“No,” I said, gathering myself to leave, “that’s well above my pay grade. You have ways and means. I’m an ex-aid worker, that’s all. And one who’s in trouble for nicking a lorry at that . . . but I expect you know all about that. I’d play with your conference, but I’m not about to start fronting the next American–Israeli peace process, or whatever it turns out to be. I wouldn’t know what I was doing. It’s a daft way to do it anyway.”
“Well, I hope you’ll think about it. You’re ideal and it would be a huge help,” said Baldy and Rev Cara looked sad. “But let’s talk about the conference anyway. We’ll be in touch.”
And after a bit more chit-chat I left. Toby was curiously already waiting outside in the corridor and delivered his Persephone back through the underworld. That night I looked Cara up in Crockford’s, the clergy reference log. Leeds Uni, then Westcott House, Cambridge for her training. Parish ministry in Derbyshire, then mission work for the Archbishops’ Council. That was it. It obviously didn’t tell her story. But then my entry looks as innocent as hers, too.
8
Funny, isn’t it, how looking back you remember incidents that change everything, but you don’t notice at the time how they’re changing you. These slower swings in direction are more like slow changes of season; I’d discover after a while that the climatic conditions I lived in had dramatically altered, without identifying a particular moment when my second spring had taken me to priesthood, or when autumn became winter in my marriage.
Then there are those life changes that combine the sudden and the seasonal. An event that changes everything for ever, so that we can see later that we were different people either side of that moment. I was a different woman with that ridiculous little team in the bright and shiny Vauxhall Cross office, with the forced flora under its twenty-four-hour lighting, than the woman I was subsequently. But that change wasn’t incremental. It came in a single moment. That moment of change, after which nothing ever looked the same, was just after I’d found child pornography on Adrian’s computer.
More precisely, it was the moment right after his denial. This is how it happened.
Looking back now – and it’s weird – I see myself entering my house as in a movie, an atmosphere charged with a sense that there was something waiting to be discovered. Waiting for me, to be discovered by me. I realise I’m writing that back into the story now, giving the build-up to the hideous little discoveries a greater sense of anticipation than I had at the time. There were no portents of things to come. But those things did come, so the events that led me to them are freighted with a sense of foreboding.
Still, it has to be said that I stood in the hall of my house for a moment and felt the intensity of silence around me, the still air taking on the soupy quality of someone else being with me. Mystics and mountaineers have talked of sensing the presence of The Other. Perhaps that was the trip I was on. If not, why did I call out “Hello?” Then, feeling idiotic and slightly insecure, “Adrian?” It felt like there was someone in the house.
I knew he’d left for work, as always, at about half past eight. The mug was in the muesli bowl above the dishwasher, an arrogant little assumption that I would put it in because he had a formal, contractual start-time of nine and my commitments varied. It was 10.15, I remember, and I was just back from taking the duty matins and binning correspondence in the Chapter House.
Whatever it was, my issue wasn’t with the ground floor. I was calling upwards, towards the study and bedrooms, where a classical radio station was playing softly. We never listened to classical radio.
I started upstairs as if I was in a cheap movie horror scene, not exactly scared, but moving briskly and wearing a bewildered expression to assure anyone I found, or if no one then myself, that the atmosphere was normal. On the landing, silence again. I must have known I was alone, but still pushed the door of the study open as if I was intruding. The desk light was on and I remember the door hitting the bookcase-end behind it. There was no one behind the door but, childlike, I still looked.
