The Paper Lovers

by Gerard Woodward

  He suddenly noticed the bed was empty. He must have fallen asleep for a while. He looked around the room. Vera was at the foot of the bed, naked, but positioned in such a way that she looked like a little girl saying her bedtime prayers. Suddenly he wondered if that was what she was doing, though when she moved it seemed she was merely looking for the clothing she had discarded earlier. They had made love, but disappointingly. It was a week after the incident at the fishing town.

  ‘That thing you told me about your grandfather – you never finished it.’

  Vera looked puzzled at first, then remembered.

  ‘Oh, the League of the Militant Godless. Yes, I did my Ph.D. on them.’

  ‘And were they effective? Did parading the image of Christ around in a clown’s outfit persuade anyone to abandon their faith?’

  Vera was sitting on the edge of the bed, side-on to him, pulling on her jeans. It was a view of her body he loved, her breasts in profile, one nipple peeping out from behind the other.

  ‘Well, as my mother said, you’d think they’d never heard of the crucifixion. The whole Christian faith is based on the humiliation and torture of its central figure.’

  Arnold smiled, and enjoyed the remaining spectacle of Vera’s dressing, which compensated a little for the disappointments of their earlier lovemaking. It had been the first time they had failed to achieve the fullest pleasure in each other. Instead it was as though they had run out of energy, or had lost confidence in themselves.

  Vera spoke without turning to face him.

  ‘It was the boy made of paper, wasn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Last week. By the fish market.’

  ‘He wasn’t made of paper – but yes, I thought it was him.’

  Vera was silent for a few moments and then said, ‘It’s almost like he’s in the room. I can hear you thinking about him.’

  Arnold wondered for a moment if she meant it literally. He tried to laugh at the remark. ‘You are right. He keeps popping into my thoughts. I feel partly responsible. Whenever I think about him I think that he is going to come to some sort of tragic end. I didn’t think people like him really existed any more.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. People as beautiful as him. There is something unapproachably beautiful about him. You can’t bear to touch him.’

  Now fully clothed, Vera moved back on the bed, but sat upright against the headboard, whereas Arnold was still lying flat.

  ‘You are worried that he may come to harm?’

  Arnold wanted to talk to Vera about Martin Guerre, but realized that he couldn’t do so without exposing his own feelings of guilt and betrayal. He himself didn’t fully understand why he was so troubled by the boy. He tried to explain it to himself as a natural concern for a vulnerable young man. At the university he was occasionally put in the absurd position of dispensing pastoral care to milksop first years. He had objected at first, saying that he was foremost an academic, and that the role of pastoral care should be assigned to people who actually cared. The chorus of disapproving gasps and tuts this raised in the meeting caused him to clarify his point. He had meant people trained in the strategies of caring. Now, to his surprise, he found that he was caring about the welfare of someone for no obvious reason other than that he felt an ambiguous sense that he was the cause and origin of his anguish, and not just because he had written some unkind comments on his poetry. He had done that many times before, after all, and no one had poisoned themselves as a result, as far as he knew. Arnold had hurt Martin in a deeper way.

  ‘I admired you,’ said Vera.

  ‘Admired me?’

  ‘Yes. You pushed a man into the sea. For some reason, I found that impressive.’

  ‘Personally, I have never been so ashamed of myself. I could have killed him. My own stupid clumsiness could have killed him.’

  ‘I wanted to laugh. Did you notice, a lot of the people on the quayside thought you were playing a joke on a friend? They thought you were some sort of prankster, and they were laughing.’

  Arnold remembered, and was now worried that they would never be able to return to the town, the place that had become their own.

  ‘I can’t get out of my mind the idea that he will do something terrible. I’ve only met him once, and I have no obligations to him. All he has done is sent me his poems.’

  ‘He must be a very unhappy young man. It’s touching that you are so concerned about him.’

  ‘It’s not that so much – it’s more the feeling that he is beyond reach. I don’t even know why I think that, but there’s a remoteness about him, and a fragility. He seems breakable, like china.’

  ‘Or paper . . .’ Vera smiled. ‘There is something that you could do for him, Arnold. That you and I could do for him, together.’

  There was a note in her voice, a slight tremor, that served as a warning. Arnold sat up a little and turned to her.

  ‘What do you mean? What could we do for him?’

  ‘We could pray for him.’

  He looked at her for a moment, trying to gauge the seriousness of what she had said. He was wondering if she had meant it as a joke. He lay back again. He didn’t know what to say. For the first time in her company he felt embarrassed. It was a terrible feeling.

  ‘Is that what you were doing just now? Praying?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I saw you kneeling at the end of the bed.’

  ‘No, I was just trying to find my bra.’

  ‘Ah. Well. You know, even if I believed in God, I’d find it impossible to believe that he would grant me personal favours if I prayed to him.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. That’s not what prayer is.’

  Arnold was silent for a few moments, not wanting to allow the conversation to follow this line too far. Vera spoke again.

  ‘I’ve struggled with it since I met you, Arnold. I gave up praying. I didn’t feel the need. But now I find that I miss it very badly. It’s not about asking favours of God. That would be ridiculous. It’s about finding strength and support. We wouldn’t be asking God to help the boy made of paper, but praying for strength so that we could help him . . .’

