“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,
