The Paper Lovers

by Gerard Woodward

  On her way back down Evelyn burst into his room as she often did to report on her day, but he was worried by her face, which was distraught. He had misread the sounds of normality. Evelyn had been crying.

  ‘What’s up?’ said Arnold, his heart racing. It couldn’t possibly be what he dreaded.

  ‘I hate Irina,’ she said.

  ‘Oh not again. Why?’

  ‘She’s a bitch.’

  ‘Evelyn, I’ve told you about using that word.’ But he could have hugged her for using it, since it took his daughter’s grievances so far away from what he’d feared had been their cause.

  ‘But she is one . . .’ Evelyn was using that pleading voice, the moaning intonation she produced when she knew she lacked the necessary words to express her feelings ‘. . . she is so much one . . .’

  ‘What’s she done?’

  ‘She wouldn’t let me read her mind.’

  ‘Oh God you’re not still doing that, are you? I thought Mummy told you not to play with those cards any more.’

  ‘I wasn’t using the cards.’

  ‘What were you doing then?’

  ‘I just told her that I could read minds and I asked her to think of something and let me read her mind.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Well she said I got it wrong every time but she was just saying that – I couldn’t have got it wrong every time.’

  ‘And of course there was no way of knowing if she was telling the truth.’

  ‘Of course there was, I could read in her mind that she was lying. She was thinking about a parrot, but she said she was thinking about a koala bear.’

  ‘Listen, Evelyn . . .’

  ‘And then she was thinking about an owl but said she was thinking about a balloon.’

  ‘Evelyn . . .’

  ‘It was so unfair, she just didn’t want to admit I was right.’

  ‘Evelyn – you don’t actually think – I mean, you don’t really believe you can read minds, do you?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Because no one can. It’s not physically possible.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘It just can’t be done. If it could be done, someone would have proved it by now, and no one has.’

  ‘Then let me prove it. Think of something.’

  ‘No, Evelyn.’

  ‘Just think of something!’ she shouted with impatience, and closed her eyes in concentration. Arnold was tempted to test her, but as soon as he paused long enough for a thought to enter his head, he saw Vera’s naked body spread before him, glossy with his spittle. The image had been in his head all afternoon, almost as though it was permanently fixed to the pinboard of his mind. He shook with the effort of trying to wipe the image from his brain, in terror that there was the slightest chance that Evelyn possessed the gift she claimed. But then here was the saddest proof of all that his daughter was not psychic, for she could see nothing of that seared image and instead was chuckling at something much pleasanter she’d seen.

  ‘You’re thinking about Emily,’ she said.

  ‘Emily? Who’s Emily?’

  Evelyn gave a cackling laugh. ‘Emily? Don’t you know who Emily is?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘She’s downstairs. She’s the kitten. I thought of a name for her. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘And were you thinking about her?’

  ‘No, I wasn’t.’

  ‘You were!’ Evelyn gave the long moan again, her body twisted with frustration.

  ‘I wasn’t, I was thinking about something else.’

  ‘What were you thinking of?’

  ‘I was thinking about Mummy.’

  This seemed to satisfy Evelyn a little, as though her mother and the kitten were the same sort of thing. They went downstairs together to find them.

  5

  It wasn’t exactly triumph that Arnold felt when he went downstairs to live out the rest of the evening as a perfectly normal, regular evening of eating and chatting and television, but a sense close to that – that he and Vera had done it, they had done it and got away with it. No one had been harmed, physically or mentally, and life was carrying on as normal. It was true that they had planted something in their lives that could, at any time, burst into flames, but if they handled everything as calmly and as carefully as they had that first day, then there seemed no reason the current of things couldn’t continue indefinitely.

  It was almost as if without any planning at all that he and Vera slipped into their adulterous routine. Amateurs who had discovered a talent for something they’d never dreamed of before, their lovemaking session of that afternoon was repeated the following Wednesday, and then after the agony of the Easter break when it was impossible to arrange anything – and during which Arnold had been particularly anxious about the reawakening of Vera’s religious conscience – on through the summer term, each time with the same sense of excitement and discovery as on that first afternoon. It became timetabled into their lives as much as the classes Arnold taught or the lectures he gave. A weekly encounter, an appointment not to be missed. They left him feeling flushed, exhausted and tremblingly happy. The feeling would last well into the evening, to be replaced by a crushing wave of despair brought on by a realization of what he was doing and the new power he had to destroy the happiness of his family.

  He wondered if Vera felt the same way but felt afraid to ask, in case she did. Yet she showed no sign that she did. In every other respect their feelings and their outlooks seemed to run parallel – but not their sense of guilt and shame. It unnerved him a little. As someone with religious faith, surely she would have felt more strongly the wrongness of what they were doing. And because he regarded her as someone with a stronger moral outlook than himself (indeed he regarded her with something approaching awe in this respect), he took some comfort from her apparent ease with their transgression.

