A Dark Nativity Read online

  Our joint enterprise in southern Sudan was yet to come. But on the splintered decking of NW5, by a damp, untended ivy trellis, with the taste of dry cider lining my mouth and the sun setting on my first realisation that there was a war on and that he was a warrior in its theatre, I suppose I thought I fell in love with Adrian.

  3

  There is a final moment, I think, when the old life ended and the new began. Through a glass darkly, I remember. Me, standing in the bathroom shower, the time directly before my exile. There’s a chasm between me then and now and, if I look down dimly into its depths, I can see the shadows of people and acts that make me scream silently, as in a dream, numb to virtue and stripped of any capacity even to feel guilt. Guilt requires some small measure of responsibility and I never asked to be here, on this side of the bottomless pit.

  It’s funny, because a detail of the start of that day is very vivid, as when the victims of a disaster, like an air crash or the outbreak of war, recall the tiny, prosaic images just before it happens. As when you look away from a running child and its image is frozen for an instant on the mind’s photographic plate. Adrian had said that the computer had crashed, or the broadband line had gone down, or something. I was in the shower, the steam of the day’s first hot water rising.

  “Did you use it last night?” Adrian was shouting through bubbled glass, his head and the collar of a pink shirt presented in large blobs, as in a Derain painting.

  I remember watching him from my steaming geyser. I had one foot on the side of the bath, and had just dragged a razor deliciously up the side of my calf. I recall this detail, because it was my razor; I had bought it at a new little convenience store on Ludgate Hill. I had bought it because Adrian had complained that I was always using his. He had thrown his razor away, saying he didn’t need it because he was going to grow a beard now. I recall thinking that it was all about stopping me using his frigging razor. That’s the way I thought of him then, but we pottered along.

  “What?” I called back with an irritable edge.

  I had heard him perfectly well. But I looked at him through the panel of mottled glass. His forehead was close to the door, inclined so that the stretch of his balding pate was exaggerated, the bubbles of the glass picking up the line of his recently cropped, greying hair above his ear. His dark eyes, made more beady by the new austerity of the top of his head, were disassembled like molecular diagrams. I could recognise from his posture that he was pushing his lower lip together into a crease with the fingers of his right hand, a habit that was used to indicate both his self-control and irritation.

  “The computer won’t work. I can’t log on. It says my user name is invalid.”

  He stressed the first syllable of invalid, to make it sound like a sick person.

  “Have you tried rebooting it?”

  This exchange continued in the liturgy of a million middle-class households, more usually, I imagined, between parents and children. I told him to use my laptop if he just needed to look at emails. The old PC on this first floor, bought way back from my theological college during an IT upgrade, had become his by custom and practice, and he tended to tuck himself away up in what was now evidently his study, reading council papers without interruption. The wild man. He always had to start again if he was interrupted, he said.

  “I wish you wouldn’t use it.”

  This was about territory, not internet access.

  “I didn’t,” I replied, calmly now, in our customary rhythm of de-escalation.

  “Well, somebody did,” he was saying as he turned away and disappeared into the invisible world a foot from the door.

  “I expect it was the Archbishop of Uganda, looking for homos in the diocese,” I murmured to my shin.

  I remember this and other little conversations because this arid domestic trivia, from which any nourishment had been sucked, was to be the last of the normal that Adrian and I really had.

  I dried, dressed and made for the cathedral, a hop and a jump away. As I left the house, two figures stood just across the cobbles from my front door. One was familiar, hands thrust deep into a navy donkey jacket, a grey beanie pulled over his ears, stamping his feet though it was far from cold. The other was new, pale and younger with a black beard, maybe Turkish, two cameras slung from his shoulders, one of which he now focused on me.

  “Hi, Tony,” I said, walking up to them, ignoring the whir of the camera’s motor-drive. “What’s up?”

  “Want to talk about Sudan, Nat?”

  I let my shoulders drop wearily and turned my head to express scepticism. “What about Sudan?”

  “Oh, y’know, Nat. Nicked any Aussie trucks lately?”

  I sighed a laugh. “You know I can’t.”

