He tucked his chin behind his collar and continued.
“I think I can anticipate where you are on this and, of course, in many important respects, we shouldn’t be treating women candidates for episcopacy any differently from the male of the species.”
“Differently?” I asked, cocking slightly to the right. I can do coquettish. Men like Dean liked it even – especially – if they were gay.
“Well,” his hands opened, “there is at least meant to be some element of surprise in the approach from the CNC. But I thought it was only fair on you that I ask.”
I paused for a beat or two, looking at the carpet, pretending to choose my words.
“I have no desire to be a bishop,” I said evenly. “And I don’t suppose there is much desire among the entire company of the Kingdom of Heaven for me to be a bishop. More to the point, you won’t want a bishop with damn near a criminal conviction for foreign-aid food theft and lorry hijacking.”
“As I say, the general feeling is that that could be something of a public relations triumph.”
“I’m happy where I am,” I said. “Maybe some parish ministry is called for. But I’m not a symbol of unity. Or an administrator.”
“There’s a prophetic tradition in the English episcopacy too,” he said calmly. He was talking someone else’s book.
“Or a leader of men, then,” I added.
I let the phrase hang in the air. I’d enjoyed the reference to the Kingdom and now I knew I’d brought it bang down to earth. But elegantly, as Dean would appreciate. The corner of his mouth was raised, in the semblance of a quizzical smile.
“I understand that. But, in any event,” he too paused for a beat, “they have asked me to sound you out.” Well, I never, Dean, good job you pointed that out as my silly, ditzy brain may not have grasped it. “I think they’re very keen, you know.”
“Is there to be a lavender list?” I asked, doing the cocked head thing again.
“Oh, I don’t think there’d be anything so formal.” He leaned forward in his chair and shot his cuffs. I realised now we were being collegial. Men had done this stuff in senior common rooms and the tea rooms of parliament for generations, but it wasn’t a body language in which I was fluent. “I think it’s more a case of the House of Bishops being asked to get their ducks in a row, as it were.”
I resisted the temptation to change the vowel in duck. So I confined myself to: “And if I look like a duck and quack like a duck . . .”
“You develop the metaphor with a self-deprecation I hadn’t invited. But precisely.”
Dean was smiling at me now in a manner that he must have imagined was kindly. I sensed he was enjoying this more than he had expected.
“Anyway, the Bishop would like to see you on the matter of the formation of your ministry too. I’m sure if you tell him what you’ve told me he’ll be grateful.”
His use of the word “formation” was interesting. It’s what they talk about at theological colleges before ordination. But he turned conversation to my work at the cathedral and I understood his agenda for this encounter had been concluded.
Outside, I found Hugh in his small office on the first floor. It smelt caustically of lilies. In his most inquisitively camp way, he went straight for the debrief.
“Just some rubbish about whether I should ever want to be a bishop,” I said, noting privately that I was playing Dean’s confidentiality game. It was infectious. I needed quarantine.
I took a mouthful of tepid coffee from a mug whose rim was too thick and which was painted with a childish pig.
“And why are church coffee mugs so shite?”
I didn’t want to talk about bishops. I liked Hugh and didn’t want him to think I was on the make.
“It’ll be the finest porcelain for you soon enough, your grace.”
Hugh made to prod me with his ginger nut.
“Sod off, Huge. I really can’t bear this whole sketch. It’s either smarmy pussycats like Dean trying to do me a favour, or weepy, fat old faggots – like you – at Synod treating me like the Antichrist. Anyway, I don’t have any parish experience.”
“Sweets, don’t be so naïve. They’ll stick you in some gig in the City for six months – or St Mary’s in Elizabeth Street is free.”
He rolled his eyes roguishly. St Mary the Virgin was a very high church, where women knew their place.
“And purple would so suit you. Or maybe you could get away with mauve. Do it for me, darling. We’ve got to have a bishop that nobody minds men shagging for once. What happens next?”
“I’m seeing Londin next week, Tuesday.”
Short for Londinium. Bishops style themselves in Latin.
Hugh made a sound and gesture like he’d taken an arrow to the breast. “They’re so lining you up, dear. What time? Promise me you’ll meet me straight afterwards in the Cock.”
“Three.”
“I have choir at four. Cock at five.”
You didn’t contradict Hugh when he was on a gossip roll. I remember smiling at how much I loved having him around. How I trusted him completely. I would instinctively not talk about this stuff to anyone else. Not Adrian. But Hugh was metabolically incapable of letting me down. It just wasn’t in his make-up. I wished then that we could have worked together until we were two hundred years old. He would have kept me clean, if I’d let him. If I’d just hung out with Hugh, nothing would have happened. And not much comes of nothing.
4
I first met Toby from the Foreign Office some weeks before the Bishop introduced us, at one of those pointless debates about women bishops – pointless because the same people always came, not unlike Sunday
