We’d met in the Bishop’s office, so that he could introduce us, then I was to allow two hours for Toby to take me to meet his colleagues. I noticed more about him this time. He wore a pale yellow-and-white striped shirt, the collar of which seemed a little high, like I remember my father wearing. Or I may have seen it in a television revival of one of those intense boardroom dramas, in which men in such shirts did barely restrained anger all the time. The shirt fell loose at the front. He didn’t need to worry that his correct collar size might show his stomach; nothing inside it touched the shirt and, when he sat, you could still see his belt all the way round.
He wore a lilac tie with snail motifs on it. He wore it on the two or three times that I encountered him in these formal circumstances, though now I come to think of it, there may have been one with giraffes too. But, surprisingly for a spook, he dressed so you noticed his clothes. I remember his young pink neck too, scoured with shaving. The dimpled chin and the flush of cheeks that came with health that didn’t need exercise, ginger-blond eyebrows, balding at the top of the forehead, a stubbly outcrop at the front, like seaweed finding purchase on a freckled rock. Tortoiseshell glasses with top-frames. Lashed azure eyes and fair hair cropped up the sides. No earlobes. Yes, I think I could pick him out of a parade.
We left the cobblestone yard of the Old Deanery and walked up the narrow lane, with its barber shop and wine bar, little changed in function, I imagine, over the past half-millennium or so. It’s a dark little passage – the sun only shines on the new world.
“Are you Toby or Rupert, then?” I said, breaking into a trot to keep up with him.
“Call me Toby,” he said and smiled. “Because it’s my name.”
“Why then? Why the business with the name?”
“To tell the truth, I think the Bishop was just a bit confused. We’d just been talking about my army years.”
When we reached the traffic, I squinted up towards the cathedral. It was eighteen minutes past eleven.
“Shall we get a cab?” asked Toby and stepped towards the pavement edge. I noticed how elderly his natural posture was. He was so naturally fit, but held himself in that manner of the old moneyed classes, bent forward from the waist, his shirt collar emerging tightly from his suit lapel.
His hand should really have held a tightly furled umbrella as he hailed a taxi. I wasn’t inclined to follow his burst of military energy and stayed by the glass of the sandwich shop on the corner. The taxi passed and he stared after it indignantly. Another was passing in the opposite direction, its window open. I lay my forefinger and thumb on my tongue and whistled hard. I can do that, always have been able to, and it’s handy in the field. The cabbie glanced across his resting elbow and swung around. Toby smiled at me.
He barked something authoritatively through the cab’s front window and then turned, holding the door. His right hand performed a little swish towards me, as if sweeping me into the back. Momentarily, I wondered how many luckless bankers’ daughters had been swept along similarly in the outer reaches of SW postcodes. Swept off their feet, he probably imagined. What a knob.
Inside, as the cab swung left at the Circus for Victoria Embankment through a knot of office workers out for sandwiches, I thought Tobes was leaning forward to shut the sliding plastic window to the driver. But he was just jerking the flap of his doublevents on his jacket from under his bum.
“Is the Foreign Office the big marble one with the murals in Parliament Street?” I said, wanting to sound informed but uninterested.
“Ye-es, I expect so,” he said, attempting a patronising smile that made him look like he was going to sneeze. “But we’re not going there.”
An irritating pause, into which I was expected to contribute.
“So where are we going, Sherlock?”
Looking back, how I wish that I’d just asked the cab to pull over and let me out. It was sunny, I could have walked for a bit.
“We’re going sarf of the river – to sis.”
“We’re going to visit your sister?” I imagined a snake-hipped redhead with an Alice band and freckles. Clapham, probably. I was glad he’d attempted an Ealing-comedy accent. It put him further into my classification.
“No, not quite. I don’t have a sister.” Ah, actually that made more sense. “S-I-S. PO Box 010. Six.” He turned towards me for the first time. “Vauxhall Cross.”
