The Paper Lovers

by Gerard Woodward

  ‘You are so sweet, Arnold.’

  ‘You should adopt him, the boy in paper. Take him in.’

  ‘I think we’ve got enough on our plate.’

  He noticed Vera look at him when he said this, the only moment in the whole afternoon that she did so.

  Later in the holiday he found himself tasked with retrieving Evelyn from an afternoon spent with some other children at Vera’s house. He had doubts about whether he should really do this, and wondered if he should try and find a way out of it, thinking it might be a bad idea to rerun the circumstances of their first sexual encounter. And when he went there, he was in a very different mood, with the feeling that he was stepping into a trap. He saw himself as if from the outside, from a distance, or watching himself in a film. And when he went there he found everything as it had been that other time – the strewn living room with left-over food turning cold on the table. In the playroom the children were again in the grip of the television, ready and waiting to be betrayed. But this time he and Vera did not steal up the staircases to make hurried love, instead they behaved like a tired married couple.

  ‘I’m so looking forward to when this week’s over,’ Vera said as she handed him a mug of tea, ‘aren’t you?’

  The tone of voice in which she said this suggested she was just tired of having the children at home all day, not that she was longing for the return of their trysts.

  ‘Ye-es,’ he said, cautiously.

  ‘You don’t sound that sure.’

  ‘I’ve been wondering if we need to rethink things.’

  ‘I didn’t realize we had thought things in the first place.’

  Realizing the conversation was going to deal with these personal matters, they moved into the front room, well away from the children, and continued their conversation in whispers.

  ‘Well, perhaps we should have. Being in love, if that’s what we are, has given us a special kind of power that neither of us wanted.’

  Vera nodded, but more to make him explain himself.

  ‘The power to hurt the people who love us.’

  ‘That power is always with us . . .’

  ‘Not this kind of power. We are armed to the teeth. I feel like I have been given charge of a huge animal that is peaceful most of the time, but that at any moment could turn savage and start eating people.’

  ‘I don’t know why you think we should ever have to hurt people.’

  He didn’t know what to say to this. Did she not understand? Or did she understand more than he realized? Had she some plan that would mean their lives could go on unaffected by their relationship? That what they were doing could be somehow contained, for ever.

  ‘I think we both need to understand what we are doing, and how it might affect other people.’

  She seemed disappointed. He felt suddenly that he’d failed her in some crucial way. She did her best to disguise her feelings, but they surfaced in the form of visible concentration. She was staring hard at his mouth, then his eyes, then his mouth, as though actually trying to read the words he was speaking, so intent was she in extracting any hidden meanings in them. It unsettled him. He had been hoping for some form of assent, agreement, sympathy. Surely she was worried as well, about where their relationship might lead. Two families destroyed, for the sake of something purely sensual.

  ‘Let’s talk about it after the holiday,’ she said in her low, quiet voice, her serious voice. And almost immediately Arnold was back in the sensual realm, desiring her, just because of the movement of her lips, the beadwork beauty of them, the glimpse of a richly pink interior they gave as she spoke, the plush tongue. It made him want to venture into her, and he had to resist strongly. The blind power she had to reach instantly into his primal desires, just by the slightest movement of her facial muscles. How could he ever hope to escape, or to maintain a reasoned viewpoint on their situation? He felt an overwhelming sense that when the time came to draw the line he would be unable to free himself from the grip of her beauty. The sacrifice would go on and on. His passion for her was relentless in the sacrifices it made, he would chop down tree after tree until there were no trees left on the island, he would shoot every seabird until there were no seabirds left, and no meat to cook, he would strip an island’s resources bare, in order to preserve what they had. It maintained itself above all other considerations, values, wants. Why not just give in now and save the agonies that lay in store, say goodbye to his family and his life?

