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?’

‘Just doing my best to blend in. You have to think of this as a sort of undercover operation. I have to look the part.’

But he looked wrong in a tie, to Polly. He looked as though he’d been lassoed. And the gunk he’d put in his hair. He would have to wash that out when he came home. It was bad enough that he was behaving like a Christian, she didn’t want him to look like one as well.

‘I don’t know why you can’t just interview people. I’m sure they would be willing to talk to you. Why do you have to actually go and join in?’

He shrugged, as if it was both too simple and too complicated to explain. ‘It’s not the same,’ he said, ‘and I’m not “joining in”. I’m a detached observer, like I said.’

It annoyed her that he found her objections amusing, as though she was being the silly little girl frightened by the big bad wolf of religion. He cuddled her in a fatherly way as she sat in bed, kissing the top of her head and telling her not to be ‘daft’, in such a patronizing tone that as he turned his back she made a gesture that he couldn’t see, the middle finger raised in both hands, jerking them aggressively up and down while biting her top teeth over her lower lip, screaming silently as she did it, which came out as a little puff of anger at the conclusion of the gesture, which he didn’t hear.

Sunday mornings were now a new and different space in the week. To make sense of them and to make a claim on them, she devised things for her and Evelyn to do on their own. Since the one thing that Evelyn was sure to appreciate and never refuse an opportunity to do was going round the big department stores in the city centre, they did that. They indulged themselves in the material and the mercantile in a celebration of everything that Polly supposed was as far removed from the piousness of the religious mind as possible. They ate in fast-food outlets, and lingered over make-up counters trying lipsticks and perfumes. She had always felt uncomfortable before in pandering to Evelyn’s need to indulge in what she and her young friends called ‘girly stuff’. When she had been their age it was the slashed leather jackets and porch ghoul mascara of Siouxsie Sioux that had inspired her, not this plasticky world of pop princesses and squeaky clean boys. But now she took it up with relish, the pair of them returning home sometimes after Arnold had returned from church, bright with sugary energy and glittery purchases, their breath sweet with carbonated drinks. Though it only seemed to please Arnold that they had found things to do in his absence.

He went regularly to the church all through the summer, taking a break only when they went on their fortnight’s holiday to the Languedoc. There, he seemed restless and agitated, complaining about the heat and the fact that their house didn’t have a swimming pool. He was like a smoker who’d given up smoking, though Arnold had given up smoking before Polly even knew him. She thought it was because they were on their own, when usually they holidayed with friends who had young children, so that Evelyn would be occupied, and would give him some time each day to read and write. Though he never did much reading or writing on holiday, and it puzzled her that he had always looked on the summer holiday as an opportunity to catch up on those things, when everyone else could see that they must be the worst possible times to seek the necessary seclusion and concentration, when all around him people were having fun and asking him to do things.

And this time the matter of religion penetrated even as far as this crumbling farmhouse in its grove of olive trees. She had overheard a discussion he was having with Evelyn. She had asked him about the cavemen, and if they would ever get into heaven. What about the people who built Stonehenge?

‘Heaven is not like a club where you have to know the password to get in. I think they’ll allow anyone in who’s lived a good life.’

‘That’s not what Irina said. She said the cavemen wouldn’t be allowed in because they are descendants of Adam, who disobeyed God. But I think it’s so unfair. If God made human beings, why did he wait until two thousand years ago before he let people into heaven? Why didn’t he come down earlier, in the Stone Age, or the Bronze Age, at least?’

‘Well, we are the lucky ones then. A bit like the fast lane at Alton Towers, where you can get quick entry to the ride, while all the cavemen have to wait in the queue.’

Polly had listened to this conversation from downstairs, wondering if she should intervene. She realized that they had never had the conversation with Evelyn that they thought they would have, when they had to explain what happens after death. She remembered an incident when Evelyn was much younger, perhaps just three or four years old. She had begun crying uncontrollably because she had convinced herself that she and Arnold were going to die and leave her on her own. And they had both struggled to deal with the situation, Evelyn had been completely inconsolable for an hour or more, she almost seemed to cry the humanness out of herself, becoming something more like a riled gamebird or distressed tree monkey. She had been touched in a profound way by it, because it seemed to mark the emergence of Evelyn’s own independent consciousness, an awareness that her parents were not only separate individuals but ones susceptible to damage, to change, or that could be lost altogether, that the world was not the safe protective nest in which she had existed so far, but that there was a darkness beyond the nest that extended for ever. It was her own sudden awareness of her dependence.

They had reassured Evelyn that, although people do die, her parents were likely to be around until she herself was an old lady. There was no need to worry. The words themselves had no effect, and Evelyn’s anxiety could only be worked out by what seemed like an almost metabolic process, carrying on until she had run out of tears. They had ended up singing nursery rhymes together, and their gentle sweet rhythms seemed to finally draw the fear of death from her thoughts, and she returned to the safe shores of childhood. But where had it come from? That was when they realized they would at some point have to talk about death, and decide what to say. But they never had agreed, and now, without any consultation, he seemed to be telling her there was a heaven.

After Evelyn had gone to bed, she spoke to him about it as they sat on the terrace with a bottle of wine beneath a Van Gogh sky.

‘Did you listen to yourself? Did you hear yourself speak?’

‘I had to say something, and just because you are explaining the religious point of view, doesn’t mean you subscribe to that view.’

‘You said “we are the lucky ones”, “we’ll get into heaven”.’

‘I was joking.’

‘How can you joke about it – do you want our daughter to grow up thinking heaven is a real place?’

‘She knows it’s not a place,’ said Arnold.

‘What disturbs me more is that Evelyn is now starting to think of you as someone who knows about religion. She sees you go off to church every Sunday. She asked me the other day why we don’t go as well.’

‘But she knows why I’m going there, doesn’t she?’

‘I’m not sure she really understands.’ And Polly thought she could add, ‘and who does?’ but didn’t. And religion wasn’t mentioned for the rest of the holiday.

There was something she remembered from her student days – perhaps it was George Eliot, who claimed that she gained all the knowledge she needed to write about French Protestant youth in a single glimpse she’d had through an open Parisian doorway into the home of a pasteur. Some of the Protestants were seated at a table round a finished meal. When added to her existing stock of knowledge about France, Protestantism and youth, the glimpse was enough to furnish an entire world in her imagination. So it was a shock, on returning from France, to find that Arnold, on the first Sunday back in England, resumed his routine of going to church. And more than that, he had begun going to midweek meetings as well. Not at church, but in people’s homes. They were informal discussion groups, he said. He had been invited, and so he thought he should go. He said the chance it gave him of seeing more deeply into the lives of the people he was researching would be invaluable. He would see them in their own homes.

‘Arnold, how long is this going to go on for?’

‘Oh you know, when I feel I know enough.’

She tried countering with the George Eliot example. He knew it well. It was quoted in Henry James’s The Art of Fiction, something he used regularly in his teaching. In fact, she now suspected he was probably the one who told her about it. ‘We can’t all be George Eliot,’ was his riposte.

‘Do the people there know you’re just doing research?’

‘Yes – though they may have forgotten.’

‘What about Vera and Angus – have they forgotten?’

‘I think they might have,’ he chuckled. ‘They think I’ve been saved. I don’t really want to remind them.’

‘Do you think that’s fair, deceiving people like that?’

‘I’m not deceiving them. I’m just being polite. If someone tells you they believe they are going to heaven, it’s very rude to contradict them.’

‘They think you’re going to heaven, do they? You’ve booked your place already.’

‘From what I can gather it’s quite hard to avoid going to heaven. There’s almost no talk at all about the other place.’

‘Well, I won’t be going to heaven – so you won’t see me there.’

‘I won’t see anyone there, because I’m not going either.’

‘Then it’s rude of you to lie to the Christians about what you believe.’

‘Oh, they won’t mind. They’ll just try harder to save me. They are very hopeful when it comes to saving souls. They never give up. That’s something I’ve learnt about believers, they just never give up, and they always look on the bright side, and they love everything. The best ones do, at least.’

‘I would find that endlessly irritating. And it would have irritated you, once.’

‘Oh, it does. They can be very irritating. The thing is, it seems forced, at first. But then you begin to see it isn’t. They are driven by something. They keep asking me when I’m going to bring you along.’

‘Don’t you dare even think about asking me. I wouldn’t be seen dead . . .’

There was nothing in her past that could explain Polly’s aversion to religion. Her parents were both born-again atheists, and the school she had attended, though C of E by name, paid almost no attention to religious matters outside of the once a week RE lesson, which, as far as she could remember, was taught by secular teachers as bored with their subject as their pupils. At university there had been the encounters with the Christian Union, targets of mockery and scorn from most of her friends, the feeling of dread whenever one of them caught you in conversation – and yes, there had been a friendship with a woman who left to become a nun. An English student, like her. The student had befriended someone from the Christian Union and been lost to them. She dropped out in the third year. Did she really become a nun, or was that just a rumour? Well, she can’t have been a very close friend, or she would have known. Now she couldn’t even remember her name. But what she did remember was the apparent disappearance of this friend. The way she dropped out of view completely. Given that she had been a quiet, unassuming woman in the first place, meant the vanishing had not been so noticeable, and maybe the friend had been more susceptible than most, but still – the complete disappearance, as though she had never existed in the first place was, looking back on it, rather shocking. But Polly’s aversion to religion had little to do with that particular incident. It was already there, ready formed by the time she got to university. The Christians were like another species, pure and clean of heart, when she and her friends were into punk and its aftermath, the Christians maintained a timeless decorum, and looked at the world around them with continual disapproval. In many ways Vera was the perfect adult incarnation of those happy clappy students, but somehow, because they were both mothers, a deeper bond existed between them, that superseded spiritual beliefs.

Perhaps she had to go back further into her family to understand the origins of her aversion. She knew little about her grandparents, but perhaps it stemmed from them, giving her own parents an innate aversion bordering on disgust, which had been passed on to her.

