The Paper Lovers

by Gerard Woodward

  ‘Just doing my best to blend in. You have to think of this as a sort of undercover operation. I have to look the part.’

  But he looked wrong in a tie, to Polly. He looked as though he’d been lassoed. And the gunk he’d put in his hair. He would have to wash that out when he came home. It was bad enough that he was behaving like a Christian, she didn’t want him to look like one as well.

  ‘I don’t know why you can’t just interview people. I’m sure they would be willing to talk to you. Why do you have to actually go and join in?’

  He shrugged, as if it was both too simple and too complicated to explain. ‘It’s not the same,’ he said, ‘and I’m not “joining in”. I’m a detached observer, like I said.’

  It annoyed her that he found her objections amusing, as though she was being the silly little girl frightened by the big bad wolf of religion. He cuddled her in a fatherly way as she sat in bed, kissing the top of her head and telling her not to be ‘daft’, in such a patronizing tone that as he turned his back she made a gesture that he couldn’t see, the middle finger raised in both hands, jerking them aggressively up and down while biting her top teeth over her lower lip, screaming silently as she did it, which came out as a little puff of anger at the conclusion of the gesture, which he didn’t hear.

  Sunday mornings were now a new and different space in the week. To make sense of them and to make a claim on them, she devised things for her and Evelyn to do on their own. Since the one thing that Evelyn was sure to appreciate and never refuse an opportunity to do was going round the big department stores in the city centre, they did that. They indulged themselves in the material and the mercantile in a celebration of everything that Polly supposed was as far removed from the piousness of the religious mind as possible. They ate in fast-food outlets, and lingered over make-up counters trying lipsticks and perfumes. She had always felt uncomfortable before in pandering to Evelyn’s need to indulge in what she and her young friends called ‘girly stuff’. When she had been their age it was the slashed leather jackets and porch ghoul mascara of Siouxsie Sioux that had inspired her, not this plasticky world of pop princesses and squeaky clean boys. But now she took it up with relish, the pair of them returning home sometimes after Arnold had returned from church, bright with sugary energy and glittery purchases, their breath sweet with carbonated drinks. Though it only seemed to please Arnold that they had found things to do in his absence.

  He went regularly to the church all through the summer, taking a break only when they went on their fortnight’s holiday to the Languedoc. There, he seemed restless and agitated, complaining about the heat and the fact that their house didn’t have a swimming pool. He was like a smoker who’d given up smoking, though Arnold had given up smoking before Polly even knew him. She thought it was because they were on their own, when usually they holidayed with friends who had young children, so that Evelyn would be occupied, and would give him some time each day to read and write. Though he never did much reading or writing on holiday, and it puzzled her that he had always looked on the summer holiday as an opportunity to catch up on those things, when everyone else could see that they must be the worst possible times to seek the necessary seclusion and concentration, when all around him people were having fun and asking him to do things.

  And this time the matter of religion penetrated even as far as this crumbling farmhouse in its grove of olive trees. She had overheard a discussion he was having with Evelyn. She had asked him about the cavemen, and if they would ever get into heaven. What about the people who built Stonehenge?

  ‘Heaven is not like a club where you have to know the password to get in. I think they’ll allow anyone in who’s lived a good life.’

  ‘That’s not what Irina said. She said the cavemen wouldn’t be allowed in because they are descendants of Adam, who disobeyed God. But I think it’s so unfair. If God made human beings, why did he wait until two thousand years ago before he let people into heaven? Why didn’t he come down earlier, in the Stone Age, or the Bronze Age, at least?’

  ‘Well, we are the lucky ones then. A bit like the fast lane at Alton Towers, where you can get quick entry to the ride, while all the cavemen have to wait in the queue.’

  Polly had listened to this conversation from downstairs, wondering if she should intervene. She realized that they had never had the conversation with Evelyn that they thought they would have, when they had to explain what happens after death. She remembered an incident when Evelyn was much younger, perhaps just three or four years old. She had begun crying uncontrollably because she had convinced herself that she and Arnold were going to die and leave her on her own. And they had both struggled to deal with the situation, Evelyn had been completely inconsolable for an hour or more, she almost seemed to cry the humanness out of herself, becoming something more like a riled gamebird or distressed tree monkey. She had been touched in a profound way by it, because it seemed to mark the emergence of Evelyn’s own independent consciousness, an awareness that her parents were not only separate individuals but ones susceptible to damage, to change, or that could be lost altogether, that the world was not the safe protective nest in which she had existed so far, but that there was a darkness beyond the nest that extended for ever. It was her own sudden awareness of her dependence.

  They had reassured Evelyn that, although people do die, her parents were likely to be around until she herself was an old lady. There was no need to worry. The words themselves had no effect, and Evelyn’s anxiety could only be worked out by what seemed like an almost metabolic process, carrying on until she had run out of tears. They had ended up singing nursery rhymes together, and their gentle sweet rhythms seemed to finally draw the fear of death from her thoughts, and she returned to the safe shores of childhood. But where had it come from? That was when they realized they would at some point have to talk about death, and decide what to say. But they never had agreed, and now, without any consultation, he seemed to be telling her there was a heaven.

