“Anyway,” he said more loudly, suddenly sitting up and swinging one, short-socked ankle over his knee. “The Foreign Office has, again as you’ll know, quite a collateral interest in the plight of Christians in the Holy Land, such as they now are. And this chap I saw at the ADC thought that we should be talking about how the Christian voice in the Middle East could be speaking up for the peace process in general and this scheme in particular. That seems to me to be rather a good idea. And,” he cleared his throat lightly, “of course I immediately thought of you.”
The Archbishops’ Development Council was one of the interminable talking shops that the Anglican Church gets off on. I’d always rather enjoyed the sense of superiority I felt from having served in the field when it came to overseas aid. I thought of saying so, but kept silent.
“You’d be ideal,” he continued. “You know the region, you can speak to the issues and, er, you’re quite high profile.”
“You mean I’ve been in the newspapers.”
“I mean you know how to handle the media.”
“I stole a lorry,” I laughed. “And they took photos of me. That hardly makes me the acceptable face of the Anglican Communion.”
“You gave your all in one of the toughest places on earth to have to serve a ministry. People relate to you. And to your motives. It’s easy to trust people when you know where their heart is.”
He’s good at this, I thought. But he did like me, I knew that. He’d backed me as soon as the UN’s heavies had come after me. Us. It wasn’t just the threat of prosecution over the lorry business – it was the way I’d played out in the media too. I knew that the prosecution of me by the Aussies and the UN would have been a whole lot worse if the Bishop hadn’t come out publicly in my support.
“This is a matter of enormous regret and we take it very seriously,” he had said at the time. “But foreign-aid workers work under great stress and at great personal risk to themselves. And there is no greater risk than that attached to serving the innocent victims of a war zone.”
Yes, I remember it verbatim. I liked him too, for standing in my corner, and I thought that as I watched him try to persuade me to go back to the Middle East.
“Would you like more coffee?” he asked.
I’d entirely forgotten the half-pool of milky slurry that remained on the small table beside me. I flicked up a hand from the arm of the chair in deferential refusal.
“I wonder if you’d meet our man from the Foreign Office. His name’s Roger Passmore and he carries a brief for the Middle East desk. In any event, I’d really value your take on the whole thing.”
I sensed our meeting was drawing to its close.
“If you could come back here, I’ll introduce you to his young aide-de-camp, a nice boy. But Natalie, if you do get involved – and I do hope you’ll go and see him at least, no obligation to buy, as it were – I want this to be purple-stole business. It’s far from clear that any of this will happen. I don’t think it’s any more than a radical flyer at the moment. And with all the delicacies of the peace process and our roles in it . . .” He trailed off. “We really need to keep this tight, yes?”
Our roles in it? Our? But I nodded: “The seal of the confessional.”
“Good!” he slapped his thighs. “I’ll need to introduce you to the Foreign Office people. And then perhaps you’ll come back and tell me how it goes.”
We started to amble across the office.
“How is Adrian?” he asked. I said he was fine too. He was good on partners’ names, less good on knowing anything useful about them. “And how is the monstrous regiment going? I hope the trad jazz isn’t winding you up too much.”
“The usual mix of hormones and politics,” I said. “I think most women who would make bishop have lost the will to fight and I’m guessing that’s a position that doesn’t keep an established Church awake at night.”
He stopped short of the door. “I hope you haven’t lost the will to fight, Natalie, nor the will to live. We need you.”
It was the sort of thing he said on the way out, the anteroom salutation, but I did wonder how much it was a thinly veiled deal – do me this favour, Natalie, and there’s a bishopric in it for you. I hoped not, because he was a friend and it would mean he’d developed a different, more formal and manipulative approach to me. But it was demonstrable that this hadn’t been the meeting that Dean had anticipated we were going to have.
As I walked up the lane towards the worker ants of Paternoster Square, I knew I couldn’t share this agenda with Hugh, and it irritated me that this was an issue that was changing two friendships. I didn’t have many – never had. With both the Bishop and Hugh, I’d always talked freely and we’d built a decent back catalogue of protected confidences. And then there was Sarah; I couldn’t ever see her as my contact with the Russians. But after that conversation it all felt very different, like I’d been taken into an inner sanctum. I was aware that I was responding in a new way. Or perhaps I was just pondering all these things inside, in heart rather than mind. For one thing, I hadn’t responded at all when he mentioned Roger Passmore’s name and I couldn’t work out why.
Hugh was right. I was called by an antediluvian churchwarden at St Mary the Virgin, Elizabeth Street, and was asked if I could “help out at all” during its interregnum, the hiatus between incumbent vicars when the laity run