A Dark Nativity Read online

  And so I had a career. I was employed by the Church of England, but my ministry was in foreign aid. I became something of a poster girl, I suppose, for women priests without a proper job. And I liked that too. It was who I was and who I still am.

  Years later, Sarah and I met in one of the City chaps’ wine bars in Paternoster Square, dark inside, but pleasant enough outside under the awning when it wasn’t too cold, close to one of the autumn’s first-lit gas burners. She was scooping hot Camembert on to toasted focaccia while I toyed with an anchovy salad.

  We’d laughed about how we’d graduated from the Kentish Town greasy-spoon we used at the agency to a place that sold Petit Chablis for twenty-three quid, which, to be fair, only Sarah could afford.

  I remember watching as she looked at her prematurely wrinkled fingers and swollen knuckles. Her nails were good, I noticed, not dirty and cracked as they’d been when she’d been in the field.

  I’d just asked her a difficult question. If the Nobel-aspirant Russian oligarch she was working for now was so keen on finding a solution to Palestine, why was he using American dollars?

  “It’s just the international currency.”

  “How many of them?”

  She looked at me for emphasis. “About a billion.”

  It was the first time I thought she might like money and it shamed me.

  “Is that a thousand million or a million million?”

  “Does it matter?”

  She popped a lump of bread and molten cheese in her mouth and sucked her finger. We were girls again and it was fun.

  “I don’t do money, Sar, you know that,” I said. “It sounds like a job for suits. It’ll be one of those ghastly gigs with name badges. Davos with matzoh balls.”

  “It needs to be done.”

  “Does it? I mean, does it really? What difference can money make when people hate each other?”

  “They can hate each other in more comfort. They can hate each other as social equals. Money makes people forget they hate each other anyway. They can despise each other’s garden furniture instead.”

  “So your man’s an economic engineer.”

  I looked out across the dazzling lake of new paving stones towards the Temple Gate.

  “Engineering’s part of it.”

  “I think we want people to stay poor. Keeps us in a job.”

  “The Church or Aid?” asked Sarah. She was always so easy to talk to. “The poor are always with us.”

  There was a pause as she tore off some softer bread from the basket and wiped her bowl with it. A young Baltic waiter came and poured more wine.

  “I really want you to come to Jerusalem, Nat,” she said. “We get to be peace envoys. With the Centre’s money. And I’ll be there. What’s not to like?”

  I was silent, as if considering it.

  “Ade and I are finished,” I said. She was looking at me and chewing at half speed, so I paused for dramatic effect. “I mean Adrian.”

  And we laughed out the tension of the moment.

  “He bonked who?” she asked, after I’d given her the highlights.

  “I don’t know. Someone from the office.”

  “Don’t you want to know?”

  “What difference would it make?”

  “Then it’s settled.”

  “What is?”

  “You have to come to Jerusalem. An away-break to save the world.”

  When I think of my own investment of trust and self-deception in my marriage, I often recall Sarah and her dark epiphany back at school, that she was physically disabled and despised for it, which marked the end of the denial of her little truth. In my case, I pretended my life with Adrian was something that a little honesty would have immediately shown that it wasn’t.

  Adrian had been part of a tribe too. He was part of a warrior class set against world poverty and deprivation, coordinating and sometimes leading a private army of the irrational from the proud Western democracies to attack the wicked insurgencies of famine and drought in our former colonies. We were underpaid mercenaries, I know now, not so much working towards heavenly reward but for our daily bread. We were offending a system that depended for its riches on the desolation of Africa. We were a disruption to the natural order – as Sarah was – and I came to depend on Adrian’s living witness to our alternatives.

  None of this gang culture meant anything, of course. But while it lasted I was happy to believe that I was part of the gang, that it contained me. Actually, my commitment was built on contempt, just as those schoolgirls’ was, but I’d never have admitted that so long as I was captivated by the power I exercised over Adrian’s relative inferiority.

  When I caught Adrian bonking his assistant director of probation – on the job, as I believe the boys call it – I was surprised by two of my reactions. First, I recoiled from the scene not in horror or hurt, but – now get this – because I felt I had intruded on their privacy. It was allegedly my house, our home, but my instinctive reaction was that I had violated their intimate space. I’ve dwelt on that feeling since, even cherished it.

  The curtains in the big front drawing room were closed. Nothing unusual in that. Adrian would have been watching some dismal sports channel into the small hours and may have gone up to bed at about two, with a glass of skimmed milk, and then left for work, after a run, without touching this front room, an empty can at the foot of the sofa like an abandoned sentry box. So it was in that familiar morning half-light that I saw the two figures through the hallway arch, struggling out from behind the sofa. I seem to recall that my first thought was that we had repairmen, then rejected that, since the curtains were drawn. Then burglars, but as my eyes adjusted and I held the front door to facilitate an escape, it was clear she had a white, scalloped blouse, open with bra in place, and was scrabbling for the discarded shrink-wrap of tights and tangled pants. He was lurching out on the opposite side, rather comically yanking up the charity-shop trousers I’d given him for his birthday.