  At times he felt that what they were doing was a thing of such concentrated wrongness that it existed beyond the range of conventional perceptions. It was such an unlikely thing that people wouldn’t have seen it even if they had dropped some clue. It made him feel that their affair inhabited its own world, an invisible structure, a palace of glass that soared above the other buildings, but which people walked right past, or through, without noticing. Polly could walk past it and not see it, she could walk through it, walk right through the middle of it, and not feel the touch of its walls.

  In counterpoint to this, Arnold was dismayed to find that the real building he lived in, his house of red bricks and Victorian stained glass, of chessboard-tiled floors and toy-filled bedrooms, had become smaller, darker and colder. He felt this most strongly on the days when he’d made love to Vera in their invisible palace, though in the ensuing days it lost some of its dankness and littleness, and he could begin to find attraction in its lighting, its pictures, and its ever-growing population of sewn and stitched things that continued to emanate from the little machine that had started it all.

  He could not look at his wife properly. She seemed to have drifted out of focus, or only to exist in his peripheral vision. Sometimes he would try and correct this, and would find himself staring at her for long periods, while she was unawares. His relationship with Polly granted him the privilege to look at her, yet when she noticed, she found his gaze unsettling.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ It was the first time, in over an hour, she had looked up from her work at the sewing machine.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Why do you keep staring at me?’

  ‘I like looking at you.’

  Polly gave a little laugh, as if to say she wasn’t fooled. ‘No really, why do you keep looking at me? Is there something wrong with me?’

  About her husband Vera said very little, though she did once tell Arnold that he had not ‘paid court’ to her since the day of their marriage. He liked the way she used that term, ‘paid court’. He also liked the fact that she didn�
��t understand why it amused him that she used it.

  Arnold supposed that he himself did pay court to her. As their affair continued they had grown increasingly secure in each other’s company. Inhibitions about their respective bodies had disappeared; they gave each other permission to range freely across their neighbouring territories of skin, and would spend long minutes charting new discoveries there, of moles and scars and veins that were to them like archaeological treasures. They teased each other’s bodies for new ways of raising pleasure, experimenting and improvising. They spoke very little. Their lovemaking was like a dumb-show. Afterwards they would lie together in silence almost as if in celebration of the fact that they did not need to talk, concentrating all their thoughts on the abstract realms of bliss. To speak would have felt like an intrusion. Instead the only accepted form of expression was smiles, touches, sighs, giggles. The few times Arnold did try to talk, she hushed him quiet, smilingly laying a finger on his lips, as if urging him not to break the precious spell.

  At first he found this conversational absence a relief. Their relationship was freed from the pressure of language. But as the weeks went on, he began to worry that their affair existed only for the slaking of Vera’s sexual thirst. Eventually that thirst would be satisfied, she would have had her fill, she would be rehydrated – and what then? He didn’t even know what they had in common, if anything. And every time they made love the same ties hung on the back of the chair, the same polished shoes stood on the floor. At times he thought he could hear them pacing restlessly up and down while they were in bed. He could hear the toes tapping with impatience, waiting for them to be done . . .

  Why was she doing this to her husband? Had the man in the big shoes mistreated her? Arnold wanted to know. Were they just bored with each other, or was it something more than boredom? He wanted to find out about her. He wanted to talk to her about her parents, what country they had come from. He wanted to know about her childhood, her first boyfriend, her finding of God. He wanted to know what she and God thought about what they were doing. He wanted reassurance from her. He wanted to know, from a religious woman, that what they were doing together was, in some way, explainable. But for all he knew she had given up on God, had lost her faith. The thought troubled him, as though at some higher level their affair might no longer be sanctioned. At the same time he didn’t want to awaken in her a sense of guilt, or shame that might have slumbered on otherwise. He didn’t want her to be like him, full of fear and trepidation.

  Arnold could not quite believe what had happened to him. He was not someone upon whom the world rushed to bestow favours of love, in fact he had begun to feel, in his more recent years, quite the opposite. In this sense he had become disappointed with life. Beyond his marriage it seemed that people had very little regard for him, his company was not sought as an end in itself, his own friends were few, and could not tolerate too frequent contact with him. He guessed it was because he had an innate ability to put people on edge, to make them feel awkward, to appear cross when he was anything but, to seem impatient when he wasn’t. At times brittle, defensive and cranky, he realized he was not easy company. The urgency of Vera’s passion for him seemed all the more surprising, therefore. She didn’t misread his mood, as so many people did, but seemed to perceive it with astonishing accuracy. Polly was the only other person who was consistently able to do this. Furthermore, Vera seemed anxious to experience him as intensely as possible. He had some sort of quality that she desired strongly. It was not his looks, as these were ordinary, and his character, as he understood it, lacked charm, yet there was something attractive about him, and to have this confirmed by someone other than Polly, that there should be two people in the world of seven billion who desired him, doubled the previous figure and so doubled his sense of self-worth and confidence. He became terrified of continuing the affair with Vera, and he became terrified, equally, of losing her.

  Sometimes he tried making the suggestion that instead of using their weekly assignation to make love in her house, they could go somewhere else, but not to make love, just to have lunch, or a drink, and to talk. Always her answer was the same.

