The Paper Lovers

by Gerard Woodward

  They visited other rooms, went up more stairs, finally they were in the attic, which was one of the children’s bedrooms, and here they made love.

  He reached out and put his hand against the side of her neck. He felt confident that his touch was desired and would not be rejected. She had brought him up here for no other reason than to be as far away from the children as they could be, to have the longest amount of warning if they were interrupted – all those staircases to clump up. He could see in her face that she was waiting for him to do something, the eye contact was prolonged and meaningful. She looked a little afraid, knowing that they had reached a boundary and were preparing to cross. She almost seemed to wish there were more stairs to climb, that her house went up and up for ever. But they had reached the top. They were crushed in beneath the low attic roof. And he reached out and touched her neck, placing his hand on the side of it, in a gesture that was reassuring, gently affirmative, encouraging, as if she had been a frightened child, or he was seeing her off on a train. And she held his gaze as his hand rested there. He could feel her pulse in the palm of his hand. And she lifted her hand and placed it on top of his, cementing the grip.

  He had always imagined that, if this moment were ever to occur, something would hold him back, some moral force – guilt, a sense of wrongness, fear for what he was putting at stake, and if not that, then Vera’s religious sense of right and wrong would prevail and prevent anything happening. But in reality, those forces proved to be as weak as a baby’s hand, and Arnold suddenly became aware that what he had been doing in all these weeks of chatting with Vera and complimenting her on her looks and talking about her neck, was laying the ground for precisely this to happen.

  They kissed, and he remembered how complicated the procedure seemed when performed with a near-stranger. He didn’t know her mouth and their teeth clashed. She put out her tongue at the wrong moment, so that it was left hanging in the air, before he went back and took it in his own mouth. There was no taste in her mouth other than the taste of her. She put a hand to his crotch. The sensation of being touched there by her knocked the air out of him. He was becoming so solid he had to wriggle slightly against the sudden ache, and had to free himself of his own arousal, in order to let it gain strength. Her hand against his jeans pinched lightly at the stiffened length as though gauging its thickness. His hand went to her abdomen and stirred the fabric at her waist, untucked her and went inside. The warmth of her skin was slightly cloying, she felt softer than he’d expected in one so slim, it seemed she had no skeleton, no edges. He pulled back from her and lifted the T-shirt higher, exposing her white bra. He suddenly became aware that he would do anything to have her breasts revealed to him. Their disclosure seemed, in that moment, like the greatest goal of his life; he would have done anything to guard and maintain the privilege that had, out of nowhere, come to him, of witnessing the moment. If a child had run into the room he couldn’t have stopped himself. He would have killed someone. He was that closed off from things. At the same time, he wanted to hold back that moment of disclosure for as long as he could, knowing it could never happen in quite the same way again. It was the moment, as much as the thing, that contained the beauty.

  His breath went away again when they were uncupped. He couldn’t help but utter, barely audibly, the single word, ‘Jesus’, because they seemed to him miraculously perfect. He was aware that she was making a mewling sound as he put his lips to her tightened nipple and sucked. Her mouth was at his ear, her tongue travelling along its grooves, voice filling it. His mouth tugged at her, extended her, she snapped back, there was a taste of something on his tongue. In his mind he pictured her neck, her long neck, her swan’s neck, her Alice in Wonderland neck coiling like a serpent, like a serpent, coiling down on him. She had found a way through his clothing and her fingers had lightly touched his cock, then slowly began to take a firmer hold. He wanted to cry like a baby. He felt helpless, as though his body had come undone and she was fastening it. He felt as though he was bleeding somewhere. Then he felt powerful, gigantic. He could have kicked a door down.

  And then they were finished. They had reached a point where they could go no further, not without risking everything. High up in the attic of the tall house they felt as though their children were trapped at the bottom of a well, but even so, they might come tumbling up the stairs at any moment on some spontaneous expedition. A form of sanity returned to the two adults and settled on them and they adjusted themselves, tucked themselves away, buttoned themselves up. Still breathless they hugged and kissed in a reaffirming way, at the top of the stairs. At the landing they kissed again, telling each other, by so doing, that they didn’t regret what they had done on the floor above. Only when they came towards the stairs and passed the open door of the master bedroom did they break off contact, became separate and distinct again. Arnold experienced a sense of exertion, as though he had been running, or climbing. He felt as though he had rescued Vera from a crumbling building. He felt as though she, in turn, had rescued him. He felt like they were survivors of some unimaginable disaster, that they had saved each other, and were returning to their old life as if reborn, ready for anything.

  The children amazed him by showing no sign that anything had happened; they were just as he’d left them, in the gaze of the television, even though their DVD had finished, and they were watching something else. It seemed impossible that what they had done upstairs had not wrought some change in the world beyond them, but everything was the same, nothing had been affected. Even Vera was back to the woman she’d always been on the ground floor of the house – sensible, polite, serious. But he could still see the flush on her skin, the fullness of her eyes, as though she’d been crying.