  So the meeting on the first Wednesday after the half term was to be a test of his resolve. He had determined that he would ask for an end to their relationship. He would be staring into the fire of her beauty, and would have to not flinch. He worried about it for several days. It was not something he’d ever had to do before and he couldn’t quite work out a formula of words. When he arrived, creeping as usual like a criminal through the back gate and the shrubs of her unkempt garden, she seemed to have made a special effort with her appearance, wearing a pretty yellow dress. He had never seen her in anything other than jeans before. It was heartbreaking.

  ‘All I am saying,’ he said, once they were settled at the table, ‘is that we should perhaps have a break . . .’

  ‘We’ve already had a break, it’s been three weeks since we last fucked.’

  Her use of that word, blunt and uncharacteristic, sent such a thrill of pleasure through his body that he couldn’t gather his thoughts for a response, and she carried on. ‘What you mean is that you want to end it completely. So why don’t you just say it?’

  ‘I’m not saying that . . .’

  ‘Even if you aren’t, what is the point of having this break?’

  ‘So we can think carefully about where we go from here. Look, I don’t want to lose my family, and I don’t think you want to lose yours. If Polly found out about us I don’t think I would last more than five minutes before I found myself homeless. The longer we continue our relationship, the more chance she has of finding out.’

  Vera didn’t seem impressed by any of these comments. ‘Was it the boy dressed in paper who changed things?’

  ‘Yes, in some ways it was. I saw how he was damaged by his parents – his father left home when he was ten. You can see the pain of it written all over his face, no matter how bravely he tries to cover it up. I keep thinking of Evelyn. I find it very hard to handle the fact that I possess knowledge that would destroy her.’ The look on Vera’s face made him have another go at phrasing his thoughts. ‘Not “destroy”, then, but “damage”. Damage badly. She would survive, of course. We all would. But we would all be badly wounded. It wouldn’t make a difference if I was unhappy with Polly, and I have tried everything I can think of to examine that question, of how happy I am with her, and though I am more excited by you, I am not unhappy with her, so I can’t justify to myself breaking things up for that reason.’

  ‘That is good of you, Arnold. And it makes me feel bad, but on the other hand, if what we do goes no further, that we simply keep it to this once weekly meeting, then we could maintain this for as long as we needed to.’

  Her words chilled him. He had not expected resistance to his plan, even though this was a mild, reasoned, considered form of resistance. He was expecting to have his plan agreed to immediately. It puzzled him.

  ‘But you see, the longer it continues, the more chance there is that eventually we will be discovered, that someone will see me coming out of here, or will see us together somewhere, or we will accidentally leave some clue, or Polly will smell you on my clothes – something like that will happen in the end . . .’

  ‘Not if we’re careful . . .’

  ‘But careful for how long, a year? Two years? Five years? The rest of our lives?’

  ‘Why not? I’ve heard of people who’ve done things like that.’

  ‘For five years? Imagine what Polly would think if she found out we’d been sleeping together for five years . . .’

  ‘We can’t predict how people will react. Why should it be any worse
a reaction than if it had been for five weeks?’

  ‘Because of the depth of the deceit. Because of the depth of our commitment to the deceit, to maintain it for that long, it proves that we had years to think about how wrong what we were doing was, but went on doing it anyway.’

  ‘I think you are worrying too much, Arnold. Our love for each other should be allowed to exist – if it grows, then we have to look after it, if it dies out, then we can go back to how we were, but we would be disrespectful to it if we killed it now, it would be too cruel.’

  ‘I’m not saying we end it. All I’m asking for is time.’

  She smiled at this. ‘It’s the one thing we haven’t got. Just these few minutes once a week. Don’t you feel the preciousness of it? For me, it feels like my whole life is compressed into those two hours. I am not sure I would be able to survive properly without them. But – if that is what you want, then you can have your moratorium. Starting from next week? Yes?’