She began looking for signs that Arnold had become a Christian. It seemed ludicrous at first, to be thinking of this question at all, because surely if he had become a true Christian, he would not be ashamed of the fact and would announce it with pride. He would not lie about it. Lying was a sin. She knew that such reasoning was rather simplistic, and that being a Christian didn’t mean you were unable to do anything but blurt the truth, but at the same time she thought Arnold might be in some sort of transitional phase. And knowing her distaste for religion he might well be reluctant to proclaim his conversion. Yet he couldn’t conceal those tell-tale signs – the peaceableness, the calmness, the optimism. These were qualities she had noticed in him, that had grown in recent weeks. Or so she felt. Hadn’t he always been an optimist? What about his lack of complaint when doing household chores, his performance of good works around the house? What had happened to his domestic laziness?

She made the decision to delve into his study to see what she could find there. Normally she would not have had any qualms about doing this. She quite often ventured in there if she happened to be passing, usually after running out of coffee mugs downstairs. She would find a trove of half-finished mugs, each with a stone-cold puddle of coffee at the bottom – occasionally full cups frosted over with particulated milk. And during these forays she might glance at whatever was left open on his desk. Unfortunately his handwriting was so difficult to read she could only tell from the shape of the words on the page whether she was looking at a poem or not. She had not noticed the pages of solid prose that would indicate a novel was in the making, but then maybe he was writing it straight onto his laptop.

The safest time for her to investigate his study now was, of course, Sunday mornings, when he was regularly and reliably away for four hours, giving her all the time she needed. Yet she still felt a sense of guilt when venturing in there, not as a casually interested observer of her husband’s workspace, but as someone entering what could now be thought of as hostile territory, looking for clues to something she couldn’t understand. His laptop was on the desk, closed up like an oyster. To her annoyance, when she woke it up, she found it was password protected. There were the usual stacks of books and manuscripts – the fat envelope that contained Martin Guerre’s poems was on the floor by the chair, still, it seemed, awaiting Arnold’s response. To her surprise, the sight of it made her smile. She was tempted to read through those poems again to see if they were as she remembered them, and picked the envelope up for a moment, but then put it back down again, not wanting to be distracted. She looked through various notebooks – the handwriting was barely legible, she couldn’t read it. To her surprise there were several folders of what looked like new poems, stapled together with their early drafts. Conveniently he was in the habit of dating them, and so she could see that he had been busy with poetry, at a gradually increasing rate over the last few years. She wasn’t inclined to spend too long looking through them for clues, though she could gather from their titles (which were legible) that he was exploring the already well-charted territory of his first book, and gave no evidence of sudden Christian conversion. She looked through his bookshelves instead. Poetry, poetry criticism, some novels. Dante’s Inferno. And a little book that froze her. The Bible, a pocket edition. She picked it up and examined it. It was old and well thumbed, but was not something that had always been in the house. She remembered Arnold saying something about a favourite poet of his who used to read the King James Bible every day for an hour just to get his poetry voice working. He was a secular poet, not a religious poet. Was this what Arnold was doing? And if he was writing a novel about a religious person, then of course he would want to look at the Bible. What was really surprising was the fact there weren’t more books on religion evident. All this research he was doing, and there wasn’t a single work of theology on his desk nor on his shelves, apart from this one little pocket Bible. And where were the notebooks for this new novel? Although she couldn’t read much of the handwriting, she could read enough to tell that his notebooks were full of the sort of random observations that he kept all the time.

She remembered the occasion when she was working in the publicity department of Carpenter and Wylde, when many of the desks in the office looked like this, until a new management broom came in and swept them clean, making everyone keep tidy work spaces.

She had never had to read so much, not even for her finals at university. She would be handed a manuscript in the afternoon and then asked for her opinion the following morning, and if she couldn’t give a detailed, insightful reply her standing in the office would soon begin to fall. She had begun to master the art of reading a novel in a few hours. She could get through a manuscript in a day and absorb probably about forty per cent of it, and given that in most novels it seemed that only about forty per cent of the writing was worth reading, she felt she could talk about such a novel with confidence.

Then one slow afternoon she took a call from the organizers of the W. H. Auden Awards.

‘Hello, I’m so thrilled to be able to tell you that one of your authors has been shortlisted for our award.’

‘Fantastic, who is it?’

‘Isn’t it fantastic? The author is a poet, Arnold Proctor.’

‘Wonderful.’

‘And we were hoping that you would be able to send us some publicity information, perhaps a photograph of the author, that we can use on our promotional material.’

‘Arnold Broccoli?’

‘Arnold Proctor. I’m so sorry. This is quite a bad line isn’t it? Just for the record, could you tell me something about his background? This is his first publication, isn’t it?’

‘Do you mind if I get back to you on that? I’ll just need to go through our publicity files.’

‘Of course not, I’ll look forward to hearing from you.’

This was in the days when computers were still in their infancy, all the information was kept in folders held in filing cabinets. She could find no trace of anyone called Arnold Proctor.

She found the head of publicity, having had to wait for her to come out of a meeting.

‘I’ve had a phone call from someone wanting publicity information about a writer called Arnold Broccoli. I mean Proctor. Arnold Proctor.’

‘Are you sure he’s one of ours?’

There were other publishers under the same umbrella company, occupying different floors of the one building. She phoned upstairs and downstairs, but no one had heard of Arnold Proctor. She wondered if she should phone the W. H. Auden Awards to make sure they had the right poet, or publisher. But then she found one of the senior editors.

‘You should ask Vita, she does the poetry list.’

‘Vita?’

‘Vita Cartwright. She doesn’t come in much, once a month to have a long lunch with her old Bloomsbury friends, less so now that we’ve moved out of Bloomsbury. If she remembers she pops in here to look at the submissions, usually leaves without opening anything. She used to be a poet herself, but nothing published since about 1938.’

She went to Vita’s desk, which had somehow escaped the new management broom. There was simply a heap of stuff on it, roughly conical in form, consisting of manuscripts, envelopes, magazines, pictures, dried flowers and box files. She couldn’t touch anything for fear of causing an avalanche. Vita’s filing cabinet contained no files but instead ornate and empty wine bottles, articles of clothing and an empty bird cage. She asked another editor, at the neighbouring desk,

‘Do you have Vita Cartwright’s phone number?’

‘Oh no, she doesn’t use the phone. She only responds to letters.’

‘Does she live in London?’

‘Somewhere in Surrey, I think.’

She had no choice in the end but go into the managing director’s office, Miranda Mulholland, the only person in the company to have her own door, which was nearly always closed.

‘I’m trying to contact Vita Cartwright, one of her authors is up for a prize.’

‘Oh, Vita’s dead dear. Who is the author you are talking about?’

‘Arnold Proctor.’

Mulholland looked blank. ‘It does ring a bell. What is the prize he has won?’

‘He’s been shortlisted for the W. H. Auden Award.’

‘Oh, that’s quite good. We should let him know as soon as possible. He’d be very happy.’

‘That’s what I was wanting to contact Vita for – I’m so sorry she’s dead.’ Without warning, and without feeling at all sad, Polly felt the seep of tears.

‘I’m sorry, dear. I forget there may be people in the office who have known Vita. She was such a secretive old sweetheart. I thought to make a proper announcement but she was here so rarely I truly forgot all about it. Did you know her well?’

‘Not at all, actually. I hadn’t heard her name until today.’

The thought that Arnold might be having an affair occurred to her now and then. In the past there had been one or two occasions when she had had cause to wonder – when she caught the way he was looking at a woman or, more rarely, the other way round. He claimed invisibility as far as the opposite sex was concerned, but she knew there was a certain type of woman who found him attractive. Women like her, for example. She couldn’t be unique. This time she doubted it because she detected little sign of unhappiness or guilt in him. He seemed blasé and calm in everything he did. Their lovemaking continued in the precautionary and routine way they had adapted since the birth of their daughter – nothing too elaborate or extravagant that couldn’t be instantly covered up if their child intruded, which she often did. She read that one of the first signs that a man was having an affair was the sudden appearance of new sexual techniques or interests in the bedroom. Well, there certainly hadn’t been any of those. But then she read somewhere else that a certain man is duplicitous and conscientious enough to make sure he doesn’t bring any new habits into a well-established lovemaking routine. She strongly doubted whether Arnold was duplicitous and conscientious enough.

She thought about the time she finally met him, at the awards ceremony. It was a tight-lipped do, the award presented by a celebrated poet she was embarrassed to find she’d never heard of. She saw her own poet standing awkwardly, a little drunkenly, with the other shortlisted authors. Something about the awkwardness attracted her. She went over to him.

‘You must be Arnold, I’m Polly.’

She had grown used to meeting distinguished authors, so meeting an unknown poet was easy enough to handle.

‘Hello, Polly.’

‘I’m one of the publicity assistants at Carpenter’s. We’ve spoken on the phone.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘Many congratulations.’ She felt suddenly tongue-tied.

‘Thanks. Is anyone else here? From Carpenter’s, I mean.’

‘No, but they all send their warmest congratulations, I’m afraid they are tied up with other things tonight.’

‘All of them?’

‘Yes, except me.’

‘Even the poetry editor?’

‘Oh, didn’t you know?’

‘Know what?’

‘Your editor is dead.’

Arnold gave a shrugging laugh, as if to say, That’s all I needed.

‘I’m so sorry – someone should have informed you, I can’t believe they haven’t. Did you know her well?’

‘I never met her actually, so no, I didn’t know her at all.’

‘That’s good. No one in the office seems to have known her either. But she must have had a great affection for your work, she would have been so pleased that your book is on this shortlist, I’m sure.’

‘Actually, I’m beginning to wonder if she published me by mistake. She may have thought I was someone else.’

‘Oh I’m sure that’s not the case.’

‘There is another poet, called Andrew Porter. He has been very successful in the magazines and with the competitions, but he has never had a book published. I wondered if she got our names mixed up. She was very old, and she once called me Andrew, in one of her letters.’

