The Paper Lovers Read online

  And with that, Vera suddenly realized how late things were. She was meant to be home an hour ago.

  ‘I am sorry for turning your house upside down, Arnold,’ she said just before she left, looking back at the overturned room. ‘What a mess I have made.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Polly, ‘it’s a lovely mess. I’ll get Arnold to clear it up while I make the dinner.’

  Both women laughed.

  But no one cleared up the mess. Arnold found, in the quiet of the living room post-Vera, with Evelyn now upstairs with the kitten, and Polly in the kitchen, the space had changed from a place of fraught chaos into one of peacefulness. He had thought for a moment that he might tidy things away, but he felt the same form of compunction he experienced when, for whatever reason, he had to break a spider’s web. It had taken so much work to create the disorder of the room that it would have felt destructive to tidy it. And if he did clear it up, the chances were that the sewing maidens would never reappear. He didn’t articulate the thought to himself, but he left the room untidy as a sort of charm to ensure Vera’s return.

  It worked, because not only did Vera return, but others came with her, and a regular series of sewing evenings were formed as others in Polly’s circle of friends became interested, and soon the living room was crowded, once a week, with enthusiastic needleworkers. They assembled after dinner, and mixed sewing and haberdashery with wine-drinking and cheese-nibbling. The sewing machine was again at the centre of everything, but some women brought their own machines, saying they hadn’t used them for years, and expressing gratitude for being given this opportunity to use them again. Polly was praised for reviving their interest in what everyone agreed was a dying art. They would reminisce about their mothers’ sewing skills, and how they had loved to watch them, as children, making things. They would bring along books and magazines on sewing, discuss projects, and take turns trying out the machines, comparing the quality of stitches and seams.

  Arnold was again transfixed by how the house became a different place on these occasions, even more so with the growing membership. And as the membership grew, so did Arnold’s sense of exclusion. In fact the living room became a place of such clustered, concentrated femininity he couldn’t have felt more out place if he had stumbled into the dressing room of a troupe of Tiller girls. Polly suggested he simply not bother coming home on the sewing evenings – he could go for a drink with his friends, or work late. He could go and have dinner in town.

  He joked, at first, that they would need him to thread the needle, and he strongly desired to be there, as part of the group, because he wanted to observe Vera again, to see if her beauty was a permanent, enduring thing about her, or whether it had existed only in his perception of her on that one occasion. And he had no friends, at least none that he could rely upon to be available for a drink in the evening.

  Once, tired of making himself scarce and longing to look at Vera again, he tried his best to become involved. Unlike the first time, his entry into the room drew much attention and was a cause of amusement, because he was so obviously out of place in a room of nine women and five or six little girls. Their excitement at what they had done and their anticipation of the possibilities of the new group had made them playful and foolish. So when Arnold entered a cry went up that was both a cheerful salutation and a warning.

  ‘No men! No men! Sorry sweetie, this has become a women-only house . . .’

  It felt almost as if he was in front of a class, and he felt gripped in the same way as he felt when confronted with a new seminar group, by the responsibility to say and do something. Yet he didn’t know what to say. All he could do was smile and survey, as quickly as he could, the room. On all the available chairs and on the floor the women sat, some of whom he knew well, others only vaguely, some not at all. There was Geerda, a doctor on extended maternity leave, who always looked as though she was about to lose her temper, and in the far corner the hippyish woman whose name he didn’t know, dressed in her high-priestess robes and beads; Tamsin, the sweary but golden-hearted teenage mum who worked in Polly’s shop, whom Polly and her friends had taken rather under their collective wing. And more women, laughing, turning their heads, reaching for an olive, flushed and smiling, and in the centre of everything there were the sewing machines, most of which looked like the one they had bought for Evelyn, although there was one that was much older, a black and silver model that looked like something from the Victorian era. And everywhere there was fabric; two women were at that moment examining together a long length of magenta curtain, holding it out between them as if stretching a safety net for someone about to fall from the ceiling.

  After Polly’s exclamation all faces turned towards him in expectation of a riposte, as if some sort of battle of the sexes was to be played out before them, for their entertainment. But still he felt the dumbness that had overwhelmed him since he had entered the room. What existed there now was an entire garden, in the full force of its blossoming, whereas before it had been a single plant with its evocative, enticing perfume. He held up a defensive hand. ‘You know I’ve never approved of sweatshop labour,’ he said at last. It was the best he could do, and although some of the women laughed, most of them looked at each other with fixed smiles, wondering if there was something darker behind what he had said.

  ‘Why don’t you go off and buy a box of cigars and smoke them while reading a car magazine?’

  The woman who said this was one of the overdone, tinted and glossy types who didn’t really belong among Polly’s friends, and whose husband probably did exactly the things she’d just recommended, regularly. It didn’t play well with the other women, who saw genuine antagonism in the remark, and Arnold began backing away, and the group very quickly began to lose interest in him.