The desktop computer was on, its fan turning a little whirlwind of dust in the morning shafts from the window. That must in some way have been playing into the stillness of the house, changing its mood, as if there was someone still here after they’d departed. I’d have muttered some sort of dissatisfied expletive as I turned the lamp out and shook the mouse to shut down the screen. Adrian’s email from his server connection at the office shone out and I reduced it. Behind it was another page, a deep red background, a primitive masthead stamped across the top with “dotcum.com”, a small screen to the right streaming a loop of some monstrous organ penetrating an anus like a Victorian mill piston. I let out an abrupt little grunt and scrolled down. Lots of doll-like painted faces with improbable names under them, improper nouns like Summer and Lolly. I shut the site and went to Recycle Bin. Nothing. To Tools and History. A gruesome litany of babes and bangs and sluts between the codes and forward-slashes. This time, I was surprised at how calm I was, how I moved the cursor around the screen like I was shopping or looking for directions. I clicked on a couple at random, black screens started to download, little wheel-clocks rotating to show that moving images were being downloaded. I shrank them to the bar at the bottom of the screen, like foul genies going back in their bottle. I carried on clicking, bent towards the screen as if an invisible, incompetent child was occupying the chair.
Then up came some apparently random coding, and after a blank white screen for a moment, the machine matter-of-factly delivered the image that made me exhale as if punched, the air drawn in a short gasp, knocking my ribcage upright, my hand over the bottom half of my face as if holding the living breath in, so that nothing could escape from me, not a cry, not a word in response to the scene in front of me. If I made a sound, it would be a response. That would mean I’d engaged and I could not. The eyes. The insane bewilderment of the grin. The plaits in the hair.
Then I had to get it away, out of the room, out of sight and out of mind, out of me. The hand that reached for the mouse wasn’t calm any more; it had that robotic, anticipative shake of someone traumatised. I knocked it down, but didn’t delete, scrolled down the history. There were many pages from the same site. I couldn’t, wouldn’t, open them, as a vague notion of self-protection returned – this was my session now and it would record my choices. Could I explain that? I wondered what planetpuck might be, or sodasiphon or icescream.
I shrank the history to the base bar and threw the mouse behind the phone as if it had stung me. My God, my prints were on it. Don’t be silly, it was my computer, our computer, why shouldn’t I have touched it? My hands were at my side, not covering my face or anything. I was suddenly interested in my calm. The initial shock was gone. I could do what I wanted. I picked the mouse up and placed it carefully on its mat. I turned and left it as it was, like I was abandoning a failed tumble dryer. Downstairs I felt safe, the atmosphere had returned to something approaching normal, the exaggerated clatter of my movements in the kitchen affirming I was functional and human, making some coffee, the teacher who had cleaned up the messy child, the nurse who had changed the dressing on the wound. I can do anything, I told myself again.
I assessed the legality of having the computer upstairs with active downloads. They had been opened by me. But the log-in was Adrian’s. What was running was evidence of a crime. To that extent, I was helping police with their inquiries. These were material consequences. Elsewhere in my consciousness I was recognising incrementally that nothing would or could ever be the same again. I had ruptured a membrane to hell in my own house. Its gates were open. It was like I’d unlocked the beast in the study upstairs. It was still belching noxious breath with its gentle fan, poisoning the air of my house. Was that what I had felt and smelt in the house, what had led me to the desktop there in the first place? I don’t know, but I had been led, hadn’t I?
Contingency planning, they call it in the field. Think what could go wrong – with supplies, with militia s
tealing the food – and eliminate the possibilities. What if I died this afternoon, electrocuted on a household appliance, brain haemorrhage, bludgeoned by a burglar? That stuff would be found on the computer and I’d never have a voice. Adrian wouldn’t confess. It couldn’t harm the dead, he’d reason, even if I was despised for my secret life. He was nothing if not pragmatic, as his internet cache strangely showed, with its neat cataloguing. What if the house was raided this afternoon? I’d look like his winsome accomplice, like those passive partners who are stage assistants to rape and murder? It was like there were cadavers of the innocents on the floor above me.
But, again, I was surprised that I was calm. The involuntary shake in my forearm had gone almost immediately. I realised it was the shock of the moment, genuinely and only the moment of realisation. There was no aftershock; it hadn’t possessed me. Indeed, I was self-possessed. My breathing was shallow. I was the expressionless cleric as I passed the large, fitted gilt mirror in the hall that had come with the house, pale, offering no signals in my face because there was no one there to offer them to.
