily, and he found the way she laughed enchanting – the tilted head, the crescented eyes. Usually slow and deliberate in his conversation, he found himself possessed of a fluency he’d never had before, so that he couldn’t quite believe it was himself talking. It was almost as if she was talking through him. It astonished him. Whatever came out of his mouth seemed to charm and amuse her. And he was conscious at the same time that he was talking rubbish, nonsense, inconsequential tittle-tattle. He suddenly wondered if he was actually a fool. His default position, conversationally, was surfaces and appearances. These were the things he liked talking about.

  He began noticing that she seemed pleased to see him when he arrived in the playground. It became expected that he should talk to her. It became a routine, a normal thing. One morning, when by chance she was in conversation with another mother when he arrived, he stood apart, and felt conspicuous and out of place. Another morning, when he arrived, Vera was crouching down, attending to some problem with her daughter’s shoes, so that she looked up at Arnold as he approached, her face filled with a smile, and her look passed all the way up and down his body, and her gaze settled on his body just for a moment longer than would have been normal for a friend. She seemed to enjoy looking at him.

  The effect of knowing Vera, of being in her presence, even for that ten-minute morning drop-off, lasted with Arnold for the rest of the day, all through work and into the evening. He came home bright and elated, full of joy. But it was a general joy in life and its apparatus that he experienced, that through the day had become dissociated from its source, so that he couldn’t have explained, exactly, why he felt happy, and mistakenly thought it was simply because he was home with his wife and daughter. It took him quite a lot of thought and reflection to realize that the happiness originated in that morning encounter, and that in a strange way the blissful energy that came from Vera was fuelling his joy in his own domestic life. She was giving him the energy to enjoy what he treasured most, even as she tempted him away from it.

  As soon as the night came and the day was finished, when he’d eaten with his family, enjoyed them, helped his daughter with her homework, played with her, watched television with her, watched the late news, showered and gone to bed, he woke the next morning as if scraped and scaled of every last vestige of Vera’s influence, and felt the need, the overwhelming urge, to revisit her, to see her again, as if she was a place, a beautiful building or landscape that held strong and comforting associations for him. Yet he couldn’t go every morning, and sometimes he couldn’t go for several days. There were long separations. The hosting of the sewing evenings was now shared with friends, and they met at Polly and Arnold’s only on alternate weeks now. So the chances of seeing Vera were reduced even further. Then a half term and no school runs for a week. How was he to cope? He hoped he would begin to forget about her, but in fact her memory seemed to grow stronger in his mind the longer the absence.

  He felt an urge to talk about Vera with his wife, principally to find out more about her, but also because of a rather dangerous need he experienced, to have Vera established as an abstract presence within the family, someone they could both talk about and share opinions on. In a curious way he wanted to share his feelings about Vera, just as he would want to share his thoughts about a good book he’d just read. But he realized the profound risk he was taking in even mentioning Vera. The only way he dared do it was by contriving a conversational exchange in which Polly herself might be prompted to mention her. So he would ask how the sewing evenings were going. Had anyone made anything fantastic? Yes, said Polly, Geerda had started making velvet watermelons, using a special stitching technique. And Beverly had made a cover for her husband’s iPad. Gillian was making a clown costume for a fancy dress party . . .

  ‘Is that what you do, then, bring in pieces you’ve been working on and talk abo
ut them?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. We talk about what we’ve been working on, then we take turns using some of the machines, sharing new techniques any of us have learnt. Then we have a drink and start gossiping.’

  And what has Vera been making, he wanted to say, but it seemed she had made nothing of note, at least not enough to be among the examples Polly brought forth.

  The only other subject he could think of was religion. If he could engage Polly in a religious discussion, then she would inevitably bring Vera into the conversation, because she was the one example she had, among her friends, of a religious person. She might cite and quote things Vera had said. But it was difficult to get Polly to talk about religion. She was, like him, an atheist, but more vehemently than him. Arnold liked the idea of religion, even if he didn’t believe in a god, but Polly didn’t even like the idea of it, was adamant that it was the product of fear and stupidity, that it was a force for bad in the world and that only the frightened and the stupid could believe in it. Which was Vera, he wondered, frightened or stupid?

  ‘I’ve got this religious fanatic in one of my writing classes,’ he said to her one evening in as casual a way as he could, which was difficult because he was doing something unusual in talking about his work. They were side by side on the couch, in the blaze of the television, wine glasses in hand, and Evelyn upstairs in bed.

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Yes. Whenever the discussion moves on to sex, she asks if she can leave the room.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not really sure. I suppose it offends her religious sensibility. She’s very polite and apologetic about it. She behaves like someone with asthma might behave if someone started smoking. She just has to go outside, and comes back when the air has cleared.’

  ‘So how often do your writing classes involve talking about sex?’

  ‘Unfortunately one of the other students writes about nothing else, and of a quite extreme kind. But then most students think detailed sex scenes are compulsory in a novel. They don’t seem to think anyone else knows how to do it. And they think they are the first ones ever to write about it.’

  ‘And I suppose you take extra care in evaluating their descriptive powers in this area.’

  ‘Well, I usually tell them to cut it out. I say if you’re writing a story about two people and at some point they make love, there is no need to then go into several pages of detailed description. They wouldn’t lavish the same amount of attention on them cutting their toenails, so why focus on the sex?’

  ‘And, well, you’re the writer, but I’ve always felt that including explicit sex scenes in a novel is just – bad manners.’

  ‘Spoken like a true Englishwoman. But anyway, I feel sorry for the religious fanatic.’

