The Paper Lovers

by Gerard Woodward

  ‘I’ve booked you a hotel,’ she said.

  She noted the way he looked at her, then at the suitcase, which sat upright on the floor like an obedient little bodybuilder, then back at her. He was working out what strategy to follow. He made a stab at incomprehension.

  ‘What? What are you talking about?’

  ‘I want you out of the house, tonight.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You do. I’ve spoken to Vera. She told me everything.’

  He stared at her for several seconds. The light went out of his eyes.

  ‘She had no right.’

  ‘She had no right not to. You, apparently, were going to keep it a secret for ever.’

  ‘I would have told you in my own way. What else could I do?’ He was raising his voice. She cast her eyes upwards to remind him that Evelyn should not have to hear them.

  ‘You could have told the truth.’

  ‘And would things have been any better?’

  ‘I don’t care. It’s too late to care about that question. If you’d told me, there might have been a chance to talk. But not now. Not now that I’ve found out this way.’

  ‘There’s still time to talk. We have to talk.’

  She ignored this remark, and instead handed him a piece of paper on which was written the details of the hotel she’d booked.

  She didn’t understand why he smiled to himself when he saw that she had booked the hotel on the bypass. She didn’t realize it was the same hotel he had used on his night away in an imaginary Birmingham. He thought she had chosen it for its cheapness and its seediness, but it was the hotel Arnold would have used again, if he had had to make the choice.

  ‘You’ve booked me a week at this place?’

  ‘Yes. I booked it with your card.’

  ‘And after the week’s over?’

  ‘Then you’ll have found somewhere else to live. Or you can stay on in the hotel for as long as you like.’

  ‘I won’t be able to find somewhere else to live. I’ve got nowhere else to go.’

  ‘Perhaps your church will help you.’

  He was shaking his head, looking at her pleadingly. ‘All that church business – you don’t understand – they forced me . . .’ As though realizing how pathetic it sounded, he stopped mid-sentence. Every avenue of explanation seemed blocked to him.

  He begged for a few more minutes to sort out some papers in his study. He had lectures to give, student work to mark. She told him to go. He could collect his stuff at some future date, but he had to go now. His students would have to suffer. His lectures would have to be off the cuff. Or he could phone in sick. It wasn’t her problem. There was a moment when she could see he was thinking about whether or not to protest. Any moment he was going to say that she was being unreasonable. To pre-empt this, she said:

  ‘Do you really want Evelyn to hear us fighting? Are you waiting for me to smash something? I think we can do this like civilized people, but if you want blood, I’ll give you blood.’

  The words seemed to empty Arnold of any colour, though she too was terrified by what she had said, and by the fact that she meant it.

  With one final but long drawn out stream of apologies during which Arnold did his best to produce tears (but failed), he was gone.

  When he went, in that manner of meek obedience that had somehow become his hallmark, she didn’t shed the flood of tears she was expecting to. Instead she felt a beautiful hardness settle within her. In removing Arnold from her presence, she had protected herself. After listening to the sad coughing of his car starting up, and then the engine fading out into the distance, she experienced for the first time the house without Arnold. It was silent. The TV was off. There was nothing but the remote, within-the-walls hum of the house doing its own work, those noises she was never quite sure about – refrigeration? Central heating? The expansion tank filling? She let it settle about her for a moment, wondering what sort of person she was, in this new, few-minutes-old life. She put aside thoughts of whether she had been fair and reasonable in her actions, and instead tested the weather of her own feelings. Did she feel better for what she had done? Yes she did. Was this a permanent or a momentary feeling? Permanent, she thought.

  The House Without Arnold, she discovered, was a very different place from The House From Which Arnold Is Temporarily Absent. The silence of that house was sometimes awkward and uncomfortable, even frightening. But the silence of the House Without Arnold was comforting and luxuriant. A very different place. The House Without Arnold opened up around her, the walls seemed to recede, enlarging the space within, the lights brightened. She was shocked by the feeling, the sense of release, of relief, of something dark having lifted. Later she thought it was the departure of that unwanted and invisible guest who’d taken up residence since Arnold’s conversion. The weight of Arnold’s faith had lifted, there was no one watching her now.

  She walked about the house as if to experience it for the first time, opening doors and peeping into rooms to see if they were the same, surprised to find that they were, but only literally. Otherwise they were transformed. Evelyn’s bedroom, into which she dared herself to glance, seemed actually to be the fairytale princess’s boudoir to which it aspired. Lately Evelyn had been asking for it to be redecorated, as she had outgrown its prettily clashing colour schemes. Arnold had always been in charge of redecorating his daughter’s bedroom. Polly realized that she would now have to do this herself. And in reflecting on that fact she realized that she had thoroughly written Arnold out of the future history of the house. She had had no hesitation in accepting this new dispensation and adapting to it. There could be no second chance for Arnold. He would be back, probably as soon as tomorrow, with some sort of angle or strategy to excuse what he had done, to make her think less badly of him. But she was firm – firmer than she actually thought she would be – in putting her plan into action, of protecting the pearl that was so close to being dashed, by giving Arnold no quarter.