  She was suggesting that, if their period of abstinence was about to start, they should use the present moment for one last session of lovemaking. The Shrove Tuesday of their sexual Lent. He agreed. And he was surprised, after the soberness of their conversation, at how swimmingly aroused he felt. The mood changed instantly from one of courtroom sombreness to one of dreamy sensuality. It was like someone had thrown a switch to dim the lights and ignite the candles. The longing that suddenly rose in his body was a physical sensation like the pain of hunger, but without specific location, it seemed not to belong to the genitals, but was spread more evenly throughout his abdomen, a pain that moved all the way up to his heart, a kind of dyspepsia, though not acid in its origins. They had not made love for three weeks, and he had thought, in that time, that he had slowly built a form or resistance to the tremendous power of her beauty, that he had inoculated himself against it, but in the bedroom, all the barriers melted away. And she was emboldened and enhanced, as though anticipating he might have put up defences. She had dressed herself in beautiful underwear. It was a shock, and he had never thought of himself as someone likely to be aroused by something so tacky, but Vera wore it and had produced a wonderful edition of herself. The notion that she had committed herself so strongly to his arousal, by investing in this material, and wearing it, when it could have been of little benefit to her, overwhelmed him with a sense of gratitude, that she had transformed her entire body into a sort of gift, and was presenting it to him. She was the last person he imagined would find sexy underwear appealing, it was another of the little sacrifices she was making, another tract of undergrowth slashed and burned, another clearing constructed in the forest, another turret added to the invisible palace.

  She attached little pieces of jewellery to herself, sparkling things to her earlobes, faceted little crystals, she said they were her grandmother’s, that she had never worn them before because they hurt her ears and that she would have to take them off soon, but the effect on her was startling. Again he was not someone who cared much about jewellery, Polly’s was of the wooden-bead type, nothing that flashed and dazzled like this, casting rainbow light on Vera’s wonderful neck, round which another piece of work hung, making her something that was easy to worship, indeed he felt a weakness in his knees at that moment, at the spectacle of her, little pieces of compressed quartz, yet they seemed to bathe her in a rejuvenating light, smoothing her skin so she seemed younger by a decade. He approached her like a fool with his hands out, blinded by the glare of her body, attracted to it like a moth, as stupidly.

  Later, spent, utterly drained, he realized this couldn’t possibly be the last occasion on which this could happen. Still stroking him, she held him transfixed in a continuous palm embrace, her hand swam through his body as though he was a pool, lifting him, parting him, stirring him, so that he couldn’t think, or rather he was thinking in a way that he hadn’t thought before. He thought in a way that was closer to the way he thought in dreams, seeing things in terms of pictures and stories, and setting himself against a situation where he has to push a large obstacle out of the way. He supposed they were on a raft in a huge ocean, but a raft that was utterly secure, unsinkable, stocked with an inexhaustible supply of food and water. Vera rose above him, naked now, but for the necklace, she straddled him, though he was soft and helpless, indeed he was in a certain amount of mild pain. Her breasts moved in front of his face and he felt the befuddled sense of being stared at by them, they were still shiny from where he’d sucked. She knocked them playfully against his nose, one after the other. Beneath them her wetness met his own wetness, and they stirred against each other, she pestled him slowly, until miraculously he found himself rigid again, as though he had risen out of his own pain, fresh and ready.

  He had arrived here determined to end things, but now he was more deeply connected to Vera than before, he was of a piece with her, their very skins seemed stitched together. And the worries he’d had now seemed trivial. Why should their spouses find out about them, and if they did, so what? Families split up every day. It is more the norm than not, to split up. Who now stays married for life? The world is full of stepchildren and second husbands, and everyone seems to manage.

  And so their affair resumed its previous course and direction – a straight, regular routine that appeared to be leading nowhere. It was as though they were building the dead straight track across the outback, sleeper by sleeper through the flat desert, rails winched into position, screwed down, mile after mile, all that energy and ingenuity going into building one dead straight track, but nowhere at the end of it, no station, no destination in sight. This continued to bother him.

