The Paper Lovers

by Gerard Woodward

  He tried to imagine a conversation with Vera.

  I went to the cathedral and I did it. I prayed.

  Well done.

  I prayed in order to seek answers from God.

  Answers to what?

  To what I should do about Polly.

  And what did God say?

  He said I should keep quiet about it.

  Really?

  Yes, he said I should act as if nothing has happened, and keep up the pretence for the rest of my married life. He said if I told her the truth she would never forgive me, she would throw me out and I would never see my daughter again. That option results in the unhappiness of three people. The prior option resulted in the unhappiness of only one, me, and that was only mild compared to how I am feeling now.

  This was how he would justify his silence to Vera when the time came.

  But what about me? she would say. I have also betrayed Polly, as her friend. Do you expect me to be complicit in your deception? Angus won’t forgive me unless I confront Polly with what I’ve done and seek forgiveness from her.

  When he came out of the cathedral he felt a little calmer, and the process of emerging from the ancient shadows of the interior into the brightly lit gaudiness of the tourist city was one that was charged lightly with a sense of renewal. If he had the desire to so do he could construe a way in which this could be thought of as a religious experience. It was the same experience he used to have whenever he visited the cathedral in its free entrance days, and the same experience whenever he visited any ancient church. But this was because they were beautiful places, not because of the presence or proximity of the divine.

  He was glad he had made the instant decision to stay away for the night. He could have gone anywhere that evening, he could have gone anywhere in the country within a few hours’ drive, but instead he went to a cheap Wayfarer Inn on the outskirts of his own town, a bleak, shabby place on the bypass, next to a newly built industrial estate and a petrol station. He did this because he didn’t want to be distracted by pleasant or charming surroundings. The drab, corporate blandness of the hotel’s little world was perfect for thinking about things. And there was no danger of his feeling guilty that he was treating himself or having his own little holiday. This night away from home had a purely functional purpose.

  He was with the company reps, the lorry drivers, the families with too many children. The hard bed, the welcome tray with its past their sell-by date biscuits. The little paper stockings of revolting coffee. The view from the window was of grey units, still empty. The Wayfarer had no restaurant and didn’t do breakfast. There was a Happy Eater on the other side of the roundabout, behind the Texaco petrol station, the receptionist told him. He could walk there in five minutes. They recommended it for breakfast as well.

  Arnold felt strongly compelled to ask the receptionist if she was interested in sleeping with him. He felt the sudden realization of his own badness as an adulterer, and wanted to test a new theory of himself, that he was the sort of man who could sleep with any woman he chose. There was a lecturer at work, his former head of department, who claimed he had routinely asked any woman he met, at a party or other social function, to sleep with him. The majority said no, but even if only one in twenty said yes, that still meant he was sleeping with a different woman perhaps once a month. The extraordinary thing, Arnold thought, was that this man seemed totally unbothered by the nineteen rejections he received in order to get the one acceptance. Lacking any physical attractiveness or social charm didn’t seem to matter; if you were prepared to ask enough women, the law of averages would see you through to a night of sex, eventually. The knowledge of this man’s sex life, something he liked to recount as an amusing aside at gatherings in the pub, deeply disappointed Arnold, in a way that made him wonder if he was actually, to his surprise, quite prudish. Perhaps it was jealousy, of a rival in the rutting stakes, who, possessed of no sexual attraction at all as far as Arnold could tell – but then who was he to discern that sort of thing in a man? – and who in fact seemed the least sexualized individual he could imagine (to the extent that if Arnold was asked to design a person least likely to appeal to the opposite sex, he would come up with something very like Professor Jim Stodmarsh), had still been far more successful than him.

  The receptionist was pretty, though in a way that suggested they had completely different views about life. She was artificially tanned, heavily mascaraed, bleach haired, her fingernails lacquered and curled like eggshells. She seemed to have gone to great lengths to conceal anything natural about herself, had expended long hours in nail bars and tanning salons – such work to create this sheen. She probably referred to her breasts as ‘boobs’. He imagined doing a Stodmarsh, what words would he use? He imagined the professor’s pass would be as bluntly to the point as it was possible to be. Would you like to sleep with me tonight? And then he imagined the response. He might be reported. There was probably a camera watching them, that would capture the slap around the face he would get.

  He thought about what she would be like in his room, if he was successful, the sprayed body glowing like teak, the cosmetic film covering her face. Neither Polly nor Vera ever wore make-up. He had not made love to a heavily made-up woman almost for as long as he could remember. Would she strip the paint off her face in preparation? And then what would she look like? A completely different woman, like in that poem by Swift, Corinna, Pride of Drury Lane, for whom no shepherd sighs in vain. But nothing happened. As he stood watching the woman take his booking, she barely looked at him, didn’t even offer him the bland corporate smile he might have expected. It wouldn’t have put Stodmarsh off, but Arnold could no more approach this woman than he could have touched a tarantula. He went to his room feeling relief and a certain amount of reassurance, that he was not a casual philanderer of the Stodmarsh sort. But what if the woman had flirted with him? What if she had signalled a willingness? What would he have done then?