I looked out of the window at the tourists around Big Ben, in what I hoped was a “whatever” kind of way. On Millbank, I expected the cab to turn left over Lambeth Bridge, crossing the Thames at the Palace, where I’d been for the legals not long before, but Toby leaned forward again and called for the cabbie to drop us just the other side of the roundabout, on the north side of the river.
A tenner through the window, some change, a receipt, then another come-on swish across the traffic and through a huge arch, decorated high above with gilt roses, in a great, light-grey granite slab of office block. Doors to be swished through, plastic identity card shown, turnstiles to be thighed through, the odd “she’s with me”, but apparently no need for me to tell anyone who I was, no desk-diaries with an elastic band across today’s date for me to sign. You’d have thought I would have to prove who I was, but being in Toby’s tow was enough.
Then a lift. Down. If I’m honest, this really was a surprise. But perhaps we were going to a bunker. Or a theatre.
The lift gave out on to a white-bleached, concrete corridor with the lighting ducts in piped conduits. Swing doors and a little platform, next to a rail-track of a small gauge. It had more in common with a mine than London’s Underground network.
“Hi-ho,” I murmured.
No response from Tobes.
“How sweet,” I added. “Do you have clock-golf too?”
“It takes us under the river to our office,” said Toby, flashing his card in front of a reader again. “Saves anyone being seen going in and being compromised. There are two trucks, one at either end, with passing points in the middle, so a train is never more than five minutes away. Like a ski-lift.”
“Or a tunnel of love.” I was beginning to enjoy this.
The driverless funicular rattled into our chamber station and we got in. It was blue, surprisingly modern, big windows, sliding doors. It hummed into the illuminated darkness. I decided to try being nice.
“Is this your normal commute, Toby?”
It was still slightly mocking, but I said it with a smile.
“No, I live in Clapham. I take the bus in and use the front door.”
Ahh. I felt slightly sorry that I’d mocked him now. Perhaps he was just a fresh-faced boy who knew no other world. But I was chuffed I’d got Clapham right, even if I had got the sister part of it wrong. He would live in a shared terraced house, close to the common, with a knock-through living area, with friends who knew what he did for a living and were quietly impressed, though they would pull his leg too. So he was used to it, but knew his job was quite cool, even if he’d applied for it, like everything else, on the internet.
The partner train flashed past – I saw no one in it. Then a more modern little station, more space, a flasher lift and into a corridor that felt high. I caught a view of the Thames sliding by, as if in the opposite direction now. Some big swing doors, open-plan behind tinted screens, staff at computers. A meeting room with two tall slit windows, facing only another wing of the same building, with similar slits. A fat-faced, smiley woman at the door.
“Would you like coffee or tea?”
I went for water, Toby held a hand up and said he was “good”.
I wandered away down the length of the table: “Who are we meeting?”
“Middle East desk. I don’t know who. I’m just the bag carrier.” He looked at me and grinned. “No offence.”
The room filled suddenly, led by a pale and skinny man, probably prematurely aged at around fifty, with blotched skin and a closely shaven balding head. He smiled a crinkly eyed grimace that gave his lids the texture of foreskins a
nd shook hands, having dumped some buff folders.
Behind him was a younger woman, tallish and slim, with sens-ibly managed hair, a pale blue suit about a decade out of date with a beetle brooch on her left lapel. She sat and opened a red and black notebook and a small laptop.
The third was another woman, shorter, with an unattended bob, showing grey streaks that weren’t highlights. She wore a ready, broad and rehearsed smile and leaned in to shake my hand warmly as if she knew me. She came too close with her greeting, wanting to convey that she was my friend and colleague in this troupe. When she’d moved from behind the others, she’d have known the first thing I’d notice was her dog collar on a navy clerical shirt, under a charcoal sleeveless cardigan.
