There followed the week of half term during which Arnold and Vera both spent time at home with their children. Arnold felt a new phase was beginning in his relationship with his lover. His longing for Vera had been somehow diverted by his encounter with the boy in paper. When he thought about her, when he thought about her body, his thoughts were drawn away by the image of Martin Guerre as a wounded bird, his paper garments like white quills. He felt the boy to be a pinpoint of moral energy. When he looked again at his own poems, which now filled several cardboard folders, he felt almost ashamed of them. The hours he’d spent, folded up at his desk, scratching those lines out, then feeling too afraid to think of publishing them. It was unimaginable that he would ever think of wearing them like the boy had done, parade them down the street, hand them out to passers-by. Was it simply a lack of critical self-awareness that enabled the boy to make such bold moves with his poems? Or was it that he was somehow more deeply connected to the things he made, more deeply invested in them? He was like some of the young writers he taught, who thought the literary qualities of their writing was not the important thing. The important thing was that their poems existed at all. You couldn’t criticize a poem when it was an event of flesh and blood occupying physical space and time. All you could do was feel it. Energy. That was what he envied the boy, and others like him. His own creative life had fallen into little fragments, widely separated. There was no one to bolster him, no one to tell him to carry on, to keep going, to value the subtleties of thought and feeling and language that he had once felt he could master. Now all that mattered in poetry was the self, the physical self standing on a stage or in the street. The word made flesh.
He thought of Vera in her house, round the other side of the park and beyond the local shops, looking after her own children. What thoughts was she having? With a reading week at the university coinciding with half term they were both housebound spouses, taking the burden of childcare while their other halves worked. Was she suffering? He needed to talk to her, he needed to fuck her, if just to break out of this spell the boy had cast.
Polly reported that Martin Guerre had dropped his one-man protest outside her shop. ‘Whatever you said to him, it seems to have worked. What did you actually say to him? You didn’t threaten him, did you?’
‘Of course I didn’t threaten him. I just got him to talk, that’s all. He was obviously troubled about something, and taking it out on you. He’s got his parents on his back, and he was upset about his poetry. So I praised his poems. That seemed to cure him.’
‘Excellent. Now you just need someone to praise yours, and we’ll all be happy. Oh, that reminds me. Although he has stopped protesting, he did pop in yesterday, while I was out, and left this for you. Tamsin said it was urgent. Where is it?’ She looked among her work things which she kept in an alcove beside the kitchen, before finding the large padded envelope.
Arnold felt both delight and dread. Delight that he had somehow managed to reach through to the boy’s vanities, dread that he would now have to read his stuff.
‘You know what it is?’
‘I asked him to resubmit his poems.’
‘Oh no, Arnold. This is what started the whole thing off. If you reject him again, he’ll come back worse than before. Do you realize this means we’ll have to publish him. I’m not having that boy standing outside my shop again, bullying my customers.’
‘OK, so we’ll publish him.’
‘And if we publish him we’ll have to deal with him. You know what it’s like, he’ll be on the phone all the time asking about why we haven’t got his book reviewed in the Observer. And it’ll harm our reputation if we publish rubbish. On top of that we’d be doing a disservice to the boy – risking him being exposed to mockery and bad reviews . . .’
‘I seem to remember you were the one who suggested publishing him last week.’
‘That wasn’t a serious suggestion. I’d rather we broke any connection with him at all. Publishing him would tie him to us for ever.’
‘Maybe it’s not rubbish. And maybe he’ll quieten down if he thinks we’re taking his writing seriously. Who knows? I don’t think we have a choice.’
Arnold took the unopened and unnervingly heavy envelope up to his office, and left it there.
During the holiday he saw Vera twice. On the first occasion they both attended a children’s party that had an adult offshoot, where the parents sat around in a separate room to chat. He noticed Vera deliberately manoeuvre herself so that she didn’t have to sit next to Polly, and he noticed, with relief, how Polly thought nothing of this. Vera avoided his eyes with such efficiency he almost felt as if she were deleting him from her field of vision. At the same time, her concentrated avoidance was a visible token of their closeness. He cherished the way she refused to meet his eyes, even on the few occasions when he held the room’s attention with a remark or anecdote.
