It frustrated him on two counts – the first was that he would not see Vera until the next day at the earliest (and Polly might well take her again then, because it was her regular turn), and secondly, his absence from his regular school run the day after their intimate embrace might send a signal to Vera, that he had regretted what they had done. It might even make her think that he had confessed to Polly, and so she might be driven to make a confession as well. Perhaps she would do so anyway, perhaps her faith, her Church, her religion had got to her. So he had to wait, and began to dread what he might find when he got home. He waited the whole day, through one lecture and two tutorials and a tedious departmental meeting, and in the evening he tried to find out how things had gone in the morning. But there seemed nothing to worry about, Polly was preoccupied with other things.
‘It is very puzzling that the phrase “as slippery as a mango” has never become established in this or any other language. They are such slippery things.’ For the second time she nearly cut herself as the fruit spun on the chopping board.
‘So, how did things go this morning?’ said Arnold.
‘This morning?’
‘Yes, did you manage to drop Evelyn off OK?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘why shouldn’t I?’
‘No reason. Just wondering.’
Arnold felt desolate. He felt as though he had gone for months without seeing Vera, when it had only been a day. And the next morning he was dismayed to find that Polly was going to take Evelyn to school again, because it was her regular day for taking her. He was unable to raise much of a protest, and then it was the weekend. It would be Monday before he could see Vera again. He vainly hoped that there might be an opportunity to pick Evelyn up from Vera’s house on Saturday, but nothing had been arranged. So it was an empty weekend for him. And on Sunday they were due to make their monthly visit to Polly’s parents, who lived an hour’s drive away in the green belt south of London.
Polly’s father was a retired builder, and had been married to Polly’s mother for nearly fifty years. They liked to joke that they were bound together by cement. Arnold had once asked them if they thought they would ever need some repointing, and they had not laughed, nor even smiled. And they clearly thought that he and Polly were joined together by a less powerful mortar. They had, for more than a decade, politely declined to show any interest in Arnold.
They lived in a house that Polly’s father had built himself, that seemed to Arnold to be a construction of unparalleled ugliness, a parody, almost, of the English country house of the Cotswold type. The mellow limestone blocks were a synthetic concoction of moulded concrete, which seemed to blow a raspberry at the past, rather than honour it. Everything felt solid and heavy and far too clean.
Apart from Polly, no one he knew thought ill of the house, and if they were pushed for a comment would praise its square, spacious rooms. Mostly Polly’s parents lived in the enormous plastic conservatory at the back of the house, which looked out onto the sloping garden and countryside beyond. The house was perched on a high slope of the North Downs, a fact that only became apparent when you looked out of the back of the house. Polly’s father was always keen to point out what a good view they had of both the M25 and the M23, which could be seen threading their way through the Wealden landscape below.
It puzzled Arnold endlessly why the house which, to the man who built it, seemed like the perfect home, to him seemed like a machine designed to suck the life out of people. The lounge was devoted to the watching of television, where a vast sofa, turning a corner and filling two walls, seemed to mutate and spawn smaller sofas – footrests, armrests. The television was of the boxy, old-fashioned type – but was half-hidden in a walnut wardrobe with folding doors that could be closed (but never were) to hide the television completely. There were no books in the house but for a few that had been given as presents and which sat in a shelf specially built for them (Britain in the Seventies was one lavishly illustrated title). In the sideboard there was a drawer full of sweet treats, to which children could help themselves as much as they liked, luxuries Polly and her siblings were never allowed when they were young, she always lamented.