  9

  For the remainder of the summer term Geoffrey, Vera’s youngest child, was in the nursery school for three full days a week. That was eighteen hours, spread over three days, when Vera would be free of all responsibility for her children. ‘If circumstances were normal,’ she said, ‘I would now be thinking of trying to pick up the pieces of my academic career, perhaps some part-time lecturing, or even some research. But now that I have whole days free, I just want to spend them with you.’ How the sentiment filled Arnold, it was such an exquisite thing to express, this longing of hers, for him. Her words smothered him sweetly, he danced with them for hours and hours after he had parted from her. She was sacrificing her scholarship for him, putting aside her wonderful mind, putting her brain on hold so that she could devote herself to the pleasure of his proximity. She was dumb with love. She was plebeian, illiterate, doltish and village-idiotic with it. And so was he.

  Arnold had more time now as well. Teaching had finished, the exam season was over and he was required to be on campus much less. With their newfound time-richness they decided to venture beyond their world to somewhere they could be together on neutral ground. They were thirty minutes’ drive from the coast and they decided to meet in one of the fishing towns. Here they could disappear together among the sightseeing crowds who came for the sands and the piers and the amusement parks, who kept an old, ridiculous economy going by purchasing tacky souvenirs and silly experiences – trampolines arrayed on the beach like a little industry devoted to testing the durability of children, donkey rides that seemed to do the same, the shoreline telescopes that swallowed twenty pence pieces only to give a little wheezing noise and a view of blurred blueness in return. Vera and Arnold delighted in these things as if they were children again.

  Sometimes Vera was able to arrange childcare so that she didn’t have to be home until late in the afternoon. They used this time to experiment with hotels, booking a room as early in the day as they could – giving them a few hours together in which they could live as they’d never lived before, in a state of true privacy, in their own space, completely cut off from their other lives.

  In these neutral zones Vera was able to free herself of that inhibition he had noticed in her since she had started talking about her beliefs and her past. In fact, she seemed more free than before, and had developed a love of self-display, of stripping nak
ed and parading her body, striding around the room. Sometimes she would stand on a chair, holding her breasts, or lifting her arms to the ceiling as if she was a supporting column, her armpits yawning with hair. There seemed no reason for doing this other than to present herself, to celebrate her body. She encouraged Arnold to do the same, and they would sometimes dance naked together on top of the bed, a precarious and static waltz or tango that would have the struts beneath the mattress straining. They would collapse giggling onto the bed, to bounce prone like trampolinists making an exit. This was almost as gratifying as the sex that followed, which would also be more open, not confined to the bed and its covers, but would be conducted in the room itself, using all its space and apparatus.

  Afterwards Vera would leave to drive back on her own, and Arnold would sometimes stay on for longer, until the early evening, for no other reason than he felt a parsimonious need to get his money’s worth from the room, before letting it go, unoccupied for the night they had booked for themselves, the little shred of time that they so longed to fill, but were unable. Soon, Vera said, soon I’ll be able to arrange something, make some excuse to be away for the night, and we can sleep together like two real people in a real hotel.

  It was Polly who reminded Arnold about the existence of Martin Guerre. She reported that he had come into the shop again, agitated and wispy, to ask after his poems.

  ‘It’s only been a few weeks,’ said Arnold.

  ‘He seemed to think that was long enough, that you should give his poems priority. There are heaps of other manuscripts, I keep telling you. They are building up.’

  The reputation of the Papyrus Press was continuing to grow, and the hopeful poets continued to send him their work. Arnold’s usual routine was, once a fortnight, to visit the shop and inspect the manuscripts, which were piled in a corner of the workshop, still in their envelopes, though carefully kept apart from the stacks of waste paper that were Papyrus’s raw material. Here he would carry out his preliminary filtering operation, rejecting anything handwritten, anything on coloured paper, anything on scented paper and anything that contained a photograph of the author. He would retain anything by a poet with a known name, and of the rest a quick reading of the first two or three poems would tell him if the manuscript as a whole was worth reading. This process would usually reduce the pile by about ninety per cent, giving him a handful of manuscripts to take home to be read at leisure, the rest to be returned, using their own self-addressed envelopes, by one of Polly’s staff.