  After Evelyn had gone to bed, she spoke to him about it as they sat on the terrace with a bottle of wine beneath a Van Gogh sky.

  ‘Did you listen to yourself? Did you hear yourself speak?’

  ‘I had to say something, and just because you are explaining the religious point of view, doesn’t mean you subscribe to that view.’

  ‘You said “we are the lucky ones”, “we’ll get into heaven”.’

  ‘I was joking.’

  ‘How can you joke about it – do you want our daughter to grow up thinking heaven is a real place?’

  ‘She knows it’s not a place,’ said Arnold.

  ‘What disturbs me more is that Evelyn is now starting to think of you as someone who knows about religion. She sees you go off to church every Sunday. She asked me the other day why we don’t go as well.’

  ‘But she knows why I’m going there, doesn’t she?’

  ‘I’m not sure she really understands.’ And Polly thought she could add, ‘and who does?’ but didn’t. And religion wasn’t mentioned for the rest of the holiday.

  There was something she remembered from her student days – perhaps it was George Eliot, who claimed that she gained all the knowledge she needed to write about French Protestant youth in a single glimpse she’d had through an open Parisian doorway into the home of a pasteur. Some of the Protestants were seated at a table round a finished meal. When added to her existing stock of knowledge about France, Protestantism and youth, the glimpse was enough to furnish an entire world in her imagination. So it was a shock, on returning from France, to find that Arnold, on the first Sunday back in England, resumed his routine of going to church. And more than that, he had begun going to midweek meetings as well. Not at church, but in people’s homes. They were informal discussion groups, he said. He had been invited, and so he thought he should go. He said the chance it gave him of seeing more deeply into the lives of the people he was researching would be invaluable. He would see them in their own homes.

 
‘Arnold, how long is this going to go on for?’

  ‘Oh you know, when I feel I know enough.’

  She tried countering with the George Eliot example. He knew it well. It was quoted in Henry James’s The Art of Fiction, something he used regularly in his teaching. In fact, she now suspected he was probably the one who told her about it. ‘We can’t all be George Eliot,’ was his riposte.

  ‘Do the people there know you’re just doing research?’

  ‘Yes – though they may have forgotten.’

  ‘What about Vera and Angus – have they forgotten?’

  ‘I think they might have,’ he chuckled. ‘They think I’ve been saved. I don’t really want to remind them.’

  ‘Do you think that’s fair, deceiving people like that?’

  ‘I’m not deceiving them. I’m just being polite. If someone tells you they believe they are going to heaven, it’s very rude to contradict them.’

  ‘They think you’re going to heaven, do they? You’ve booked your place already.’

  ‘From what I can gather it’s quite hard to avoid going to heaven. There’s almost no talk at all about the other place.’

  ‘Well, I won’t be going to heaven – so you won’t see me there.’

  ‘I won’t see anyone there, because I’m not going either.’

  ‘Then it’s rude of you to lie to the Christians about what you believe.’

  ‘Oh, they won’t mind. They’ll just try harder to save me. They are very hopeful when it comes to saving souls. They never give up. That’s something I’ve learnt about believers, they just never give up, and they always look on the bright side, and they love everything. The best ones do, at least.’

  ‘I would find that endlessly irritating. And it would have irritated you, once.’

  ‘Oh, it does. They can be very irritating. The thing is, it seems forced, at first. But then you begin to see it isn’t. They are driven by something. They keep asking me when I’m going to bring you along.’

  ‘Don’t you dare even think about asking me. I wouldn’t be seen dead . . .’

  There was nothing in her past that could explain Polly’s aversion to religion. Her parents were both born-again atheists, and the school she had attended, though C of E by name, paid almost no attention to religious matters outside of the once a week RE lesson, which, as far as she could remember, was taught by secular teachers as bored with their subject as their pupils. At university there had been the encounters with the Christian Union, targets of mockery and scorn from most of her friends, the feeling of dread whenever one of them caught you in conversation – and yes, there had been a friendship with a woman who left to become a nun. An English student, like her. The student had befriended someone from the Christian Union and been lost to them. She dropped out in the third year. Did she really become a nun, or was that just a rumour? Well, she can’t have been a very close friend, or she would have known. Now she couldn’t even remember her name. But what she did remember was the apparent disappearance of this friend. The way she dropped out of view completely. Given that she had been a quiet, unassuming woman in the first place, meant the vanishing had not been so noticeable, and maybe the friend had been more susceptible than most, but still – the complete disappearance, as though she had never existed in the first place was, looking back on it, rather shocking. But Polly’s aversion to religion had little to do with that particular incident. It was already there, ready formed by the time she got to university. The Christians were like another species, pure and clean of heart, when she and her friends were into punk and its aftermath, the Christians maintained a timeless decorum, and looked at the world around them with continual disapproval. In many ways Vera was the perfect adult incarnation of those happy clappy students, but somehow, because they were both mothers, a deeper bond existed between them, that superseded spiritual beliefs.