I did some paperwork, read some cathedral project proposals for art exhibitions, wrote some standard letters to donors. But I phoned the women-bishops group and made my excuses, flat-voiced and administrative, for not attending a briefing in Westminster. I wasn’t going to leave the house. Not in the state it was in. Not with the bodies in the study. I couldn’t yet leave the scene.
I rehearsed what I was going to say, I remember. Not for the purpose of delivering an effective speech. I needed to build my case, to identify and articulate what I thought, so that I was normal and right. On the side of the angels, I suppose. I made a small split-bean salad, enough for one, with some pitta bread and hummus. The afternoon wore on. I drank tea. I was normal; I hadn’t been to the edge of the abyss after all. And I waited, not with impatience. I was curious to know how it would turn out.
I turned on the television for the news and turned it off again. Put the radio on and the evening news magazine was running. Made more tea. Read a book on female witness in the gospels that I was to review for a theology periodical and noted with satisfaction that I could concentrate on it, make notes. It’s what I did then, before I found the deeper abyss.
And he arrived home – though, as I write that, I know now that I’d stopped considering it home, even then – at a little after six. He must have worked later than five, or had a quick drink with one of his mousy colleagues, maybe the one he’d had here. I heard the key and my mood didn’t alter, no start at the base of the throat, no gall rising. Briefly, I wondered if this was how violent episodes started, placidity turning to a sudden red mist, the sort of event we read about in the papers and never have a clear idea what really happened. One of us left dead.
But no, the surface remained as calm as my interior. It was a strange atmosphere but I wasn’t inclined to break it. I was in the kitchen at the end of the hall, a cavernous and heartless chamber that had presumably been a garden room when the kitchen was in the staff basement. I could picture the scene as he saw it: the gloaming of the hall, the brightness of the kitchen, the radio on softly, me sitting at the table with book and notes. “Hi,” he said, from the door.
“Hello.” I looked up. But didn’t stand. Just stared at him. Not with disgust, actually completely thoughtlessly, taking nothing in. A pause.
“What’s up?” he said, sensing something.
“I think you’d better tell me what’s on your computer.”
“What do you mean?” he said, straightening up.
“I think you know. You left your browser open. Something to titillate at dawn. Your Daily Office, as it were.”
He took a step into the room and exhaled like a collapsing tent.
“Oh, Jesus. It was only a bit of curiosity. Some pop-ups came with some spam and I clicked them. I’m not interested in that stuff, just clicked to see what it was.”
I was on my feet now.
“Interested? What the hell do you mean? I don’t care what you’re looking at with your pants round your ankles. But if you’re an illegal pervert – and you are – you need to be banged up and you’re not taking me with you, capisce?”
This was unplanned. Where had it come from? I wasn’t angry. I was still calm. But why was I doing this and where was I going with it?
“Hey, don’t do this,” he said, his voice rising over mine, one hand out, palm down, conciliatory, reasonable. “It’s just a bit of porn. It happens. A stupid mistake. I don’t get off on this stuff. If I was used to it, if I were a user, I’d have concealed it, wiped my history. Come on. It was just a couple of curious clicks.”
I’d walked towards him. That surprised me. I hit him on the upper chest with the palms of both hands, like one of those percussionists with a circus troupe, smashing dustbin lids together. He staggered back, a blank fear on his face for what might come next.
“I don’t give a damn what you do with your mind and body, but you bring it in my house and I’m going to call the police. Which is what I did this afternoon.”
I looked for a reaction to this lie. His brow broke.
“Police?” He grunted a disbelieving laugh. “For God’s sake, Nat, I can see why you’re angry, but this is way overreacting. Have you never seen this stuff before?”
“Dear God, Adrian, don’t tell me you think this is in any way tolerable. It’s still up there. I’ve done what I need to do. Now get up there and get it out of my house. And then get out of it yourself.”