  The phone call came at about eleven that night, just as she had expected. She read his name on the screen of her mobile. He was ringing, presumably, from the hotel, having settled in, and having had time to think of something new to say. Some new line of argument. It only reassured her that she had done the right thing. She switched her phone off without answering the call, and watched the screen go dark.

  At the back of Papyrus, in her workshop, Polly took more time than usual in tearing the paper for pulping. Tamsin was helping her. At first Polly was doubtful about letting her help, but Tamsin was bored, the customers had gone and the shop was empty. And so Polly had agreed, and allowed Tamsin to do some paper-tearing. They sat alongside each other, letting rip through the heap of material on the bench. Polly watched her assistant to see if she was taking any interest in the paper itself. It was unusual paper to be making pulp from. Loose sheets, covered in handwriting. Anyone else might have paused to try and read some of it, to wonder where it had come from, who had written all these words. But she was soon chatting about her favourite subject, which was the failings and weaknesses of her current boyfriend. Polly half-listened, having heard much of it before. She had met the boyfriend a couple of times, when he had come to the shop to meet Tamsin, and he had struck her instinctively as someone Tamsin should avoid at all costs – a loping, bejewelled, tattooed man-child who seemed to speak a language of his own devising. Tamsin’s main complaint, that evening, was that he had become addicted to computer games to the extent that he was losing interest in sex. She laughed at the right moments when Tamsin gave her account of the row they’d had. She had picked up his Xbox and had threatened to throw it out of the window.

  ‘You should have,’ said Polly, when Tamsin told her she didn’t have the heart to carry out her threat.

  She felt sorry for the fact that she couldn’t offer her own story in return. Tamsin was clearly expecting some sort of disclosure as the next part of the conversation. But it would have been impossible to talk about what h
ad happened in her own relationship. But then, if Tamsin had taken the briefest of moments to look at the paper she was tearing into strips, then smaller strips, then crossways into little squares, she might have been given a chance to begin talking about it. She would need to talk to someone soon.

  When, on the night of his departure, she had gone into Arnold’s study, she’d felt immediately that it no longer possessed any sort of power to exclude her. It was no sort of shrine or sacred space. It was a room full of objects. She had a right to do in there whatever she wanted. She had packed his laptop in his suitcase, but everything else was left as it was. The mess of his so called creative life. His writing. In the drawers she found lots of it. The folders of new poems that he had been working on with painstaking slowness for ten years. There were dozens of them. He had almost enough for a new book. He still wrote on paper, using his laptop only for university work, and for final drafts. Here were the pen-and-paper versions of each poem, A4 pages closely lined and criss-crossed with black ink, crossings out, marginal notes and arrows pointing to and from portions of circled text. It had been his characteristic habit, to write like this, on loose sheets of A4. When he finished a new draft, he fastened it on top of the old one with a paper clip. This was so that he could immediately refer back to previous drafts as he worked on the new one. He had shown her once, his system. As the successive drafts mounted up, the wad of paper held by the paper clip could become very thick. Finally the typed draft would go on top, and all the pages stapled together, as a permanent record of how the poem was made. On average he made about twenty drafts of each poem. He saved them all in the outlandish hope that they might one day be worth some money to a collector of manuscripts. There were all the manuscripts of the poems that were published in his first book, they filled a large cardboard box. The poems that he had written since filled another box. Then there were the diaries and notebooks. He was a prolific note-taker and diary keeper. The diaries were in large A4 bound notebooks that he had bought during a trip to China. Cheap, manila-coloured, thin paper, but the books were hundreds of pages thick. In other notebooks were journals that went back to when he was a teenager. All of them written in his crabbed, indecipherable hand. She went through the whole room. She found other folders. Other boxes of rough drafts. Things she’d never seen before – it looked as though he had made several attempts at writing a novel after all. Tiny handwriting filling hundreds of lined pages. The paper was, apart from the Chinese notebooks, standard white writing paper, the type of mass-produced paper Papyrus had reacted against. She spent most of the evening sorting through it, finding boxes and carrier bags to stuff the papers in. She took these out to the car and, in the dark of approaching midnight, filled the boot to its brim.

  She remembered that there was probably a document among all his official papers, which she hadn’t bothered to go through, that gave legal notice of the fact that she had been designated the executor of his literary estate. In the event of his death it would be she who would be waiting for the requests to quote, the requests to biographize, the requests to peruse the manuscripts. It was laughable to think that even a single person on the planet might be stirred enough to make such a request. She had thought that at the time but hadn’t said it. In fact she had said the opposite, yes, you must designate a literary executor, you just never know what might happen after you’ve gone. There might be people – scholars, the idly curious, the intrepid waders through forgotten troughs of literary sludge – interested enough to want to see your handwritten works.

