“St Paul’s, Roger. It’s where I work, y’know.”
I looked behind us, more for his benefit than mine. I wanted him to know I was still watching.
“So are you going to tell me what all this is about?”
He was taking control. I had to stop that.
“Don’t be silly, Roger. You know why you’re here. Why else would you have come on your own? And at a moment’s notice.”
“I’ve been worried about you.”
“Do you want the lists, Roger?”
I realised I was trembling. My voice was too high-pitched. Get a grip, girl.
“What lists, Natalie?”
“Oh, I think you know. You’ll have properly inspected the cover I emailed you yesterday.”
Better. I’d said it slowly. I tried to breathe evenly.
“I have to tell you I have no idea what that was. Or what this is.”
I turned and addressed his profile. I was surprised at my own anger, for once, not just my ability to suppress it.
“You left your desk as soon as I called to be run around the West End. So don’t shit me around, Roger. You sent me into East Jerusalem to pretend to swap your little list, you tool. Well, surprise surprise, I have it after all.”
The fountains splashed in Trafalgar Square.
“What list would that be?”
He stared straight ahead, as if he was driving. I realised that he might be wired for sound.
“But it didn’t work out that way. Funny how there’s always a different strategy going down. What is it that makes God laugh, Roger? People making plans?”
He said nothing.
“Was it you or your boss who had me kidnapped, Roger?”
I hoped that “boss” was wounding. He half-smiled. I felt the rage begin to roll inside me.
“Tell me, Roger. Was the swap of names too much like a peace process? Too much like slowing the escalation to war?”
He raised his eyebrows slightly and shook his head in an attempt at theatrical bemusement.
“I really don’t know what this is about.”
“Well, let me speculate,” I said. We swung on to the Embankment. “Suppose we were collecting the names of those who were working for Hamas in the UN, with the big aid organisations. And what had we offered in return? The names of those who worked for us? Just at a wild guess, Roger, I’d say those Palestinians who had been turned.”
He was still, silent, but I could tell he was listening, because his eyes flickered across the cab’s windscreen. So I went on.
“But that’s too much like a negotiation, isn’t it, Roger. Like a negotiated settlement. Too much like peace – like an Israel settled within its old borders, eh? Just like the good old days before 1967. Before the magical mystery tour.”
I leaned in to him.
“And what better way to stop that than have a British priest kidnapped and killed, when the time was right. Was that your idea, Roger? Or theirs? But things don’t always work out as planned, do they . . . Roger.”
I spat his name. He turned to me for the first time. His neck and lower cheeks had flushed slightly and I could see that he was angry.
“Come back with me, Natalie. Let us help you.”
I ignored that and it was my turn to look out of the cab.
“Who did you make me kill, Roger? Were they Israelis? Or were they just turned Palestinians? On the list, maybe. Did they even know what they were doing? Or were they just another bunch of sad suckers doing a job for a few American dollars?”
He looked at me now, not unkindly, sighing and letting his shoulders drop, cocking his head to one side.
“You’re a fantasist, Natalie. Let me help you. I don’t know what’s happened to you. But I do know you need help.”
I looked from one pale eye to the other. I could have cried.
“Who did I kill?” I asked again, barely audibly, I think. He was still watching me and I looked back at him.
“You killed no one, Natalie. Come back with me. Let me help.”
It was a staring match now. I lost and looked out of the window again, through the black iron railings to the lawns at the Temple.
“What happened to Toby?” I asked, as one might inquire after a school friend.
“Why do you ask?”
I gathered myself.
“It doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t tell me the truth. I have the lists. And if anything happens to me – or to anyone I love in the Middle East – let it be understood, Roger, they get published. Understand that, Roger. WikiArabs, WikiJews, Wikibollah.”
I’d altered the rhythm and there was silence. He was waiting for more. We were at Blackfriars, where this had all started.
“But there’s something else,” I said, moving my agenda on.
He turned his chest slightly towards me and stared at the cab’s light grey carpet to indicate he was listening.
“There’s still cash in that development budget you sent me out with. My cover, wasn’t it?”
“Please, Natalie, you’re not well. You need rest.”
I talked over him. “You’ll invest it after all. You’ll distribute it just as we said at the conference. But you’ll keep me informed and I’ll have final clearance on where it’s spent. And specifically you’ll put a million dollars into an organisation I’ll give you the name of.”
“I thought this might come down to money,” he said, exhaling.
He was trying to provoke me, distract me with the venal, the perceived blackmail. I took his hand on the seat, cupping my palm over his loose fist as a child might play that game, wrapping a rock with paper to win, the fragile beating the rough.
“Roger, we’re going to have such fun. I’m going to make you plant new fig orchards in Gaza. Oh, and we’re going to invest in a cafe in Nazareth, by the way. No, not invest – we’re going to save it.”
He jerked a single laugh of scorn, but nodded a kind of acquiescence.
“And I’m going to write my story, Roger. Change the names to protect the guilty. And you’re going to get it published for me. And if anything happens to me, the real names get published.”