‘Well, you can rest assured, all of us at Carpenter’s know you are Arnold Broccoli, not Andrew Porter, and that you are a much better poet.’ She put forward a jokingly clenched, comradely fist.

‘Did you say Broccoli?’

‘No, I said Proctor. Andrew Proctor. Arnold Proctor.’

‘Now that the poetry editor is dead, will they carry on publishing poetry?’

‘I’m not sure, Arnold. I expect so.’

‘The rumour is that they were running down the poetry list anyway. Now that Vita’s gone, they have the perfect opportunity to dump the list.’

He was quite drunk, and his teeth were stained with red wine. They slept together that night, literally, as Arnold went out like a light as soon as he was under the covers. Polly had never slept with a man so soon after meeting them even though, as a frequent attender of literary events like this one, she had been given countless opportunities. Perhaps it was that he, unlike the other men, had made so little effort in trying to impress her. In fact, she found it so hard to keep his attention or interest, she wondered at first if he was gay. No, he wasn’t gay, instead he seemed to live in a state of permanent distraction. Even so, she soon found that he would, without showing any obvious signs of affection, do absolutely anything for her. He would heel, or roll over like a dog. One phone call and he would drop everything to be by her side. The devotion baffled her. And he seemed almost painfully honest and trustworthy. The idea of him deceiving her, it was too troubling to even contemplate.

She sometimes wondered, on the mornings when it was quiet in the shop and she was alone in the back with her tanks of pulp, lifting pages out of the stewed fibres, if what she was doing bore any relationship at all to what happens in a church. She had read the lazy articles about artists in their studios, and writers at their desks, talking about sacred spaces. The cave of making. Arnold’s desk was such a space, but one that was unadorned and unritualized. He was not the kind of writer who filled his space with mementoes and talismans. His desk was little more than a pile of rubbish, somewhere in the midst of which art was being slowly put together. Yet even in that seemingly random configuration of codexes, mugs of pens, newspapers and half-eaten food, there seemed a kind of precious order of things. Then she realized what it was – in giving no thought to how things were arranged, Arnold’s placement of objects was perfectly aligned with his thought processes – when he finished reading something, he placed it somewhere, in relation to all the other things he had placed. In this way, the desk was an extension of his mind. It was his consciousness solidified. And that was what made it seem precious, or sacred.

Her own space was more ordered – the long benches for working and cutting, the drying racks, the shelves of inks, dyes and glues, the pulp tanks, the sink area, the storage bins with their bales of materials, the tubs of dried rose petals, leaves, bark. It was a space dedicated to a process of production that reminded her, in the very few times in her life she’d been to church, of the careful and considered orderliness of the Christian sacrament. When she lowered a frame into the pulp, it sank into an impenetrable morass of broken-down matter, and when she lifted it out, a perfect rectangle of paper held within the frame, dripping. It had to be treated as carefully and as respectfully as new-born life. If she thought about its origins, from the unstitching of the carbon dioxide molecule to the felling of an elderly tree, it seemed a miracle more wonderful than anything dreamt up by religion.

She hardly saw Vera now. The sewing evenings had petered out over the summer with few people able to make the commitment, and Vera had stopped attending before then anyway. Evelyn and Irina’s always turbulent relationship seemed to have passed a point of redemption and the regular invitations to stay at Irina’s house were no longer offered, and Evelyn had no inclination to invite Irina to hers. The mothers in Evelyn’s year no longer waited in the school playground but saw their children off at the gates. They were old enough now to find their own way into the school. So the little community that came into existence for ten or fifteen minutes every morning had ended, except for those with children in a lower year. She missed it. It was a chore that had become a special part of her life, and its passing marked another small moment of transition, another step taken in Evelyn’s progress towards independent adulthood, which had once seemed impossibly remote. And the thread that connected her to the community of other mothers had become ever so slightly weaker.

She did try to find out if something had happened between Evelyn and Vera’s daughter, but no amount of questions brought any satisfactory answers.

‘Aren’t you friends with Irina any more?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did something happen between you? Did she upset you?’

‘No.’

‘Did you upset her?’

‘No.’

‘Why then? What’s wrong?’

‘Mother – don’t you know anything about relationships? For God’s sake!’

She managed to catch Vera at the school gates one morning. They had walked past each other, Vera showing no sign of recognition. On an impulse Polly turned and ran to catch up.

‘I’m so sorry about Evelyn and Irina, they seem to have fallen out.’

‘Yes,’ Vera said thoughtfully, as though she hadn’t noticed before, and had just been made aware of the fact, ‘it’s a shame.’

‘I wonder what happened. Evelyn doesn’t seem to know . . .’

‘Well, Irina has stopped talking to me about anything to do with her personal life.’

‘Isn’t it strange? They seem to have decided to become teenagers before their time – over the summer holiday, just like that. The things Evelyn comes out with, I can’t help laughing at her.’

‘Irina’s the same. They are growing up fast.’

‘It’s a pity when that happens – it means we have less chance to meet for a chat.’

Vera agreed in a non-committal sort of way. ‘Yes, we should still meet up, but without the children.’

She started moving away. Polly understood that the promise to meet up was an empty one. As their conversation had progressed, she saw that their friendship was over. There was a new and uneasy formality to how they spoke. They spoke in generalizations and clichés, not the intimate language of friendship. They no longer spoke with the expectation of mutual comprehension. They spoke, she later realized, like former lovers who meet unexpectedly.

She also realized that she had to grab this moment, so before Vera was fully on her way, she held on to her physically, laying a hand on her forearm.

‘You are aware of Arnold’s situation, aren’t you?’

‘Situation?’

‘I mean the fact that he is doing research for a novel. That is why he is going to your church, he is writing about it.’

Vera looked confused, in a genuine way. She gave a short, uncomfortable laugh and set her head quizzically aslant. ‘I’m sorry, Polly. Where has this come from? What are you saying about Arnold?’

‘Your church, whatever it is . . . Arnold is researching a novel with a religious theme, that’s why he’s attending. He’s not a believer, not a convert.’

‘Oka-ay . . .’ Vera said, drawing the word out with a querying cautiousness, as though she was unsure if she was talking to someone who was mad. ‘I’m not sure what this . . .’

‘If he is pretending he is there for religious reasons, I don’t think it’s fair of him to deceive you. If he joins in, if he prays and sings and kneels and gives thanks to the creator of all things or whatever it is you do, then I think he is being too devious for anyone’s good. I just don’t think it’s on, that’s all. There are limits. There are boundaries. I think you should know.’

There was a pause, during which it was clearly Vera’s turn to say something, but she seemed to be waiting for more from Polly. So she said, ‘I’m probably speaking out of turn. It’s nothing really.’

‘No, it’s OK. I’m glad you’ve said something. Arnold has taken a lot of interest in us. Perhaps things will be clarified at the retreat.’

It took a moment for Polly to realize she didn’t understand that last remark.

‘I’m sorry? What retreat?’

Vera looked uncomfortable again, as if she had said something she shouldn’t.

‘Oh – just this thing we are having at the end of the month. We go to Wales, some of us. For a weekend of prayer and reflection.’

‘And Arnold’s going on this, is he?’

‘I’m sorry, Polly. I thought he would have told you.’

That evening, with Evelyn in bed, she confronted him in his study. He spent all his time in there now, giving them rare opportunities to talk freely.

‘How long are you going to go on pretending,’ she said to him.

‘Pretending what?’ He had turned round in the black Mastermind armchair they had bought in Ikea.

‘That you haven’t become a Christian.’

He closed his eyes and shook his head sadly, as if to say, not that old chestnut.

‘How many times do I have to tell you, I’m not a Christian, I’m not thinking of becoming a Christian, I’m not even thinking of thinking of it.’

‘I spoke to Vera this morning. She said you’d booked yourself in for some sort of religious retreat?’

‘Oh that. What about it?’

‘Weren’t you going to tell me?’

‘Of course, when I had a moment. It’s not something that’s at the top of my mind.’

‘You’re going on a religious retreat, you’ll be praying and singing and praising the Lord.’

‘Like everything else, it’s just for research.’

‘Vera didn’t seem to think you were doing research. She seems to think you’re a believer.’

‘Did she say that?’

‘No, but I could see it in her face, the look of discomfort when I said why you were really there.’

‘She already knows why I’m there. You don’t think I’d really lie to them about it, do you? I’ve told them I just want to observe, for research purposes. You were making a fool of yourself.’

He added that last comment under his breath. She chose to ignore it.

‘I’ve come up here to tell you that you aren’t going.’

‘Aren’t I?’

‘No. I’ve had enough, Arnold. You’re definitely not going to that retreat, it’s just a step too far. And you can stop going to that church now as well. You’ve been going for months. How much research do you need to do for God’s sake? You must know more about that church than the regular believers by now.’

Arnold didn’t say anything but sat in his chair sulkily, swinging gently on the pivot.

‘You don’t understand,’ he said quietly, ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘Got to? Got to? What does that mean?’

As though snapping himself out of something he said, ‘It’s too good an opportunity. They only do it once a year. I need to see what happens there.’

Polly felt weakened slightly in her resolve. But she couldn’t just let him go to the retreat, she had to have something in return.

‘This novel of yours,’ she said, ‘tell me about it.’

He looked at her in shock. ‘You know I can’t do that.’

‘Then show it to me. I don’t need to read it, just show me the pages you’ve written, show me the computer files. Show me the notes.’

Arnold looked at his laptop, tapped tentatively at the touchpad, stirred the cursor around the screen.

‘I can’t really even do that, I’m sorry. What is it? Don’t you believe I’m writing a novel?’