  Hardly possible to believe it happened. Shameful. Absolutely shameful. Suddenly Vera seemed like an indulgent habit of monstrous proportions. He had behaved like a heroin addict who’d stripped everything out of their house to pay for drugs. What was the difference? He’d stripped the trust of his family as surely as if he’d gutted his house. He tried making himself a cup of tea, with a teabag that dangled from a string like a rogue on a scaffold, but once the kettle had boiled he forgot about it, and it went cold again. He looked out of his hotel-room window. An expanse of car park with five cars and a white van parked in it. Beyond that the looming sheds of the freshly built industrial units. But it looked like another planet. He had to ask himself, what was there out there that he knew about? What were those buildings anyway? He was stranded as far away from his own life as he could be. There seemed no way to get back to it.

  He needed to phone Polly. It would seem odd if he didn’t phone, spending his first night away in ages, and without any warning. She would probably phone him, and he didn’t want to be phoned and caught unprepared for a conversation. He decided to phone while he was in control of the situation. She answered straight away.

  ‘Hello. Did you get my message?’

  ‘Yes, I got your message. What’s the matter with you? How could you forget something like that?’ The voice didn’t betray a scrap of suspicion in her voice.

  ‘Quite easily, it’s only a little event.’

  ‘But it’s not as if you do poetry readings every week, is it? I thought this would have had a massive flag-up in your diary.’

  ‘Well, that’s just it. It’s become such a rare thing that I didn’t even bother checking my diary.’

  ‘OK, so you’ve just driven off to stay overnight, and you didn’t even come home to pack anything.’

  ‘I didn’t have time. I had to drive straight from town, or I’d have been late. You can’t be late for your own reading.’

  ‘What about underwear?’

  ‘I bought some in town.’

  ‘Where will you be stayin
g?’

  ‘They’ve booked somewhere for me. I don’t know where.’

  In the whole saga of his affair with Vera, he had never lied to his wife so directly, so elaborately. And this was not even in the service of spending a night with Vera. He was using up all his lying capacity for a night alone in a dismal hotel less than three miles from his house.

  ‘OK, call me later, after the reading. Or text me.’

  ‘OK.’

  And that was how the conversation ended. Neither he nor Polly liked telephones and tended to end conversations as quickly as they could. Now he wondered if this was to be the last conversation he would have with her as an equal partner in marriage. If the next time he saw her he was to confess everything, her voice would be very different. There wouldn’t be the calm certainty in it that there was just now, the loving trustfulness. He had known her lose her temper, he had known her in a state of anger and he knew what sort of voice came from her then. But he imagined the loss of trustfulness would produce something very different, something more than anger. He spent most of the night trying to imagine it, the voice Polly would produce in reaction to the revelation. He was never able to conjure a satisfactory sound in his mind, and as his mostly sleepless night progressed, he felt more and more strongly how impossible it would be for him to tell Polly about his affair.

  He looked at his mobile phone. The texts he’d exchanged with Vera were all still there, contained in speech bubbles, blue for him, green for her, as though two off-stage cartoon characters were talking across a void of theatrical space. Eight hundred and fifty-nine texts they’d sent each other. The affair had lasted just four months. They had texted several times a day. That was some sort of measurement. Some sort of gauge of their relationship. A sudden cascade of words cast across the radio waves. Badly spelt. Badly punctuated. Abrupt and crude. He scrolled back through the conversations and saw his affair with Vera run suddenly in reverse. He pictured his affair as if in a rewound film, him walking backwards into the house, a little hunched as if to keep his body profile low among the rambling shrubs of that little back yard, entering the house backwards, climbing the stairs backwards, entering the bedroom backwards where Vera was already naked in the bed, sweatily damp, red-faced, red-chested, raw-looking, clammy, exhausted, and he undressed, his own dampness and clamminess increasing as the clothes are removed though he doesn’t drop them but carefully lays them on the floor, as though they are delicate things that can be broken. He watches the scene in his mind as if through the peephole of a what-the-butler-saw machine, the memories flickering backwards in black and white, him suddenly collapsing onto the side of the bed, from which a space for him has been thrown open by Vera, and he lies down, covers himself, suddenly exhausted, breathlessly staring upwards as though a great weight has fallen on him, as though he has been drenched, as though he’s been under a waterfall, then slowly, exhaustedly, he moves on top of Vera with nothing in his loins, clamps himself to her, then with sudden energy and violence his body retracts what it had put inside her, sips up the spilt seed, and then suddenly everything is energy and movement, the helplessly rhythmic movements, and as they continue, the clamminess recedes, their hair is gradually straightened, they comb each other’s straight with their fingers, they carefully suck their own saliva from each other’s mouths, repossess what each had given the other, Arnold uses his mouth to carefully straighten a strand of her hair, he deftly and skilfully puts back the violet bra that jumps into his hand, then blindly he finds her T-shirt and pulls it down over her, instantly pulling the wrinkled fabric flat, the same with her other clothes, everything goes back on, and she does the same to him, they dress each other, and then spend ages caressing the creases out of each other’s clothes until the fabric is flat and smooth. Everything is straightened, tucked in, how patiently and attentively they look to smoothing out every last imperfection in each other, Vera uses her lips to remove the redness that has appeared on his neck (a blush, not lipstick). They walk backwards down the stairs and through to the kitchen door, Arnold walks back out of the house, backwards down the garden, as if he can’t bear to take his eyes off the house, as if he dare not turn his back, and is gone.

