By this process a second pile accumulated in Arnold’s study at home, because it took him longer than a fortnight to find the time to read the manuscripts with enough close attention to be able to make a decision about them. The pile in Arnold’s office could sometimes grow so tall it had to be divided into two piles, and sometimes his heart sank when he finally got round to reading a manuscript and found that the covering letter was dated six months ago. That was when the follow-up letters would arrive, via Polly’s shop, politely enquiring after the whereabouts of the poems. One paranoid writer had insisted that the Papyrus Press existed solely to provide a free supply of paper pulp for the workshop, which Arnold had actually considered as a viable option for manuscripts that arrived without return postage.
So it shouldn’t have been unexpected that Martin Guerre would visit the shop in pursuit of his poems, though Arnold was a little put out that he should be so impatient, thinking that his offer to look at them at all should have been enough to quieten the boy for at least a few months. But he was already reapplying the pressure, the insistence on being seen and understood. So that evening after eating with his family, playing his usual role of tired adversary in his daughter’s arguments and games, he went to his study and opened the envelope that was from Martin Guerre.
It was a big thick padded envelope that when opened revealed not a manuscript but a shallow box of marbled cardboard with a deep purple ribbon around it. This was precisely the kind of presentational preciousness that would normally have Arnold rejecting a manuscript out of hand. But this was Martin Guerre’s manuscript. He had more or less committed himself to publishing whatever rubbish it contained. There was a letter on top of the box.
Dear Arnold Proctor,
I am enclosing some poems that you haven’t seen before, that I have been writing. I feel these poems express my true feelings, and I have the courage to show them to you now, after your encouraging talk. As you will see, the poems in this collection tell a story. I would like you to consider them for publication with the Papyrus Press.
Yours sincerely
Martin Guerre.
P.S. I have been re-reading your collection ‘Macroscopia’. It is truly a major work of genius, and has been very inspiring for me.
He pulled the bow and lifted the lid of the box. There was tissue paper within, and in the centre of the creased layer, a half-open rosebud, bright pink fading to brown, and very dead-looking. Arnold lifted it off as if it was an old fishbone. Then opening the layers of tissue paper, he came to the manuscript itself. On the cover was a drawing in pen and ink, of a lonely, bearded figure, wispy and awkward, holding in his hand a heart, coloured red, matching in shape the red hole in his chest. There were no words on this cover page, no title, no author name. On the next page, hand lettered in the same washy ink, the title page
The Paper Lovers
By
Martin Guerre
Martin Guerre’s short manuscript told the story of the unrequited love of a young man for an older woman. In most of the poems these characters were described as if they were made of paper. It became quite clear to Arnold that these two characters represented Martin Guerre himself, and Polly, Arnold’s wife. She was described in great physical detail – her paper glasses, her paper hair, her paper lips. It was well observed. One poem seemed to describe lovemaking between the paper figures – ‘I take your paper breast, it crumples in my hand . . .’
In nearly every poem the Martin figure suffered some sort of torture appropriate to his material – he was torn, burned, creased, crumpled and, at the end, snipped to shreds with scissors. The Polly figure, his paper lover, remained intact and pure. It was not clear whether she wielded the scissors, but she was the cause of his suffering. The scene that troubled Arnold the most, however, was one of explicit lovemaking that described in detail the paper topography of the female body, in ways that were quite startling. Arnold felt something stir in him. Anger and effrontery, he thought, though perhaps a strange form of arousal as well. To have his wife’s beauty described by another man made the beauty live again in his mind. It was as though by verification it had been made more vivid and intense. At the same time – who the hell did he think he was? It wasn’t as though he was a harmlessly charming young teenager. Martin Guerre was a fully grown man staking a claim on another man’s wife. That had been the thing all along. He was infatuated with Polly. In love with her, in whatever stupid and shapeless form of love the boy dealt.
He said quietly to himself, ‘You little devil.’
The poetry itself had some good qualities. If published it could hold its own against some of the other pamphlets they’d published. The phrasing could be awkward, but the imagery was startlingly original. And there was an undeniable emotional power to the collection. Arnold admired it, yet could hardly bear to read it. The poems by turn evoked feelings of revulsion and awe, fascination and hatred. The boy’s poetry described a desire he was not entitled to. Arnold could see the irony and the justice that was being meted out to him. Yet he could not publish this stuff, and have himself and Polly ridiculed. What would people think of them, editing such a volume, allowing it to be printed under the name of their press? Anyone who knew them would recognize Polly the Paper-maker in Martin’s poems.
Arnold realized he would have to show the poems to Polly straight away. After Evelyn had gone to bed he presented them to her, just as she’d settled down on the couch in front of the TV. She groaned.
‘Do I have to?’
‘I think you should, they are all about you.’
She sat up on the couch, a look of amusement on her face. ‘Well in that case . . .’
‘I don’t think he’s a psycho or anything but I think you should know what his feelings and intentions might be . . .’
Polly read them with far more speed than Arnold had, and he wondered if she could really have taken them in.