What she wanted to say was – no one is entitled to that amount of privacy, in a marriage. You can have your separate space, your study, your notebooks, but you can’t have places from which I’m totally banned. I don’t care if you are a writer, I have a right to know what you are doing in here. I have a right to see the evidence. What other type of man would claim such privilege? Not even the obsessive railway modellers or woodworkers would shut their wives out completely. But this claim to artistic privacy put Arnold – it came to Polly in a sudden flash of unwanted inspiration – in the same category as the husbands who mined new cellarage beneath their houses and lived secret lives there. She had recently read about one such who had kept a place like that for years. Or worse, it put him in league with the dungeon-keepers who raise whole families enslaved in a secret basement. But it was an unsayable thought – to liken the profession of writing to the worst of human behaviour – it would have been a terrible insult. Yet she could not help thinking it, and after she left the study in exasperation, she continually had the thought that Arnold was constructing such a space in their lives. Invisibly, he was working at some sort of structure that she could only sense as an architectural presence. And one day, it would be revealed, a gleaming towering church in her back garden.

There was another reason Arnold couldn’t go to the retreat, and that was because it was on a weekend when they were meant to visit her parents. On the Friday, they talked about it. He repeated that he would not get the opportunity again, that he had to go. Her parents wouldn’t mind if he wasn’t there, he said. What did it matter, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d missed a Sunday at the ugly house. Polly felt suddenly weak in her argument. It was true that occasionally Arnold was unable to go because he was away at a conference, or attending a literary festival or was just too busy with teaching-related work, and Polly had gone to her parents without him, taking Evelyn with her. She didn’t like going alone to visit her parents because it made her feel like a child again, and she hadn’t enjoyed her childhood. They had had a number of rows about it, over the years. Arnold thought that they visited her parents far too frequently. Because he was an orphan, he felt frustrated that he wasn’t able to counter their influence on Evelyn with his own parents. How Evelyn would have loved them, he sometimes lamented, and the house they lived in, with all its art and music and books. Had they still been around, Evelyn might have been more interested in such things.

‘Just promise me,’ she said to him on the Friday evening, ‘once you come back from this retreat, you will be finished with your research. No more going to Vera’s church on Sunday. Ever. Do you understand?’

‘Not ever?’

‘No. If you go back, I’ll have to assume you’ve become a Christian.’

‘And then what?’

Was he teasing her? Did he still think it was a joke?

At the ugly house she felt vulnerable and afraid. She had thought about cancelling her visit, but something made her decide to keep to the normal routine. Evelyn was happy to find that some of her young cousins were there, as both brothers had come this time, and brought their whole families. But when Evelyn went off to another part of the house, Polly felt even more alone, and prey to the old values. Her birth family seemed to tower over her, in the absence of her own. Without Arnold they seemed to think themselves more entitled than ever to offer any advice and criticism they wished, and there was no end to it. How much money was the shop making? Why didn’t she branch out into gifts and souvenirs – they lived near a popular tourist attraction, why didn’t she sell pictures of the cathedral, or porcelain plates with the cathedral on, or Union Jacks?

‘The age of paper is dead, sweetheart,’ said her mother, who had never shown much interest in paper when it was an abundant thing. ‘Only a fool would throw everything into making paper at a time when everything is going onto the internet. No one writes letters now, no one writes on paper. Haven’t you heard of computers? There is such a thing as email. You are a funny girl.’

It should have earned their respect, as a daughter of builders, that she was earning money as a capitalist, making something with her hands. But they seemed to think paper was not something of any proper value. Not the paper she made, at least. Why make paper, they wondered, when there were mills that could turn out rolls of perfect, pure white paper thousands of miles long, day after day, against which her paper was like some awful recycled rough-textured stuff from the bottom of a packing crate. Trying to compete with the big boys when paper was in decline and the market was sewn up by the conglomerates – it was crazy. It seemed to them like someone trying to compete with Sony by knocking up home-made televisions. It was pointless and doomed to fail.

‘No Arnold, this month?’

‘No, Arnold’s gone away.’

‘Oh? Where’s he gone?’

‘Wales.’

‘Wales? What on earth for?’

‘He’s doing research.’

She braced herself for the opinions that would be sure to come, about the folly of writing anything other than potboilers.

‘What’s he researching?’

She decided to be honest.

‘He’s writing a novel with a religious theme, and he’s gone to Wales on a religious retreat.’ In the hush of puzzled silence that followed this statement she felt it necessary to add, ‘To do the research.’

They were seated around the table for lunch. She noticed odd looks askance from other members of the family – her sisters-in-law exchanged glances across a bowl of steaming sprouts.

‘It’s a funny old thing, religion,’ said her father, using the phrase, word for word, that she had heard come from his lips whenever the subject of religion was raised in his presence, ‘you either believe it, or you . . .’ And as ever, he left the sentence unfinished, hanging. For some reason, it seemed, he could never quite bring himself to utter the negative, with regard to religion.

‘He’s been going to church for the same reason,’ she tried saying this in as relaxed and unconcerned a way as possible, ‘joining in with prayers and singing hymns.’ She laughed. No one else did. They looked rather concerned.

‘Have you been going as well?’ said her mother.

‘Me? No. I couldn’t bring myself, not even for research. I’m not sure how Arnold can stand it actually. He hates it as well. The hypocrisy . . .’

‘They’re all just in it for themselves,’ said her mother, to general nods of agreement around the table, as she set off on one of her favourite hobby-horses. ‘The priests, the Catholic Church. It’s all a racket. Like everything else . . .’

It had not occurred to her before, but she now saw that her parents’ aversion to religion had, like everything else in their lives, an economic source. It was all to do with money. Nothing that came into their lives or came out of it did so on anything other than a river of cash. They hated this fact, but they put up with it. They did more than put up with it, they let it completely govern their lives, so that doing anything that didn’t make economic sense was utterly pointless. This meant that they regarded anything they did for recreational pleasure as simply a way of using up money that had been earned. They had taken a pragmatic approach to life to a vulgar extreme. She had tried to put her view across many times over the years – that just because money is important doesn’t mean it is everything. Her father would lean back in his chair and laugh meanly at such a sentiment. Of course, now she understood. Their hatred of religion stemmed from its claim that money wasn’t everything. She could make that claim because she had the security of her comfortable upbringing. The Church could make it because it was wallowing in gold stolen during the Crusades. Or whenever. But her parents couldn’t make that claim because they had nothing else to fall back on. They were frustrated. Deep down they knew that money wasn’t everything, but they just couldn’t fathom what else there was. Polly felt a flutter of nervousness at the thought that her opposition to her parents put her on the side of God.

It was a showery day. Rain would pound the plastic roof of the conservatory where they ate, for a few minutes, and then be replaced by bright sunshine. Under the strain of the sudden changes in temperature the whole conservatory seemed to creak and crack arthritically. The weather was all around them and yet they could hardly seem further from it. Around the table people constantly changed colour, went in and out of shadow. Later the sky opened up and sunshine established itself and the lawn quickly began to dry out.

‘It would be quite nice to sit outside,’ said Polly.

Her mother wasn’t keen. ‘Would it be worth getting the furniture out? You’ll be going soon.’

It seemed they couldn’t just go in the garden. It had to be prepared for them, the garden furniture had to be got out of the garage, the swinging bench thing that they had bought recently, which Polly thought looked like a floating settee, under a gondola-like canopy, had to be set up. Sunshades had to be erected and correctly positioned. At home, if they used the garden, they just went out there, maybe taking a blanket to sit on.

‘I might just go out anyway, I need some air.’

And so she stepped out onto the lawn alone. It was a large, well-kept garden, almost all the work of a hired gardener, and the view across the Weald was mesmerizing. It was not a house she had known as a child. She had grown up somewhere much smaller, and every time she came to her parents’ house now she had to readjust her conception of the family home.

At first she remained alone in the garden, everyone else seemed to be busy with something, but soon she was joined by her sister-in-law Holly, Mikey’s wife. Of her two sisters-in-law she was more wary of Holly. She trusted her less. She was the worldlier of the two, always dressed fashionably, always fabulously turned out. She had been flirty with Arnold when she first appeared at the ugly house, and somewhere deep inside herself she had never forgiven her for this, even though she understood that she was just a flirty sort of woman who communicated with most men that way. She had brought two children with her from a previous marriage, and now her daughter with Mikey, Tabitha, was three years old. The little girl was with her now; she was beautiful but seemed quietly nervous of everything. She hardly ever spoke, and then only in soft murmurs in her mother’s ear. Polly didn’t really know what to do with her whenever she encountered her, she was so different from Evelyn.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t read any of Arnold’s novels,’ said Holly, as she guided Tabitha by the hand round the edge of a flowerbed, ‘I don’t get a lot of time for reading.’

‘Arnold hasn’t written any novels. This would be his first. He usually writes poetry.’

‘Well in that case I’m sorry I haven’t read any of his poetry anthologies.’

‘And he’s only written one of those.’

‘Oh . . .’ She didn’t seem to know where to take the conversation next, and Polly, a little meanly she acknowledged to herself, didn’t want to help her. She had come out here to be alone, and to not worry about Arnold.

‘I lost a husband to religion once. It was weird.’

This piece of news, delivered so tritely, seemed too big for the mouth it had come out of.

‘I haven’t lost him. Didn’t you hear what I was saying in there? He’s doing research. I haven’t lost him to religion.’

‘I didn’t say you had. I’m just saying, I had a husband who went over to religion.’

‘As though that gave us something in common. But it doesn’t.’ Polly had to recalibrate her tone of voice. ‘I’m sorry for snapping. I’m tired.’

Holly was silent for a few moments, and Polly could almost hear her thinking how to frame the next statement, how to present her thoughts about Arnold. She approached closely, still with Tabitha in her hand, who was trying to reach out to pick the flower heads.

‘On the other hand, I can tell you’re worried he’s gone over. You put on a good act in there, laughing about it, but I can see it in your eyes. You’re worried he’s become religious. Believe me I know the signs, I’ve been there.’

Fury rose up in Polly’s chest, at the effrontery of this woman to make assumptions about her marriage, but the anger would not express itself and instead held back at the brink. She realized that, presumptuous though this woman’s remarks were, she had valuable knowledge. Polly wanted to hear more.

