The Paper Lovers

by Gerard Woodward

  ‘It’s a nice neck,’ he said. Too quick. Too sudden. He hadn’t thought about it. He had just said it. He said it in an encouraging tone of voice, as if in reply to a remark of self-deprecation, as though she had said ‘I’ve got an ugly neck’. No, it’s a nice neck. You should be proud of your neck. You should make a display of your neck, you should wrap it with jewellery, a choke of pearls, or black velvet. Actually no – such ornaments would look silly on Vera’s neck. She would look like something on a hoop-la stall. She would look like one of those tribal women who increase the length of their neck by the means of stacked rings.

  ‘I wasn’t fishing for a compliment,’ said Vera.

  ‘I know. I shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘It was nice of you to say it.’

  Evelyn and Irina marched across the playground, shaking their brass bell, and all the children began to move away from their parents and into the school building.

  It was as though she had said – ‘Here is my neck, you are free to adore it.’ He had wondered – did she really have a long neck? Was it longer than other people’s? Necks are all the same length. They consist of the same set of bones, the seven segments, C1–C7 of the cervical spine. Everyone has a neck of seven bones. Well, he supposed these bones could be bigger, thicker, taller in some people than others. All mammals, not just humans, have a neck of seven bones – dogs, gazelles, camels, even giraffes. Seven cervical vertebrae. Thoughts about Vera’s neck filled him. He had been given her neck, she had offered him her neck, to think about, and he thought about it, just as he thought about everything she said during that morning encounter, for the rest of the day, so that he could process it and analyse it for any clue as to her feelings towards him. He imagined planting kisses along that pale column, planting kisses all the way along – how many would it have taken. Seven? A kiss for each vertebra?

  When he got home he felt relieved and thankful to find that his family was as it always was – busy and messy and preoccupied. He imagined that he had harmed it merely by harbouring the thoughts he’d had about Vera, the thoughts that had been in his head all day since that morning encounter and the conversation about her neck. All day he wondered what he had done. It was a simple remark, but he had complimented her on an aspect of her physical appearance, he had told her that he appreciated a part of her body. And she had received the remark willingly. It was a nice thing to say, she had told him. She appreciated the remark, as though people didn’t appreciate her neck often enough. That she had a neglected neck. You should wear your hair up, he had said, venturing further than he thought he’d ever dare, yet somehow he felt it was all right to say this to Vera. But the cheek. Who was he to start saying how she should wear her hair? You should wear your hair up. Show it off, your neck. He had put playfulness into his tone of voice, which took energy, because the actual tone of voice he wanted to use was one of hushed, devoted seriousness. And she had smiled and responded to his playfulness – ‘No, too much work. And I need to protect it from the cold.’

  Now, at home, he could hardly believe the conversation had ever taken place. Not here, in his home with his daughter, in the lounge-diner and Polly busy in the kitchen. At times like these his house reminded him of a workshop in which people are hard at the task of creating themselves. His daughter had a pack of cards and was sitting on the floor, bent over them. As soon as he entered the room she claimed him, springing up and going over to the dining table, demanding he sit down opposite her. He felt compelled to obey, because at this time of day it was understood that he was under his daughter’s command.

  He thought at first that Evelyn had a deck of ordinary playing cards, and he was anticipating a game of pairs or snap, or beat your neighbours out of doors, one of those interminable games with few rules. But when he sat down he saw that they were not ordinary playing cards. They had plain symbols on them, in heavy black outlines – a square, a circle, a star . . . . He recognized them. They were mind-reading cards.

  ‘Where did you get these?’ But he vaguely remembered that they’d come in a box of magic tricks she had been given for Christmas a year or two ago, and never used until now.

  ‘I can read minds, Daddy,’ said Evelyn, in a cheerful voice.

  Without quite knowing where it came from, at first, Arnold experienced a cold sense of threat. He felt like someone walking the length of a causeway who suddenly finds they are cut off by the tide. Then he realized this sense of dread emanated from his own daughter.

  ‘Is that a good thing?’