‘Oh, Arnold. These are harmless. They are quite fun, but harmless.’
‘You think so? You think it’s fun when he describes the structure of your clitoris?’
‘Well, first of all you are making the obvious mistake of identifying the characters in these poems with real people. Why should these paper figures be anything other than fictional characters? He is describing the clitoris of a woman made of paper. I am made of flesh and blood.’
‘That is not how the boy’s mind works. He is a truth-teller. That’s his thing. He writes about his true feelings, that’s what he’s always talking about.’
‘And the other mistake you are making is assuming his infatuation is with the woman in these poems. Any idiot could see it is not the woman he is in love with.’
‘What is it then?’
‘It’s paper.’
Arnold pondered her observation. She elaborated, ‘He has fetishized it. He must be the only writer I can think of who finds origami erotic. Oh God, my shop, for him, must be like a sex shop, a sleazy emporium of rubber gear, or something. No wonder he kept coming back.’
‘I must admit I find that poem about lovemaking as a form of paper-folding very original. Nevertheless, it’s you he’s folding and unfolding. There’s no doubt about it.’
‘Oh I don’t know. If he was a different type of person I might be worried – but he’s Martin Guerre. He’s harmless, like his poems.’
‘Are you sure? You seemed worried about him once.’
‘That was when he was stopping people coming into my shop. And anyway, if you want to worry about someone, it should be him. These poems seem to enact a kind of death wish.’
‘You mean the scissors, at the end?’
‘Yes. If you want to take things literally, these poems enact Martin Guerre’s suicide.’
‘Perhaps I should talk to him.’
They were silent for a moment. Then Polly said, ‘Do you know you sounded quite cross when you came downstairs?’
‘Did I?’
‘Yes. You had a sort of accusatory tone in your voice. Almost as if
you were blaming me.’
‘I don’t think so, you’re imagining it.’
‘You’re not jealous, are you? Jealous of the little thin-as-a-cornstalk poet?’ She nuzzled him teasingly, pushing her face into his neck.
10
They were walking along the harbour front in their chosen fishing town when, without any warning, Vera asked Arnold about his past. Her interest in him was so unexpected and sudden he wondered if she had suffered some sort of mental collapse. She had asked him about his parents, and he told her they had both died when he was in his twenties.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
‘There’s no need to be. They were old when they had me, so I always knew they would die while I was still young.’
‘What did they do?’
‘My father was a bookseller. He had a shop in Highgate. My mother was a musician and music teacher.’
‘What did she play?’
‘The flute.’
A seagull landed on the harbour wall, just in front of them. It touched down with the same lack of gravity as a puppet on strings. They were startled by its size, its brilliant whiteness, and by the stern, frowning face. A breeze lifted some of its feathers. As though realizing it had landed too close to the human couple, it took off again almost immediately.
‘The only time I ever have any thoughts about life after death is when things like that happen.’
‘Things like what?’
‘That seagull. It was my mother.’
‘So you are a heathen after all.’
‘Any animal out of place, that strays into the exclusively human realm, I think it’s her. An owl trapped in a church nave, once. A dog who sat by the lamp post across the road and watched our house all night. That’s the nearest I get to seeing the dead.’
Vera, who had her arm through his, pulled herself close to him.
They were wandering towards the fish market, walking without any strong sense of purpose; no one did in the fishing town, apart from the fishermen sometimes. The fish market occupied one side of the harbour in a series of large open barn-like structures of black corrugated steel. The market itself had finished much earlier in the day, but the fishmongers were still there, behind their long, chilled displays of crushed ice.
‘When the first cosmonauts went into space, my mother said they saw angels out of their windows. She believed the Communist Party suppressed the reports.’
They were in the market now, walking the salty floors of cement, looking at the stacked plastic crates where unsold fish were beginning to rot. Men in gory aprons and galoshes were sweeping heads and tails into bins, others were hosing down the stainless-steel tables. Arnold and Vera wandered among the displays where, on long counters of snow, the whole or splayed bodies of fish were on show. There were crabs and lobsters, monstrous and red. Dogfish as doey-eyed as puppies.
‘Do you like fish?’ Arnold said, eyeing the displays with slight revulsion.
‘Do you mean to eat, or to look at?’
‘To think about.’
The question caused Vera to ponder deeply. She looked at the fish.
‘I don’t know about them. They seem to come from another world, when you see them like this.’
It was as though they were in a museum of the fish. People ambled around with no apparent intent to buy anything, and instead gawped at tanks of live eels, or watched the gutting of bream and bass. Arnold and Vera felt a greater freedom to talk than usual. With no prompting, Vera began talking about her family.