‘What happened to your husband?’

Holly shook her head at the memory of it.

‘Our son Jamie nearly died from meningitis when he was six. Tom said prayers by his bedside every day. Constantly. He’d never prayed before, though he did go to a religious school, but he’d never prayed like that. And Jamie got better, thanks to the antibiotics, but Tom insisted it was a miracle. From then on he became a true believer, started going to church, reading the Bible. I didn’t know what to do, where to look. He made this separate space for himself in our lives that was nothing to do with me. OK, it was only an hour or so every Sunday, and I wouldn’t have minded if he was playing golf or going to the gym, but going to church was different. I wondered if I should join him, to be supportive, but I just couldn’t bring myself to. I don’t have strong objections to religion, but I can’t sit in a church and be told what to do and how to live my life by a man wearing a dress. So I stayed out of it, and we didn’t talk about it and things just carried on for a while. But it was never the same again. Tom had changed. It was almost like he was having an affair, and in a way he was, but with God. God took priority in everything that went on in our lives from then on. It was like there was a stranger in the house, someone in the room with us all the time – at meals, watching the TV. At times I was scared. He stopped drinking. He’d always liked a pint with his mates, but he stopped going to the pub. He started seeing less of his friends, and more of the people at the church. Then the criticism started. If I wore anything too revealing in public, and I’m not talking tarty, just a normal bit of cleavage – he would start getting upset. If I went out with my friends and came home a bit drunk he would give me these filthy looks. Then he started trying to turn the children against me, using me as an example of how not to behave – “You don’t want to end up like your mother . . .” I actually heard him say that to our daughter. Then he wanted them baptized, and then he wanted me to start coming to church. He said I needed to be saved. He got more and more fanatical. In the end I just had to leave.’

Polly was touched by Holly’s openness, and her obvious desire to share her experience in order to help.

‘Thank you for telling me all this, Holly. And I’m so sorry about Jamie, it must have been terrifying.’

‘In some ways it was. But I knew we’d caught it in time, and I just had complete trust in the doctors that they would cure him. My doubt in them never wavered. But for some reason, Tom didn’t think science was enough to save Jamie. It was almost like he was waiting for an excuse to become religious.’

By now Holly had let go of Tabitha’s hand and the child was now roaming the edge of the flowerbed, talking to the flowers as though they were a class of children and she was their teacher, her quiet voice making very little sense, as far as Polly could hear.

‘Like I said, Arnold hasn’t become religious. If he had, why would he hide it?’

‘I’m sure you’re right, Polly. Arnold hasn’t got the religious spark in him that was triggered in my Tom. There has to be something there in the first place for religion to do its work. You look at Arnold, you can see there’s nothing there.’

Polly began wondering if she should get offended all over again at these remarks, but by now Buzz had come into the garden, with a can of beer in his hand. He and his father headed over to the garage and began work on filling the lawn with furniture.

Arnold didn’t get back on Sunday night till very late. It was a long drive from Wales and he had texted her regularly to give her updates on his journey. But she was in bed and pretending to be asleep when he got home, at half-past one in the morning. She could follow through sound the entire progress of his journey through the house, even though he was doing his best to be quiet. She heard the front door go, then the soft hiss of the pipes as he filled the kettle in the kitchen. Then more sound from the plumbing as he used the downstairs loo. She heard the stairs creak and the study door click as he poked around in there for a while. Then the closer sound of the bathroom, where she could monitor the brushing of his teeth, more tap noise, more rinsing. He was in the bathroom for longer than normal, making no sound at all.

And then he was in the bedroom. She could hear his feet on the carpet, hear his breathing, the rustling of his clothes, the clink of his belt, the rasp of his fly, the momentary pauses now and then when he was watching to see if she was awake. Then the covers were lifted and he was inside, bringing cold air with him. She could sense him craning his neck to check on her once again. She could have murmured a goodnight to him, but she decided to maintain the pretence of being asleep. She could always tell the difference between when he was asleep and when he was lying there awake but with his eyes closed. But he couldn’t. As far as he could tell she was dead to the world, and he was soon asleep himself.

In some ways, what she feared most was that she might become someone who had feelings of bitterness towards men in general. She didn’t want to be like some of the women she knew, the worn-out, faded women who’d nurtured their good looks and had used them ruthlessly to ensnare and captivate, only then to wonder why they had been treated so thoughtlessly by those they had captured. She didn’t want to be weary of men, to be cynical, to be dismissive, and yet she couldn’t help feeling that she would become so if Arnold betrayed her. She had never been betrayed like that before, by a man. She had parted company with previous boyfriends and lovers painlessly and politely. She had lately begun to visualize her state of unbetrayal as a kind of pearl that she carried inside her, of innocence and loving trustfulness, that was perfectly beautiful and solid and hard at the same time. Over the years the cultivation of this pearl had come to matter to her more than anything, and the work of carrying it throughout her entire life seemed the most urgent and important task that she had assigned herself, after the successful raising of Evelyn. It was important because it fed all her energy, all her resourcefulness, it gave her the ability to face up to the daily challenges of life and to see them as things of potential reward. She thought that betrayal by Arnold would dash this pearl from her grasp and risk it being damaged or lost for ever. For that reason she would treat any misdemeanour by Arnold with severity, before it could damage her. That was just how she thought about things. Cultivating herself meant being in proximity to beautiful and nourishing things. Arnold had been one of these things, and his new venture into things separate from her she regarded with suspicion and fear.

She didn’t ask him about the retreat, and he didn’t volunteer any information. The next morning he was only just getting out of bed, groggy from his late night and long travelling, as she was taking Evelyn to school. They didn’t see each other till the evening. Over dinner she couldn’t hold back, it would have seemed odd not to have asked anything, so she asked how it went at the retreat.

‘It was useful,’ he replied.

‘Oh good.’

‘Very useful. Funny. And interesting.’

‘Funny in what way?’

‘Oh, you know. Christians are funny . . .’ He couldn’t explain.

‘So you got a lot of material?’

‘Yes. The dynamics are very interesting. You start to see the underlying structures. Who has the real power. I found out a lot more about how the church is organized. The politics behind it all. The money.’

‘Do they have a lot of money?’

‘There’s quite a lot of money about, yes. Or there certainly seems to be. They have some wealthy donors. They have a sister church in Rwanda. Out in the bush. They are working on building a new, bigger one on the site of the old one, with a school and a sort of seminary attached.’

‘That’s interesting.’

‘Vera and her family go out there every year for a few weeks, to help.’

‘Do they?’

‘They suggested, just as a joke I think, that we should go out there with them, or any time we like.’

‘A joke?’

‘Well, I don’t think they were entirely serious, but they did say it would be a very cheap holiday, we would only have to pay the air fares, everything else would be free, and actually I could get the university to pay mine, if I make a claim for research funding.’

‘So you’ve given it some thought, then . . .’ Again the feeling of fury that rose in Polly’s chest, that she had to hold back, almost as if she was having an attack of reflux acidity, this burning sensation deep inside her. Had he heard nothing that she had said about this retreat being his last thing to do with research? She tried to speak calmly. ‘What would we do out there, exactly?’

‘Well, strictly speaking, we would be there as volunteers helping with the building of the church, but that could be anything really – just helping with the running of things, most of the time we could be just holidaying . . .’

‘Are you suggesting that for our holiday we should go and build a church in Africa?’

‘Wouldn’t you like to go to Africa?’

‘Yes, but not to build a church. Isn’t that something practising Christians do?’

‘Daddy,’ said Evelyn, who had been following the conversation closely, ‘I’m not going to Africa with Irina.’

‘We wouldn’t even have to go at the same time as Vera’s family, we could just go on our own.’

‘Daddy,’ said Evelyn again, in an accusatory tone of voice this time, ‘do you actually believe in God?’

In the flow of conversation Arnold was able to pass over this question.

‘It’s dangerous,’ said Polly, speaking against her own instinctive understanding that Rwanda was now a safe country to visit, she wanted to use whatever weapon she had to throw against this idea of going to Africa on a mission, ‘it’s not a place to take young children.’

‘Well like I said, it was just a jokey suggestion that Vera made, she didn’t really think you would want to go . . .’

‘Oh really? Why not?’

‘She knows you’re not religious.’

‘That’s something you talk about, is it? My religious beliefs, or lack of them?’

‘We don’t need to, you make it obvious.’

She waited with increasing anxiety for Sunday, without saying anything more on the subject. The night before, she could hardly sleep, and would wake every hour, almost on the hour, all through until dawn, when she gave up any attempt to sleep again. And her heart sank when she heard Arnold begin to stir at 8 a.m., and then rise a few moments later.

‘What are you doing?’ she said quietly as he headed for the shower. Her voice froze him, he seemed to think she had been deeply asleep.

‘I’m going to have a shower.’

‘And then what?’

‘What I normally do. Go to church.’

‘But we agreed, after you went to that retreat, there would be no more. You would be finished with your research.’

‘Did we?’

‘Yes, don’t you remember?’

‘I remember you saying that, I don’t remember agreeing.’

‘Well I’m telling you now, you’re not going to church.’

He seemed rooted to the floor, unable to move forwards or backwards.

‘What’s your reason?’

Polly sat upright. ‘The reason is that I did not marry a Christian, and if you go to church today you are proving to me that you are one.’

‘Are you saying people are not allowed to change their beliefs, over the entire course of their life?’

‘This sounds like you are telling me that you have become a Christian.’

He made no move to deny it.

‘Have you?’ she said.

He stood for a moment looking at her, motionless. She guessed he was trying to judge if this was the right moment to answer honestly. And she felt sick when he gave her that answer, in the form of a small, frightened nod.

‘Say it,’ she said. ‘So that there’s no misunderstanding. Say it loud and clear, that you believe in God.’

Again he took the moment to judge if the time was right.