It was impossible for Arnold to imagine that his father-in-law had ever strayed. Why was that? He was not moralistic in any obvious way, wasn’t a churchgoer, or politically conscious, or culturally knowing, was the same age as Keith Richards, he smoked and drank, yet a strain of old-world puritanism had survived in him. The idea of marriage as a sacred social space, family as a cherished end in itself, prevailed in him in a way that it hadn’t for Arnold and the people he grew up with. But then Arnold identified with the post-sixties punk generation (that he had narrowly missed) that wanted to smash the system. If he regarded marriage as sacred now, he was surprised and amazed by the fact, as though he had stumbled on treasure by chance. It was not a deeply held belief. He tried to imagine the horror with which news of his affair, if it ever leaked out, and if it was ever to become something more substantial than it currently was, would be greeted by his father-in-law, and the rest of Polly’s family.
Polly’s two brothers were at the house. Occasionally it happened this way that the whole of Polly’s clan would be gathered for a Sunday, and yet it would have to be this weekend, the one in which Arnold was in thrall to a mistress, that they would have to be there, as if rallying round their sister in a crisis that had yet to erupt, as if to emblazon and embody the very notion of family. The two shaven-headed brothers, Mikey and Buzz (how uncomfortably those names, with their inbuilt and unwelcome familiarity, sat on Arnold’s tongue) had both married loud, meaty women who never tired of advising Arnold and Polly on every aspect of their lives. They seemed not to comprehend Arnold’s academic career at all and instead regarded the pair – a poet and a paper-maker – as people who had lost their way, or else were pursuing a hopeless dream. Poetry, they rightly recognized, didn’t make any money and paper – well, how could Polly hope to compete with the likes of WH Smith? The women had already produced a half dozen babies between them, and were building a solid, slab-like future for them. They made Polly and Arnold feel neglectful and self-indulgent.
The food served on these Sundays was stodgy, claggy, greasy. Polly’s mother didn’t pour off the fat when she made gravy, so it was pure grease and baked blood with brown food colouring that was poured over their heaped roasts. The meat was home-grown, as Polly’s parents had a smallholding that adjoined the garden where they kept some sheep and hens. As far as he could tell they only ate their own meat on Sundays like this, when guests were present, at other times they ate supermarket food like everyone else. Nevertheless they had an inexhaustible pride in their self-sufficiency, and would always invite Arnold and Polly to agree with them that their meat tasted ‘different’.
They often found themselves separated in the afternoons, when the household divided according to seemingly unconscious principles of segregation, with Mikey and Buzz holding court with their father in the conservatory, and the women confined to the lounge. Arnold felt he’d fallen for some sort of trick, to be left defenceless at the mercies of the brothers and their father, and be adrift in a stream of conversation about things of which he knew nothing. They talked about work they’d had done on their cars, each telling the other off for having not got the best deal on whatever it was they’d had done. Arnold knew it was pointless trying to join in this conversation because his own car – they had made it clear – did not entitle him to be taken seriously in any conversation about driving. Instead he nodded and observed, and then imagined that the conversation the men were having was not about driving, but about the shock revelation that he, Arnold, had been having an affair with one of Polly’s friends. Their father was disgusted by the news but resigned to it, as though he’d known all along that his poet-son-in-law was not to be trusted. He shook his head in a pitying yet slightly threatening way. Mikey and Buzz were sniggeringly disapproving, and also head-shaking, but more from surprise than pity. They, unlike
their father, would never have dreamed it of Arnold, and would have been secretly admiring and full of respect for his prowess, had he not been married to their sister.
The segregation was finally ended when one of the wives entered the conservatory. Holly, Mikey’s wife, followed her small daughter into the space and said, ‘All right chaps?’ addressing all the men as one. Arnold detected a moment’s hesitation before she used the term ‘chaps’, as though she had suddenly become aware of this separation of genders and was struck by its oddness. Her form of address had instantly normalized it, and also suggested it had all been a good and fun thing to do, to let the men and women get on with things among themselves.
By the time they got back home that evening, Arnold felt as though his body had been stuffed but his head eviscerated. He had to get Polly to drive, he was so without life that he couldn’t rely upon himself to care enough about things not to crash the car. At night he couldn’t sleep properly, he could feel his intestines struggling with the bulk they’d been fed, he could feel the dinner making painfully slow progress through the chicanes of his gut, but he couldn’t settle for other reasons. Tomorrow he would see Vera again.
