The Paper Lovers

by Gerard Woodward

  ‘Are you insane? Church? Why are you going to church?’

  In fact, her response was quite different. Silence, at first, as though she had not heard. She lifted her face from the paper she was reading, looked at him quizzically, noticed that he had a half-smile on his face, as if he was joking, realized he wasn’t, wrinkled her nose slightly and said, ‘What for?’ As if she already knew the last thing he could be going there for was to worship.

  And then he found the only answer he could give convincingly.

  ‘Research.’

  ‘Research?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you’re writing poems about church?’

  ‘A novel, actually.’

  ‘I thought you said you hated novels.’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘You said that novels weren’t real literature. That the form was dead, killed off by the corporatization of modern publishing, reduced to a mere commodity, subservient to the market. Those were your actual words. I’ve remembered them.’

  ‘Well, maybe I said that once, now it just so happens that I thought I’d try my hand at one.’

  ‘Have you actually started it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet. All I know is that one of the characters goes to church.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, why all the questions . . . ?’

  ‘I’m just interested.’

  ‘But you know how it is – if you try explaining too much too soon, the whole thing can slip out of your grasp . . .’

  ‘How would you know, you’ve never written a novel before?’

  ‘Perhaps I have, for all you know. Look – can we just leave it, I don’t want to go to church, but I need to find out what it’s like. I’ve never been, apart from weddings and funerals.’

  ‘Can’t you just ask Angus and Vera, ask them what they do in there?’

  ‘It’s not the same. And actually, I have asked them, and it’s not enough. I have to see it.’

  ‘So you’re leaving us? Leaving us alone on a Sunday morning so you can go to church? When will you be back?’

  ‘Not long, I don’t think they last very long, church services, about an hour? You see? I don’t even know that . . .’

  It seemed to be working, this strategy. He didn’t actually feel like he was lying, because as a writer he could regard anything he did as research, even having the affair with Vera, in an extreme way, since he would undoubtedly be using some of that experience in his writing, in one way or another. As long as he maintained the playful tone of the thing, as long as he didn’t get cross or tetchy, which was in fact very hard because he found the lying very stressful, then Polly showed every sign of accepting this turn of events.

  ‘Fine, go to your house of God. Just tell me one thing – are you going to be a detached observer or are you going to – you know – join in?’

  ‘I’ll play it by ear,’ Arnold said, ‘I’m hoping I can observe things from a distance, but if I have to join in, then I suppose I will.’

  And so, on Sunday morning, Arnold went to church.

  Part Two

  At the back of her workshop Polly stored the raw materials for paper-making. Bundles of recyclable paper tied up with string and stacked according to thickness and colour. Newsprint was the easiest to come by, but the ink made it difficult to work with if one wanted to achieve anything other than a dirty grey hue in the finished product. In other bundles were the rarer papers, the pure white sheets of packaging or the coloured tissue papers that she had once had to scavenge for at the backs of shops. These days she had arrangements with various stores around the town to take their used paper, and had more than she needed. The cycle of paper production was slow and she always accumulated the raw material at a faster rate than she could process it, yet she couldn’t bear not to take in paper that was available. She hoarded it like those old people who had started to feature in prurient TV documentaries, who stuff their houses until they can hardly get in the door. One day, she realized, there would be no more space.

  The slowness of the production process had been one of the biggest early obstacles to the shop’s profitability. The pulp had to sit for hours in the tanks, slowly disintegrating. Then it could only be turned into paper one sheet at a time, lifted out of the vat on a mesh, pressed and dried. The only way to speed up production was to increase the number of tanks, but space was limited. Even so, she had six large tanks of paper pulp in constant operation, six stagnant pools of plant fibre where the water did its work silently and wouldn’t be hurried.

  Before seeing the demonstration in the Welsh slate caverns, Polly had never realized how simple the process of paper-making was, nor how magical. Dipping the mesh into the tank of pulp and lifting it out, it was almost as if the paper had made itself, sitting within the rectangular frame like a lawn under virgin snow, as though the complete leaf had been there in the water all along, waiting for her to find it. She came away from the caverns with a feeling that she had been given secret knowledge (which made no sense, given that there were daily public demonstrations), and after that it all seemed to happen so fast – from practising at home, taking courses, impressing friends and eventually starting her own business, she still hadn’t quite taken in all that she had achieved.

  Her mornings were usually spent in the workshop turning the pulp that had been soaking overnight into leaves of fresh new paper. Few customers called before noon, so the shop itself could be tended by an assistant. When custom picked up towards midday and early afternoon, Polly would dry her hands and come into the shop itself, while Tamsin or another assistant would attend to minor tasks in the workshop. The day ended with the preparation of new pulp, which meant the tearing up, by hand, of hundreds of sheets of paper from the stacked bales at the back of the shop, and stirring them into the water, along with the dyes (and any other additives) to soak overnight. Anyone who was available would take part in the tearing of the raw paper, and it had become a kind of ritual at the end of the day, a festive occasion, almost party-like in its atmosphere. Tearing, rather than cutting, was essential, to break up the fibres in the paper, and the smaller the pieces that resulted, the better. If there was enough time the paper would be torn almost to fluff before being sprinkled into the pulp tanks. The noise of paper being torn could at times be deafeningly loud.