  She broke the hardback covers of the notebooks and diaries and disposed of them, leaving the loose pages to add to all the other loose material. There would be enough to fill several tanks, she thought. Tamsin left her to it when some customers arrived. By now they had torn through most of the paper, reducing it almost to fluff. Her fingers were grey with ink and a little tired. She filled the tanks with water and then began adding the paper, lifting heaps of it in her cupped hands and scattering it in. The ink separated from the paper, darkening the water. She added bleach, which dissolved the ink further, clearing the water and whitening the pulp that remained. By the time it had properly soaked there wouldn’t be a trace of Arnold’s writing left, not even its chemical make-up.

  A few weeks before, Polly had ordered papyrus sheets from a manufacturer in Egypt. The parcel had arrived earlier that day. Though they had named the shop after this product, they had never given much thought to the material itself, or the fact that it might still be manufactured, but a brief search found that specialist manufacturers still made it on the banks of the Nile. She and Terri thought they would have to stock some. But now that she had it, she wondered if it could be added to ordinary paper pulp, to make a new kind of paper. She did this to the tanks in which Arnold’s collected works had dissolved and when, some days later, she began making paper from the pulp, she found these new sheets had a colour and texture quite unlike anything she had made before – they seemed almost to be golden. It was going to be beautiful paper to print The Paper Lovers on.

  There were moments when she felt bad about what she had done to him, and in all her imaginings of such an event, the destruction of irreplaceable written matter, the record of someone’s life, the expression of their imagination, had not occurred to her. She had changed the locks by the time Arnold returned to the house, but she let him in so that he could get some of his things. She followed him upstairs. He ignored the bedroom where the rest of his clothes were and went straight to the study. She waited on the landing, behind him. She heard him opening and closing the drawers. When he emerged he looked white and blank.

  ‘What have you done?’ he said, quietly.

  She said nothing. In rehearsing this moment, she discovered there was a danger in making it seem as though the debt of Arnold’s crime had been repaid by her destruction of his life’s work, and they could now be thought of as equal. He didn’t seem to be seeing it that way.

  ‘Everything?’ he said. ‘You’ve got rid of everything? What did you do, make a bonfire? Do you realize . . .’ He looked again at the bareness of the room, ‘Do you realize what you’ve done?’

  She remained silent. When she was actually doing it she had relished the thought of telling him precisely what she had done with his writing, but now she couldn’t. She was not sure if she would ever be able to. He couldn’t summon any anger. He just looked tired and sad. He returned to the room to sort out a few books and collect the student work that she had carefully separated from his own material.

  They talked briefly about Evelyn. She told him that, so far, she was fine, but it was early days. Yes, of course he could see her. They would arrange something. He mentioned going to Africa. He would be going soon, he said. Given the situation, perhaps it was just as well. He might stay out there for longer than he originally planned. When the time came to leave he paused at the front door, and delivered a short speech that he had clearly been working hard on.

  ‘There are things about this situation that you don’t understand, Polly. I know you don’t want to listen to me now, but I hope that in the future . . .’ Instinctively she shut the door on him, cutting off anything further he had to say.

  Apart from the student work, there was one other item of written material that Polly saved from the pulp tanks, and that was the collection of poems, still in their large padded envelope, by Martin Guerre. On the night of Arnold’s departure she had taken them downstairs, feeling as though she’d saved them from a catastrophe. She read them again. Perhaps it was the memory of her recent encounter with his parents, or the awful news they’d borne of his suffering, but she fell deeply in love with Martin’s poems. Their obsession with paper, through which she could better understand her own love of the material. Their humanizing of it. The extraordinary way in which paper and people seemed interchangeable. As for Arnold’s worry that they serenaded her, that was pure fantasy on his part. Martin’s paper lovers were universal, archetypal. For Martin paper was always a living
breathing substance. She would publish these poems as soon as she could. She would organize a proper launch party, everything they did for their best poets, all would be laid on for Martin and his parents.

  The publication of The Paper Lovers was something that gave her both a point of focus and a pleasing distraction in the fraught weeks following her separation from Arnold. At first she feared she would have to involve him because she had no way of contacting Martin or his parents, there was no address on the manuscript and there was no sign of him online. Only Arnold knew where he lived. Fortunately, the boy’s parents made a second visit to the shop that week, following up on her promise to make a quick decision.

  ‘We don’t mean to press you, Mrs Proctor, but this matter does need to be resolved as soon as possible. It can’t be allowed to carry on any longer.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Polly, unable to conceal her delight that they had appeared in her shop at just the right moment, ‘we’ve made our decision. We would like to publish The Paper Lovers immediately. I’ve already started making the paper.’

  When Martin arrived at the shop this time, he was like a man who had returned from a wilderness. In the weeks leading up to this moment, she had not met him. He had given her free reign to select whichever poems she liked for the pamphlet, he only asked that no changes be made to the poems themselves. Fortunately, no changes were needed, as far as she was concerned. There weren’t even any typos. She sent proofs to his parents, and they came back by return of post, with no corrections. She asked him for a list of people to invite to the launch party. After a few days, a list was sent. It read