  Arnold suddenly sat up.

  ‘I’m not going to pray, Vera. Please, don’t ask me to.’

  He could see her face filling with disappointment. He began dressing. Vera fell silent and sank back into the bed. He didn’t look at her but could hear the quietest sounds of weeping coming from her. They confused and annoyed him. When he was dressed he made for the door and thought for a second that he was going to leave without saying a word or giving her a glance, but at the last moment he paused and turned. She was still lying against the pillows and was looking straight ahead of her. She had stopped crying but her face was red and damp. He realized he had hurt her badly by his reaction.

  ‘I’m sorry, Vera,’ he said, ‘it was a shock for me, that’s all, hearing you talk like that. I’m not against people praying . . .’

  Her answer was to sink down into the bed and turn away from him. He left quietly.

  Arnold hadn’t mentioned the fact that the real source of his anxiety lay in his decision not to publish Martin’s poems. If only he hadn’t put me in this position, he thought to himself. If only he had written poems about having sex with someone other than Polly. Arnold had an idea that he could offer to publish some of Martin’s other poetry, something on a different theme. But he felt he had to say this to him personally.

  Martin Guerre had left no contact details, there were none on his manuscript, not even a return envelope – he was not expecting to have it returned. The only thing Arnold knew about him was the house he had dropped him off at, after their coffee together. The tall shabby house in the student zone. He went there one afternoon after work, picking his way through the littered path round the side of the house to a door that led directly into the kitchen. The door itself was open, and a couple of students were inside, a male and female, s
itting at a messy dining table, staring together at something on a laptop. Arnold tapped on the door as he entered their space, they barely acknowledged his arrival. This was a house where people came and went without much ceremony.

  ‘I’m looking for Martin.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Martin. Martin Guerre.’

  ‘Don’t know who you mean.’

  Of course, Arnold forgot it was a nom de plume. ‘A tall man, wispy and thin, with long dark hair.’

  ‘He means Ryan.’ Said the girl, ‘Are you one of his lecturers?’

  ‘Actually, I’m his publisher.’

  The two students looked at each other conspiratorially and smiled. They were beautiful in a similar way to Martin.

  ‘He’s in the other room, on the settee. You can go through.’

  A little cautiously Arnold passed through the kitchen and into a hallway that led to the front door. To the left was a doorway to a large silent living room. There was a television that was not on, and the curtains were drawn, making the room quite dark. Not until he was fully in the room did he notice a figure sitting on the couch, as if watching the television, and though it gave him a momentary shock and feeling of coldness, he quickly recognized that this figure, though life-sized and fully human in form, was some sort of mannequin or dummy. He was about to leave the room, thinking the students were trying to play some sort of stupid joke on him, when he turned to find they had followed him in. They were both laughing.

  ‘Did you find him?’ the girl said.

  ‘Yes, very funny. Is he in the house at all?’

  ‘That is him, we weren’t having a joke with you. Go and have a look.’

  ‘It’s really cool,’ the boy said, ‘he’s made lots of them.’

  ‘Right,’ said Arnold, ‘it’s some sort of sculpture of his, is it?’

  ‘It’s not just a sculpture, it’s a full body cast, of himself.’

  They had moved into the room and towards the figure on the couch. Now Arnold could appreciate the quality of the work. The white mottled texture, the naturalistic shape and proportion. Then he suddenly realized.

  ‘It’s made of paper – isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, papier mâché, whatever. He makes it from his torn-up poems. He tears up his poems, turns them into pulp. Then takes casts. He’s done about three here. There’s one in his bedroom.’

  ‘He started off doing casts of smaller things. A kettle. A coffee-maker. Then he took a cast of a television. He makes ordinary things look spooky. Then he started on himself.’

  ‘If you look closely,’ said the girl, ‘you can see words, little bits of his poems . . .’

  Arnold did look closely and could see them. The ghost of Martin Guerre, sitting on a sofa, made of his own poetry. He saw the word ‘heart’. Then ‘melancholy’. Then ‘rebarbative’.

  ‘That’s why we thought you was one of his tutors. He doesn’t seem to go in much now, but he’s doing loads of work here, at home. One did call round the other day. He thought Ryan was doing some good work. But he said he needed to do it in college, not home. I think Ryan sort of said something like it was easier for him to do this sort of work at home – where he could use the bathroom and so on . . . I don’t know.’

  The ghost of Martin Guerre was almost too much for Arnold to understand in a single sighting. It heartened him that the boy was regarded so warmly by these housemates of his, and that he was putting in what must have been many hours of work in making what was a very striking sculptural project, albeit without the support of his college. But the hollow man sitting on the couch was unnerving and disquieting to such an extent that he wished he had never seen it.

  After they’d had their joke the students directed Arnold to a pub where they thought it most likely that Ryan, as they called him, was currently to be found.