‘I believe in our Lord Jesus Christ.’

It wasn’t just the words, but the voice. The flat seriousness of it. The absence of irony. He tried to reassure her that it made no difference to them, that he wasn’t going to think of her differently, or even their lives. He wasn’t going to start imposing strange rules on how they behaved. She asked him if he was going to start saying grace before meals and he said that if he did he would do it silently, to himself. Her feelings of fury subsided and his reassurances had worked in part by giving her a sense of relief that at least he had decided to be honest with her and tell her the truth and she had asked him how long he had been a believer and he said vague things like it had been stirring in him for a while, he had been harbouring thoughts about a spiritual dimension to life, and that no, he didn’t believe in the literal truth of the Bible or the miracles or even the resurrection though he was still finding his way through the tenets of the faith. Attending a church meant agreeing to certain basic principles of faith, but that didn’t mean you had to believe them, belief could still be a personal thing. It was too long to go into it there and then, he needed to get ready to go to church, they could talk about it later. But Polly didn’t want to talk about it later, not with him. The problem was, she still didn’t believe him, when he said it didn’t matter, that he was the same person, that he didn’t believe in the literal truth of the scriptures. He might say that now, but his faith was probably growing, he had entered a path and he didn’t know himself where it might lead.

And the worst thing was, he had lessened in her eyes. He had become someone weaker and slighter than she had previously known. She had always admired his cleverness before, but she had always wondered about its strength. How susceptible was he, after all, to persuasion, to propaganda? Was it strong enough to resist succumbing to something that he might encounter first as a detached observer? Evidently not. She hated to think it, but the truth was she now regarded Arnold as a little bit weak and a little bit stupid.

And his faith was a stranger in the household. An uninvited guest. An admonishing angel present everywhere.

She kept thinking of her sister-in-law’s words – that she had lost a husband to religion. She almost wished he had had an affair instead. At least then she would know what she was dealing with, she would comprehend the situation. She could do battle with a scarlet woman, throw her cheating husband out on his ear, be confident that she was in the right and he was in the wrong. But in giving himself to God, Arnold had done nothing bad. The opposite, in fact. He was behaving like a good man. Like a paragon of goodness. And he wanted to go to Africa and build a church for the poor Africans, when he was someone who she had never seen put so much as a penny in a charity tin before, who avoided beggars on the street as though they were carriers of the plague. Now he would be washing their feet. So what should she do? She couldn’t throw him out of the house for being religious. There seemed no help available. The advice columns were full of salacious letters about women whose husbands had turned out to be gay, or transvestites. There was no shortage of husbands who, as soon as they were married, turned themselves into women. But there seemed nothing she could read anywhere about the husbands who run off to join a church, or who are overtaken by a sudden urge to build a seminary in the African bush.

Now, at home, she observed him carefully, trying to understand him, what he had become. He had changed remarkably. The initial smallness she had seen in him on the morning of his confession was now replaced by a sort of nimbleness, a sprightliness. He would spring up from the table after dinner and take the plates to the kitchen. He would talk with Evelyn just as he had before, but in a more relaxed and cheerful way. He was still funny, but it was a different kind of funny. A less prickly form of humour seemed to have emerged in him. He reminded her of those magazine articles she had seen around the house when she was little, that talked about humour as medicine, a tonic. He was all good clean fun now. Or was she just thinking that because of what she knew about him?

Before meals she watched for signs that he was saying grace. It was impossible to be sure, but there were quiet moments as the food was being served when he didn’t say anything, and he could have been praying, or he could have been just keeping quiet.

Evelyn, she could see, saw nothing changed in her father. And so she wondered if this was how it would continue, with the slightly more cheerful, positive, energetic Arnold, from now and for ever, and if she could accept it. Her aversion to religion was deep and visceral, almost organic. She hated the touch and feel of it, the smell of incense, the dreary groaning of hymns. She hated the smell of religion. But although she tried to find it on Arnold, she had to admit, he did not carry that smell with him, not really. In fact, he smelt sweeter and fresher than he had ever done.

These were the thoughts that filled her mind every morning at the shop now, when she was in the back with the pulp tanks, lifting the poor, soaking pages out of the water. Rescuing them, perhaps. Giving life back to the broken-down sheets, lifting them out of the water as if they were drowned kittens. To be making something was good. To be making anything.

Two people came into the shop one morning, a few days after Arnold’s confession. She could glimpse them from her bench in the workshop, through the doorway. She had never seen them before. They were a late-middle-aged couple who looked oddly paired. Her first impression was of a Native American princess married to a railway ticket inspector. She had long black hair that hung in crimped, paranoid curtains either side of her face. Heavy, dark brows, her eyes almost hidden in shadow. Her mouth was a lipless slit turned down at the ends. A square jaw. She seemed beautiful against the odds. The man was small and apologetic-looking, with small, baggy, slightly bad-tempered eyes. His hair was tatty and balding. He wore sexless greys and browns in contrast to his partner’s moody purples and greens.

She took no more notice of them until Tamsin poked her head around the door and said that there were some people asking to see her, by name. She came out of the workshop and found the pair, standing closely and expectantly together by the counter. The man spoke first.

‘Are you Mrs Proctor?’

He spoke awkwardly, not knowing where to put his words.

‘I am. Can I help you?’

‘Do you publish poems?’

‘Yes, we run a small press here, we publish booklets of poems, and other things, sometimes.’ Polly said this while trying to wipe glue off her fingers with a rag.

‘We believe you know my son,’ said the woman, ‘our son. You might know him as Martin Guerre. His real name is Ryan.’

‘He told us he sent you some of his poems. He said you had promised to publish them. And now you haven’t and are refusing to return them.’

‘He thinks you might be trying to publish them under someone else’s name – your husband’s, he says.’

‘He says your husband hasn’t been able to write a new book of poems, and so he is going to publish our son’s work under his own name.’

The couple delivered these statements as though they had memorized them. There was no anger in their voices, but rather a sense of genuine puzzlement and wonder. Polly was affected by the gentleness of their tones.

‘That’s quite an accusation to make,’ she said, equally puzzled. She remembered seeing the manuscript of Martin’s poems when she had delved into Arnold’s study, but that was weeks ago. What had become of them since?

‘We understand that, and we didn’t think it likely. But we trust our son and we always take the trouble to believe him when he says unlikely things.’

‘I don’t really know anything about poetry,’ the man said, ‘my wife knows more than me, but I tend to have old-fashioned ideas about poems. So I can’t really tell if Ryan’s writing is very good or not.’

‘Well, it is good, I assure you.’

The couple seemed comforted by this, and smiled, but didn’t ask her to elaborate on this simple evaluation.

‘I like Elizabeth Barrett Browning,’ said the woman, ‘and Emily Dickinson. But no one else. I don’t know why. When Ryan hurt himself, I found myself reading them both, one after the other. It made me feel better.’

The horrible piece of information, tucked away inside the woman’s voice, snagged on Polly’s mind like a thorn.

‘Is Martin – Ryan all right?’

The man nodded, closing his eyes in a tired way again.

‘He did something silly last week. It’s not the first time. It was quite bad. He’s in hospital at the moment, but he’s doing well.’

Polly put her hand over her mouth. By now she had walked Martin’s parents through to the privacy of the workshop.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, feeling that dragging sensation she experienced whenever confronted with a stranger’s misfortune, born of a fear that anything she said might be misconstrued or lack sufficient sympathy. Oddly it was Vera who sprang to her mind as a role model of sympathetic listening. It was the way her face registered exactly what she was thinking, the way the brow would furrow with concern, the eyes intensify. Polly could feel herself willing her own brow to furrow, and hoping Martin’s parents would recognize her concern.

But her statement seemed to have absolutely no effect on the couple. They continued as though she hadn’t spoken.

‘Do you have Ryan’s poems here? We could take them back to him. He wants to see them again.’

Having successfully stifled the urge to weep, Polly was able to talk coherently.

‘I didn’t think we had reached a decision on Martin’s poems. Sorry – Ryan’s poems. If he is still interested in having them published, I think we could make a decision very soon. This week, in fact – I can promise you.’

The couple looked at each other. They were a little taken aback, having neither sought nor expected such an offer. They didn’t say anything, but looked at Polly suspiciously. To break the silence, Polly indicated the shelf where Papyrus’s published works were displayed.

‘These are some of the books we have published,’ she said. Being mostly thin volumes Papyrus’s output didn’t take up a lot of shelf space when only one copy of each was displayed. In all they had produced just over twenty poetry pamphlets. ‘We make the paper ourselves.’

Martin Guerre’s parents looked impressed. Polly was proud of the Papyrus Press, more so than she realized, until that moment.

‘You make the paper by hand?’ the woman asked. ‘A page at a time? That must take for ever.’

‘No, I make large sheets of paper that can take eight pages of print, then they’re cut up and folded to make the book. You only need to do two sheets for a pamphlet of sixteen pages. We have done some larger ones of twenty-four pages.’

‘But even so, it must take a long time.’

Polly wasn’t sure how to take this woman’s insistence that large amounts of time were involved. Later she supposed it meant that she valued time more than anything else.

‘We only do limited runs, sometimes only fifty copies. So I have to make a hundred sheets. It takes a while, yes.’

‘It makes it quite special I suppose,’ the man said, in his sad, slightly croaky voice, ‘when you’ve made the paper yourself.’

‘That’s the idea,’ said Polly. ‘And I usually try and do something with the paper that responds to the poems in some way. For instance this book here has several poems about the sea. And so I added seaweed to the paper pulp. You can see it’s given the paper a slightly yellowy, greeny tint. But also a rather evocative smell, if you hold it to your nose . . .’

‘I can smell the sea!’ the woman said, after engulfing herself in the pamphlet. ‘That’s quite wonderful.’ She held it out to her husband, who didn’t look impressed. ‘My sense of smell isn’t what it was,’ he said, sniffing deeply at the words.