  ‘Oh, she sounds idiotic. An attention-seeker. Passive-aggressive. If she was in a class of mine I’d have sex there and then, just to annoy her.’

  In fact, the student didn’t exist. Arnold had made her up for the purposes of talking about religion.

  ‘I think it’s rather sweet that people can still be offended by it, in this day and age. It is strange, the religious mind.’

  ‘Stupid, you mean.’

  ‘Isn’t one of your friends religious?’

  ‘Oh, Vera? Yes, she is a bit.’

  ‘And is she stupid?’

  ‘Well, I suppose in some fundamental way she must be stupid, but otherwise I think she’s very clever. I like her, actually. She never talks about religion.’

  ‘So how do you know she’s religious?’

  ‘She says things like she went to church on Sunday, but she doesn’t talk about her beliefs – that’s what I meant.’

  ‘Has she ever tried to convert you?’

  Polly laughed. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Why “of course not”?’

  ‘Because I don’t think she’s that sort of religious – an evangelical. And she knows that we would have to stop being friends if she tried anything like that. I couldn’t stand it. In fact just thinking about her religion is starting to put me off her. If I don’t think about it, then I can like her.’

  In a strange way this was a relief. Their friendship only went so deep. They weren’t soulmates or kindred spirits. Religion acted as an impediment to deeper friendship. In the mind experiment that Arnold was playing, in which he entered into a full-blown affair with Vera, the damage he would do to Polly was softened a little by this fact. And then he went on to have the thought that Vera’s religiousness made having an affair with her a less insidious crime than if she was an atheist. It would demonstrate that the passion between them was so strong, so irresistible, that even the strictures and prohibitions of one of the world’s great religions couldn’t prevent it from happening. Not even God could have stopped it. If a devout Christian couldn’t resist the temptation, then what chance did he, a faithless little poet, have?

  ‘What church does she go to?’

  ‘What church? You mean the actual building, or the branch of Christianity?’

  ‘Both, I suppose.’

  ‘I don’t know the answer to either, actually. But I know it’s not a regular church, not a traditional church with a steeple, it’s some other place.’

  There were several churches with steeples in their neighbourhood, mostly Victorian neo-Gothic structures with billboards outside that said things like Jesus Saves, or He is Watching You. Arnold had taken little notice of them before and felt glad that she didn’t attend one of those, because they seemed institutions of unbearable sadness, akin to old people’s homes. But then the modern churches seemed even sadder, the Kingdom Halls with their feeble attempts at inspirational architecture, an out of town supermarket was a more uplifting building. Then the terrifying thought – supposing she was a Jehovah’s Witness, or a Seventh Day Adventist? Someone bound up in rigid dogma and governed by peculiar laws and prohibitions. How could he have a relationship with someone who might think him evil, for obscure, irrational reasons?

  He satisfied himself that her religion could not be extreme in any way. She seemed too relaxed, too at ease with the vulgarities of secular society. She would be at the softer end of the scale of religious belief, the tolerant one, the one that doesn’t really believe in miracles. She would not be like that woman he once met at an airport who said that aeroplanes flew because they were borne aloft by angels. But then again, she did look religious. What did that mean? He could have picked her out of a crowd, if told there was one believer in a crowd of unbelievers. She looked unadorned, pure, clean. There was nothing decorative about her. She looked fresh and healthy. But she also looked serious and a little bit stern. He began to wonder if that was what he found attractive about her. And in that way she was similar to Polly. He had always felt attracted to studious, serious, quiet women, which he thought must have been a legacy of falling in love, as a child, with so many of his teachers. She also looked peaceful. It was impossible to imagine her committing an act of violence, or shouting. That was why the experience of causing her to smile or laugh, to animate her in any way, felt so fulfilling.

  Arnold still did not fully understand the force of Vera’s attraction for him. He could see that her looks were plain at the same time as he felt a sense of helpless devotion to them. Perhaps it was purely chemical, or olfactory, or perhaps she resembled closely some childhood goddess who had transfixed him once, and then been forgotten. At times he felt afraid of the force of attraction he was experiencing. He tried reassuring himself that her spiritual beliefs, her religiousness, her moral uprightness and her commitments to her husband and family were all strong enough to ensure that nothing could ever happen between them, and that his own family was safe and secure. But then, when he saw her again, when they had their easy little playground chats, when he saw her full of smiling and laughter, these certainties would melt away and he would feel himself in the current of something irresistible, that he was being pulled willingly towards uncertainty and danger.

  And then, on
e morning, she said something about her body. They were standing side by side in the playground, waiting for the bell to go. Each morning a different child was given the privilege of ringing the large brass handbell that signalled the start of the school day. This morning, for the first time, the privilege had been given to Arnold’s own golden-haired daughter Evelyn, who insisted that she would only do it together with her best friend, Vera’s daughter Irina. The two girls went over to the far end of the playground where the teacher on duty was standing with the bell, and the two parents watched side by side from afar. A mother and father, of different families, but both looking on in shared pride, as though they were part of the same family. Arnold noticed a little moment of pain pass across Vera’s face.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Just a headache,’ she said. ‘I get lots of headaches. I think it’s to do with my neck.’

  ‘What’s wrong with your neck?’

  ‘Nothing, it’s just too long.’

  He was touched by this reference to that part of her, and a little shocked. He felt flushed in the face. It was because he found her neck so attractive, so gorgeous, that by acknowledging it, it was almost as though she had made a sexually provocative remark. It was almost as though she had said ‘my breasts are too small’.