  She ignored his question and handed him the cards. ‘Pick one,’ she said, ‘but don’t show me.’

  With dumb obedience he took the little pack, aware all the time that his wife was behind him in the kitchen, busy with important things. He picked a card. A set of wavy lines. They represented water, which made the sense of threat all the stronger.

  ‘You’re not thinking,’ said Evelyn.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Think harder.’

  He couldn’t help being reminded, by the wavy lines, of Vera’s hair, and for a moment felt afraid that Evelyn might say, ‘Irina’s mum. You’re thinking of Irina’s mum.’ But instead she said, ‘Water.’

  He had been prepared for playing a little joke on his daughter, and switching the cards to make it seem as though she’d given the right answer, and he was taken aback by the fact that he didn’t need to. In fact, he was momentarily horrified. He showed her the card, and she took the news of her success in her stride. Mind-reading, to this young girl, seemed nothing exceptional.

  ‘Let’s do it again,’ she said.

  Reluctantly he took another card. A star. Evelyn concentrated, a little frown appeared on her forehead, above her closed eyes.

  ‘You’re not thinking hard enough,’ she said.

  Arnold realized this was true, he had not thought about the star at all. When he did, staring and trying to make it big in his mind, Evelyn suddenly relaxed her face and said, ‘Star.’ He hardly had to show her the card, she seemed to know she was right.

  Polly appeared. ‘Are you still playing with those silly cards?’

  ‘She got it right twice in a row,’ said Arnold, disconcerted by his daughter’s apparent ability.

  ‘I told you I can read minds,’ said Evelyn, ‘I can read Mummy’s too.’

  ‘She got two out of three with me,’ said Polly, as if confidentially to her husband, half-smiling. ‘It would be a useful ability, if it worked with anything other than those cards.’

  Polly was setting the table at which they were seated. Arnold had a clear view of her as she made a space for the plates that were on her arm. He wondered when he had stopped observing her so closely, and realized it was only within the last few weeks. Up until then she had had all his attention, but in the short time since, he had almost forgotten what she looked like. He noticed her neck. It was a beautiful neck, but it was not Vera’s.

  Evelyn was urging him to pick another card, but Arnold declined as gracefully as he could. He knew it was a game that could only end in disappointment, after however many lucky guesses. And perhaps it was better to preserve the magical moment in which the child genuinely believed she could read his mind.

  Polly dropped a handful of cutlery onto the table with a sound like chains being severed.

  3

  It was a harder thing for Arnold to have an excuse to collect Evelyn from Vera’s house if his daughter went there after school. Polly always fetched her because she was usually back from the shop before Arnold was home from work. There were only two days of the week when Arnold was home earlier, and these only rarely coincided with the days that Evelyn went to Vera’s house. Nevertheless he prepared himself for the occasion when it did happen, that he could leap in and offer to collect Evelyn from Vera’s. He didn’t feel it was something he could just volunteer to do, he had to have a good reason. And so when the time came he picked his moment carefully and said he had to go out and buy a new ink cartridge. That was the kind of moder
n emergency that fitted the situation perfectly, one that every poet and academic knows – the empty ink cartridge and the dissertation to print out by tomorrow. They sold his cartridges at a place on the main road that didn’t close till 6.30. ‘I’ll pick Evelyn up on the way back, if you like.’

  ‘OK,’ said Polly, mildly surprised, ‘if you don’t mind.’

  ‘No, I don’t mind.’

  And he drove straight to Vera’s house.

  He had only been there once or twice before, and hadn’t taken much notice of it then, but now he studied it in every detail. He took in the frontage, rather similar to his own house, Victorian red brick, stained glass in the front-door window, tasteful curls of art nouveau in the side panels. The glass in the windows was dimpled and crisp. There were net curtains, which Arnold thought rather odd. His generation had done away with net curtains, so he had assumed. But here were net curtains, greyly opaque, such as his grandmother used to have in her windows, from which she observed the world as though from inside a muslin bag.

