I stood and talked to the verger for a minute, a stocky chap in a livery gown who wanted to go on about the acoustics being poor, though I think not hearing me may have been a positive advantage for him. I’d had a glass of astringent Argentinian white and avoided the white-bread grated-cheese-and-pickle sandwiches – it’s not authentically C of E unless the catering’s third-rate – when our man from the FO slid sideways through bodies and stood in front of me. He was shorter than I’d expected. I noticed he had a paisleypatterned pocket square.
“I thought you won on points. And you might have had a knockout in the final round if the ref hadn’t stopped it.”
“Hardly a heavyweight contest,” I said, just graciously enough. “Actually, it was tennis. Do you think I’m a heavyweight then?”
“Only polemically.”
Toby introduced himself again and gave me a card.
“I was on the Middle East desk when we did some work with your people on Lebanon relief. I think we used to speak to Adrian. When were you out there?”
“Not long after Israel started closing its borders,” I said rather gratuitously. “Well done on that, by the way.”
I like getting to the point.
“We’re actually much more supportive than you might think. It’s the Christians that are the great concern out there now.”
“Why’s that? Aren’t they all Russians trying to get American passports?”
I wasn’t about to be patronised by a diplomat.
“We’re not too bothered who they are. We’re just anxious that they don’t get pushed out entirely. Christians provide the balance out there.”
“Is that right,” I said flatly. “Actually, I don’t think it matters if there are no Christians in Palestine, does it?”
“They’re crucial for peace. They have a role to play. You’ve had that role to play. You’ve always been there for us.” It was unclear whether he meant me specifically or Christians in general.
“There were no Christians at the crucifixion,” was all I said.
He was smiling again and that annoyed me.
“We’d like to talk to you more about it. I wonder if I can introduce you to my boss, Roger Passmore? Perhaps you know him. Can I reach you at the cathedral?”
“Sure, it’s the big building at the top of the hill,” I said.
He called the following day. Apparently contact had already been established with the Bishop’s office. That’s how we’d link up. The Bishop would bring us all into the loop. From such banality does evil grow.
5
The Old Deanery is tucked down one of the capillary lanes that track the sclerotic web of medieval thoroughfares to the south of the cathedral. It’s a gently beautiful seventeenth-century house behind in-and-out gates and a cobbled courtyard, with a twin flight of stairs up to its black front door. As with all these places, you buzz “Bishop’s Office” to be let in and there’s a large hall with grey carpet over an uneven floor, some iconic gifts and a model of the cathedral to keep you amused while you wait.
For the posh-boy visitors, it must be a bit like waiting to see the headmaster. I remembered that feeling even from my school and pressed my thighs together as I sat on a chair to see if I could still get that schoolgirl sensation in my hip muscles. His Cerberus, an elderly lady, more tired than retired, with dyed honey hair, occupied a desk at the front window of this room, through which you can wave rather than use the buzzer if she’s at her station. We’d exchange some listless pleasantries about the day, which drove me to take a pad with me and affect to make some notes of preparation.
The Bishop had just “had someone with him”, Cerberus said, and opened his heavy carved door for this previous guest, a grey little chap with dandruff on a shiny navy jacket with a tiny, smug Christian-fish badge on its lapel. The Bishop never gave it the “Have you met?” routine and we guests just smiled an acknowledgement of our change of shift, and this worthy administrator of some church-outreach initiative was gently dispatched to his further ministry, with the afterglow of a little episcopal affirmation.
“Natalie, how good to see you.”
He took my hand, less in a shake than an embrace. I wouldn’t have objected in this instance to the quickie English doublecheeker, because the Bishop didn’t occupy your space and knew when to abandon it. He was warm, without cloying. I liked him then. I don’t know if I could like him in the same way now. I don’t know that I could like anyone like that now. But actually I can’t be sure how much he knew of what he was letting me in for at that time, or even now.
His office is a modest room at the back, with fading magnolia walls above panelling, some intimidating bookcases, heavy embroidered vintage curtains, his laden desk facing a window on to the backyard. We sat in a three-piece by the marble fireplace. He always took the upright upholstery by the firedogs, back to the working door, his face lit from the only window. I took its opposite number, eschewing the threadbare and somewhat subjugating chaise-longue. The Bishop has a fop of grey hair that he pushes back regularly, more in distraction than affectation, and kind blue eyes behind rimless spectacles that engage rather than simply examine you. He was filling out a bit, I noticed, as he sank a bit in the chair, a little pot developing under the shimmering purple shirt.
“How are you, Natalie?” he asked plainly, neither a platitude nor a piece of bleeding-heart pastoral ministry.
I assured him I was fine, referenced my brief at the cathedral, and, just before it became too routine, he lobbed in a couple of mild indiscretions about Dean, rolling his eyes in a post-adolescent way. It didn’t amount to much – something like “. . . in that particularly exhibitive way he has made his own” – but it served to show we were on the same side.