  Tony was the most persistent of the press pack that had pursued me after the last Sudan trip. He was freelance, but had made me his project for some reason, turning up in Amen Court periodically to ask the same questions. I’d made him tea and brought him sandwiches when public interest in me had meant that he staked me out most days and much of the evenings, but I never invited him in. There was a protocol to be observed.

  “Why the snapper?” I indicated his new colleague, who was examining a shot of me on the back of his camera.

  “This is Mirac,” said Tony, and Mirac grinned and raised his weapon again.

  “I said why, not who.”

  “They say you could be up for a big job. One of the first women’s bishoprics or something.”

  “And a paper’s paid for a photographer? Really?”

  “He’s agency and a mate. Well, he owes me a favour. Y’know, if I got the exclusive interview with new Bishop Natalie, I’d have the pics too.”

  “Oh, come on, Tony, you’re having me on,” and I laughed. “That’ll be ages off yet. It wouldn’t be a scoop. It would be a guess.”

  “But have they talked to you about a bishopric? I mean, they couldn’t, could they, until the old Sudan job was cleared up?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What does that mean?” Irritation had crept into Tony’s voice.

  “It means I don’t know anything. I haven’t heard anything. And you shouldn’t believe everything you hear in the newspapers. I’m late.” And I waved a hand airily over my shoulder.

  Off past the hideous new Paternoster Vents, a stainless-steel installation which wafts smells from some kind of substation through what are meant to look like angel wings, to the Chapter House. This place was the purpose of my existence at the time; both an escape from and a justification for the home with Adrian.

  From behind the heavy door, when I’d shouldered it aside, Jay said, “Morning, Natalie. They’re upstairs today – you’re not quite late yet.”

  Jay liked me, I knew. She was comely, wide-faced, big glasses, a colourful wrap thrown across her right shoulder, both shawl and wearer from Nigeria. I dropped the almond croissant that I brought her in a paper bag on to the desk. “Sorry about the greasy bag,” I said, but she waved me away with a laugh.

  Climbing the three flights of formal stairs was nasty, their steps shallow in pitch and long in the tread, built for cassocks, making them difficult to skip up. Coffee and tea at the top, in large white china pots, unlike the plastic screw-top Thermoses known to every parish in the land, next to plates of khaki biscuits, with nauseating fillings. I took a coffee, black, and pressed the saucer into the palm free of paperwork. I liked Jay’s coffee and I miss it.

  I entered the big state room as I always did, pretending to have difficulty managing both coffee and papers. This little deceit saved me having to look at the assembled men for a moment. There were a couple of “Ah, Natalie” greetings, of the bouncy-syllable variety to demonstrate faux welcome, and one “Hey, Nat” from someone who wanted to be my right-on friend.

  You don’t need to know who these people are – nobody does – but there was Dean (never “the Dean”), in the middle and silhouetted in the light of one of the three long sash windows that face the c
athedral. He was between the Canon Precentor, a better harpist than administrator, and Dean’s secretary, jolly and overweight. On my left, against the ridiculous columned fireplace and under a huge, dark painting of an early Victorian cleric whom no one could be bothered to remember, were the tall and beaky Canon Treasurer and Hugh, our Canon Pastor and the only one, including me, in an open-necked shirt without a jacket. The legal secretary was sorting papers further down the table.

  All were men and they mostly wore the full-wrap acetate clerical collar, except the secretaries, the only laypeople present. Dean wore his crushed silk vestock and starched linen collar, somewhat presumptuously with a large pectoral cross, made of nails.

  “Always those nearest who are last to arrive,” said Dean, grinning but not kindly.

  “Actually, Hugh lives closer,” I said, wincing into the light from the window.

  Hugo, Hugh for short, Huge to me, was my neighbour in Ave Maria Court, the small enclave of house-for-duty Georgian homes, and one door closer to Paternoster Square, like it mattered.

  The Chapter House had survived the Blitz and had dowager-duchess status among the local postmodern architecture. It sat incongruously next to Temple Bar, Fleet Street’s ancient gate to the City of London, which had been rescued from ivy and nettles in the park of some stately home and dropped like a last-minute conversation piece into the redesign. It fitted in only in so far as it was a folly.