He was back at the door, staggering back under the force of another thud from the balls of my palms. He turned and lurched from the room. He was like a humiliated child as he stumbled up the stairs, not sure where or why he was going, but I had no pity. Humiliation was what I wanted.
I sat again and began to process his reaction, what he had said. I turned the radio off, but not really to hear what was going on upstairs. It was like inside me something was speaking to me, and I needed to listen, to concentrate anyway. But I suppose too that I wanted the atmosphere to be sparse when he returned. I wanted him to feel he was facing his judge, not a probationer. No, that’s not quite right, I wanted him to be entering his condemned cell.
Right now, he would be learning quite how much I’d discovered, I thought, hoping that I’d just stumbled on some fetish or adult site, if adult is the correct alternative to what was up there. I imagined him closing his eyes and dropping his head as he raised the images from the download bar, not so much out of the shame of discovery as the disappointment that this was indeed what I had found. Maybe he’d sit for a moment on the sofa in there to prepare his response. Maybe he’d kill himself.
It certainly took some time for him to reappear. Longer than I expected anyway. Perhaps he’d thought I would follow him. I heard a foot on the landing, then heavy steps on the stair. They bore the weight of guilt, I thought. I was sitting again and he came further into the room this time. I said nothing. If I’d smoked at home, I’d have been holding a cigarette.
“Nat, that stuff,” he started and his voice was weak. “You can’t believe that has anything to do with me. Can you? It doesn’t. Really. Please.”
As the words started to come singly, I noticed he was even paler and there were tears in his eyes. His jawline trembled. I had expected denial; I hadn’t expected self-pity. I felt nothing.
“So who got them up, Mrs Pug?”
Mrs Putt was a weekly cleaner provided by the Chapter. She had a squashed and wrinkled nose. This was engagement and I immediately regretted it. However absurd, I’d let an alternative possibility into the narrative. He jumped on it and started forming sentences. They tumbled out as if their quantity gave them credibility.
“I swear, I have never ever looked at child stuff. I never, ever would. That’s just vile.” He struggled for other words. “You must know that. Anyway, I just looked, just now, and it’s from behind a paywall and I’ve never paid for anything like that – you can check my credit card if you like, if
you must. The other stuff, the tame stuff, the stuff I checked on in the spam, must have linked to the other pages somehow, I don’t know. But I had nothing to do with that stuff. Oh, for God’s sake.”
He half-turned away, sighed and stared at the ceiling. The humiliation was complete. I stared at him, waiting for something else. It didn’t come. I think he was waiting for some comfort, for some evidence of anything between us that could bridge this. I didn’t feel sorry for him, but I did feel some sorrow for him, I see that now. I see also that, had I felt something for him, I really might have stood and taken his arm in some sort of gesture of familial solidarity, shared the pain, offered some grace, if not forgiveness.
But I knew then that I wasn’t that person, we weren’t those people, and it came as no surprise, as I’d known it all along. It couldn’t compare with the shock of the discovery upstairs, after all.
And something else. Something more mildly shocking, but of the moment and this room we were in. The something that changed everything. To my surprise and shock, I wanted to believe him.
An alternative narrative began to form. I examined it briefly, turned it over to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit, satisfied myself that I wasn’t indulging in wishful thinking.
“Have you also taken to listening to Classic FM on the radio upstairs?” I asked softly.
“Of course not,” he said sulkily, his back still turned. “Why would I do that?”
“I know,” I said, by way of cold acknowledgement. I said it calmly, the energy sucked out of our confrontation by this new banality. The kitchen was still to this little epiphany and I realised I could hear, or could imagine, the whirr of the computer fan again upstairs.
The revelation continued to unfold itself to me. I examined how every part of it fell into a well-formed place. How everything previously now looked awkward and ill-fitting, how this new idea had brought order to all that before had been random and chaotic, how it made all things new.
A Dark Nativity Page 12