  ‘There is no time. We would have to go somewhere very far away, to avoid the risk of being seen together, and we haven’t got time for that. And besides, we can talk now. We can talk any time.’

  ‘But you always hush me when I try to talk.’

  ‘Oh, it’s just because we have something so special, so different, that we risk spoiling it by talking about ordinary things. Once we start talking, we start realizing how complicated everything is. Without talking, it is just you and me, our bodies, our selves, and nothing else.’

  It seemed at first that Vera couldn’t quite grasp this need of his to experience her mentally as well as physically. Yet she claimed to be a spiritual person, worshipper of an ethereal deity, believer in Cartesian dualism, of spirit that detached from the body and floated away in death. With Arnold she seemed to value nothing but his body. He could see that she was beginning to understand that this worried him. She agreed that they should talk more, but thought that they would have to go somewhere away from home to do it. It would seem absurd to go through all the subterfuge of his creeping in through the back door, just to have a conversation. Then one day she said to him,

  ‘You are right. We should do other things as well. I will meet you in town one day. There’s a cafe no one we know goes to. We could meet there.’

  6

  It was called The Market Café, although the cattle market it had once served had moved, twenty years before, to a location outside the city. A bus station had been built where they had once auctioned heifers and swine, and the customers of the Market Café now were mostly bus drivers and their forlorn passengers. Arnold and Vera looked out of place. Vera had dressed differently, as though she was in disguise, reverting to a charity-shop student-chic that would have been her normal garb in the days when there was still a cattle market over the road. She had on a woolly, rainbow-coloured beret, and wellingtons, for no reason that Arnold could think of. She drew very little attention from the men in the cafe, yet Arnold couldn’t think why they weren’t staring at her.

  To his amazement she ordered a mixed grill. He had thought she was vegetarian, but then realized he had no reason to think this, other than it would have suited her.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ she said, as if reading his thoughts. She removed her beret and let golden strands fall beautifully about her face. It seemed strange, but he felt he had her much more in his possession now than when she was naked beneath him in her and her husband’s double bed. Here, though clothed, she was before him and for him in her entirety, sitting across the table from him, a miniature Manhattan of condiments between them, and the laminated menu from which they’d ordered.

  He wanted to take stock of her beauty. In their relationship so far, in its rush of emotions, in its hastiness and secrecy, he hadn’t been able to take his time to appreciate what she was. Her face was little, trim and perfectly balanced. It bore so few signs of ageing, and yet she was unmistakably a woman of her years. For the first time he saw traces of otherness in her, of a different line of descent, the Slavic, eastern races noticeable in her eyes and cheekbones. He kept forgetting she had a Russian mother and father, or was it grandparents? In her voice there was nothing more pinpointable than southern English. He felt he knew nothing about her.

  At the same time, no matter how much he appreciated her physical presence, he was bothered by the feeling that this wasn’t all of her. That the whole of her was something beyond her flesh and blood, rainbow-wool-and-wellington-booted-here-and-nowness. He thought something as ungraspable as mist was a part of her, that could detach itself and drift away.

  When the food came, he was horrified by her serving. Bacon, sausages, a chop, black pudding, kidneys. So much muscle on the plate, her meal looked more likely to eat her than the other way round. It pained him to imagine all that protein attacking her body, when she seemed mad
e of purer things.

  ‘What’s the point of coming to a place like this if you can’t have the full eating experience?’ she said.

  Arnold was disappointed.

  ‘I didn’t think we chose this place because of its food.’

  Vera looked slightly less attractive when eating. Her face lost its symmetry, and she kept having to extract unchewable things from her mouth. She kept blowing her nose, an action that gave her hamster cheeks and eyes. He had given up an afternoon of sex with her for this.

  He had not ordered any food, wrong-footed into believing that Vera wouldn’t be hungry, and he didn’t want to be the only one eating. By the time she ordered he’d already committed himself to having nothing, just a mug of tea. And now he was hungry. He didn’t believe she would finish it. All that grease and tissue going into that slight, pure body must surely cause some sort of chemical insurgency.

  ‘You are eating like someone who’s been held hostage.’

  Vera said nothing but went on sawing away at the meat, placing it delicately in her mouth, then chewing, with difficulty. She seemed to be forcing it down, the long neck rippling with each swallow. She offered him a piece of offal on the end of her fork. He politely refused. She smiled at him.

  ‘Why won’t you eat anything?’

  ‘I’m not hungry. And like I said, I didn’t think we came here to eat.’

  ‘No. But then you’re not doing anything else, at the moment.’

  ‘I am doing something.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Looking at you.’

  ‘Looking at me stuffing my face.’

  ‘I like looking at you.’

  Vera smiled again, but didn’t return the compliment. She seemed to be taking little notice of him.

  ‘So what did you want us to talk about?’ she said.

  ‘I just wanted us to know a little more about each other.’

  ‘In my limited experience, the more people know about each other, the more complicated everything gets. But go on.’