  I sat at the table, facing the windows and beyond them the north walls of the cathedral, as the meeting lurched along bet-ween self-interest and exhibitionism. These meetings were easy enough to play. Just stay in touch, drifting a little off the tide of the conversations, offer my own agenda items and make about three considered interventions into those of others. Job done. I stared out through the long windows, as though considering the issues of budgeting for art shows in the north transept, or the policy on charging tourists who said they wanted to access the cathedral to pray, but really considering the uselessness of these two houses: the home I shared a few hundred yards away with a man who couldn’t manage his own email and this politburo of ecclesiastical bureaucracy.

  The great walls of the cathedral rose terrifyingly outside, so large they looked closer than they were. It was right that they had put the old Temple Bar next to it – this was our Temple in the old scriptural sense, the Temple at Jerusalem, the old order, and no number of new committees could expunge its corruption.

  I imagined it as a great steam liner in port, we in some sort of stevedores’ office on the jetty. I had heard somewhere that Christopher Wren had deliberately built the edifice from every bit of its entire base upwards, like a ship raised from the keel, to avoid the king suddenly ordering something smaller to save money. Then I imagined the great ship sway in some remote ocean, pitching slowly and irresistibly in the swell, then quite still in a glassy sea, perhaps the north Atlantic in April, a huge foundering metaphor for the Church of England.

  As I watched from the Chapter House, my cathedral-liner began to settle at its east end, its bow out of sight from me, but the horizontal lines of its ancient architecture imperceptibly tipping in that direction and then occasionally taking a more definite lurch as a bulkhead in its vast crypt gave way. Its great west-end stern began to rise from the water and the tourists who had sought sanctuary there began to drop, screaming, into St Paul’s Graveyard. Finally, the great vessel started to swing to the perpendicular, the proud dome breaking free and crashing into the City offices of Cheapside. It stood there a moment, its lights extinguished, then shuddered and roared as it began its inexorable plunge into the depths of the ground, leaving a chaos of flotsam on the surface, smashed choir stalls, events leaflets, regimental flags and a Pre-Raphaelite painting, bobbing on the vacated surface of the City of London, as the screams died away.

  Well, shall we leave it there.

  “Well, shall we leave it there?”

  Dean was wrapping up. Chairs were pushed back.

  “Natalie, would you spare a moment,” he said down the table.

  I nodded and smiled.

  “Just give me five minutes and then come through.” And he glided out, the trunk of his body still, as if on castors.

  We called the Dean of St Paul’s “Dean”. That may seem obvious, but the most senior cleric of a cathedral is usually only called that, without the definite article, to his or her face: “Yes, Dean, the regimental flags in the transept will be laundered ahead of the Lord Mayor’s choral evensong.” Elsewhere it would be “The Dean wants the bloody flags washed.”

  But we called ours “Dean”, rather than “the Dean”, behind his back too. Like it was his name. Everyone knew intuitively that you couldn’t think of a name demographically more inappropriate for the spectacularly patrician Rt Rev’d Dr Algernon Crowhurst. Algy was Winchester and Oxford; Dean was a plumber’s mate.

  If you’re going over to the dark side, you have to visit Dean. He is not lightened in any part of himself by popular culture. I imagine his evenings are accompanied only by the rhythm of a marbled mantelpiece clock and a carefully chosen operetta on the wireless (never the radio). He would read papers that contained Latin extemporisations, without translations. Forty years ago, he’d have smoked a pipe confidently, a straight one, held proudly level by a square jaw.

  He reminded me of a drawing of a clergyman I’d seen in the vintage catalogue of the clergy outfitters in Westminster, which, like Dean, was on life’s slow train, stopping at all stations. I had been collecting my cathedral vestments, and the quietly clipped lady sales assistant had brought out the museum file of old catalogues, the pages now in plastic sachets for protection. There was an ink sketch of a clerical figure – male, of course – in a “short summer cassock, with breeches and stockings”. The illustration was probably from the 1930s.