We were on Ludgate Hill now, passing that coffee shop where I’d decided to go to Jerusalem. I could see myself inside, sitting back in my chair, already weary, Toby all bouncy. We were crawling past it up to the western facade of the cathedral. My wailing wall.
He didn’t take his hand away, but moved his other across, topping mine, joining the game. He had decided it was over. Whatever he’d come for, he’d received. Or he was giving up.
“You’re an extraordinary woman, Natalie. Our recruitment is good, but we must have had no idea what we were taking on with you. I hope we can work together again soon.”
He dropped his eyes and took his hands away.
“Take care, Natalie. Take very good care of yourself.”
It was a threat, of course.
“No, Roger,” I said and I leaned in much further. “You’re going to take very good care of me.”
It was intimate in a creepy way. I broke the spell. “Drop me here,” I said to the driver, as we pulled level with Paternoster Square. “I’m sure the gentleman doesn’t mind paying.”
I closed the door and stood at the window a moment.
“What a glorious day the Lord has made,” said Roger, smiling now, resigned.
“Let’s rejoice and be glad in it,” I said and let go of his door.
I stood on the edge of the cobbles as the cab swung around. Roger didn’t turn to look at me. I let him slip down the hill, disappearing among buses, before I turned my back and headed towards the Chapter House.
Epilogue
I suppose it’s a commonplace to say that we spend too long on the past. But we do.
We try to live with it by suggesting that memory is unreliable or that others see it differently, or that it can come back and surprise us, or that we simply make our own history. But it’s all an avoidance strategy, because our future is entirely unm
anageable too. Nothing turns out as we expect it to.
I know that people always say that, but they don’t really know what it means. They mean the course of their lives is unpredictable, or that some episodes don’t turn out as they might have done. But I mean something different: nothing, nothing at all, absolutely nothing turns out as you might expect, because we’re remade by every new event that unfolds. So that means that our expectations are always on the change, and subtly, imperceptibly, develop like the appearance of lines on a face.
I understand that now, my relationship with my future, and it’s not too late for me. As the man might have said, the future’s another country, we’ll do things differently there.
I told you at the start that I’m writing my life assurance and I still am. But it’s my confession too. Near the same window seat where I began, I’m now set up at a helpful little trestle table that makes it easier to type at the laptop. Let me just tell you about the day I started to write all this down.
It wasn’t an epiphany and I didn’t suddenly have an urge to make a record of what had happened to me and what I’d done. That would imply that I was joining in, engaging with others, and it wasn’t like that. It was quite the reverse; it was because I was, for the first time, truly alone and I realised that I was.
I’ve never felt more alone. Not in my little backroom prison in northern Israel, not with the dying in Sudan, not being married to Adrian. No, I was never more alone than when I stood in the late low winter sun of Oxford’s South Park, holding my baby son.
I was standing about three-quarters of the way up the hill, looking down to the river and across the town, and though the odd cyclist passed and some adolescents in baggy black tracksuit trousers were kicking a football about not far away, as they had on a rec ground in suburban Nazareth, their cries carrying through the oily membrane of what I might once have called my bubble, I seemed to be the only one here, with all the world over there, where the godly towers popped up from the melee of roofs, as they may once have done in Jerusalem.
I was deliciously alone, feeling my stretched body, like the flesh of fruit, held compactly by firm skins of clothing, the outer layer a dog-tooth coat of some vintage I’d bought for five pounds in a charity shop with Hugh.
Absurdly, I still wore the headscarf Yusef had given me – a link to him, I suppose, the man I would never see again – and it now completed the retro-forties anachronism that stood on a metalled path, a ghostly figure, looking like she was wondering how to spend her ration, her simple husband killed in a distant war somewhere.
Alone, not despite my baby in the crook of my elbow, but because of him. We were, we are, one body, he and I, and standing there, as one, we were complete, independent of anyone. He, this tiny child, has done more than anyone to burst the bubble in which I existed, more than the kindly doctor lady that I now see twice a week, and to put me in the world. There is nothing like being put in the world for feeling so totally alone.
He was wrapped, in a similarly absurd counterpoint to my headscarf, in a little pink cot blanket, because Hugh had been so sure that he would be a girl. In the three days since his birth, his face had unfolded like a flower and now his shiny nose had reddened slightly against the cold and the waffle-weave was folded down over his forehead like a cap, concealing his cloud of dark hair, the only visible clue to which were those jet lashes that now sealed his eyes in sleep, the quiver of a lower lip, hidden in the tiny fold of his pout, the surface sign of the ticking, thrumming little body of life in the bundle. Other than the button-like interruption that is the redoubt of that reddening nose, his skin was a creamy caramel. It looked like it could be scooped and I will wait and watch as its depths darken.
But I should tell you why I was there. My beautiful boy – still unnamed then, as I recall us standing alone on that hillside – was born at the John Radcliffe Hospital early on a February morning. It had been a relatively quick delivery, they told me, quicker than I’d feared and in all honesty the pain’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
He arrived in a slither of lilac, “a little undercooked”, the nurse said, and Hugh, whose forearm I gripped throughout, wept like a woman. They put him straight on my breast and then he slept like he’d just come from a sweaty day in the fields, and Hugh threw the blanket over him, stammering something silly about the dangers of being gender-specific. And we cried and laughed some more.