  Perhaps she had to go back further into her family to understand the origins of her aversion. She knew little about her grandparents, but perhaps it stemmed from them, giving her own parents an innate aversion bordering on disgust, which had been passed on to her.

  She began looking for signs that Arnold had become a Christian. It seemed ludicrous at first, to be thinking of this question at all, because surely if he had become a true Christian, he would not be ashamed of the fact and would announce it with pride. He would not lie about it. Lying was a sin. She knew that such reasoning was rather simplistic, and that being a Christian didn’t mean you were unable to do anything but blurt the truth, but at the same time she thought Arnold might be in some sort of transitional phase. And knowing her distaste for religion he might well be reluctant to proclaim his conversion. Yet he couldn’t conceal those tell-tale signs – the peaceableness, the calmness, the optimism. These were qualities she had noticed in him, that had grown in recent weeks. Or so she felt. Hadn’t he always been an optimist? What about his lack of complaint when doing household chores, his performance of good works around the house? What had happened to his domestic laziness?

  She made the decision to delve into his study to see what she could find there. Normally she would not have had any qualms about doing this. She quite often ventured in there if she happened to be passing, usually after running out of coffee mugs downstairs. She would find a trove of half-finished mugs, each with a stone-cold puddle of coffee at the bottom – occasionally full cups frosted over with particulated milk. And during these forays she might glance at whatever was left open on his desk. Unfortunately his handwriting was so difficult to read she could only tell from the shape of the words on the page whether she was looking at a poem or not. She had not noticed the pages of solid prose that would indicate a novel was in the making, but then maybe he was writing it straight onto his laptop.

  The safest time for her to investigate his study now was, of course, Sunday mornings, when he was regularly and reliably away for four hours, giving her all the time she needed. Yet she still felt a sense of guilt when venturing in there, not as a casually interested observer of her husband’s workspace, but as someone entering what could now be thought of as hostile territory, looking for clues to something she couldn’t understand. His laptop was on the desk, closed up like an oyster. To her annoyance, when she woke it up, she found it was password protected. There were the usual stacks of books and manuscripts – the fat envelope that contained Martin Guerre’s poems was on the floor by the chair, still, it seemed, awaiting Arnold’s response. To her surprise, the sight of it made her smile. She was tempted to read through those poems again to see if they were as she remembered them, and picked the envelope up for a moment, but then put it back down again, not wanting to be distracted. She looked through various notebooks – the handwriting was barely legible, she couldn’t read it. To her surprise there were several folders of what looked like new poems, stapled together with their early drafts. Conveniently he was in the habit of dating them, and so she could see that he had been busy with poetry, at a gradually increasing rate over the last few years. She wasn’t inclined to spend too long looking through them for clues, though she could gather from their titles (which were legible) that he was exploring the already well-charted territory of his first book, and gave no evidence of sudden Christian conversion. She looked through his bookshelves instead. Poetry, poetry criticism, some novels. Dante’s Inferno. And a little book that froze her. The Bible, a pocket edition. She picked it up and examined it. It was old and well thumbed, but was not something that had always been in the house. She remembered Arnold saying something about a favourite poet of his who used to read the King James Bible every day for an hour just to get his poetry voice working. He was a secular poet, not a religious poet. Was this what Arnold was doing? And if he was writing a novel about a religious person, then of course he would want to look at the Bible. What was really surprising was the fact there weren’t more books on religion evident. All this research he was doing, and there wasn’t a single work of theology on his desk nor on his shelves, apart from
this one little pocket Bible. And where were the notebooks for this new novel? Although she couldn’t read much of the handwriting, she could read enough to tell that his notebooks were full of the sort of random observations that he kept all the time.

  She remembered the occasion when she was working in the publicity department of Carpenter and Wylde, when many of the desks in the office looked like this, until a new management broom came in and swept them clean, making everyone keep tidy work spaces.

  She had never had to read so much, not even for her finals at university. She would be handed a manuscript in the afternoon and then asked for her opinion the following morning, and if she couldn’t give a detailed, insightful reply her standing in the office would soon begin to fall. She had begun to master the art of reading a novel in a few hours. She could get through a manuscript in a day and absorb probably about forty per cent of it, and given that in most novels it seemed that only about forty per cent of the writing was worth reading, she felt she could talk about such a novel with confidence.

  Then one slow afternoon she took a call from the organizers of the W. H. Auden Awards.

  ‘Hello, I’m so thrilled to be able to tell you that one of your authors has been shortlisted for our award.’

  ‘Fantastic, who is it?’

  ‘Isn’t it fantastic? The author is a poet, Arnold Proctor.’

  ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘And we were hoping that you would be able to send us some publicity information, perhaps a photograph of the author, that we can use on our promotional material.’

  ‘Arnold Broccoli?’

  ‘Arnold Proctor. I’m so sorry. This is quite a bad line isn’t it? Just for the record, could you tell me something about his background? This is his first publication, isn’t it?’

  ‘Do you mind if I get back to you on that? I’ll just need to go through our publicity files.’