He wished Polly hadn’t started talking about the boy in the paper suit, but it was a story that fascinated everyone, and the conversation kept returning to the subject, and Arnold had to add his own details.
‘It sounds to me like he could be seriously disturbed,’ said someone.
‘Bring him to a sewing evening, we’ll stitch something together for him to wear.’
‘People like that can be so unpredictable, how do you know what he’ll do next?’
‘Oh, he has clothes to wear, I don’t think he was dressed in paper because that’s all he had.’
‘He’s not dangerous, no, far from it. I think he is a simple, harmless soul.’
‘You are so sweet, Arnold.’
‘You should adopt him, the boy in paper. Take him in.’
‘I think we’ve got enough on our plate.’
He noticed Vera look at him when he said this, the only moment in the whole afternoon that she did so.
Later in the holiday he found himself tasked with retrieving Evelyn from an afternoon spent with some other children at Vera’s house. He had doubts about whether he should really do this, and wondered if he should try and find a way out of it, thinking it might be a bad idea to rerun the circumstances of their first sexual encounter. And when he went there, he was in a very different mood, with the feeling that he was stepping into a trap. He saw himself as if from the outside, from a distance, or watching himself in a film. And when he went there he found everything as it had been that other time – the strewn living room with left-over food turning cold on the table. In the playroom the children were again in the grip of the television, ready and waiting to be betrayed. But this time he and Vera did not steal up the staircases to make hurried love, instead they behaved like a tired married couple.
‘I’m so looking forward to when this week’s over,’ Vera said as she handed him a mug of tea, ‘aren’t you?’
The tone of voice in which she said this suggested she was just tired of having the children at home all day, not that she was longing for the return of their trysts.
‘Ye-es,’ he said, cautiously.
‘You don’t sound that sure.’
‘I’ve been wondering if we need to rethink things.’
‘I didn’t realize we had thought things in the first place.’
Realizing the conversation was going to deal with these personal matters, they moved into the front room, well away from the children, and continued their conversation in whispers.
‘Well, perhaps we should have. Being in love, if that’s what we are, has given us a special kind of power that neither of us wanted.’
Vera nodded, but more to make him explain himself.
‘The power to hurt the people who love us.’
‘That power is always with us . . .’
‘Not this kind of power. We are armed to the teeth. I feel like I have been given charge of a huge animal that is peaceful most of the time, but that at any moment could turn savage and start eating people.’
‘I don’t know why you think we should ever have to hurt people.’
He didn’t know what to say to this. Did she not understand? Or did she understand more than he realized? Had she some plan that would mean their lives could go on unaffected by their relationship? That what they were doing could be somehow contained, for ever.
‘I think we both need to understand what we are doing, and how it might affect other people.’
She seemed disappointed. He felt suddenly that he’d failed her in some crucial way. She did her best to disguise her feelings, but they surfaced in the form of visible concentration. She was staring hard at his mouth, then his eyes, then his mouth, as though actually trying to read the words he was speaking, so intent was she in extracting any hidden meanings in them. It unsettled him. He had been hoping for some form of assent, agreement, sympathy. Surely she was worried as well, about where their relationship might lead. Two families destroyed, for the sake of something purely sensual.
‘Let’s talk about it after the holiday,’ she said in her low, quiet voice, her serious voice. And almost immediately Arnold was back in the sensual realm, desiring her, just because of the movement of her lips, the beadwork beauty of them, the glimpse of a richly pink interior they gave as she spoke, the plush tongue. It made him want to venture into her, and he had to resist strongly. The blind power she had to reach instantly into his primal desires, just by the slightest movement of her facial muscles. How could he ever hope to escape, or to maintain a reasoned viewpoint on their situation? He felt an overwhelming sense that when the time came to draw the line he would be unable to free himself from the grip of her beauty. The sacrifice would go on and on. His passion for her was relentless in the sacrifices it made, he would chop down tree after tree until there were no trees left on the island, he would shoot every seabird until there were no seabirds left, and no meat to cook, he would strip an island’s resources bare, in order to preserve what they had. It maintained itself above all other considerations, values, wants. Why not just give in now and save the agonies that lay in store, say goodbye to his family and his life?