This little triumvirate had been together elsewhere, I thought. They had gathered before I arrived for the purpose of this meeting, and I wondered what they’d been saying about me and what was on Miss Buttoned-Up Oxbridge’s laptop, as Toby, suddenly deferential, slid by wall-side and out of the room, closing the door without any acknowledgement from the new arrivals. This wasn’t apparently a display of rudeness; they all knew each other too well for that.
“Roger Passmore,” said Baldy, nodding in affirmation of his own name. “This is my colleague Catherine and I wonder if you’ve met Cara Carrington, who works in the mission division of Church House?” Cara. Of course. From the big meeting room at Lambeth Palace. But not bustling out this time.
I could have arrived for an interview, which in a way I suppose I had.
“I don’t think we have,” said Cara, tilting her head and furrowing her brow, which I recognised as the universal pastoral signal that “I’m happy to know you – please trust me with all your secrets.”
No doing, sister – I hope to Christ I never looked at anyone like that. “We were in the same room once at Lambeth Palace,” I said. “But we weren’t introduced.” I saw a flicker of insecurity cross her face and that was satisfying.
We sat at the phony, walnut-style table, Passmore at the head, the Rev Cara by Catherine opposite, so she was on the edge of the meeting, having to lean in on her forearms to show her engagement with me.
I remember there was a sort of washing-up session at the top of the meeting. Passmore was clearly used to this kind of recruitment exercise and was nothing if not a stickler for detail. He delivered a smooth preamble on the Official Secrets Act as if barely listening to himself. He said it was generally misunderstood and that we didn’t sign it so much as be bound by it permanently, like any other law.
He made what may have been a previously successful gag about some people exercising their right to opt out of it in favour of Her Majesty’s hospitality – even Rev Cara didn’t laugh – and wound up by saying that “in any event”, he found it easy talking freely with clergy because his work “in all kinds of ways” suited the confessional.
Rev Cara smiled fit to burst at this. I mentally cast her as a circus act called Seal of Confessional, balancing a ball on her nose and slapping her short fins together.
“We just wondered if you could help us with some analysis we’re doing of the peace process in Palestine,” he said.
That’s what he actually said, I remember now.
“The difficulty we have is ensuring the safety and security of aid workers in occupied territories in Palestine, particularly Christians.”
Oh yeah? You don’t give a damn about the safety of aid workers, I thought at the time. But that’s not what I said. What I said at the time was all quietly expert and thoughtful.
“Why would you have to?” I asked. “My understanding is that aid workers are there at their own risk, with the UN supposedly providing some blanket cover.”
I knew from my own time in Palestine that we were meant to invoke the United Nations for free passage, but that it was useless in the field. It’s hard to invoke international law under mortar attack or with a muzzle in your mouth, though I’d been lucky. I’d heard stories. There are more aid workers killed out there than you ever hear about in the Western papers, mainly because so many of them aren’t European.
Rev Cara interrupted, her voice soft but firm. I bet life was tough for Mr Rev Cara.
“Much of the work we’ve done there has been facilitated by the Foreign Office. The government has a duty of care to those who work there. I’d like to think the Church does too.”
What textbook did she get that out of ?
“The Christian population there is dwindling, as I’m sure you know,” said Baldy Roger. “Most of them are Russians now, looking for an American passport. But the Christian axis continues to offer a crucial arbitration between Israel and the Palestinians.”
I didn’t need to hear all that stuff. Baldy even asked if I knew Palestinian Christians are called Living Stones. Yeah, I did actually. And Israel was trying to get blood out of them. But I didn’t say that.
It went on like this for a bit, the usual old rubbish about the Christians keeping the peace by being the via media between an Israel that occupied the entire region and a Palestine that wanted to wipe it from the map.
After a load of this, I asked the big question: “So where do I fit in?”
“Ah,” he said, taking this as encouragement that I would want to. “We want to hold a conference out there. A Christian conference, one that reaches out to the other faith communities, that provides a neutral platform for speakers from all three religions, a bridge across the conflict that both shows the importance of the Christian presence but which really sweats its unique opportunity to be the catalyst for a lasting peace in Palestine.”