  In contrast the mornings were silent, contemplative. A space in her life that resisted all outside pressures, leaving just her and the pulp tanks and the leaves of paper that she lifted from them, one by one. As they dried in their frames on the bench she sometimes revisited the thought that first came into her head when they started up the Papyrus Press, that her business was making the blank pages for others to write on. They were all around her, the clean slates, empty and inviting, books in embryo, yet she had never thought to write, or draw, or paint on them herself. She wasn’t creative in that sense, and sometimes felt disappointed, or even surprised by that fact, since she believed herself to be someone who experienced the world as thoroughly and as intensely as any of the writers and artists she knew. She could see the world vividly and clearly, but she didn’t feel the need to report on this experience. A tree is enough of a thing in itself, she thought, why try adding another one in paint or words that can never be as good as the original? She’d tried this idea on Arnold once, and he dismissed it quite quickly, saying – if she remembered rightly – that art wasn’t simply reproduction. The painted tree is a thing in its own right, as miraculous, in its own way, as the tree itself. She wasn’t sure she agreed. It depended who painted it, she supposed. But the fact of producing paper at all, let alone the high-quality artisan paper she made, with its embedded rose petals and sweetly scented mulberry leaves, its natural dyes of varying subtle shades, was something that delighted and amazed her. When one day one her customers said to her, ‘You know, I’d like to buy one of your sheets of paper and just hang it on my wall. It’s
such a beautiful thing to look at,’ she felt a sense of fulfilment that she supposed was something close to that of artistic achievement.

  She had studied English at university and, even though she had done well, was left with a nagging feeling of guilt whenever she derived pleasure from reading. This was dispelled when she took a job in publishing, where she was allowed to enjoy novels again, as things that enthralled and enchanted. She was a junior in the publicity department when she met Arnold at a literary party. They immediately bonded, even though she had nothing to do with the publishing of his poetry, and indeed hadn’t long been aware that he was one of their authors.

  She and Arnold had lived together in London for a while, but she was quite happy to give up her job when he got the post at the university, perceiving that she was unlikely ever to progress from publicity into editing. Besides, she was on maternity leave by that time, and had been doubtful about ever going back. Evelyn had been a handful as a baby, but in the town they’d moved to she soon found a circle of friends, other young mothers, who proved very supportive. She had been so involved in this new circle, and in the raising of her daughter and in the setting up and running of her business, that she had to confess she hadn’t taken much notice of Arnold in the last few years. She assumed everything was OK at the university, even though he didn’t talk much about it. With the larger house they were able to buy in moving away from London, he had space to make a study, and no longer had to use a corner of the living room to write. The fact that he had, since the success of his first book of poems, made only slow progress towards a second did not seem to cause him much anxiety. He was a slow writer. He would remind her that Philip Larkin only produced a slim volume once every ten years.

  No one was insensitive enough to remark that, alongside Arnold’s failure to produce a second book, had been their joint failure to produce a second child. They had been trying now for many years but for some reason – a reason they had refused so far to investigate medically – the second child remained unconceived. It would have been nice for there to have been a boy to add to the family, to balance in gender Evelyn’s bright presence and bring symmetry to the household. But both Polly and Arnold seemed wordlessly to agree the moment had passed. Time was now against their family ever growing.

  Their work together on the Papyrus Press had been a point of intersection in their lives that otherwise followed different courses. They did their best to have their dinners and evenings together as much as possible, and concentrated their home lives into that space. And even though Arnold led his own life, teaching and publishing and editing and trying to write, she didn’t feel that his life was in any way inaccessible to her, had she wanted access. It was a life she understood and could comprehend. But the moment he stepped across the threshold of a church, he had entered somewhere she could not understand, nor have access to.

  She recalled the first Sunday of what he had started calling his ‘fieldwork’, when he was up early and showering and putting on smart clothes, as though he was setting off for a job interview. She had accepted his reasoning, albeit reluctantly, that he needed to do research, even though he had never written a novel, as far as she knew, nor expressed any serious desire to write one, before now. And when she asked him about this novel he became withdrawn and defensive, saying he would risk damaging the creative flow if he started talking about it too much, becoming quite annoyed sometimes, saying she didn’t understand the creative process, which made her quietly angry and upset. He had never said anything like that to her before.

  To cover her hurt she tried to make light of the event. ‘Is that your version of a Sunday best?’ she said when he came into the bedroom to say goodbye. She had stayed in bed while he was getting ready, propped up on some pillows, reading, as if determined to live her own Sunday as normally as possible. ‘You look so smart. God will approve.’

  ‘It’s not God I’m worried about,’ he said, bending to kiss her, ‘it’s the Christians.’