So the meeting on the first Wednesday after the half term was to be a test of his resolve. He had determined that he would ask for an end to their relationship. He would be staring into the fire of her beauty, and would have to not flinch. He worried about it for several days. It was not something he’d ever had to do before and he couldn’t quite work out a formula of words. When he arrived, creeping as usual like a criminal through the back gate and the shrubs of her unkempt garden, she seemed to have made a special effort with her appearance, wearing a pretty yellow dress. He had never seen her in anything other than jeans before. It was heartbreaking.
‘All I am saying,’ he said, once they were settled at the table, ‘is that we should perhaps have a break . . .’
‘We’ve already had a break, it’s been three weeks since we last fucked.’
Her use of that word, blunt and uncharacteristic, sent such a thrill of pleasure through his body that he couldn’t gather his thoughts for a response, and she carried on. ‘What you mean is that you want to end it completely. So why don’t you just say it?’
‘I’m not saying that . . .’
‘Even if you aren’t, what is the point of having this break?’
‘So we can think carefully about where we go from here. Look, I don’t want to lose my family, and I don’t think you want to lose yours. If Polly found out about us I don’t think I would last more than five minutes before I found myself homeless. The longer we continue our relationship, the more chance she has of finding out.’
Vera didn’t seem impressed by any of these comments. ‘Was it the boy dressed in paper who changed things?’
‘Yes, in some ways it was. I saw how he was damaged by his parents – his father left home when he was ten. You can see the pain of it written all over his face, no matter how bravely he tries to cover it up. I keep thinking of Evelyn. I find it very hard to handle the fact that I possess knowledge that would destroy her.’ The look on Vera’s face made him have another go at phrasing his thoughts. ‘Not “destroy”, then, but “damage”. Damage badly. She would survive, of course. We all would. But we would all be badly wounded. It wouldn’t make a difference if I was unhappy with Polly, and I have tried everything I can think of to examine that question, of how happy I am with her, and though I am more excited by you, I am not unhappy with her, so I can’t justify to myself breaking things up for that reason.’
‘That is good of you, Arnold. And it makes me feel bad, but on the other hand, if what we do goes no further, that we simply keep it to this once weekly meeting, then we could maintain this for as long as we needed to.’
Her words chilled him. He had not expected resistance to his plan, even though this was a mild, reasoned, considered form of resistance. He was expecting to have his plan agreed to immediately. It puzzled him.
‘But you see, the longer it continues, the more chance there is that eventually we will be discovered, that someone will see me coming out of here, or will see us together somewhere, or we will accidentally leave some clue, or Polly will smell you on my clothes – something like that will happen in the end . . .’
‘Not if we’re careful . . .’
‘But careful for how long, a year? Two years? Five years? The rest of our lives?’
‘Why not? I’ve heard of people who’ve done things like that.’
‘For five years? Imagine what Polly would think if she found out we’d been sleeping together for five years . . .’
‘We can’t predict how people will react. Why should it be any worse a reaction than if it had been for five weeks?’
‘Because of the depth of the deceit. Because of the depth of our commitment to the deceit, to maintain it for that long, it proves that we had years to think about how wrong what we were doing was, but went on doing it anyway.’
‘I think you are worrying too much, Arnold. Our love for each other should be allowed to exist – if it grows, then we have to look after it, if it dies out, then we can go back to how we were, but we would be disrespectful to it if we killed it now, it would be too cruel.’
‘I’m not saying we end it. All I’m asking for is time.’
She smiled at this. ‘It’s the one thing we haven’t got. Just these few minutes once a week. Don’t you feel the preciousness of it? For me, it feels like my whole life is compressed into those two hours. I am not sure I would be able to survive properly without them. But – if that is what you want, then you can have your moratorium. Starting from next week? Yes?’