Polly, delighted, continued her tour of their publications. ‘This other book has rather a lot of references to blood in it . . .’ She saw the looks of mild horror in the faces of the couple as they wondered what she might say next, ‘and my husband seriously suggested I mix blood in with the pulp. Human blood. I drew the line at that. I used stewed rosehips instead. Unfortunately they turned out to be a bit yellowy as well. But never mind.’

‘These are very beautiful books,’ said the woman. ‘I wonder what you would do with the paper for Ryan’s book.’

‘Well, that’s an interesting question. His main subject, as far as I can tell, is paper. And our books are already made of that.’

‘Would you publish him under his pen name?’ the husband said, ignoring this dilemma.

‘Yes, unless he suggests otherwise. It’s the author’s choice how they would like to be known, usually.’

‘We would like to have a proper contract drawn up,’ said Martin’s mother, ‘so that everything is above board.’

‘Of course.’

‘And we don’t want you to feel that you’ve been blackmailed into publishing his book. He would have cut his wrists anyway, it was nothing to do with you . . .’

‘. . . It doesn’t seem to matter what happens in his life, when his mood gets dark, nothing can bring him round. Nothing.’

‘He lost quite a bit of blood this time. He hasn’t done that before. He’s taken pills before . . .’

Polly felt terrible for talking earlier about the blood paper. She tried to think of how to make up for it. She would produce the most beautiful paper for Martin’s book. She didn’t know what, yet, but it would be something special.

‘We don’t want you to publish them just out of sympathy for him. We want you to publish them because you think they are good poems. Otherwise it’s a waste of time.’

Polly nodded obediently.

‘And of course we’ll have to speak to Ryan about it. I’m sure he would be pleased to have them published, whatever he may say. His mood can change so quickly. It would help him. Give him something solid to point to and say I did that.’

They talked a little more, but the parents soon seemed to exhaust themselves of words. They continued to thank Polly for taking an interest in their son’s poems, to such an extent that she felt embarrassed. She had the awkward feeling that the conversation had somehow transformed her original offer to give them a quick decision on Martin’s poems into a firm promise to publish them.

As the couple made to leave she felt suddenly compelled to ask them a question that had sprung to her mind.

‘Do you mind if I ask you something? You said your son cut his wrists. It may seem odd, but can you tell me what he used?’

The couple looked so untroubled by this question you might have assumed they were asked it every few hours.

‘He used scissors,’ said the woman. ‘That’s one reason he was unsuccessful. They weren’t very sharp.’

She had wondered for a while whether or not to tell Arnold about Martin Guerre. Since he had declared himself a Christian, she no longer trusted him. She was interested, on the other hand, to see how he would react to the news of Martin’s attempted suicide. Knowing now how closely the boy trod the margins of rational existence, would Arnold feel some retrospective guilt at his treatment of the young man? Might he be racked with remorse for the things he wrote on his first submission of poems? If so, did he deserve to be? Now that he was a Christian, would he have a different strategy for dealing with it? The old Arnold would have felt sorry for the boy, but then nothing more. He would have tried to dismiss it as something beyond his control. What would the new Arnold do? Pray, presumably. And perhaps go and visit the boy in his sickbed, and pray by his side. As far as Polly was concerned, that was the last thing Martin Guerre needed, a born-again Christian poet who had previously written nasty comments on his poems, praying for his soul.

She also feared that, as a Christian, he would object even more strongly to the publication of the poems, emerging, as they did, from what he regarded as immoral desires. He might now share the sensibilities of that student he’d told her about, who would leave the room whenever sex was mentioned. He had seen Martin’s poems (mistakenly, in her view) as thinly veiled expressions of sexual obsession for her, Polly. His fear, she supposed, was that they would release into the world a plausible narrative of his wife’s infidelity that people might actually believe.

On the other hand, might it not be a rather cruel thing to withhold the information about Martin? Arnold had shown signs that he cared about him. She wrestled with this problem for a while, and it was forgotten about in the little storm that was whipped up by the different news that Arnold had to tell her.

He was going to Africa.

She had been in her office at home, the corner of the living room that she had furnished with a small desk and a set of shelves. She had been working on her monthly accounts, entering the data from her receipts and invoices onto a spreadsheet, when he casually dropped the news.

‘When?’

‘Probably next month. Before Christmas, at the latest.’

She turned in her chair to face him.

‘How long for?’

‘Just a couple of weeks. Maybe a bit longer, it depends. I’ve made a bid for some research leave, I’m owed a lot, so I should be free from teaching for the rest of the term.’

He seemed to think she should be pleased for him.

‘Only it’s not research now, is it? You’re going there because you want to spread the word. You’re a missionary.’

‘I’m helping out with a building project.’

‘Ha! What have you ever built?’

She didn’t like the way she said this, and felt ashamed at being so scornful. But the anger was mounting.

‘Tell me the truth. Was there ever a novel?’

‘Of course.’ She could hear the strain in his voice, he was lying in a new way, he was lying in a way he had never lied before, as someone who believed in sin. ‘There still might be.’

His trip to Africa loomed before her like a bare hill. He had been in agony for so long with his writing that she had tolerated this venture into religious territory if it was to provide him with a creative breakthrough. The thought that it might not lead to the novel he had proposed, that the novel might never have been in his mind, that this whole episode had been, from the start, a quest for some sort of spiritual fulfilment, gave her a feeling of having been betrayed. Yet there seemed no object she could fix her anger upon. She longed more than ever for the scarlet woman, someone she could scream at. But there was only God.

Polly thought – people (apart from my birth family) think I am a strong person, they think I am brave for setting up my own business, for learning how to make paper and how to sell it. They see me as someone to be admired, as someone feisty and indefatigable. But they don’t know what I’m feeling, and when Arnold told me he was going to Africa it was almost as though he had told me he was going to heaven. That he was going to die. I can’t live with this man, she thought. Now that he believes in eternal life he exists in another place.

Then there was the terror that was to come, according to her sister-in-law, when Arnold would eventually turn his thoughts towards saving her. She didn’t want to be saved. More than anything she didn’t want to be saved. I don’t want to go to heaven. If she could put her opposition to religion into a single sentence, that was it.

She needed someone she could talk to about these feelings. She wondered if she should go back to Holly, yet she dreaded it, because Holly represented the failure of this kind of relationship, the living proof that a Christian and an atheist cannot live together. Yet there must be some who do, successfully.

She became aware of churches – as buildings – as if for the first time. As if they had suddenly appeared in her neighbourhood, had sprung up like mushrooms overnight. Recent events had made them visible to her in a way they hadn’t been before. Everywhere she went she saw them, some ancient, some new, most of them in between. If she walked past one she found herself slowing down, lingering outside, reading the posters and notices on the boards, as if they could provide any answers. She wondered if she should venture in, see if she could find anyone to talk to, but the churches were locked and showed little sign that anyone ever came and went.

She decided to see Vera. In the months since their friendship had faded, she realized she had missed her. It was not that they had ever talked in a deeply personal way about anything, but rather they seemed kindred spirits, despite their different outlooks. In her absence a space had opened up in Polly’s life that could only be filled by the one who had caused it, Vera. She was proof that she could talk to and be friends with a Christian. Perhaps, therefore, she could also be married to one. And if there was anyone she would feel comfortable talking about religion with, it was Vera. And now, with the prospect of Arnold leaving her not only spiritually but physically, going away somewhere that she couldn’t follow, she thought of Vera as the only one who could offer her advice.

So she went to Vera’s unannounced. Walking up the little path to her door she felt a sudden nostalgia for the familiarity of the house, so similar to her own. She began crying, and wondered about turning back, but she had already rung the bell. When Vera opened the door, Polly could hardly see her through the warp of her own tears. And what must Vera have thought, to find tearful Polly on her doorstep, saying, ‘I need to talk to you about Arnold.’

Wordlessly she had invited her into the house, though Polly noticed a cautiousness in her manner. If it had been the other way round, Polly would have offered Vera comfort even before asking what the problem was, she would have given her a hug, a cup of tea, tissues. But instead, Vera simply placed Polly in the centre of the room where she had to deal with her own tears, while Vera stood before her, her arms folded.

‘What has Arnold told you?’

And Polly had replied, ‘Everything. He’s confessed.’

A long silence, and then Polly noticed that Vera too was crying. It seemed so odd. It was she, Polly, who was the unhappy one in this scenario. What on earth had happened to Vera?

‘I’m so sorry, Polly. I’m so sorry. I hope you will forgive me.’

‘Forgive you?’

‘I never wanted to hurt you. It wasn’t even that I was unhappy with Angus. Don’t blame Arnold. He’s sweet. He still loves you deeply. I don’t deserve your forgiveness. I hope I can make myself worthy of it. I didn’t want to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you. Something had taken me over.’

Polly had found a tissue and was holding it to her eyes while Vera was speaking, and had only been listening with half her attention, waiting for her to begin making sense. In the silence that followed she realized she had it. All of it. The whole sense.

Suddenly in command of her voice again, she spoke. ‘What are you saying to me, Vera?’

That was how it came out. A misunderstanding. A simple misunderstanding. Vera had thought she was talking about something else, and in so doing, had apologized for something Polly had never imagined. The news so wrong-footed her that the tears she had been shedding since her arrival dried instantly. It was as though she drank the emotional outpouring back into her body. As though she was resetting herself. She felt her most urgent task now was to concentrate all her attention to the words that were coming from Vera’s mouth.

‘We lost control,’ she said. ‘It was like a madness. Only that doesn’t excuse us, because we always had the power to stop it. Arnold was always frightened by what we were doing, because he didn’t want to lose you.’

‘How long?’ said Polly, astounded by her own self-control.

‘Since early spring. And then we ended it in July, just before the summer holidays.’

‘Why?’

Vera seemed to have trouble answering this question. She made several attempts, but came to a halt each time, then she cried again. ‘Shall we sit down?’ she said, when she had recovered a little. They were still standing in the centre of the room, facing each other.