It felt as if it had been in another life that they had embraced, had taken each other so ravenously, yet he had relived every moment as if on a continual loop of memory. He examined the event with the intensity of an art conservator going over an old master, looking at the detail, squinting his eyes at a hairline crack in the pigment. Arnold roved back and forth across his memories, as if to enhance their permanence, but also to make sure everything was there – and each time he went over them he did remember something, recovered a fragment of the experience he hadn’t had before – the sensation of her hot breath in his ear, the way her hair got in between his teeth, the dampness of the skin on her tummy, the vocalization she gave when he pinched her nipple with his lips. It had happened in another country, and he had no evidence of it ever having occurred, no photographs, no souvenirs, nothing he could look at to remind him.
Vera might behave as if it had never taken place. At the back of his mind this was what was keeping him awake, how to handle it in the playground tomorrow morning – what were the protocols? What were the right words to use? Nothing could be said directly, it would have to all be inference and suggestion, smiles and non-smiles, everything encoded, and he hated communicating in that way.
As he took Evelyn to school the next morning he felt a coldness inside him, a dread and fear. He was trembling. He had a sense of self-loathing that came from nowhere. He rounded the corner of the old red-brick building and into the playground where all the mothers and the few fathers waited. At first he thought she wasn’t there, because the usual spot in the playground where she stood with Irina was empty of her, and then to his horror he realized that she was in a different group of mothers – ones he didn’t know so well.
Worse, Evelyn did not make her usual beeline for Irina, and indeed seemed rather reluctant to head in her direction. Had there been a cooling off of their friendship? He could not now drag his daughter to this new group without making it seem as though he was tagging along after Vera, when the natural thing to do would be to stand with the mothers of the old group. He did this, while observing Vera, just a few yards away. It puzzled and worried him. The group she had joined was one of the groups he and Polly sometimes referred to as the locals. It was mainly comprised of mothers who were born and bred in the neighbourhood, many of them having gone to the school themselves as children, knowing each other from those times. They had stood on those precise spots in the playground as kids with their own mothers. They set people like Polly and himself apart as incomers, in a very subtle way that it had taken them several years to recognize.
Their husbands were skilled manual workers – builders and electricians – or else general managers of engineering workshops, or car showrooms, people he had nothing in common with, and who had a completely different world view. When he overheard their conversation it was always of material things – cars, the price of houses, the cost of living. Having spent the Sunday with Polly’s family, who were people of the same type, he could not bear the thought of more prattling conversation about nothing. But what was Vera doing there? She would not be interested in talking about those sorts of things, so why had she joined the group? Was it a deliberate manoeuvre to alienate him, to isolate him, to escape from him? He tried not to look concerned or bothered by Vera’s change of group. She might have done it, he realized, to avoid being with Polly. She was not to know that he was to deliver Evelyn this morning. She might have assumed he was not coming back, and that Polly was taking Evelyn to school every day from now on. She might have assumed that he was full of regret and didn’t want to see her again. But if so she could have given him some sort of signal. She could have met his eye, at least.
When the bell was finally rung and the children gathered themselves into lines and began the slow march into school, the mothers dispersed, being either the busy mothers who rushed off the moment their children were lined up, jangling a bunch of keys in their hands as they rushed to their car, or they were the lingering mothers, who went on chatting in the playground long after the children had gone into their classrooms. Vera was one of these latter, and she hung around in the playground with a few other mothers. This made it difficult for Arnold who, not being in a group, had no reason to linger. He moved as slowly as he could, pretending to be checking messages on his mobile phone, and eventually moved back through the gates, ahead of Vera who was still talking to the other mothers. He got to his car and waited there, observing the mothers from a distance. They dispersed at the gate and Vera began walking towards him, by chance he had parked his car on the route she normally took back home.