She was suggesting that, if their period of abstinence was about to start, they should use the present moment for one last session of lovemaking. The Shrove Tuesday of their sexual Lent. He agreed. And he was surprised, after the soberness of their conversation, at how swimmingly aroused he felt. The mood changed instantly from one of courtroom sombreness to one of dreamy sensuality. It was like someone had thrown a switch to dim the lights and ignite the candles. The longing that suddenly rose in his body was a physical sensation like the pain of hunger, but without specific location, it seemed not to belong to the genitals, but was spread more evenly throughout his abdomen, a pain that moved all the way up to his heart, a kind of dyspepsia, though not acid in its origins. They had not made love for three weeks, and he had thought, in that time, that he had slowly built a form or resistance to the tremendous power of her beauty, that he had inoculated himself against it, but in the bedroom, all the barriers melted away. And she was emboldened and enhanced, as though anticipating he might have put up defences. She had dressed herself in beautiful underwear. It was a shock, and he had never thought of himself as someone likely to be aroused by something so tacky, but Vera wore it and had produced a wonderful edition of herself. The notion that she had committed herself so strongly to his arousal, by investing in this material, and wearing it, when it could have been of little benefit to her, overwhelmed him with a sense of gratitude, that she had transformed her entire body into a sort of gift, and was presenting it to him. She was the last person he imagined would find sexy underwear appealing, it was another of the little sacrifices she was making, another tract of undergrowth slashed and burned, another clearing constructed in the forest, another turret added to the invisible palace.
She attached little pieces of jewellery to herself, sparkling things to her earlobes, faceted little crystals, she said they were her grandmother’s, that she had never worn them before because they hurt her ears and that she would have to take them off soon, but the effect on her was startling. Again he was not someone who cared much about jewellery, Polly’s was of the wooden-bead type, nothing that flashed and dazzled like this, casting rainbow light on Vera’s wonderful neck, round which another piece of work hung, making her something that was easy to worship, indeed he felt a weakness in his knees at that moment, at the spectacle of her, little pieces of compressed quartz, yet they seemed to bathe her in a rejuvenating light, smoothing her skin so she seemed younger by a decade. He approached her like a fool with his hands out, blinded by the glare of her body, attracted to it like a moth, as stupidly.
Later, spent, utterly drained, he realized this couldn’t possibly be the last occasion on which this could happen. Still stroking him, she held him transfixed in a continuous palm embrace, her hand swam through his body as though he was a pool, lifting him, parting him, stirring him, so that he couldn’t think, or rather he was thinking in a way that he hadn’t thought before. He thought in a way that was closer to the way he thought in dreams, seeing things in terms of pictures and stories, and setting himself against a situation where he has to push a large obstacle out of the way. He supposed they were on a raft in a huge ocean, but a raft that was utterly secure, unsinkable, stocked with an inexhaustible supply of food and water. Vera rose above him, naked now, but for the necklace, she straddled him, though he was soft and helpless, indeed he was in a certain amount of mild pain. Her breasts moved in front of his face and he felt the befuddled sense of being stared at by them, they were still shiny from where he’d sucked. She knocked them playfully against his nose, one after the other. Beneath them her wetness met his own wetness, and they stirred against each other, she pestled him slowly, until miraculously he found himself rigid again, as though he had risen out of his own pain, fresh and ready.
He had arrived here determined to end things, but now he was more deeply connected to Vera than before, he was of a piece with her, their very skins seemed stitched together. And the worries he’d had now seemed trivial. Why should their spouses find out about them, and if they did, so what? Families split up every day. It is more the norm than not, to split up. Who now stays married for life? The world is full of stepchildren and second husbands, and everyone seems to manage.
And so their affair resumed its previous course and direction – a straight, regular routine that appeared to be leading nowhere. It was as though they were building the dead straight track across the outback, sleeper by sleeper through the flat desert, rails winched into position, screwed down, mile after mile, all that energy and ingenuity going into building one dead straight track, but nowhere at the end of it, no station, no destination in sight. This continued to bother him.