  He stayed for as long as he could to observe Vera, who so far as he could tell had taken no notice of him at all during the whole comedy of his entrance. All the time she had seemed preoccupied with the Victorian sewing machine. She may have given him a half-glance, but otherwise she was busy with threads and bobbins, using her mouth to break a length of cotton, her golden hair spilling forward as she bent to the task. But she filled his attention as she had done before. It was an agony to take his eyes away from her, to pretend uninterest. And the scent was as powerful as the last time. The room was a mixture of smells now, a stew of perfumes, but the original one dominated, the hyacinth tang that had amazed him before and amazed him again.

  He withdrew, first to the kitchen, then he slipped upstairs, and from there he listened.

  At first he listened from the spare bedroom that he used as a study, but was soon drawn out of that room and onto the landing, where he could hear more clearly. He was alone in the upper part of the house. His daughter was downstairs with the rest of the females. From his perch at the top of the stairs he could eavesdrop without fear of discovery, but he had trouble making out individual words. Why did they talk so much at the same time? He worked his way slowly down the stairs. Someone had shut the living-room door, which made it very hard to hear clearly, though he could make out enough to tell they were talking about sewing and sewing machines, about fabrics and stitches and threads. They were sharing recently uncovered memories of childhood sewing, of watching their mothers sew, of holding wool for their grandmothers. From what he could make out, they never deviated beyond this general subject area. And then he heard it – Vera’s voice. That was all he was waiting for, he realized. He didn’t care about the sense, he just wanted to hear the voice, the music of it. From the general hubbub of the women, Vera’s voice broke through and silenced everything around it. He was entranced by its music. All the other voices held back, allowing it to do its work, which was probably the telling of another sewing anecdote of no import, and although her voice had no great strength, it had the power to quieten the other voices, the only voice among the women that was able to do that. They listened to her story until it reached its conclusion, and then they laughed and respo
nded, as though released from a spell.

  Then he noticed something that fixed him with a sudden whelming of energy. The vestibule at the end of the hall where they kept their shoes and coats had thickened and swelled. The women had brought coats and hats with them, and Polly must have hung them up there, because leaning over the banister he could see several strange garments he hadn’t seen before, and he wondered if Vera’s coat would be part of that little crowd of empty clothes.

  Barely had he had a moment to think through what he was doing before he was down in the hall and in among the coats. He had to pass right by the door to the living room, and pass close to the voices that were now much clearer. He put to the back of his mind the problem of what to do if that door should open now, as he was feeling his way through the visitors’ coats trying to identify Vera’s, what he would say if Polly saw him. He was too busy following the smell, which was rich and deep here, and helped him pull out from its hook the black duffel coat that he remembered he had seen on Vera, and to take it in his arms and engulf it. No one opened the door. He held the coat close to him, pushing his face into its lining, enveloping himself in the hood. He was surprised by its texture, expecting a duffel-coat roughness, a bristliness, but instead there was a softness to the fabric; the big black muscly coat was tender and yielding, so much so that it felt as though the coat was touching him back. He felt suddenly joyous, for the stupidity of what he was doing, making love to an empty coat, playing with its silly, childlike toggles. Rather than feeling ashamed at having executed such an underhand, proxy assault, he felt the triumph of a little boy who has obtained some forbidden treat from the adult world. He thought for a second about taking the coat upstairs, kidnapping it entirely, taking possession of it, imagining the quandary when it came to home time – where was it? Where had Vera’s coat gone? Are you sure you brought a coat with you? I don’t remember you having one? Yes, the black one, the duffel coat, it’s my favourite coat, the nicest coat I’ve ever had, the warmest, the loveliest . . .

  2

  Since he regarded himself as someone to whom women were not inordinately attracted, Arnold did not see much risk in indulging his fascination for Vera. He also felt that, because she was a practising Christian, he was doubly safe from any danger of straying. Even if he had wanted to, he could not have tempted her into infidelities, her beliefs and her commitment to her family were too strong. There were three barriers, then, to any chance of dalliance – family, Church and his own lack of sexual appeal. This all-surrounding triple-layered fender of prohibition made it seem perfectly safe for him to encounter Vera and play with the possibilities of what could happen between them, if those three barriers hadn’t existed. It also enabled him to deny to himself he had any physical longing for Vera, and to feel instead that he was merely enjoying the richness of a particular type of human presence.

  Outside of the sewing-machine circle, the only other opportunity Arnold had to meet Vera was at the school when dropping off or collecting Evelyn. Polly did this, even though it would have made more sense, given their working hours, for Arnold to have done so, but Polly felt it kept her in touch with the other parents, and with their daughter’s teachers. In the evenings it was normal for Evelyn to go to a friend’s house to be picked up from there at around half-past four or five o’clock, which was usually the earliest Polly could get back from her shop. Now that she had a new best friend in Irina, Vera’s daughter, she most often went to her house after school to be collected.

  In usual circumstances Arnold only did the school run if Polly had some other commitment, and it was a task he generally hated. It meant standing in the playground waiting for the bell to go (a reminder of his own dismal school days) with the other mothers and the occasional father, with whom he felt he had very little in common. He would endure the scanty conversations he had with these parents, which were mostly confined to enquiries about Polly and why she hadn’t shown up, or else things about the children’s education that he tried hard to appear interested in, when really he was just waiting for the bell to go so that he could make his escape.