“I hope the Dean indicated that we’re in the endgame of your little unlocal difficulty. It looks at last like we can say that there won’t be criminal charges. At any rate, the UN’s administrative tribunal seems to have lost interest in taking your case any further. The lawyers will send the paperwork to me and their letter will be copied to you. As expected, but good news nonetheless.” He coughed. “There will have to be the odd quid pro quo. While the Archbishop of Sydney no longer wants to make a martyr of you, they’ll want something to save face, I suppose. We’re now at the level of negotiating a settlement for you, so I’m hoping that it’s all about money rather than about something more vindictive like punishing you.”
“We’ve established what I am – we’re just discussing the price, right?” I said.
Some months previously a columnist in the Daily Mail had called me a media tart.
“That’s about the size of it, Natalie,” said the Bishop, ignoring the reference. “But I can’t be certain they won’t want an ounce or two of your flesh in some form or other. A grovelling apology or something.”
“And at the ICJ level?” We’d originally been threatened with the International Court of Justice when the Sudanese government was involved.
“Always too heavy-handed. It’s been a long haul at the diplomatic level, but I think that’s over. For appearances’ sake – and because it’s technically an Anglican Communion and not just a Church of England matter – it’ll have to be finished off at archbishop level. So it’s been knocked upstairs and you’ll have to go down to Lambeth and see the team there, I’m afraid. But after that we should celebrate.”
“Thanks for all your support, Bishop.”
“Now let’s move on. I think I may have something rather interesting for you, Natalie,” he said fairly quickly. I was conscious that Cerberus had this down as a half-hour slot, rather than the full hour.
“I do appreciate you’re not under my authority these days.” He chuckled and arched an eyebrow. “As if you ever were. But I was talking to a chap at the ADC, who tells me that DFID has made some progress with the Foreign Office and Number 10 in getting some proper support for the Palestinians in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.”
A translator would have described how the Bishop had b
een briefed by an emissary from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the margins of the Archbishops’ Development Council. This was set up by the offices of Canterbury and York around the same time as the Quartet – the UN, the US, the EU and Russia, the foursome that had spent the best part of a decade wringing its hands and providing money-laundering services – allegedly to coordinate global Anglican efforts in aid and development with reps from government agencies.
“I need hardly tell you, of all people, how important that could be for the Palestinians,” added the Bishop.
I smiled in the face of such rank flattery. Silly boy, I thought. What I said was: “It’s been a long time coming. Why now?”
“It’s all wrapped up in the peace process of course.” Well, stone me. “I’m presuming the Quartet have brokered something when it comes to the repatriation of refugees. As you know, that’s a huge sticking point.”
And I thought I’d come to talk about women bloody bishops.
“What, money to stay where they are or to return home?” I asked eventually.
The Bishop paused just long enough to acknowledge “home”, clocking what was effectively my position statement.
“A mixture, it seems,” he replied, setting aside some paperwork from his previous meeting. “There would be money to raise conditions immeasurably for those who decide to stay where they are – and you’ll know how much that is needed. But then, crucially, vast investment for those who return to an unoccupied Palestine. As I understand it, the Western partners would effectively be subsidising an infrastructural rebuild of the West Bank and Gaza that, with some cooperation from the Israelis I might add, would bring living standards up to those of the settlements.”
I snorted in affable derision.
“I know, I know,” he said, holding his hands aloft and swinging his lowered head in theatrical disbelief. “I’d have thought there was a greater chance of the entire Knesset galloping through the eye of a needle than seriously examining the prospects of Arabs living the lives of Israelis behind 1967 borders, especially with American money. But there you go.”
“American?” I turned one ear towards him.
“Apparently so. Well, it’s UN money, funnily enough, but you’d look to three-quarters of the Quartet for its source. That’s who is really behind it.”
“No Russian money?” I asked.
“Actually, there is some,” he said as if he’d just remembered. “But it’s private, not state, capital. They wouldn’t want to be left out.”
“I have a friend who works with the Russians in the Middle East,” I said. “She may know.”
He said nothing.
“How much in total?” I pressed.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.” He was swinging his head again and spoke softly. I wondered then and I wonder now if he did know the sums involved and just wasn’t letting on. Those in Whitehall who run bishops train them well.
“Anyway,” he said more loudly, suddenly sitting up and swinging one, short-socked ankle over his knee. “The Foreign Office has, again as you’ll know, quite a collateral interest in the plight of Christians in the Holy Land, such as they now are. And this chap I saw at the ADC thought that we should be talking about how the Christian voice in the Middle East could be speaking up for the peace process in general and this scheme in particular. That seems to me to be rather a good idea. And,” he cleared his throat lightly, “of course I immediately thought of you.”
The Archbishops’ Development Council was one of the interminable talking shops that the Anglican Church gets off on. I’d always rather enjoyed the sense of superiority I felt from having served in the field when it came to overseas aid. I thought of saying so, but kept silent.
“You’d be ideal,” he continued. “You know the region, you can speak to the issues and, er, you’re quite high profile.”
“You mean I’ve been in the newspapers.”
“I mean you know how to handle the media.”
“I stole a lorry,” I laughed. “And they took photos of me. That hardly makes me the acceptable face of the Anglican Communion.”