  ‘Bring back some wine,’ she called to him as he left, ‘or fishes. For lunch.’

  He was gone for four hours. She and Evelyn spent a puzzled morning not quite sure of how to handle the space in their lives that Arnold had left vacant. They were due to attend a picnic in the park in the afternoon, organized by the mothers of some of Evelyn’s friends. She hadn’t thought that she would have needed to remind Arnold to be back in time for that, because she assumed he would only be gone for an hour or so. When he did finally return she felt angry with him again and it turned into one of those days that starts off badly and never recovers. They got to the picnic late. She walked there and told Arnold to take the car and buy some picnic food, their contribution to the event, and meet them there. He did so, but arrived with such junk – jam tarts, sausage rolls, bottles of pink pop – that she could hardly bear to put them out with the dishes of hummus and cherry tomatoes, and noted the looks of bemusement, or barely concealed horror, on the faces of some of the mothers.

  He wouldn’t say much about going to church, but she could see it had effected some change in him. He was quiet, surly, shocked. When she asked him, he said it was boring. She asked him what sort of church it was, what the building was like. He said it was a modern building, like a house. In fact it had been a guest house at one time. There was a large conference room at the back that was used for worship. He said it was uninspiring, a little bit depressing. Nevertheless, it was a very useful experience for what he was writing about.

  ‘Such dedication,’ she said. ‘What a thing to put yourself through for the sake of your art. I could almost admire you for it. In fact I do admire you. Despite the mess you’ve made of our lives this morning.’

  They spent the rest of the afternoon peaceably enough, enjoying what was left of the picnic, playing with the children. In the evening she felt as though she had run out of the energy needed to restrain her feelings. She thought she could smell something on him.

  ‘You smell of religion,’ she said to him.

  He looked a little taken aback.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You have a smell on you, a religious smell. Candle smoke. Flowers.’

  ‘They didn’t have any candles there. It wasn’t that sort of place.’

  ‘Did they say Hallelujah?’

  Arnold laughed, but didn’t reply.

  ‘Come on, tell me more. Did they babble in tongues? Drink the blood of Christ?’

  ‘It was very boring. Just people talking. One of the preachers, he talked for an hour or so. All about the book of Corinthians. It was like listening to a lecture on English literature by someone who’d never read a book before. He said he went to a sales conference in Cincinnati, and thought this was what heaven might be like. So it was depressing, drab. But useful.’

  ‘Did they wear funny clothes, the preachers? Regalia? White double breasted suits?’

  ‘No, they wore just ordinary clothes, grey suits, like sales reps. They had name tags.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll wear name tags in heaven?’

  Arnold laughed. ‘Almost certainly. It must be a very confusing place.’

  Now Polly laughed, pleased that Arnold had opened up a little. She wondered why she had worried so much. After all, if he had gone to a meeting of neo-Nazis for research purposes she wouldn’t have been worried that he might come back with fascist views. But then, he was too intelligent to be swayed by such obviously flawed ideology. Religion didn’t work like that. Intelligent people were susceptible too, she supposed. She might, in her less considered moments, think religion was for the lame-minded, but otherwise she had to concede that it wasn’t so simple. The problem was that Arnold’s behaviour was encouraging her to examine her own prejudices, and as far as religion was concerned, she was normally happy for these to remain unexamined. By conceding that reasonable, intelligent people could find something in religion, she was making herself vulnerable to its seduction.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose you can at least thank
God you’ll never have to go to one of those places again. You’ve suffered enough.’

  He didn’t reply but left her remark hanging. She didn’t feel wholly satisfied. Arnold had said the things she would have expected him to say, but otherwise she sensed he was holding back. If it had been the neo-Nazis, he would have been full of stories about them, of their vileness, their stupidity, their crop-headed aggressiveness. He would have been full of contempt for them. But the worst he could say of the Christians was that they were boring. She so longed for him to say something rude about them. She offered him one more chance.

  ‘Such poor fools,’ she sighed, ‘to believe in fairy tales.’

  He seemed not to hear her.

  When, the following Sunday, he went through the same routine of rising early, showering and dressing in presentable clothes she had to think for a moment before she realized what he was doing. She had assumed the visit to the church would be a one-off.

  ‘You’re going again?’

  ‘Of course. I only scratched the surface last week. I need to get a sense of the people there, what goes on in their heads.’

  ‘Surely there can’t be much . . .’

  He laughed, but it was another dutiful laugh, she thought, delivered to express loyalty to herself. And having let him go to church last week, she didn’t have strong grounds to object now. But by the third Sunday, she felt she had to make a stand.

  ‘Arnold, I don’t like you going to church.’

  He laughed. ‘I’m not going to church. I’m just going to a building that happens to be a church, as an outside, detached, atheist observer.’

  ‘Where did you get that awful tie from?’ she said, as he adjusted a brown and purple length of fabric round his neck, ‘and your hair. Have you put something in it?’