She didn’t ask him about the retreat, and he didn’t volunteer any information. The next morning he was only just getting out of bed, groggy from his late night and long travelling, as she was taking Evelyn to school. They didn’t see each other till the evening. Over dinner she couldn’t hold back, it would have seemed odd not to have asked anything, so she asked how it went at the retreat.
‘It was useful,’ he replied.
‘Oh good.’
‘Very useful. Funny. And interesting.’
‘Funny in what way?’
‘Oh, you know. Christians are funny . . .’ He couldn’t explain.
‘So you got a lot of material?’
‘Yes. The dynamics are very interesting. You start to see the underlying structures. Who has the real power. I found out a lot more about how the church is organized. The politics behind it all. The money.’
‘Do they have a lot of money?’
‘There’s quite a lot of money about, yes. Or there certainly seems to be. They have some wealthy donors. They have a sister church in Rwanda. Out in the bush. They are working on building a new, bigger one on the site of the old one, with a school and a sort of seminary attached.’
‘That’s interesting.’
‘Vera and her family go out there every year for a few weeks, to help.’
‘Do they?’
‘They suggested, just as a joke I think, that we should go out there with them, or any time we like.’
‘A joke?’
‘Well, I don’t think they were entirely serious, but they did say it would be a very cheap holiday, we would only have to pay the air fares, everything else would be free, and actually I could get the university to pay mine, if I make a claim for research funding.’
‘So you’ve given it some thought, then . . .’ Again the feeling of fury that rose in Polly’s chest, that she had to hold back, almost as if she was having an attack of reflux acidity, this burning sensation deep inside her. Had he heard nothing that she had said about this retreat being his last thing to do with research? She tried to speak calmly. ‘What would we do out there, exactly?’
‘Well, strictly speaking, we would be there as volunteers helping with the building of the church, but that could be anything really – just helping with the running of things, most of the time we could be just holidaying . . .’
‘Are you suggesting that for our holiday we should go and build a church in Africa?’
‘Wouldn’t you like to go to Africa?’
‘Yes, but not to build a church. Isn’t that something practising Christians do?’
‘Daddy,’ said Evelyn, who had been following the conversation closely, ‘I’m not going to Africa with Irina.’
‘We wouldn’t even have to go at the same time as Vera’s family, we could just go on our own.’
‘Daddy,’ said Evelyn again, in an accusatory tone of voice this time, ‘do you actually believe in God?’
In the flow of conversation Arnold was able to pass over this question.
‘It’s dangerous,’ said Polly, speaking against her own instinctive understanding that Rwanda was now a safe country to visit, she wanted to use whatever weapon she had to throw against this idea of going to Africa on a mission, ‘it’s not a place to take young children.’
‘Well like I said, it was just a jokey suggestion that Vera made, she didn’t really think you would want to go . . .’
‘Oh really? Why not?’
‘She knows you’re not religious.’
‘That’s something you talk about, is it? My religious beliefs, or lack of them?’
‘We don’t need to, you make it obvious.’
She waited with increasing anxiety for Sunday, without saying anything more on the subject. The night before, she could hardly sleep, and would wake every hour, almost on the hour, all through until dawn, when she gave up any attempt to sleep again. And her heart sank when she heard Arnold begin to stir at 8 a.m., and then rise a few moments later.
‘What are you doing?’ she said quietly as he headed for the shower. Her voice froze him, he seemed to think she had been deeply asleep.
‘I’m going to have a shower.’
‘And then what?’
‘What I normally do. Go to church.’
‘But we agreed, after you went to that retreat, there would be no more. You would be finished with your research.’
‘Did we?’
‘Yes, don’t you remember?’
‘I remember you saying that, I don’t remember agreeing.’
‘Well I’m telling you now, you’re not going to church.’
He seemed rooted to the floor, unable to move forwards or backwards.
‘What’s your reason?’
Polly sat upright. ‘The reason is that I did not marry a Christian, and if you go to church today you are proving to me that you are one.’
‘Are you saying people are not allowed to change their beliefs, over the entire course of their life?’
‘This sounds like you are telling me that you have become a Christian.’
He made no move to deny it.
‘Have you?’ she said.
He stood for a moment looking at her, motionless. She guessed he was trying to judge if this was the right moment to answer honestly. And she felt sick when he gave her that answer, in the form of a small, frightened nod.
‘Say it,’ she said. ‘So that there’s no misunderstanding. Say it loud and clear, that you believe in God.’
Again he took the moment to judge if the time was right.
‘I believe in our Lord Jesus Christ.’