‘I don’t want to sit down,’ said Polly. But Vera had already taken a seat at the table.

Polly took a moment to look at Vera’s face, suddenly seeing it as Arnold must have seen it, and a thread of recent memories suddenly lit up in her mind, connecting together the moments Arnold had mentioned Vera over the past few months, the times he had casually dropped her into the conversation, the looks she had seen pass between them when they were in proximity. How had she failed to notice them, when now they were towering landmarks in her memory? For a moment long-suppressed schoolday thoughts came back to her, of older girls, beautiful and contemptuous, the frailty of her school-self, of everyone but her knowing things.

Vera, recomposed, spoke again.

‘We aren’t made for having affairs, Polly. Arnold even less so than me. We didn’t know what to do about what we were doing.’

‘But you still did it.’

‘It was as though we didn’t know how to stop. We didn’t know the language.’

‘The language is very simple.’

So she had the scarlet woman, she had her right in front of her, to scream at, to scratch at. She had always imagined that she would fight in a situation like this. That she would raise hell, be violent, vocal. She always believed she had it in her power to do those things, but now, in the curdled reality that had accreted around her, she felt frightened, more than anything. Frightened for herself, that she was in danger of losing the thing she most treasured about herself, that pearl of pure, trusting innocence that had somehow survived all these years.

‘We couldn’t be our proper selves with each other, because we realized that out proper selves were with our families. We realized the most important thing was to protect our marriages. That is why Angus and I encouraged Arnold to come to our church. We felt it would give him the strength to tell you what he had done.’

Other paths in her memory lit up. This woman had been behind everything that had been happening in her family for months. The lonely Sunday mornings, the distracted presence at the dinner table. And she had thought he was worrying about his writing.

‘So, not content with stealing my husband’s body, you are now trying to steal his soul.’

‘I’m trying to save his soul . . . and yours . . .’

She had had enough.

‘You must never, ever come anywhere near me again.’ She said it quietly, but with thundering emphasis. Her instinct was to scream the words but she had to remain dignified. She let the words hang in the silence for a few moments, during which she saw Vera’s face, wet and puffy, looking at her with a loose, bewildered expression. Then she repeated the words, this time pointing a finger at the seated woman. ‘You must never, ever come anywhere near me again.’

And she left the house.

Her eyes were so full of tears that she had trouble finding her car. She wiped them away angrily, feeling betrayed by her own body, that it should express feelings she thought were under control. Anger was what she wanted to feel, not sadness. She was worried that someone on the street might see her drenched face and take pity on her. She didn’t want to be pitied. She wanted to be furious. She wanted to be a giant.

In the car she took some time to compose herself. Deep breaths. Checking her eyes in the mirror. The tears had stopped, but their traces remained, like washed-out riverbank grass after a flood. Her mind was having trouble catching up with her body, which seemed to have reacted in its own way to the revelation. She had to keep reliving moments from her recent past to see if there were clues that she should have noticed, but had missed. She suddenly remembered the school run, and Arnold’s sudden eagerness to undertake that particular chore. That must have been when it started. All those months ago. It was like history being rewritten. Every action, every word he’d spoken in all those months had been carefully chosen to conceal what was really happening. Now she knew, she had to relive those months again in her mind as they really were, with Arnold coming and going from wherever he’d been, hiding the traces, covering up the facts. The cleverness of his lying, the skill of his subterfuge. It made her feel physically sick. And then the anger came again, engulfing her. Then the tears. Then the anger at the tears.

It was half an hour or more before she felt stable enough to start the car. She didn’t know where to go or what to do. She didn’t want to go home. She had taken time away from the shop to visit Vera, and so she went there. As she drove she felt her old self recovering, taking charge. She hadn’t realized before quite what a sanctuary Papyrus had become. Had she gone home she would have been in uncontrollable fits of sorrow, but at Papyrus she felt composed and sane. She carried on with her work as though everything was fine, she chatted with Tamsin and Terri, aware that she was a different woman from the woman who had been in the shop a couple of hours ago, but she was able to pass herself off as normal. She wasn’t yet ready to confide anything, nor did she feel the need for support, not yet. There would be a time when she would cry on Terri’s shoulder, but not now. Now she had the shop to take care of. She had felt, on her way back from Vera’s house, suddenly concerned for the paper she had made. All those fragile leaves, thin and vulnerable. Blank sheets, nothing written on them. Unreadable. No one could take these and read them, as Vera had done Arnold. She wanted to be there to take care of them.

In the evening, she could see that Arnold was oblivious to what she knew. She had given no sign, no clue. It amazed her, her own capacity for calm self-control. She cooked a normal meal. A home-made pizza. It was something they had nearly every week, on a Wednesday or Thursday. Of all their meals, it was probably the one they most enjoyed. It was the most fun. Evelyn loved her mother’s pizzas, the colourfulness of them, the slapdash extravagance of them, the way they could be eaten without a knife and fork in a fiesta of hand-to-mouth gobbling. Polly watched Evelyn and her father enjoying their slices, playing little games about who had chosen the best portion, whose mozzarella was the stretchiest. All through the meal she maintained her composure, she had managed to lock down her rage, and had built up reserves of strength to see her through whatever was to follow.

After dinner the evening dragged on. Still he had noticed nothing different or odd in her mood. She felt as though she was in some terrible endurance contest, like in one of those ghastly TV shows Arnold enjoyed, where famous people are buried alive with rats. She sang songs quietly to herself, went about her business of clearing up and tidying away, found things to occupy herself. And then, when finally Arnold went upstairs to read to Evelyn, she got the suitcase she’d earlier packed, down from the bedroom, and awaited Arnold’s return to the living room.

‘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 had 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

Mum

Dad

David

David, it turned out, was his brother, who had emigrated to Australia. What about his friends from college, she asked his parents. Was there no one else? Yes, they said, there were other people they could ask. Ryan seems to have forgotten he has any friends, his mother said, but they are still there, and they still love him. They would be proud of him. And so his parents handled the delicate task of inviting people who loved Ryan. Would Ryan be prepared to read some of his own poems at the launch? His mother thought that yes, if he felt strong enough, he would love to be able to read some his poems aloud.

The regular attenders of their book launches could be relied upon to provide additional audience. She invited some of her own friends. People from the sewing evenings came, wearing their latest creations. It didn’t take many people to fill the little venue, once they had cleared away the display tables and put out the chairs. There was already a buzzing crowd by the time Martin arrived. He came with his parents. It wasn’t that they were holding him up, rather they were standing either side of him, as if ready to be there if he should fall. He was still visibly the young man she had last seen dressed in a suit of paper, haranguing her customers. Yet he looked older now. Perhaps it was the beard, fuller than it had been then. He was thin, or thinner. She glimpsed fresh scars on his wrists.

Polly hugged him. He almost disappeared under the pressure of her embrace, and he gave a little sigh. She had pushed the air out of his lungs.

‘I am so glad you have agreed to read some of your poems. Are you pleased with the book? I can’t believe we haven’t met before.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ he replied. He was holding a copy in his slender, slightly trembling fingers, and he admired it again. ‘I never thought I would see it.’

His parents were nearby, close to the table where some olives and nuts had been put out. She acknowledged them and they smiled. They had a slightly dazed air about them, as if unable to quite believe what had happened and so quickly, from making a simple enquiry about a stray manuscript, to the launch of their son’s first book of poetry.

‘I’m so looking forward to hearing you read these,’ Polly said.

There was a calmness about Martin now. She wondered if he was on tranquillizers, or whether having his book published had had a soothing effect on him. The only moment of agitation was when he mentioned Arnold.

‘Is Mr Proctor here?’

‘No, he’s not.’

Martin looked disappointed.

‘He didn’t seem to have any hand in making this book. Mum and Dad said they only dealt with you.’

‘That’s right, Arnold’s gone away.’

‘Someone told me he is in Africa.’

‘Yes, I believe he is.’

‘You’re not sure?’

‘I am sure he would be very happy with the book we’ve produced. It will always be special to him. I know that.’

Later, Polly took her place at the front, before the audience that was now seated.

‘Thank you all so much for coming this evening. As you know, we at the Papyrus Press specialize in producing poetry pamphlets of the highest quality, both in terms of their poetry – and I think there can be none higher where Martin’s poems are concerned – and in terms of their paper. We produce paper specifically for the book. In that way, every one of our publications is unique, not only for the words they contain, but for the paper on which they are printed. I feel the Papyrus Press has been very lucky, privileged even, to have the opportunity to publish Martin’s poetry. When I first read his poems – I have to say I fell in love. They were poems by someone who had a very special feeling for paper itself. When you read these beautiful poems, and when you hear them later, you will see that Martin – I think some of you will know him as Ryan – thinks about paper in a way that is very original and very unusual. I’m not sure that I have met someone who thinks about paper so deeply. And so I realized that the paper we made for Martin’s book would have to be very special indeed. And so we made the paper from a very special pulp that incorporates real papyrus, grown on the banks of the Nile, which I have had imported specially from an Egyptian manufacturer – yes, you can still find it and indeed there are papyri still being made to this day. But despite the fact that the name of this shop is Papyrus, we have never used papyrus in our paper before. So I am glad to say that not only does Martin’s book represent a wonderful new addition to the family of Papyrus Press Poets, it actually legitimates the press and the shop by using the product after which it is named. What can be more wonderful and fitting than that, for a book made of paper, about paper, by people who love paper?’ There was a pause while the audience nodded agreement, and murmured interestedly. The poet was sitting a little nervously on the front row, ready to take his place before the audience. ‘And so now, I would like to introduce the extraordinary poet whose debut collection, The Paper Lovers, is launched tonight – please welcome, Martin Guerre.’

There was vigorous applause and some whoops from the back of the room as Martin shakily lifted himself from his seat, stepped to the front and then turned to face the audience. A silence fell. Then, in a hesitant, at times barely audible but beautiful voice, he read his poems.