  Now Arnold grabbed every opportunity for taking Evelyn to school. If Polly showed the least sign that it was too much for her, if she was running the littlest bit late or worrying about the pile of things she had to do at the shop, he would step in and helpfully volunteer for the school run. It was ridiculous, he said, that on mornings when he didn’t have to be at work till ten, he didn’t take Evelyn. It was actually on his way to work, whereas Polly’s shop was in the opposite direction. He even had a research day each week, when he didn’t have to go to work at all. Why not let him take some of the burden? And Polly agreed, after a moment of doubt, that it did make sense when he had the more flexible work pattern, to take on some of the ferrying duties. It would be a relief, she said. And so once or twice a week, and sometimes more, and to the child’s delight and puzzlement (‘Why are you taking me to school, Daddy?’) Arnold took his daughter to St Clare’s primary.

  Vera was always there. She was usually part of a small group of two or three other mothers. Now that their daughters were best friends, he had permission to join this group, indeed he had little choice and could even make a display of being the reluctant follower as Evelyn led him across the grey playground, to where Irina and her mother stood. And as soon as they were together the children would go off to play or talk, leaving the adults to themselves.

  Arnold then found he couldn’t do much more than observe Vera, as she would be in conversation with the others, and in some ways he felt satisfied with that. In fact he felt a terror of being alone with her, for fear that he would suddenly blurt some inappropriate remark, or even take hold of her, hug her, as he had done already her coat. But he was happy to be part of the small crowd, to laugh at the right moments, to offer his bland, innocuous comments when required, to add to all the other bland, innocuous comments that made up the typical playground conversation.

  Sometimes a father would be part of their group, dressed for work in the real world of business, wearing a suit and tie, and Arnold would feel overshadowed by the way this man handled the group, dominating it in such a way that the women didn’t seem to mind being interrupted and spoken over, since it was done with such good humour. Then Arnold would wonder if he was doing something wrong, that he should follow the example of this man, and do what he did, which was somehow to entertain the women, as though they were in his charge and he had responsibility for them. And when the man was in the full flow of his entertaining, charming the mothers with work anecdotes – he was a sales and marketing manager for a firm that made something Arnold had never heard of – Arnold felt a responsibility to assert his own presence, and to match the father’s stories with stories of his own. He didn’t because he felt that doing so would put the two males in competition and somehow imply a sexual motivation for his presence in the group. So he held back, remaining silent and unobserved.

  Once or twice a week his day started in this way, to be followed by the familiar routines of teaching and research. In his classes there were many beautiful students, yet none of them held the remotest interest for him, and not simply because they were more than twenty years his junior. The beautiful faces seemed like exquisite masks with no character or expression, fragile artefacts compared to Vera’s older, living face. And then once a week the sewing evening, when he would eavesdrop if he could, or linger in the kitchen to get a glimpse of her, and feel sorrowful and even heartbroken if for some reason she wasn’t there.

  As far as he could tell, she had taken very little notice of him in return. Beyond polite pleasantries, nods and smiles, she seemed mostly unaware of his interest. He was not surprised and it confirmed his feeling of safety and protection. It would be hard to design a person less inclined to have an extramarital affair than Vera. She, like him, was still devoted to her family. For his part he was not even bored with his. They still interested and excited him. In this way he found his attraction to Vera quite inexplic able.
He had no needs that were not being met. He was satisfied with his life, his love, his work, everything. He also sensed that Vera’s beauty was something most people wouldn’t see. She was beautiful in her own way, and this set her apart from other women. She was not like certain females he knew – that tinted and overdone woman in the sewing group, for instance – who seemed finely attuned to the subtleties of male attention, whose attractiveness had made them skilled in fending off or courting it, according to their highly specific preferences. Vera had not turned many heads in her life, he imagined, and was mostly overlooked by the male gaze, but not by his.

  She had, if anything, a slightly odd face, rather distended and awkwardly put together, and her glasses made her eyes look little and sad. Yet being in her presence had an effect on him that was like the feeling of his heart being lifted out of his body. An intoxicating sense of gladness and relief that she was there. He began to feel about her in the same way that he understood some people felt about the natural world, birdwatchers and the like, that they felt a constant reassurance from observing it, having it in front of them, the solid, empirical evidence of its existence. A twitcher catching sight of a rare warbler on a twig has their trust in the forcefulness of nature restored. That’s what he was beginning to feel about Vera, the whole bundle of her physical existence, the four-limbed, bipedal feet-on-the-ground substance of her.

  He would have dealt with her in poems if he could, but writing poems about people had never been where his talents had lain. He longed, rather, for painterly skills, and was surprised that he didn’t have such a talent, since he considered himself a far better observer of the world than most people he knew, including the handful of artists he’d met in his life, those sloppy splashers of colour and scrapers of pigment, who seemed to think paint itself was the important thing, and not the stuff out there. And Vera was stuff, she was the essence of stuff. When he was close to her he felt as though he was within the remit of something infinitely benevolent, that he was inside a charmed circle, and that the source of this energy was located in the form of her physical presence – her body, her clothes, the breath she emitted, and the invisible, intangible things that her body gave off – pheromones, DNA, molecular chaff.