It wasn’t just the words, but the voice. The flat seriousness of it. The absence of irony. He tried to reassure her that it made no difference to them, that he wasn’t going to think of her differently, or even their lives. He wasn’t going to start imposing strange rules on how they behaved. She asked him if he was going to start saying grace before meals and he said that if he did he would do it silently, to himself. Her feelings of fury subsided and his reassurances had worked in part by giving her a sense of relief that at least he had decided to be honest with her and tell her the truth and she had asked him how long he had been a believer and he said vague things like it had been stirring in him for a while, he had been harbouring thoughts about a spiritual dimension to life, and that no, he didn’t believe in the literal truth of the Bible or the miracles or even the resurrection though he was still finding his way through the tenets of the faith. Attending a church meant agreeing to certain basic principles of faith, but that didn’t mean you had to believe them, belief could still be a personal thing. It was too long to go into it there and then, he needed to get ready to go to church, they could talk about it later. But Polly didn’t want to talk about it later, not with him. The problem was, she still didn’t believe him, when he said it didn’t matter, that he was the same person, that he didn’t believe in the literal truth of the scriptures. He might say that now, but his faith was probably growing, he had entered a path and he didn’t know himself where it might lead.
And the worst thing was, he had lessened in her eyes. He had become someone weaker and slighter than she had previously known. She had always admired his cleverness before, but she had always wondered about its strength. How susceptible was he, after all, to persuasion, to propaganda? Was it strong enough to resist succumbing to something that he might encounter first as a detached observer? Evidently not. She hated to think it, but the truth was she now regarded Arnold as a little bit weak and a little bit stupid.
And his faith was a stranger in the household. An uninvited guest. An admonishing angel present everywhere.
She kept thinking of her sister-in-law’s words – that she had lost a husband to religion. She almost wished he had had an affair instead. At least then she would know what she was dealing with, she would comprehend the situation. She could do battle with a scarlet woman, throw her cheating husband out on his ear, be confident that she was in the rig
ht and he was in the wrong. But in giving himself to God, Arnold had done nothing bad. The opposite, in fact. He was behaving like a good man. Like a paragon of goodness. And he wanted to go to Africa and build a church for the poor Africans, when he was someone who she had never seen put so much as a penny in a charity tin before, who avoided beggars on the street as though they were carriers of the plague. Now he would be washing their feet. So what should she do? She couldn’t throw him out of the house for being religious. There seemed no help available. The advice columns were full of salacious letters about women whose husbands had turned out to be gay, or transvestites. There was no shortage of husbands who, as soon as they were married, turned themselves into women. But there seemed nothing she could read anywhere about the husbands who run off to join a church, or who are overtaken by a sudden urge to build a seminary in the African bush.
Now, at home, she observed him carefully, trying to understand him, what he had become. He had changed remarkably. The initial smallness she had seen in him on the morning of his confession was now replaced by a sort of nimbleness, a sprightliness. He would spring up from the table after dinner and take the plates to the kitchen. He would talk with Evelyn just as he had before, but in a more relaxed and cheerful way. He was still funny, but it was a different kind of funny. A less prickly form of humour seemed to have emerged in him. He reminded her of those magazine articles she had seen around the house when she was little, that talked about humour as medicine, a tonic. He was all good clean fun now. Or was she just thinking that because of what she knew about him?
Before meals she watched for signs that he was saying grace. It was impossible to be sure, but there were quiet moments as the food was being served when he didn’t say anything, and he could have been praying, or he could have been just keeping quiet.
Evelyn, she could see, saw nothing changed in her father. And so she wondered if this was how it would continue, with the slightly more cheerful, positive, energetic Arnold, from now and for ever, and if she could accept it. Her aversion to religion was deep and visceral, almost organic. She hated the touch and feel of it, the smell of incense, the dreary groaning of hymns. She hated the smell of religion. But although she tried to find it on Arnold, she had to admit, he did not carry that smell with him, not really. In fact, he smelt sweeter and fresher than he had ever done.
These were the thoughts that filled her mind every morning at the shop now, when she was in the back with the pulp tanks, lifting the poor, soaking pages out of the water. Rescuing them, perhaps. Giving life back to the broken-down sheets, lifting them out of the water as if they were drowned kittens. To be making something was good. To be making anything.
Two people came into the shop one morning, a few days after Arnold’s confession. She could glimpse them from her bench in the workshop, through the doorway. She had never seen them before. They were a late-middle-aged couple who looked oddly paired. Her first impression was of a Native American princess married to a railway ticket inspector. She had long black hair that hung in crimped, paranoid curtains either side of her face. Heavy, dark brows, her eyes almost hidden in shadow. Her mouth was a lipless slit turned down at the ends. A square jaw. She seemed beautiful against the odds. The man was small and apologetic-looking, with small, baggy, slightly bad-tempered eyes. His hair was tatty and balding. He wore sexless greys and browns in contrast to his partner’s moody purples and greens.
She took no more notice of them until Tamsin poked her head around the door and said that there were some people asking to see her, by name. She came out of the workshop and found the pair, standing closely and expectantly together by the counter. The man spoke first.
‘Are you Mrs Proctor?’
He spoke awkwardly, not knowing where to put his words.
‘I am. Can I help you?’
‘Do you publish poems?’
‘Yes, we run a small press here, we publish booklets of poems, and other things, sometimes.’ Polly said this while trying to wipe glue off her fingers with a rag.