I promise you he did talk about “sweating” the Christian opportunity.
“We’d love you to convene one of the three days of the conference. We’ll have the Archbishop of Jerusalem, of course – and we hope we’ll have Canterbury too – but we really thought it would be helpful to have someone who knew the region and its problems at ground level, as it were.”
“And a woman,” said Rev Cara, with a concerned face now.
“An aid worker, a Christian priest, someone who could speak authentically but wasn’t just one of the big figureheads of religious leadership,” said Baldy and Cat (as he called her) patted this profile of me into her laptop.
“Right.” I sat back and laughed at the three of them. Not unpleasantly. I was doing charming, like I did on my women’s committees. “But why are we here?”
They sat still. They didn’t surely think I was making an existential point?
“I mean, why are we sitting in intelligence services talking about this?” I’d wanted to say: why are we sitting in this hollowed-out volcano like Bond villains? But I didn’t want to offend them. Not yet.
“Why are we here, Cara?”
Again, I wanted to say, why are you here?
They all looked at Baldy, but he didn’t speak, so I went on. “You know how this usually works. Some bloke from the Foreign Office has a word with the Archbishop’s Council, then suddenly the Anglican Communion’s office is organising a conference in Israel. Why not that? I’d never have known the difference. Why the spooks?”
“We indirectly cooperate, as you know, with a number of arms of government and the intelligence service is one of those and it’s a two-way street. . .” Cara began to drone on, colouring slightly and taking the subject seriously for the first time that afternoon, I thought. Baldy let her finish.
“All that Cara says is right,” he said. “Much of the coordination for a project such as this would be done through the Middle East desk here. Nothing odd about that. It’s where the expertise lies. And then there’s your expertise, Natalie. We’d want to dovetail into that. It’s a question of excellence.” Oh, my Lord.
“And . . .” He paused for effect. “There’s something else we’d like you to do for us.” We all stayed quiet, so he had to carry on. “And this is where this meeting departs from its formal agenda.”
Cat, I noticed, had stopped tap-tapping into her laptop.
“T
hank you, Cat,” said Baldy. She stood without a word and left the room. Such economy, three swift movements and she was gone.
“The women priests now outnumber you,” I said to Baldy, but what I was really wondering was why Rev Cara was still here.
“Cara has been putting much of the conference together for us. And she suggested you as the ideal candidate for this role.”
“Role?” I was struggling again to take this seriously.
“We wondered if you’d be kind enough to run an errand for us.”
Baldy was talking like a geography teacher taking an orienteering exercise.
“What sort of errand?”
“We simply need an envelope swapped with another envelope in Jerusalem. It’s quite safe and simple. It’s a simple exchange of contracts. Letters of undertaking on both sides to abide by the protocols that establish the Church in Jerusalem as a mechanism for a peace agreement. Not so much as arbitrators, not that proactive, more acting as the clearing house.”
I snorted slightly and shrugged.
“Why would you want me to do it? Why me? Why don’t you just email each other? Or why not have Cara be your postman?”
“It’s just about a degree of anonymity, Natalie. For right or wrong, people who have worked closely with the Foreign Office are perceived as people who might . . . unhelpfully recognise people on the other side of the argument. Cara is one of those people. They will similarly send someone who has had no background in negotiations or discussions. It’s just a way of acting in good faith.”
“It’s really not a big deal,” said Cara suddenly. “It’s just that both sides have to behave in the same way.”
“And what would those sides be?” I asked. There was a pause so I filled it. “Let me take a wild guess – I suppose I’m not running your errand for dispossessed Palestinians?”
“We’re hoping that Hamas will respond in kind to the initiative we’re holding out.”
“It would be a tremendous service, if you could help us,” added Baldy Roger. His forearms were on the table. He’d finished his pitch and was now sounding supplicatory.
A Dark Nativity Page 11