I ignored him and walked to my desk. He came over. Milo was only in his forties, but years of excessive drinking had bloated his features. His hair was sparse and fair, his blue eyes bleary. He was mid-height but seemed taller because of his habit of coming too close and, when approaching someone seated, looming over them.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“I told Simon. He wasn’t there.”
“Well where the hell was he?”
“I don’t know! I’m not psychic.”
“The Editor has gone ballistic. What am I supposed to tell him?”
“I don’t know, Milo. I went to do the interview – ”
“Oh, for God’s sake…”
“So it’s my fault again, is it?”
“That’s what the Editor thinks.”
“And I suppose I can count on you to confirm that opinion?”
Milo grinned. His smile was, curiously, even more unpleasant than his customary limited gallery of expressions, which ranged from scowl to leer. Turning on his heel, he said, “Certainly can.”
As I muttered, “Bastard,” at his retreating form, he turned and grinned, saying, “Nice of you to notice.”
My friend Alex looked at me, worried. Alex, who was in his early twenties, had joined the paper six months earlier and I had been helping him to settle into his first job in Fleet Street. He said, “You don’t want to keep challenging him, Jo. Milo’s dangerous.”
“Mainly to himself, the amount he drinks,” I said.
“If only that were true…”
“Has he been getting at you again? Try to ignore him,” I said.
“Hah! That’s rich, coming from you. His being permanently pissed, obnoxious, talentless and devious I can handle. But stitching me up with his bungling incompetence – that’s something else.”
“What’s he done?”
“Never mind,” said Alex wearily. “There’s no point.”
“I’ll have a word…”
“Don’t! I can look after myself. You don’t have to take on everyone else’s battles. You’re not to get involved, Jo. Have you got that?”
“OK, OK,” I replied.
I wondered how long it would take Alex to become as disillusioned as the rest of us. I said, “He should sack Milo. But that’ll never happen.”
“Our Milo’s a talentless hack who’s politicked his way to the middle and now no one can shift him because he knows where the bodies are buried,” said Alex. “Well, at least he knows what he is; there’s some saving grace there, maybe. Unlike our esteemed Editor. A third-rater who thinks he’s God’s anointed. That’s the biggest con of all – when you con yourself.”
I had liked Alex from our first meeting. I liked his lively manner, with its suggestion of curiosity and amusement. He was tallish, around five foot eleven, and slim, with longish straight dark hair that fell across his forehead, and deep-set brown eyes. He had caught the eye of some female colleagues but seemed unaware of his attractiveness. He had no vanity whatsoever.
I took the books I had bought from my bag and showed Alex the political biography. “Would you say this was in good condition?”
“Very good. Disraeli.” He flicked through the pages. “Are you planning a political career? Oh, I know, it’s for old Smoothie-Chops, isn’t it?” I had confided in Alex about my secret relationship with Patrick.
“Don’t say that.” I lowered my voice. “You don’t know him.”
“I know enough,” said Alex. “And how is your wimpish, ageing paramour? Still back-stabbing in the palace of power?”
“He doesn’t back-stab. He makes strategic moves.”
“Oh, like Milo, you mean?”
“Nothing like Milo.”
“Really? I sometimes find it hard to tell.”
Alex was becoming irritating. I said, “You’re being unfair. Anyway, who ever heard of a wimpish back-stabber?”
“He’s wimpish as far as you’re concerned. He shouldn’t mess you about.”
“He doesn’t,” I said.
“Yes he does. All this ‘My wife and I have an understanding’ stuff. It’s a load of cobblers.”
“You’re wrong. Patrick tells me the truth.”
“Then you’re the only one. Jo, he’s the Minister for Spin.”
“That’s nonsense,” I whispered. “You know he has no involvement with the media – other than being interviewed, that’s it.”
“Is that what he tells you? Well, they say love is blind.” Alex picked up the red leather volume with the silver clasps. “What’s this?”
“I don’t know. Some kind of journal.”
“Who’s Anna Leigh?”
“No idea.”
Alex opened the book. He said, “This feels good, good and solid. Very nice.”
I looked over his shoulder as he riffled through the pages. The book comprised a series of entries, each passage notated by an embellished capital.
Alex said, “Oh, this is a surprise. It’s about a medieval mystic. She’s writing about Julian of Norwich.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Her. She was an anchoress who lived in a cell attached to St Julian’s Church. She took her name from the church.” Alex had a First in medieval history from Oxford.
“What’s that?”
“An anchoress? A woman who devoted her life to prayer for the community. Julian’s an intriguing character. There’s something about her that draws people in. She had these visions of the crucifixion, in which she received a series of messages, and she wrote a book about them. It was incredibly risky. She was a very brave woman.”
“In what way?”
“Well, the Church was preaching the wrath of God and fires of hell for wicked sinners. Your only hope of salvation was forgiveness and absolution, which only the Church could grant. And there was Julian, right under the noses of the authorities, writing about a God who is never angry with us, doesn’t blame us and has already forgiven us for anything we’ll ever do.”
“What would have happened to her if she’d been found out?”