  As he took his daughter out of the front door which Vera held open for him she was all practical, polite primness. He looked at her carefully for any sign of regret, and she gave him a smile of intense warmth as he passed, a momentary glimpse of her upstairs face, that lasted barely a second, but which was enough to signal she had no regrets about what had happened.

  He held his daughter by the hand as he walked her to the car. The feel of her hand in his was terrible, for what his own hand had so recently been doing. He felt he was passing the essence of his wrongness from his hand to hers, that he had infected her with his own vileness, that she was permanently marked with it, yet he couldn’t avoid holding her hand, because he couldn’t reject normal contact with her either. And at the same time, the feeling of rebirth stayed with him. It was a feeling of exhilaration that was so strong he was shaking, and had trouble driving. When he spoke he had no idea what was going to come out of his mouth, and his daughter laughed at him, because he was talking nonsense. He was so exhilarated it was all he could do to prevent himself from telling his daughter what he had just done, he was overspilling with the joy of it, he wanted to share it, to relate it. At home, the same with Polly, he wanted to tell her what had just happened, not as a confession, but in order to let her know how he was feeling, to share the joy of the experience. But the sane part of him placed its restraints on his behaviour. He understood quite plainly how badly he had behaved with Vera, and he understood how that behaviour would be seen by others. But from that point on he felt as though there were two of him living parallel lives, the part of him that cared about and loved his family, and the part of him that loved Vera, and he was able to separate one from the other with an ease that surprised and worried him.

  The wrongness of what he had done seemed nourishing. And he wanted more of it. He wanted to do it again and again. He wanted to do nothing but that thing he had done with Vera. He could not stop thinking about her. Not even for a moment. It was as though she had written herself onto him.

  4

  It was during a holiday in Wales, when Evelyn was still a baby, that Polly discovered she had a talent for paper-making. On a guided tour of some slate caverns they had come across a little paper-making workshop near the exit and Polly had volunteered to have a
go herself after the paper-maker had given a demonstration. She had fallen instantly in love with the process and as soon as she was back home had started making it herself, filling the bath with paper pulp and the house with piles of scrap paper to use as raw material. She had become so quickly adept at the craft that it turned into a hobby, then an obsession. After doing some short courses in business management and accounting she decided to try and make a living from it. She was convinced there was a demand, in an age where paper was being used less and less, for a hand-made high-quality version of the product. Artisan stationery. Two years after Evelyn’s birth, and in partnership with a small group of friends, she opened a shop in a good location off the High Street in the tourist area of the city centre, near the cathedral. She called it, simply, Papyrus. Arnold objected to this name, saying that papyrus and paper were completely different things, but Polly insisted, because it was etymologically the root of the word paper and therefore, somehow, a purer form of it.

  She had never run a business before, but she seemed to discover a talent for that as well. She filled the shop, as much as she could, with her own paper, which she made in a workshop at the back – itself open to visitors. For the rest of the stock she relied mostly on high-quality paper bought from other small-scale, specialist paper-makers, alongside other stationery items – envelopes, pens, notebooks. She also sold original artwork and some other crafts made by her friends. Terri, one of her partners in the business and co-manager of the shop, made greetings cards and jewellery.

  Polly sometimes liked to claim, half-jokingly, that she had reinvented paper. Arnold had to agree that, as a writer, he had never thought about the surface upon which he wrote more deeply than when confronted with the beautiful leaves of paper that came from Papyrus’s pulp tanks. The shop and Polly’s hand-made paper seemed to remind a public that had forgotten how to look at it that paper had a texture, a thickness and an edge.

  Polly ran a programme of events at Papyrus as a way of raising the profile of the business and bringing potential customers into the shop. At first she organized paper-making courses, and then drawing and painting sessions in which home-made paper was used. It then seemed to her an obvious idea that the next step in promoting her paper would be to use it for the publishing of books, which could then be read to an audience at the shop. Since she would only ever be able to make small books in short print runs, poetry pamphlets seemed a good idea. With a modestly famous poet husband as editor, they might even be able to attract well-known poetry names to publish with them. Arnold was reluctant, at first, to take on the role of editor for the Papyrus Press, even though he could see it was a potentially good idea. Polly said that the paper would be individually made for each book, and would incorporate something that responded to the content of the book. So if a book contained references to a particular material, or colour, those things could be used in the making of the paper. And so the Papyrus Press published a small number of poetry pamphlets each year with Arnold as the general editor, Polly the designer and paper-maker. They were, so they believed, the only publishing press in the country that produced books using their own bespoke paper.

  Other than this joint venture, Arnold had little to do with Papyrus, and it was recognized as entirely Polly’s business, in which Arnold didn’t even have a share. She often said how it had kept her sane in the years after Evelyn’s birth, being something that could fit in with the raising of a child. Evelyn as a toddler could be kept quiet for hours when given a role in the paper-making process. The profits, after a slow start, were reasonable, and the future of Papyrus was looking good. Polly employed a small number of staff in both the sales area and the workshop. In the evening she would often be full of news about her day, which she imparted to her family during the evening meal. This evening, over a lamb tagine, she told them about a visitor they’d had.