“You gave your all in one of the toughest places on earth to have to serve a ministry. People relate to you. And to your motives. It’s easy to trust people when you know where their heart is.”
He’s good at this, I thought. But he did like me, I knew that. He’d backed me as soon as the UN’s heavies had come after me. Us. It wasn’t just the threat of prosecution over the lorry business – it was the way I’d played out in the media too. I knew that the prosecution of me by the Aussies and the UN would have been a whole lot worse if the Bishop hadn’t come out publicly in my support.
“This is a matter of enormous regret and we take it very seriously,” he had said at the time. “But foreign-aid workers work under great stress and at great personal risk to themselves. And there is no greater risk than that attached to serving the innocent victims of a war zone.”
Yes, I remember it verbatim. I liked him too, for standing in my corner, and I thought that as I watched him try to persuade me to go back to the Middle East.
“Would you like more coffee?” he asked.
I’d entirely forgotten the half-pool of milky slurry that remained on the small table beside me. I flicked up a hand from the arm of the chair in deferential refusal.
“I wonder if you’d meet our man from the Foreign Office. His name’s Roger Passmore and he carries a brief for the Middle East desk. In any event, I’d really value your take on the whole thing.”
I sensed our meeting was drawing to its close.
“If you could come back here, I’ll introduce you to his young aide-de-camp, a nice boy. But Natalie, if you do get involved – and I do hope you’ll go and see him at least, no obligation to buy, as it were – I want this to be purple-stole business. It’s far from clear that any of this will happen. I don’t think it’s any more than a radical flyer at the moment. And with all the delicacies of the peace process and our roles in it . . .” He trailed off. “We really need to keep this tight, yes?”
Our roles in it? Our? But I nodded: “The seal of the confessional.”
“Good!” he slapped his thighs. “I’ll need to introduce you to the Foreign Office people. And then perhaps you’ll come back and tell me how it goes.”
We started to amble across the office.
“How is Adrian?” he asked. I said he was fine too. He was good on partners’ names, less good on knowing anything useful about them. “And how is the monstrous regiment going? I hope the trad jazz isn’t winding you up too much.”
“The usual mix of hormones and politics,” I said. “I think most women who would make bishop have lost the will to fight and I’m guessing that’s a position that doesn’t keep an established Church awake at night.”
He stopped short of the door. “I hope you haven’t lost the will to fight, Natalie, nor the will to live. We need you.”
It was the sort of thing he said on the way out, the anteroom salutation, but I did wonder how much it was a thinly veiled deal – do me this favour, Natalie, and there’s a bishopric in it for you. I hoped not, because he was a friend and it would mean he’d developed a different, more formal and manipulative approach to me. But it was demonstrable that this hadn’t been the meeting that Dean had anticipated we were going to have.
As I walked up the lane towards the worker ants of Paternoster Square, I knew I couldn’t share this agenda with Hugh, and it irritated me that this was an issue that was changing two friendships. I didn’t have many – never had. With both the Bishop and Hugh, I’d always talked freely and we’d built a decent back catalogue of protected confidences. And then there was Sarah; I couldn’t ever see her as my contact with the Russians. But after that conversation it all felt very different, like I’d been taken into an inner sanctum. I was aware that I was responding in a new way. Or perhaps I was just pondering all these things inside, in heart rather than mind. For one thing, I hadn’t responded
at all when he mentioned Roger Passmore’s name and I couldn’t work out why.
Hugh was right. I was called by an antediluvian churchwarden at St Mary the Virgin, Elizabeth Street, and was asked if I could “help out at all” during its interregnum, the hiatus between incumbent vicars when the laity run the church. We settled on Trinity Sunday in May. It’s always difficult to find a priest to preach at Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is complex and incumbents invariably want to swerve it.
“Will you preach?” he asked.
“Yes.” Of course I’ll bloody preach. Women do that too.
I prepared something on the word “if ”. If God is three persons, what does that mean? “If ” is an enormous word for its size. It’s loaded with so much hope and expectation. Trouble is, nobody notices it much these days. It’s a cheap little word. Kipling must take the blame for that. Mention the word “if ” on its own and your mind defaults, like an internet search, to that ridiculous phallocentric verse.
I didn’t say that in the sermon, of course. I just said I visited his house once, an unfinished Jacobean pile in Sussex, with a colleague from a teaching agency. It was a sad place. Kipling had known so much of the world, created his own universes, was so very rich, and it came down to this rather poky, rambling house, surrounded by his books, where he grieved for his only lost son whom he had encouraged to go to war with the world. What would the Almighty know about that, eh?
That’s how I dealt with the first two persons of the Trinity. What I didn’t say was that I hate the poem. If you can take all the shame and disappointment that’s thrown at you and make a decent fist of pretending it’s not really there, then you’re a real man, my son. What do the little ladies do, I wonder – throw themselves at this lantern-jawed bovine, splattered with his own blood and disappointment, I suppose. Yes, Kipling really did for that word.
A Dark Nativity Page 6