“She’d have been condemned as a heretic and burned at the stake. The thing that fascinates me is that she writes like a reporter. She tells it like it is, even if it’s an uncomfortable and inexpedient truth – she tells it anyway.”
After an exhausting twelve-hour day, I arrived home at ten o’clock, too tired to cook. I transferred a ready-made dinner from the freezer to the microwave and poured myself a glass of wine, before sinking gratefully into my couch. I examined the book I had bought for Patrick. Yes, he would be delighted with his gift.
I took up the second book – Anna Leigh’s Journal – and flicked through the pages. I was intrigued by Alex’s description of Julian the mystic. I wondered what it must be like to risk death for a piece of writing. I read again the message on the flyleaf, the message that seemed so personal to me. I had always known what I wanted to do with my life. It was a secret certainty that nourished me and delineated a clear path ahead. I would discover and reveal the truth. I wanted to understand and explain why things happened, why people did what they did. I wanted to expose lies and show what was real. Of course, as a child I did not express my desire, even to myself, in such clear-cut terms. It was simply an expectation and a knowledge that I would use words to communicate meaning. When had I slipped away from that intention? What had happened to the part of me that had been idealistic and full of hope?
I had come upon a mystery. I wanted to know, who was Anna Leigh? What was so special about her journal that it had to be returned to her? Why had it been bound so beautifully? Who had valued it so highly? Had it been Anna herself or the writer of the message on the flyleaf? There were no clues: no publisher’s mark; not even the name of a printer. How had such a book, a personal journal, found its way to the anonymous, secret world I had come upon in the antiquarian bookshop? How long had it lingered in that repository of forgotten souls?
Most curiously of all, why did I feel that the
message written on the flyleaf – like a message in a bottle that had washed up on the shore at my feet – had been meant for me? I began to read.
18 August
By chance, I encountered the lost lady. At that time I still believed in chance. A candle burned, and by the light of the flame I embarked upon the soul’s solitary adventure.
A clear, bright day in Norwich was drawing to a close. The rays of sunlight slanting through the cathedral’s stained-glass windows were fragmenting into fine and glimmering strands. As the light withdrew, I remained a moment longer within the quietude of fading day.
I turned to leave, and my eye was drawn by a leaflet on a table near the entrance. The leaflet, partly obscured in a display of books and postcards, was decorated with a drawing of a woman in nun’s habit, holding delicately, between thumb and forefinger, a tiny object that looked like a hazelnut.
I picked up the leaflet and read “Julian of Norwich is believed to be the first woman to write a book in English. In 1373, during a severe illness, she received a series of visions of the crucifixion, in which Jesus spoke to her of God’s love. For the next forty years she lived as an anchoress in a small room attached to St Julian’s Church, where she interpreted the meaning of the revelations and wrote her book.”
Julian of Norwich… I remembered her name from long ago. Sister Mary Theresa had read to me from her book, comforting, reassuring words of love, during a long period of illness when I was eight years old. Sister had sat by my bedside, soothing me with her cool hand on my forehead, her gentle, loving presence and words of kindness.
Sister Mary Theresa had told me that God loved me, no matter what I said or did, and that he could never be angry with me because he was all love. I remembered the words “all shall be well…” In that little time in my life, I dared to believe that all could be well – perhaps because I so desperately wanted it to be – to believe that my life could change one day and I could be happy.
I opened the leaflet and found inside a map of the route to St Julian’s Church, which was some ten minutes’ walk away. My curiosity was aroused. A woman writer, like me, but one who was a solitary and lived six hundred years ago. What kind of life would she have lived? There was an hour to spare before my train back to London. I decided to visit St Julian’s.
The map led me to the outskirts of town, down dingy streets with lock-up garages to a small, dark alleyway, where a sign directed me to St Julian’s Church. I stepped into a suddenly cool, close place. I walked across the nave towards the altar. To my right I saw a little door with a notice that read “Julian’s cell”. Close up, I read “Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century mystic, lived here. The cell was destroyed in the Reformation, but was rebuilt when the church was repaired after being bombed during the Second World War.”
There was something in the air. Something indefinable touched me in some forgotten, neglected part of my being. There was something about the simplicity and quiet of the place that spoke to me, as if the silence contained a message.
I was caught by the presence of the place. I sensed an invitation to be rested and healed.
In the margin was reproduced a note that Anna presumably had added after the original entry. It read:
But there was more. I believe I knew, deep inside, that in acknowledging the truth of the moment I stepped onto the path that was my destiny. I believe I knew that the path I chose would take me on a hazardous journey into the lost land of shadows.
It reminded me of my own feeling of sanctuary when I entered the unfamiliar world of the antiquarian bookshop. The main narrative continued:
Someone had made this place, created its sacred centre. Her atmosphere remained. I wondered about her. If I turned my head quickly, I thought, I’d catch sight of the edge of her skirt; if I closed my eyes, I’d feel her touch at my shoulder, hear gentle laughter. She was unseen but substantial.
I entered the cell. To the right of the small space was a window, looking onto a patch of grass and flowers enclosed by the church wall. To the front was a plain table covered by a white cloth, upon which stood two candlesticks. High up on the wall, above the table, was a large wooden crucifix. Some little stools were stacked near the door. I took one and sat on it and closed my eyes.