  Twelve times the speed of life, that’s how fast he’d lived in that time. It was as though six years had passed, and the invisible palace had outgrown the whole neighbourhood. And as he watched it spool back, he could still picture every second of it, every second crushed into his fist, into the phone, into the texts, and then suddenly he’s in the room again, the room where it first happened, when the smell of her had knocked him back, the scent of her that he realized now, when he said to her one day, your perfume is so beautiful so gorgeous, and she’d said to him – I don’t wear perfume, Arnold. You should know that. I hate perfume. It brings me out in spots. It burns my skin. He didn’t believe her. He can still hardly believe it. The scent had been so strong, yet it was just her, her body, he was sensitive to something in her chemical make-up, he was sniffing her essence, right down into the hereditary material. And now it was gone.

  14

  He winged a day of teaching, and arrived home at the normal time. All through the day and the night before he had been playing out different scenarios in his mind – the one in which he confessed everything to Polly and suffered her rage, and the one in which he told her nothing and somehow dealt with Vera and Angus instead. How well could he anticipate Polly’s response? Was there a possibility that, after rage, there might come some sort of acceptance? His first and only affair. Might she give him a second chance? Yes, there was a possibility, that after much agony and attrition and perhaps a temporary separation of a few days or a few weeks, he might be allowed his second chance. If so, what was the likelihood? What were the odds? It seemed absurd to him that it should all come down to a gambling question. He was aware that he was ignoring the moral imperative, that there was a right and a wrong way to proceed. The right thing to do was to confess all to Polly, the wrong thing was to hide the truth from her for as long as she lived. Yet here he was, calculating the best odds for his own survival. Thinking of himself. That’s certainly how Angus and Vera would view his practical reasoning. That he was putting himself first. But he remained unconvinced that the moral imperative should trump the pragmatic one, the utilitarian one, the one that would result in the largest amount of happiness for the largest number of people, and there was no doubt in his mind that keeping quiet, keeping everything secret, would result in more happiness for more people than telling the truth. And who were Vera and Angus to say that the resulting happiness wouldn’t be true happiness, that it would be false, tainted, corrupt? Happiness was happiness.

  Yet they would have to be managed. He had left them with an understanding that he would confess to Polly. They had threatened to tell her if he didn’t. That was the impression they gave him, at least. He had a responsibility to her and to them to tell the truth. He worried that they had already told her. Perhaps Polly and Vera had met at the school gates and Vera had felt compelled to confess, as she had done to Angus. He texted Polly several times during the day and felt cold with fear when there was no reply. It was only a temporary coldness however, because the reply eventually came, mundanely carefree and trustingly warm in its response. She didn’t know anything.

  Polly was getting the dinner on the table. He discerned a multitude of ways in which nothing had changed. There was the same light coming from the light bulbs, the same cuboid space defined by the four walls of the lounge-diner, the same ceiling separating them from the upstairs worlds. The furniture had retained its ability to stay still. There was one thing about the room that surprised him, not because of its newness but because he had not noticed it before, and that was how much of it was under the sway and influence of the sewing machine, which still sat on its coffee table near the bay window, a spot that could be regarded as pride of place, bathed in light from the window, overseeing everything and being seen by everything in the room. But apart from that, the space was drape
d and stacked with the folded product of that machine, the fabric creations, the throws and pillowcases, and clothes and cushion covers that Polly and her sewing-machine friends had created over the months. It was not that these things had suddenly been produced while he was away and put on display – rather that they had always been there, only strengthening and thickening their occupation of the house’s living space, to the extent that it now resembled a clothing or fabric emporium, or one of those trendy market stalls that sells hippyish garments and drapery, batik scarves and shawls and capes and ponchos and snoods with jewellery and fragments of mirror sewn in so that the wearer sparkles like a glitter ball.

  They had been busy, the sewing maidens, they had been busy and enthusiastic. That could be sensed merely from the presence of all this material.

  They ate their dinner with the usual messy talkativeness. Arnold and Polly had worked hard at making mealtimes social occasions where conversation flowed. It had not always been easy, their daughter had sometimes to be prised from wherever she was and cemented into her place at the table, and meals could pass in a frowny silence where the cheerful comments of the parents went unanswered. But this evening was not one of those, and both Polly and Evelyn were keen to ask him questions about Birmingham and his poetry reading. It seemed his unexpected absence the previous night had excited them in some way – not with interest in what he had done so much, but the unplanned change to their routine had put them on edge and made them anxious, which expressed itself as a form of nervous energy.