They put him under a lamp because he was a little jaundiced, so we were stuck there for a day or two. But as soon as Hugh was gone, I just wanted to get him and me out and away from there. They tried to make us wait. I filled out forms and on the line about parents I just wrote “Father unknown”, because it was right.
We were meant to see another doctor, but on the morning of the third day, while it was still dark, I packed my little bag – yes, the same little bag – and we left, catching a bus into town, the old women in the queue cooing and nodding knowingly and me smiling proudly.
On Headington Road, I won’t say I panicked – God knows, I don’t do that now – but as the city approached I knew I needed to get out, I knew we had to be on our own, to have some time on our own. So there I was in the park, holding him, and I don’t have to imagine myself back far to know the woman who stood there.
She had landed back in Britain feeling like a stranger reoccupying an alien existence, like a Palestinian coming home. She knew no one any more, but they behaved as if they knew her. And now it was as if the gash in time that had accommodated my life in Israel and Palestine and Lebanon had healed over, leaving only scar tissue. It was a subcutaneous scar and one that no one need really notice, but I could still feel it, like an old injury that wasn’t spoken about in polite company.
I saw Adrian twice and then no more. I doubt we’ll ever meet again. I’d borrowed the master keys from the Chapter House and the house was dulled by human absence, not unlike my apartment in Jerusalem. Adrian had vacated, computer and clothes gone, and surprisingly little space was left by his departure. I phoned his office like I was calling a utility service. I didn’t even have to pause before making the call.
We met at the house, but he didn’t come in – just returning his keys, he said. I didn’t ask where he was living and he didn’t ask where I’d been. Then I called him at the office again when I knew I was pregnant. I don’t know why. I took him some post and a Hungarian language course he’d left behind. We met at a coffee house near his office. He snorted derisively when I told him, but he didn’t ask who the father was, so I couldn’t tell him I didn’t know.
Dean saw me in his rooms again and murderers, rapists and the like must give off noxious fumes that only someone of his sophistication can detect, because his nostrils flared like someone had served him a dog-mess sandwich at a General Synod fete. I told him I’d been to see the Bishop – I made the appointment as soon as I got out of Roger’s cab – and had asked for a new job.
The Bishop had said he would see what he could do, but in the meantime I should take some time out. Go on retreat. Get my strength back. He was his old kind self and treated me pastorally like someone who’d had some kind of breakdown. I wondered what his security-service friends had told him, if anything.
I wasn’t about to tell him anything – I’m tired of being treated like I’m mad. Dr Shirley here in Oxford doesn’t treat me like I’m mad, not like old Dr Gray.
The Bishop said that when I was refreshed, I was to speak to him again. My ministry wasn’t to be wasted, he said, and the Church of England needed a bishop like me. So perhaps he knows nothing of what happened in Israel. I have called him. I took a bit of a gamble and said that I doubted he wanted a divorced (well, as good as) woman bishop with an illegitimate, mixed-race son.
“You mean a single mother,” he said, “with an adopted Middle Eastern child.”
So he knows something, but no more than I could have told him. I’ve been lucky to have him. Blessed am I among women, eh?
So I came up here, to Oxford, like a Vi
ctorian woman in a delicate condition, awaiting her time. Hugh has these dear friends at the uni, he a Philosophy don, she a psychiatrist. Dr Shirley I call her, and I have their old nanny’s flat at the top of the house. And that’s where I’m writing – have now written – this, my confession.
My son sleeps quietly in a carry-cot through the bright-white folding shutter doors that are always open over the warm and expensively rough oatmeal carpet.
I may take him out in the buggy later. We can go down into the town and I may buy him something in the market, some woollen bootees, a little plastic ring of hoops for him to focus on as he kicks his legs out and sucks his knuckles.
He’s the future now. Best not to dwell on the past. That’s what the lady of this house tells me. I know she meant it kindly and, while she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, she is a little more right than she realises. What happens next is all that matters. That’s the truth.
About the Author
George Pitcher is a journalist by background and a vicar in the Church of England. A Dark Nativity is his first novel.
Acknowledgements
As journalists know, it can take a long time and a lot of people to stand up a story. And this story took more than most. First of all, thank you to Unbound, which has come up with the astonishing concept for the publishing industry that books can be published that have not been written before by someone else. So to the team at Unbound: Thanks to Dan for being my first supporter (in every way), John for not remembering me, Mark B for the video, Phil for making it work, Georgia for the campaign, Rachael – ah, especially Rachael – for listening to Nat and understanding what she was trying to say, Anna for the ruthless timeline, Mark E for the cover, Justine for the copy-edit, DeAndra for the rigour of the proofs, Charlotte for the suave PR, Penguin Random House for the distribution and all the bar staff at the Narrowboat.
Also: Jo Goldsmith for telling me what Nat did as a foreignaid worker and for playing Nat in the video, because she didn’t want to, our daughter Eddi for explaining how Nat talks and Mobbs for losing me to the study. Thank you, Natalie, for letting me into your world and, finally, thank you for buying this book or, perhaps, just borrowing it.
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