  There was a short front garden that had been pounded into submission by the pouring on of pebbles. In a wooden tub an olive tree was trying to grow. A garishly yellow and orange plastic tricycle sat crookedly on the pebbles. Unmistakably a family house, even without the tricycle – there was an aura of the siege, of a household under the constant bombardment of its children’s demands.

  He pressed the bell, which worked. Vera answered the door and didn’t immediately register his presence, saying hello without looking who she was speaking to, assuming him, he supposed, to be his wife. She did a kind of double-take, and her face immediately brightened, her eyes dilated and doubled their fullness. ‘Oh – hello, it’s you.’

  She couldn’t hide or deny her pleasure in seeing him.

  ‘Hello again. Can I come in?’

  ‘Of course,’ she stepped back from the door, and he passed her closely as she held it for him, almost as if she was expecting a kiss, the kiss of a husband home from work, the polite friendship kisses that had become commonplace now, and which provided Arnold with endless opportunities for awkwardness (to kiss or not to kiss, one cheek or two? Lip or no lip?). But he passed her without making physical contact, though he had to mention her hair – or should he? She had put it up. It was piled on the top of her head now, with some stray strands hanging down. The whole neck was revealed.

  Since their initial exchanges he felt he had gained permission to make slightly personal remarks about her appearance. He had made the suggestion about her hair several times, and she had always come back with some riposte, some reason for not wearing her hair that way.

  — Why don’t you ever wear your hair up?

  — Why – do you think it would cure my headaches?

  — It might do. But it seems strange, when you have grown your hair long, not to do things with it.

  — Oh, so you are saying I’m strange?

  — No, not at all. It’s just that your neck – you should show it off more.

  — Oh no, my neck is too long. People would laugh at me.

  They had talked about make-up. Vera never wore any because she had sensitive skin. She had never in her life worn mascara or eyeshadow. Not even when she was a teenager, when all her friends were obsessed by it. Arnold said that she didn’t need it.

  — I can’t imagine you with make-up. It would look wrong.

  — Another way of putting what you just said would be – it might make you look quite nice.

  — But you already look quite nice.

  — Angus is always trying to persuade me to wear make-up. He buys it for my birthday. He once bought this stuff for my eyelids. It was like a bottle of ink, with a paint brush. I said, what am I supposed to do with this? It looks like something to lacquer shoes with. He said I should paint it on my eyelids. And so I tried it, but it was ridiculous. Without my glasses I couldn’t see to put it on, so he tried doing it for me, but I couldn’t keep my eyelids still for long enough, and he didn’t have a steady enough hand, and the stuff kept dripping. When he’d done it I looked like a zombie. And then my eyes became inflamed and I couldn’t see for the rest of the day.

  These were the sort of things they sometimes talked about. He loved to hear her criticize her husband, which she would only do indirectly. She said he was frustrated in his job, because it was a nine-to-five job with an hour-and-a-half commute each way, which meant he felt he didn’t see enough of her or the children, and this sometimes made him sour and grumpy when he was at home.

  Half-past six was his time for returning home, though quite often he could be as late as seven. But he was never, ever, home before half-past six. Arnold had memorized this fact. It was half-past five when he arrived at the house to collect Evelyn. A whole hour before the nine-to-five man was due home from work.

  Arnold decided not to say anything about Vera’s hair, not immediately. She had not been expecting him to call, so she couldn’t have done it for his benefit. Nevertheless he was excited by the possibility that she had responded to his observations about her. He passed through the narrow hall with its tide of shoes and wellingtons and turned right into a rather dowdy lounge-diner. The last time he had seen this room it had been prepared for visitors, swept and dusted, with toys back in their boxes, DVDs back on their shelves. Now he saw it in its raw state, with its litter of childhood. The table still carried the trash from the children’s tea – smeared plates, spilt juice, flakes of food on the floor. The room had an air of defeat about it. He sensed the presence of a slightly more argumentative family than his own, of children who answered back, who had bedtime tantrums, who had the upper hand in the household’s power struggles. It became immediately apparent when Vera went to call the children, who were in the playroom at the back of the house watching a DVD. There were loud cries of protest. Arnold followed behind and saw a small group of children gathered on the carpet before the glow of a large, cumbersome television.