‘My father had a terrible argument with his own father – my grandfather. He had been an active member of the League of Militant Godless. Have you heard of them? They were a group dedicated to destroying religious faith in the Soviet Union. They tried to do this by confronting religious believers with irrefutable scientific truths. Of course I wasn’t even born when this was happening, but my mother told me stories that she heard from her own mother, about how they would conduct parades through her village, at Easter and Christmas, the holiest times, and they would carry effigies of Jesus or the Virgin Mary dressed in clown costumes, along with pagan images and Egyptian gods, to show that they were no better, that Mary was just Isis in another form. Or even worse, they dug up the bodies of local patron saints to show that they were decomposing, just like the bodies of ordinary mortals . . .’
Arnold was not listening very carefully to what Vera was saying, because he had just been knocked almost senseless by the thought that he had spotted someone he knew among the crowds in the fish market. He grabbed Vera and started steering her away. The person he had seen was not in the fish market itself, but on the quay outside, standing close to the edge and peering down into the waters; a black-clad figure, tall and thin with loose curly hair. Arnold had never seen Martin Guerre in anything other than a paper suit, but still he felt convinced the figure was him.
‘What’s wrong,’ said Vera, ‘why are you pushing me?’
‘I’ve seen someone I know.’
He felt Vera stiffen as he said the words.
‘Where?’
‘By the quayside. If he turns round, he’ll see us. Don’t look, in case he does.’
‘Do I know him?’
‘No.’
By now Arnold had steered Vera to the back of the market, deep within the structure, and far enough away from the figure that was still gazing into the water. The problem now was that they were trapped, if Martin Guerre should turn around and enter the market. There was no telling which direction he might head, once he had finished contemplating the water.
‘Who is it?’ said Vera, turning now so that she could see the figure.
‘Just a student.’
‘Are you sure it’s him? You can tell from behind?’
‘No, I’m not sure. But I’ve a strong feeling. Why is he standing there? Why doesn’t he go?’
‘The best thing would be to split up,’ said Vera. ‘If he hasn’t seen us together yet, and doesn’t know who I am, then I can walk away on my own and meet you at the hotel later.’
‘Yes, I hadn’t thought of that. What is he doing?’
The figure had taken his coat off and had just dropped it on the ground behind him. He then climbed onto one of the stone bollards that lined the quayside.
‘He’s going to jump in,’ said Arnold, suddenly panicked, moving forwards through the holiday crowd, ‘he’s going to kill himself . . .’
He was hurrying now, suddenly, against all his own expectations, acting quickly.
It wasn’t just what Polly had said about the latent death wish evident in the poems, for the last few weeks Arnold hadn’t been able to get the boy out of his mind, and had become convinced that he was, in one way or another, going to cause him great trouble. He was going to – Arnold didn’t know – do something stupid, reckless, ridiculous. And since reading and rereading The Paper Lovers, he felt more than ever that there was something brewing with Martin, that he was a danger to himself. He could be thought of as that kind of person. He was pure and innocent and straightforward. He was the sort of person who might die for a principle. And the way he was poised on the bollard. Preparing himself for death, he had stretched out his arms like wings, as though he was going to take flight in just the way the seagull had, without even having to think about it. Arnold was running now, terrified that he wouldn’t reach the boy in time.
Afterwards he wondered how he could have been so deeply in the grip of the boy’s poems, that he accosted a complete stranger, a thin, attenuated practiser of tai chi, who had no intention of throwing himself into the deep waters of the harbour, but was merely exercising his living body. It was Arnold’s intervention that had put him in danger, throwing him off balance and sending him plummeting over the side. Not before he had turned and shown Arnold a most un-Martin-like face. It would only have been suicide for a non-swimmer with weights in his pockets. The tai-chi practiser disappeared with a ripping, pluming splash but bobbed up to the surface within seconds, spitting sea
water and shaking the salt from his eyes as he breast-stroked to the nearby ladder. And he had been so understanding. He was, in fact, a great advert for the tempering powers of tai chi, for he showed not the slightest ill will towards Arnold, but instead said he quite understood. He had understandably mistaken him for someone about to throw themselves to their death. Even as he stood there dripping, the man smiled, and shook hands with Arnold, patting him wetly on the shoulder.
The incident had drawn a small crowd, though to Arnold it seemed vast. From his previous position of anonymity within the town he was propelled to sudden celebrity. It felt as though the entire population was looking at him. He feared that Vera was too close, and they would be seen together as a couple. But she moved away quickly and was soon lost to his sight. They didn’t rendezvous at the hotel as planned, but went their separate ways to their separate homes.
11
From his position on the bed, Arnold could see the sewing machine. Was it identical to Polly’s? He had never looked closely enough to check. But this afternoon, as he lay in bed, the sunlight was coming in through the nearly closed curtains and falling on the machine so that it was half lit up. He devoted all his attention to it for a few minutes. It was as white and as clean as royal icing, its smooth body punctuated by circular handles and levers that had no obvious function. There were ungraduated dials, buttons with no labels. Sockets that would take a cable of some sort, but which were presently empty. There was a ventilation grille in the form of a starburst. It seemed for a moment to be designed as though for an initiated cabal who had no need of instruction. He saw it as someone from the distant future might see it, as a beautiful object for sunlight to fall upon, but nothing else.
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