Breathing slowly and observing the intake and outflow of my breath, I meditated for several minutes. A sense of elation welled up within me. I felt ecstatic, flooded with joy. The feeling was intoxicating and made my head spin. I wept, and through my tears poured out my hurt, anger and bitter disappointment with my life.
I felt a strong, feminine presence, the warmth of a woman whose love enfolded all those who entered the place, whose arms were opened wide to soothe a frightened child, whose tender caress touched me with understanding, whose gentle entreaty breached my resistant heart, whose compassion pitied my sadness, whose joy diminished the darkness touching my soul. I suddenly yearned to know the woman whose passion was imprinted on the place, whose mothering, limitless spirit sought out my sorrow and hurt and brokenness, desiring to hold me and make me whole.
I recalled the words from Anna’s book that had so moved me, the words that had offered the hope of being held safe in an embrace that would never let me go. And here was Anna, describing my own feelings in a way that made me feel a kinship with her.
I looked up at the figure of Jesus and observed that the head was thrown back, the eyes wide open. I was brought up to believe that Jesus died on the cross to pay for our sins and in doing so had redeemed us and bought us a place in heaven. But here was an aspect of his dying that I had not seen before. The head was thrown back awkwardly and the eyes were revealed. It was not only his nakedness, his powerlessness in the hands of the people who ruled the society in which he lived, not only these familiar aspects of his death that I observed. This was different. The eyes were wide open, the soul laid bare, his feelings exposed.
Suddenly I was taken back in my memory to the age of fifteen. I had been holidaying with a German family, on an exchange visit. One day they had taken me, without warning or preparation, to the Memorial Museum on the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. We went into a hall of photographs, joining a queue of people that moved slowly, like a procession of penitents, across and around the room.
Suddenly, as my hosts moved aside to allow me to see, I was confronted by a sight that filled me with utter horror. Before me was a pyramid of rotting, skeletal flesh – blackened eye sockets where bright eyes had once smiled, emaciated limbs flung indecently across a stranger’s body, so many, many people thrown away, like rubbish, with neither kind word nor prayer. I caught my breath, feeling dizzy and sick. How was it possible? How could this terrible thing have happened in this world where I was growing up? I did not know what to feel or what to do.
To the right of the photograph I saw a glass-framed notice. It was a report written by a journalist who had accompanied the liberators of the camp. He had observed, he said, that each of the bodies in the many similar piles he saw that day had a small cut at the top of the hip. A survivor had explained to him that, when the body becomes emaciated, this is the last place where any flesh remains. The starving prisoners had been gnawing at the dead in order to stay alive.
I felt I was falling, falling backwards into a dark pit. I felt terror and I felt shame. I thought: We did this.
In that instant I knew what humanity was capable of and that I must be capable of the same. What would I have done? Might I have been a prison guard who committed such horrors? Or a guard who did not join in but looked the other way? Or one of the starving prisoners gnawing at the dead? Which of those parts might I have played?
I felt grief – for the dead and for those who had to live with what they had done. I felt shame. It is a terrible thing to kill someone. How much worse to kill his soul, to take away the part that is sacred? And how do you live among the people you love when you have compromised your soul? That day something deep within me changed for ever. My certainties dissolved. My childho
od ended.
As I stood in Julian’s cell, looking up into the eyes of the broken figure on the cross, I thought: We did this, too. I have looked at the cross many, many times, but now I seemed to see it for the first time. In the eyes of the broken figure everything was revealed – the anguish, the doubts, the fear – all the natural feelings of a man suffering terribly and close to death.
In those last moments, when Jesus bore his trial alone, he became the victim of our inhumanity. Like the numberless victims of our inhumanity throughout the ages, he was stripped of his dignity. And in his utter vulnerability, I realized, he compelled me to become a participant when I would have preferred to remain an observer, striking an image upon my heart that cannot fade.
I entered his private space, the space each of us strives to protect, hiding behind a mask throughout our lives, covering the shame we cannot bear to see in a place that no one else enters. What if the mask were wrenched away suddenly, exposing everything, exposing me as I really am? Could I bear it? Could anyone bear it if he has shame, and which of us does not?
I remembered hearing a song written by a survivor of the camps – “My sister Hana had green eyes, she looked after me, my sister Hana had green eyes, she was murdered in Treblinka.” My heart moved; I felt it move as a constellation moves in space, I felt it lift and move, as a heavy weight is moved; a movement almost mechanical, of great power, lifting my heart up and forward into a different space and engendering a deep, sweet, mighty swell of compassion, brought from unimagined depths with a force I could not comprehend and moving me to tears of such heart-full sweetness that they soothed away all hurt and horror, even the horror of the atrocity that had inspired them.
As I looked at the wide-open eyes, I realized that the beliefs of my childhood must now give way to a better understanding. It was a necessary death, but the manner of his dying was necessary, too. He embraced the worst that we could do, for us, because we needed to be shown how much we were loved and nothing less would convince us. And at the sacred centre of the crucifixion a mystery unfolded, like the opening petals of a rose, revealing the vulnerability that is at the heart of love.
The Greening Page 2