  ‘Daddy, it’s nearly finished, can we watch to the end?’

  He had almost forgotten Evelyn was in the room, and was startled for a moment to see her face down there among the other childish faces. He didn’t say anything but looked at Vera. There was nothing he wanted more than to stay. He wanted to stay for as long as he could, and hoped she was thinking the same.

  ‘It’s got about ten minutes to run,’ she said, ‘I could give you a tour of the house.’

  They left the children. Arnold took one last glance at them, making sure they were settled. There were four of them. Vera had two more children, one older, one younger than Irina. They all got on very well together. Everyone noticed it, commented on it, how well they got on. Evelyn was becoming like a new sibling for them. What struck him at that moment was how uninterested in him they seemed. Apart from Evelyn, none of them had acknowledged his presence at all, even though he was a rare visitor to the house. When he tried to remember his own childhood, the entrance of strangers into the house had always been a cause of excitement and fear, of awe – who were they, these visitors? What were they doing, why had they come? What did they know? What powers did they have? For these children nothing seemed remarkable. He was something slow and colourless by comparison to the more vivid reality of manufactured narrative that absorbed them now.

  Back in the lounge-diner, for the moment an adult domain, he and Vera inhabited what seemed a far more solid and logical world. He wanted to say something about the children, about how horrible it was that the television captured them so completely, but he was aware of how thankful he was for it, for the invisibility it conferred on them. And anyway he wanted them both to forget about the children as quickly as they could.

  ‘We’ve been wanting to decorate this room for ages, but I don’t see the point until the kids have grown up a bit. They’ll ruin it as soon as it’s done.’

  From there they went upstairs. The same scuffed quality to the walls of the stairwell, wallpaper torn aside as though someone had tried to turn it, like the page of a book. A
dent in the plaster. On the landing there was no decoration at all. Walls had been stripped in preparation for paper that was never hung, but scribbled on with pencils and crayons instead. Bare floorboards. A heap of dirty washing piled by the bathroom door.

  Vera led him through into a bedroom. The atmosphere in here was very different. The room had been decorated in dark blue, the bed was plump and neat. There was a sense of crowdedness of things, but of a careful order as well. Arnold noticed a row of ties hanging on the back of a chair. A desk was by the window with a big, out-of-date-looking computer on it. They suddenly seemed to be in a separate world from the children downstairs.

  ‘This is where we sleep,’ said Vera, with a slightly embarrassed hesitation in her voice, as if she was suddenly not sure why she had brought Arnold here. Arnold’s attention was drawn to another corner of the room, where a sewing machine sat, identical to the one he had first seen her working on, at his own house, the one that still occupied a corner of his lounge-diner. Alongside it was the older black and chrome one she had brought to a sewing evening. The lives of the husband and wife here seemed represented like two fighters in a boxing ring, occupying opposite corners. Was that a reflection of their relationship, Arnold wondered, poles apart, adversaries? But the sewing machines bothered him because they were also a reminder of Vera’s friendship with his wife. Their presence halted any thought he had that Vera had brought him in here so that they could make love, even though at that moment he had to use all his reasoning and willpower to hold himself back from reaching out and touching her. Nevertheless the privilege of being admitted to this sanctum, the place where the object of his fascination slept, albeit with the nine-to-five man, was intensely thrilling to him.

  Vera looked exquisite to him at that moment. She was wearing the simplest of clothes, jeans and a dark blue T-shirt with a neckline low enough to be revealing when she bent down. Tantalizing glimpses were given when she picked a stray toy off the floor, of smooth, deepening skin, white inner fabric. But then she was gone and he was following her back onto the landing. The house seemed to go up and up. There was another staircase, a short one that led to a mini-landing which opened onto another bathroom. This was ancient, with a copper boiler, and a white enamel bath on clawed feet. The silver taps were encrusted with white crystals. Yet there was an intense brightness about the room, a freshness despite the agedness of everything.