It seemed absurd, but he got out of the car as she approached, as if to ambush her. She couldn’t avoid looking furtive, glancing over her shoulder to see if anyone could see. What they were doing was terribly conspicuous to anyone with an eyeline – to talk like this surely looked odd. But it seemed safe to assume there was no one around.
‘Get back in the car,’ she said when she was near enough, ‘I’ll talk to you through the window.’
He still couldn’t read her face – her expression seemed neutral, there was no smile in it, but maybe she was just being cautious.
He did sit back in the car and wound the window down.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t been able to see you since last Wednesday,’ he said, looking up at her with what he imagined must have been sorrowful eyes.
‘I wondered what had happened to you.’
‘It was just bad timing.’
‘Never mind.’
‘Is everything OK?’
‘Yes, everything’s fine. I had a nice chat with Polly on Thursday.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It was fine. I felt so strange, talking to her. I was expecting you, but she turned up instead, so I was scared that she had found out. I wondered if she was acting normal, or being normal. Then I realized she didn’t know. Even with the fear, I wanted to tell her about what we’d done, but not as a confession, just as a shared experience. I have never felt so strange.’
‘I felt the same. I wanted to share the sense of joy I had.’
‘But you didn’t, of course.’
‘No, of course.’
‘I mustn’t keep you,’ she said, ‘we shouldn’t talk here for too long.’
‘Can we see each other again, do you think?’
‘We’ll have to arrange something.’ As if they were organizing a dinner party.
‘Soon?’
‘Yes, soon.’
‘Today?’
‘I don’t think so. But this week. It’s so difficult. There’s so little time when I don’t have the children.’ Arnold had forgotten that she had a younger son who was in nursery only part of the week.
‘Are you happy?’
‘I am now.’
He wanted to reach out and touch her, any p
art of her, it didn’t matter, just to hold her hand, her arm, to feel connected to her, but even that might be too risky, if they were seen.
‘Do you have a mobile phone?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me the number. I’ll text you.’
This caused lots of problems. They were both a little unfamiliar with mobile technology and neither Vera nor Arnold knew their numbers off by heart. Arnold’s number was somewhere on his phone but it took him a while to find it. He asked for her number so that he could phone her, so that his number would be in her phone’s memory, but she didn’t have her phone with her. When he told her his, she couldn’t remember the simple sequence of numbers and asked him to write it down. So he had to find something to write it down with, and on. Vera didn’t have a pen, or any paper. In the door pocket Arnold eventually found an old Bic biro, its central stem of ink nearly drained. And all he had to write on was the back of a car-park ticket. He wrote down the number, scratchily, and handed it to her.
‘It’s probably best if we don’t talk in the playground, from now on,’ she said, ‘we don’t want people to start thinking things.’ How burningly beautiful, how painfully thrilling that she had thought this far ahead. What commitment she was demonstrating. Planning and being careful. ‘I’ll text you later today. Goodbye.’
It was all in her hands, now. The future depended on her making communication. He feared there would be silence from her, but the texts started coming straight away, while he was still driving to work. She explained that she was only free during a narrow window in the early afternoon or morning, depending on when her youngest child was at nursery. The hours were 8.30 till 11.45 on Tuesdays, 1.15 till 2.45 on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Every other hour of her day was accounted for by parenting duties, these were the only slots when she was free. On his present timetable Arnold could only make the Wednesday slot. He asked her where they should meet. And she said, at her house. He asked her if she was sure that was a good idea. She said there was no time to go anywhere else, and where else could they go? Did he imagine they would book a hotel room? Drive out to a lonely spot on the Downs? But he was worried – what if someone saw me coming out of the house at that time? She said he should use the back entrance. There was a sort of mews-like alleyway at the back of the house, with a gate that led into her garden. It was normally locked, but she would leave it open. There were high walls, trees, no one would see him.
The Paper Lovers Page 6