  I could imagine Dean Crowhurst wearing breeches and stockings, and not just for private recreational purposes. He was tall with deep-set eyes and lean and sunken cheeks, but not unhealthy; a metabolism that was apparently unchallenged by intake. He ate, but only for fuel. He could only be attractive to a woman without natural juices. So that would be most female Church of England congregants then.

  “Come in, Natalie,” he said, bending his abnormally long frame to sweep some self-satisfied City glossies off the low round table next to a faded moss-green sofa. “Coffee?”

  Of course he’d have a pot ready. He’d have had a fresh pot sent up at exactly the right time. Two cups, I noted. We were on our own. Some effortless pleasantries out of the way, Dean placed his elbows on the arms of his cheap winged chair and rested his fingers together like a spider on a mirror. He started with his ritual update on the legal action against me for nicking a truck in a famine zone, which had been dragging on for years.

  “I hear that the Sudan business may at last be coming to a satisfactory conclusion,” he said. “I’m glad of that. As you know, I’ve always been frustrated that I can’t assist. But no doubt the Bishop knows best. I can only hope the lawyers have supported him well enough. He will speak to you, and I gather that Lambeth Palace wants to be in at the kill.”

  Dean had always smarted that the Diocese had insisted on running my case rather than the Chapter, which had a cosy concord with the City’s law firms.

  “If that’s the case, then it may be that we can finally close this quasi-criminal file of yours and you can prevail as a free clergywoman without a stain on your escutcheon. I have to say that I’ve always held that a disciplinary procedure for you would have been quite inappropriate, given the public interest. I’m hoping that you’ll have come out of it rather well.”

  “If that’s the case, I’ll be glad it’s over too, Dean,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Somebody said the other day that your file had been retitled GTA? I didn’t follow.”

  “Grand Theft Auto,” I said. “It’s a computer game.”

  “Indeed,” he said. “How charmingly informal.” And he shifted slightly in his chair to indicate
a change of subject. “I thought today we’d just touch on the progress of women bishops at General Synod,” he continued, his lower lip rising like a fender.

  So here we bloody go, I thought. What I hadn’t told Tony on my doorstep that morning was that some muppet on a Sunday newspaper had been in touch to ask if I would be included in a wildly speculative round-up of the likely candidates to be the first bishop without men’s bits. I’d learned that you didn’t talk to journalists about other journalists, or there’d be a feeding frenzy. But she’d suggested I was the “wild card”, given what Dean called the Sudan business.

  “I’m happy where I am,” I’d said to that reporter, but I was aware that was a churchy reply. It’s meant to imply that the nature of religious vocation doesn’t have the same structural aspirations as secular life. That might have been true in my case, but generally it’s nonsense. The upper reaches of the Church of England are a hotbed of morose entitlement, as venal as any commercial body.

  “If parliamentary time can be found towards the end of this session,” Dean was intoning, “we could plausibly see the first female names on shortlists by spring next year. Normal rules of meritocracy will apply, but the CNC may well be anxious to ensure that, in an environment of recruitment that isn’t exactly, ahem . . .” – he was doing what he imagined was roguish theatricality – “. . . accustomed to executive search in this quarter of the Church’s human resource, it would want to be sure that likely candidates were being properly identified. And . . .” – pause for imaginary effect – “. . . were likely to accept the sacrament of consecration.”

  The Crown Nominations Commission, the office that forwards names of likely bishops to the prime minister and ultimately to the monarch, makes a Freemasons’ Lodge look like a drop-in centre. It wears its secrecy like fetish gear and gets off on the confidentiality of its deliberations. I wondered who Dean knew on it. I didn’t really know where he stood on the issue of women bishops. I imagined he played by the book, with a dollop of disdain. General Synod, the Church’s parliament made up of houses of bishops, clergy and laity, had voted decisively for removing the legal obstacles for women, already ordained priests, to be made bishops. There was an irresistible rationale to that, even among most traditionalists and the predominantly male-gay Anglo-Catholic wing, to which Dean belonged, who nevertheless grew weepy over the theology of fatherhood.