  Her touching desperation to retrieve her underwear left her leaning over the back of the sofa, and it was clear, in that forensic snapshot, that this was how their sex act was being performed. It didn’t take long for me to assess the scene – what, four to eight seconds? – but I know now, knew then, that it wasn’t revulsion and hurt that made me spurn this vision and propelled me to the other side of my own front door and into the cobbled enclave outside. And maybe I’m even wrong too about their privacy, maybe it wasn’t my good manners, a well-bred sense that I was witness to an intimacy that was not my own. Perhaps it was the simple pathos of the event, the pantomime routine, a silent movie, or perhaps the mannered attempts of a French-farce pair of lovers to retain dignity through reclaimed clothing. No, it was pity that drove me away, like turning away from a humiliated child.

  I was surprised also at the lack of shock. I suppose it would have been right to have been shocked. But, walking back purposefully to St Paul’s, I found I was smiling at my liberation, for I knew in that moment that my life was changing into a journey without Adrian in it. He had, strangely and unintentionally, taken the initiative himself and our life together which had started and, in a way, ended in adventure, with a protracted period of mundanity in the middle, was drawing to its close. Our love-making had grown routine, but in truth had always been indolent, invariably in bed once we had acquired one, as though sex was something for the poorly. ‘Sex’ makes it sound hot and dirty and that hardly works if it’s a duty performed, a grunting act of prone service, a household chore that we shared like a modern couple should. Little wonder that they call it missionary; I might as well have been offering him sanitation and scripture.

  Our life as a couple had started in excitement, but that was all about the work we did. We sparked off on saving the world, not on each other. Any attempts on either part at an awakening of spontaneous passion, in a hotel bathroom attached to a conference centre where we weren’t staying over, say, or in a warm gazebo on a summer’s evening at a diocesan re
treat, had left him feeling vulnerable and me bored, tugging on the short length of rope that was our marriage.

  Yet, here he had been, in his shirt tails, taking a dumpy colleague with hip cellulite – I don’t know if she was really the deputy director of probation, I made that up – doggy-style on our soft furnishings. So, surprised, yes, but not shocked. It occurred to me, astonishingly, that it must have been his idea. I made for a chain coffee shop in Paternoster Square, which I knew staff didn’t use because there had once been a dispute over the authenticity of its Fairtrade coffee. I thought of sitting outside and smoking, but decided against it in case I was spotted by passers-by and I didn’t want to engage just now.

  I’d returned a day early from a conference in Cambridge on women’s ministry in Muslim countries, which we’d abandoned when the final keynote speaker had phoned in sick, and I’d jumped a fast train and made straight to the house. No one knew that I was here. Except, now, Adrian and his tea lady, or whoever she was. I sat for about half an hour, drank a cappuccino with an extra shot and pretended to read the paper I’d had on the train, to attract no attention.

  It wasn’t long after eleven when I’d arrived at the house. Adrian sometimes took an early lunch to go to the municipal gym when it was less crowded, but this was mid-morning, for goodness’ sake. I guessed that they’d both slid out for their tryst, perhaps attending a cancelled work meeting somewhere. That and being partially clothed in the sitting room meant that she hadn’t been an overnight guest. Adrian wouldn’t be leaving me, I knew that. That would involve too much initiative. They used the house because they were too poor or mean to use a hotel. She was either married or lived too far away, or both, though that was of little real concern to me. So what was of concern to me?

  I resolved, after staring listlessly at the weather forecast in the back of the newspaper, that I wasn’t going to throw him out, at least not immediately. It was too high-maintenance an option, would mean transfer of belongings, too much talking, and I had a shedload of work in submissions to General Synod on provision for those opposed to women bishops, which already had to be compressed by the conference I’d just co-organised. In those days, I thought that was important. On such prosaic considerations were my life decisions made back then.

  So I suppose I decided to forgive him. Or tolerate him, which is pretty far from forgiveness. But we’re in the forgiveness business, Christians. Given all that unfolded subsequently, this was Jonah bound on a calm sea for Jaffa before being flung into the belly of the whale.

  I met Adrian in the crypt cafe of the cathedral early that evening. He was largely silent as I knew he would be. He had the grace not to offer excuse or apology. He sat, staring up the cavern of mausoleums towards the military dead, and said at one point: “I don’t know what’s going on. I never wanted any of this.”

  I let the ambiguity of that hang in the musty air. Then told him we’d live separately in the house for a while. It was a big house. We’d look at each other from a bit of a distance and see what was left of us to salvage. It was an aggressive version of giving each other some room, which was the kind of expression we were taught in priestly training.

  “I don’t know what happened to us,” he said.

  “We hung out and got married,” I replied.

  He swung aside in his seat. Then he stood and slowly walked out, giving me time to catch him up, which I didn’t.

  Adrian’s not the sort of man women notice, but he had a quiet commitment that I took for strength when we worked in our overseas aid outfit in Kentish Town. The regular cast passed through. Earnest young women making a difference, young men with shaven heads ameliorating the plight of the proletariat, distracted girls filling in before marriage; our generation’s spare parts finding no other purpose for themselves in the nation’s economy.