  ‘Someone came into the shop today and told me I was wrecking the planet.’

  Arnold was having trouble with the tagine, it tasted hot to him, like a curry. Polly insisted there were no chillies in it. Yet his lips burned.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘Well, you are.’

  ‘He seemed to think I personally went out and cut down all the trees that go into our paper. And he wouldn’t stop going on about it. He kept saying we have to cut down on paper use. He said the computer was at last putting a stop to the need for paper. He said that the total world production of paper is starting to decrease for the first time in human history, and here was I, doing my bit to keep it going.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘I told him the truth, that nearly all the paper we sell is recycled, and the rest comes from sustainable forests.’

  ‘And what did he say to that?’

  ‘He said that it didn’t matter where it came from, the point is a tree has had to be cut down to make it. So I said what if the tree was planted for that purpose only, but he wasn’t listening to rational argument. He just thought paper was evil.’

  Arnold sighed. He was bothered, as Polly knew, by the current movement of physical culture into digital form. The death of the film camera and the long-playing record were losses he was still struggling to come to terms with. The threat to paper and, beyond it, the book itself, posed an unimaginable tragedy. He seriously wondered if he could live in a world where physical books had disappeared. ‘When we were young,’ he said, ‘we were enthralled by the possibilities of technology, but the last thing I would have expected of the future was that it should become a place where paper was thought of as wicked. But there do seem to be people about who regard paper as the embodiment of evil, as something that has to be wiped out.’

  ‘Are you wrecking the planet, Mummy?’ said Evelyn, who previously had not given any sign that she was following the conversation.

  ‘No, I’m not, darling.’

  ‘But Daddy said you are.’

  ‘Daddy was being funny, but I’m not wrecking the planet more than anyone else, and probably a lot less than most.’

  ‘Is Daddy wrecking the planet more than you?’

  ‘I should think so.’

  How beautiful that Polly should be so concerned with paper, with the history of paper, the future of paper. He felt rather proud that she was someone who could draw the ire of an environmental extremist. When they first met he’d never dreamed that she would be an entrepreneur, even of this softer, gentler type. He would never have thought that she would ever take up occupation of retail space on a busy shopping street, unless it was to protest against unethical trading. And now here she was, being protested against. She was exciting. He felt proud to be associated with her. And yet he still could not get out of his head the miracle that had happened earlier that evening, of having been locked in sudden, hot-breathed intimacy with another woman. More exciting by far, but was that simply because of the newness, and the wrongness of it? Polly could see nothing on him, there was no betraying mark, as she looked at him full in the face, stared at him as she related her story about the paper terrorist, about the plans he said he had for blowing up paper mills. ‘He spoke to me like I was an idiot. Tried to tell me about how paper is made. I own a paper shop and he thought I knew nothing about paper. White China clay. Quarries have to be opened up just to feed the paper mills. Chlorine, zinc, sulphur. Water wastage. He said he was organizing protests against all the big consumers of paper. Printers, news papers, book publishers. He said I was a legitimate target, because my work depended on virgin paper. I said rubbish, some of our paper is made from vegetable pulp. I tried reasoning with him, but he was mad, he wouldn’t listen to argument. I told him to fuck off and he laughed at me.’

  In some ways it was a typical, and typically charming Polly story. Odd people often came into her shop and did odd things – though he couldn’t remember anyone ever protesting about her shop before – and Polly told it so wonderfully, rounding it off with the expletive that made Evelyn blush and giggle.

  ‘I wonder if you should notify the police,’
Arnold said, ‘if he is talking about blowing things up.’

  Polly laughed at this.

  ‘He was the most unlikely terrorist you could imagine. I don’t think the shop is in any danger.’ And she concluded her remark by silently signalling to him that he shouldn’t talk like that within earshot of Evelyn, who seemed not to have picked up on what they were saying.

  ‘You were the one who started talking about bombs,’ said Arnold, loudly and indignantly.

  For no good reason Polly insisted on taking Evelyn to school the next day. It wasn’t her turn, but she could not be talked out of it. For the last few weeks they had alternated, but this morning Polly said she might as well go because she didn’t have to be at the shop till ten o’clock – Tamsin was opening up early.

  ‘Then you might as well take the opportunity for pottering around at home for an extra half-hour,’ said Arnold.

  ‘No, I’d like to take Evelyn in, I just feel like it.’ Arnold dared not push the point, in case he aroused suspicion, and he felt Polly was already on the verge of saying something like, Why are you so desperate to take her to school all of a sudden?

  It was almost as though she sensed something subconsciously, and Arnold wondered if there was some subliminal chemistry at work, that the same pheromonal tide that had drawn him to Vera in the first place was perhaps now signalling danger to Polly, that his body was giving off subtle evidence of their liaison, that he was marked after all. He could think of no other way of dissuading her, and so had no choice but to let her take Evelyn to school.