‘We believe you know my son,’ said the woman, ‘our son. You might know him as Martin Guerre. His real name is Ryan.’
‘He told us he sent you some of his poems. He said you had promised to publish them. And now you haven’t and are refusing to return them.’
‘He thinks you might be trying to publish them under someone else’s name – your husband’s, he says.’
‘He says your husband hasn’t been able to write a new book of poems, and so he is going to publish our son’s work under his own name.’
The couple delivered these statements as though they had memorized them. There was no anger in their voices, but rather a sense of genuine puzzlement and wonder. Polly was affected by the gentleness of their tones.
‘That’s quite an accusation to make,’ she said, equally puzzled. She remembered seeing the manuscript of Martin’s poems when she had delved into Arnold’s study, but that was weeks ago. What had become of them since?
‘We understand that, and we didn’t think it likely. But we trust our son and we always take the trouble to believe him when he says unlikely things.’
‘I don’t really know anything about poetry,’ the man said, ‘my wife knows more than me, but I tend to have old-fashioned ideas about poems. So I can’t really tell if Ryan’s writing is very good or not.’
‘Well, it is good, I assure you.’
The couple seemed comforted by this, and smiled, but didn’t ask her to elaborate on this simple evaluation.
‘I like Elizabeth Barrett Browning,’ said the woman, ‘and Emily Dickinson. But no one else. I don’t know why. When Ryan hurt himself, I found myself reading them both, one after the other. It made me feel better.’
The horrible piece of information, tucked away inside the woman’s voice, snagged on Polly’s mind like a thorn.
‘Is Martin – Ryan all right?’
The man nodded, closing his eyes in a tired way again.
‘He did something silly last week. It’s not the first time. It was quite bad. He’s in hospital at the moment, but he’s doing well.’
Polly put her hand over her mouth. By now she had walked Martin’s parents through to the privacy of the workshop.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, feeling that dragging sensation she experienced whenever confronted with a stranger’s misfortune, born of a fear that anything she said might be misconstrued or lack sufficient sympathy. Oddly it was Vera who sprang to her mind as a role model of sympathetic listening. It was the way her face registered exactly what she was thinking, the way the brow would furrow with concern, the eyes intensify. Polly could feel herself willing her own brow to furrow, and hoping Martin’s parents would recognize her concern.
But her statement seemed to have absolutely no effect on the couple. They continued as though she hadn’t spoken.
‘Do you have Ryan’s poems here? We could take them back to him. He wants to see them again.’
Having successfully stifled the urge to weep, Polly was able to talk coherently.
‘I didn’t think we had reached a decision on Martin’s poems. Sorry – Ryan’s poems. If he is still interested in having them published, I think we could make a decision very soon. This week, in fact – I can promise you.’
The couple looked at each other. They were a little taken aback, having neither sought nor expected such an offer. They didn’t say anything, but looked at Polly suspiciously. To break the silence, Polly indicated the shelf where Papyrus’s published works were displayed.
‘These are some of the books we have published,’ she said. Being mostly thin volumes Papyrus’s output didn’t take up a lot of shelf space when only one copy of each was displayed. In all they had produced just over twenty poetry pamphlets. ‘We make the paper ourselves.’
Martin Guerre’s parents looked impressed. Polly was proud of the Papyrus Press, more so than she realized, until that moment.
‘You make the paper by hand?’ the woman asked. ‘A pa
ge at a time? That must take for ever.’
‘No, I make large sheets of paper that can take eight pages of print, then they’re cut up and folded to make the book. You only need to do two sheets for a pamphlet of sixteen pages. We have done some larger ones of twenty-four pages.’
‘But even so, it must take a long time.’
Polly wasn’t sure how to take this woman’s insistence that large amounts of time were involved. Later she supposed it meant that she valued time more than anything else.
‘We only do limited runs, sometimes only fifty copies. So I have to make a hundred sheets. It takes a while, yes.’
‘It makes it quite special I suppose,’ the man said, in his sad, slightly croaky voice, ‘when you’ve made the paper yourself.’
‘That’s the idea,’ said Polly. ‘And I usually try and do something with the paper that responds to the poems in some way. For instance this book here has several poems about the sea. And so I added seaweed to the paper pulp. You can see it’s given the paper a slightly yellowy, greeny tint. But also a rather evocative smell, if you hold it to your nose . . .’
‘I can smell the sea!’ the woman said, after engulfing herself in the pamphlet. ‘That’s quite wonderful.’ She held it out to her husband, who didn’t look impressed. ‘My sense of smell isn’t what it was,’ he said, sniffing deeply at the words.
Polly, delighted, continued her tour of their publications. ‘This other book has rather a lot of references to blood in it . . .’ She saw the looks of mild horror in the faces of the couple as they wondered what she might say next, ‘and my husband seriously suggested I mix blood in with the pulp. Human blood. I drew the line at that. I used stewed rosehips instead. Unfortunately they turned out to be a bit yellowy as well. But never mind.’
The Paper Lovers Page 21