  We pitched ourselves as The Fed, a charity started a decade or so earlier by Jake Sorresen, one of those self-starting hipsters with a thirst that couldn’t be sated on peace and love. He was alpha-male meets folkie, Surrey goes to Lindisfarne, long and languid, loose and smiley, hair like metal wool tied behind a monkish pate, his clean-shaven, weather-beaten face set against the power-beards of the big foreign-aid charities, with their centralised executives and bibbed chuggers outside the Tube stations.

  His was a flat organisation, a federation of autonomous cells in Britain and the US, which commanded their own relief missions, the only resource from central office being intelligence. Famine or floods, we were quick. Jake’s office would call for resource and like a mini-cab firm putting out a fare, a team of two or three could be in the field within thirty-six hours. These pathfinders would assess and advise, calling down the right response, very often from the big agencies. Yes, it was exciting.

  Sarah Curse passed through. She was by then working properly for UNHCR and was seconded to the Russia Centre in Cambridge. She came to us on a kind of internship for three months, but really it was to see whether we were good enough for UNHCR recognition. On the day she arrived, she waved her stick – just one stick now – across the office at me and said she’d heard I worked there.

  “What does the Russia Centre actually do?” I asked her in the Italian coffee shop we took to using in Fortess Road, a Formica anachronism with big glass pouring jars of sugar.

  She shrugged. “It funds Middle East projects mainly. Infrastructure projects commercially. But philanthropy too. Trying to support a two-state solution.”

  “Right,” I said, flopping back in undergraduate, post-ironic style. “Not money-laundering or trading American passports then.”

  “I don’t think so. Sergei Sarapov is – or was – close to Yeltsin, but he’s one of the good guys. His wife was killed in a gangster hit in Moscow and he lives in Vienna now. It’s in Cambridge, I think, because that’s where his daughter went to uni.”

  “The charidee oligarch,” I said, determined not to buy it. “I must send him a begging letter.”

  “Stop it,” she said with a quick smile that showed her neat teeth. “Whatever it takes. That’s my view.”

  “Yeah, whatever it takes.” I looked out of the window at the grey people.

  Sarah sat next to Adrian in the office, but they never talked much. She spent most of her time on a laptop and directed questions at Jake or me. I’d sit on the edge of her desk sometimes and triangulate between her and Adrian. I think he was intimidated by her easy intellect.

  Adrian had worked there for a couple of years before I arrived. I must try to look at him objectively at that time. I suppose he grew on my younger taste buds because he was purposeful, without seeming to impress his purpose on those about him. Dear God, is that the best I can do for him now? Well, sorry, looking at him dispassionately is exactly that – perhaps there never was any passion.

  He would fill his day effortlessly, just doing one thing after another with the same paced intensity, without apparently noticing that he was doing it. He never seemed to whine about his rent like the rest of us; or what to eat, his lost travel card, the cold when the office heating failed. He was just relentlessly Adrian. We called him Ade, and inevitably Foreign Ade and Relief Ade, even Christian Ade when I discovered he went to church, though there was precious little evidence that faith was his motivation, other than what he did for those luckless enough to be born into the worst cesspits of the world. He didn’t really notice money, but he would give a fiver he couldn’t afford to rival causes if he thought it would buy someone a clean drink.

  I can probably pin our beginning to a bright and sharp September evening, sitting out on the decking beside the return of the terraced house that was the London office, after fixing a supply of maize to Addis Ababa, I think, and drinking cider from cans. He had finished his and was thumb-tipping the ash from his cigarette into the empty. It had been a highly charged day, when the hours hung on to what we were doing. He’d have gone on with the phone calls into the night and beyond. But he’d cracked it by late afternoon – I’d found a supplier in Notts
and Ade had persuaded them to deliver without VAT if he provided the transport, which we could, and the task had blown away into a rolling, grey London sky like bonfire smoke. We could stop, suddenly.

  It was just the two of us in the back room. I ran to get cigarettes and cider from the Bangla corner shop and we sat out the back in our self-righteous hiatus. In other circumstances, it could have been post-coital.

  I said something inane like, “Why do we do it?”

  He had replied in the first person: “I have to. There’s no option. There’s a war on.”

  After all that came later on, and the pathetic creature into which he evolved, it’s hard to imagine him as I saw him then. It’s like looking at old photos of yourself in implausible fashions; you can’t feel the body under the clothes any more. But Adrian was like a young man who had failed to get commissioned in the armed forces in a great war, perhaps through colour blindness, or a congenital abnormality, or perhaps because he had some great gift for martial intelligence, and so he was expiating his guilt in some brightly lit bunker on the Home Front, punishing himself with one brief after another, birching himself with administration so that some fewer of his comrades might die in the field. Pale and undernourished by sunlight, his attitude remained that of the front-line combatant. His life was forfeit, but as long as he had it he would commit small acts of defiance in the face of the unseen enemy and, so long as his friends did the same, by tiny increments we would one day prevail.

  Ade was at war with poverty, with disease and dispossession, marshalling weapons at our disposal against them, so that those crushed under the oppression of hunger, dysentery, malaria and those random acts of Ade’s God – the hurricane, the earthquake, the flood – might be liberated.