  It was a pub Arnold knew as a student haunt, the same one that he had once found himself trapped in, as a newbie lecturer, by eager students, and he had misgivings about going there. Being only late afternoon, however, the pub was not crowded, and Arnold spotted the boy almost immediately, sitting at a table with a girl and two others. The girl, he supposed, was the girlfriend he had mentioned, since she was dressed as a fashion student might be – outlandishly in something golden and high-collared. It seemed Martin didn’t immediately recognize Arnold, and instead looked at him with incomprehension.

  ‘Hello,’ said Arnold. ‘I’ve come to talk to you about your poems.’

  The boy stood up, leaving the others at the table, who had taken little notice of Arnold.

  ‘What did you want to say about them?’ He saw the anxiety move across Martin’s face like a jolt of electricity, it was as though Arnold had pliers in his hand, and was about to apply them to the boy’s flesh. To settle him down Arnold couldn’t help but blurt –

  ‘They are beautiful.’

  Martin’s face became coloured-in, just as if a child had set about him with crayons. His eyes watered.

  ‘My god,’ he said. He seemed close to collapse. He put a hand on the bar to steady himself. ‘This is so . . . so . . . amazing. You don’t know what it means to me.’

  Arnold cursed himself for laying the ground so poorly. He would have to just come out with it, be cruel.

  ‘But I don’t think I can publish the ones you sent me.’

  ‘But you just said . . .’

  ‘I can’t publish those poems. They are too . . . It’s not about the quality of the poems, it’s their subject.’

  ‘You’re talking about censorship?’

  ‘If you want to know the truth, I find them personally offensive.’

  Arnold regretted what he had said, but held to his guns. The boy’s eyes were dampening, he became tongue-tied and was completely at a loss for how to respond. Arnold talked quickly.

  ‘I’d be happy to consider any new poems you have, on a different subject. Or any older poems, for that matter.’

  The boy shook his head. ‘I won’t be writing any more poems. And I’ve destroyed all my other work. These are the only poems I want to have published. They say everything I want to say.’

  Arnold thought of the mannequins, composed of Martin Guerre’s collected works.

  ‘Don’t you think that would be a terrible waste of your talent as a poet? Your poems are getting better by the day. These poems are so much better than the first collection you sent me. If you carry on you are going to write something truly wonderful. You just need to keep going.’

  The boy was almost laughing now. ‘Poetry is like water,’ he said, ‘there is only so much to go round. If you use it up, the well runs dry. There’s no more. I’m not going to write poems just for the sake of it. If I haven’t got anything to say I’m not going to force them out. That’s why I admire you. Admired you. You wrote one book, one brilliant book, and then stopped.’

  Arnold had never had his failure to produce a second book praised before.

  ‘I admired your purity,’ the boy went on, ‘your truthfulness. I would like to believe my poetry is as honest and pure. You only write poems when you have something to say. I wanted to be like you.’

  Martin returned to the table with his friends, leaving Arnold to make his way home, where The Paper Lovers still waited for him on his desk.

  12

  They had arranged to meet, as usual, at Vera’s house, Arnold taking the back-door route through the undergrowth and past the rotary washing line and the aluminium goalposts, but from the moment he arrived at the door to the kitchen, to be met by Vera, he could see that something terrible had happened. She greeted him wordlessly, and her face was white and puffy, her eyes damp.

  He thought she must still be upset after their last encounter and the things he’d said about prayer. He made to put his arms around her and give her a conciliatory hug but she backed away and walked straight through to the lounge-diner. There her husband was waiting, standing with his arms folded, having just got up from one of the dining chairs, over the back of which h
is jacket was hanging. He was wearing his working clothes, the business suit, white shirt, a purply brown tie. One of the other dining chairs was out of position, and Arnold imagined that they had been sitting talking face to face across the corner of the table, for most of the morning. She must have called him home from work.

  No one said anything. Arnold turned from Angus to Vera, but she had lowered her gaze and wouldn’t meet his eye. She looked small and folded-up. He turned back to Angus, who was looking him in the eye, with an expression that was hard to read at first, but which Arnold decided was one of concern. Serious concern. Arnold guessed from the way these two were behaving that Vera had voluntarily confessed everything to her husband, and that they had become reunited.

  Arnold wanted most of all to ask Vera why she had done this, but he already realized that the Vera he was confronted with now was a different one from the woman he’d known. Her sense of self had shifted, or returned, to where it had been. Perhaps it was the conversations about her faith, about prayer, or the knowledge of the damaged boy made of paper, or something Arnold didn’t even know about, but a curtain had come down on the part of her that he had loved. Under the gaze of her husband he couldn’t say anything to her. His gaze burnt through any bond between them, separated them completely.

  ‘I’m sorry, Angus,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how much Vera has told you. I take full responsibility.’

  Angus gave no response at first. Then, as if having been reset, he took a step forward, holding out his hand.

  ‘I want to help you, Arnold,’ he said.

  ‘Help me?’

  ‘Yes, I want to help you. This is going to be a very difficult time for all of us.’

  Arnold took the hand that was proffered, and shook it, conscious that his grip was the weaker, and that his own hand shrank within the encompassing grasp of Angus’s meaty fist. Arnold turned to Vera again. Already she looked physically different, he could almost imagine that her flesh was changing before his eyes, as though a numbing acid had been thrown in her face.