Contingency planning, they call it in the field. Think what could go wrong – with supplies, with militia stealing the food – and eliminate the possibilities. What if I died this afternoon, electrocuted on a household appliance, brain haemorrhage, bludgeoned by a burglar? That stuff would be found on the computer and I’d never have a voice. Adrian wouldn’t confess. It couldn’t harm the dead, he’d reason, even if I was despised for my secret life. He was nothing if not pragmatic, as his internet cache strangely showed, with its neat cataloguing. What if the house was raided this afternoon? I’d look like his winsome accomplice, like those passive partners who are stage assistants to rape and murder? It was like there were cadavers of the innocents on the floor above me.
But, again, I was surprised that I was calm. The involuntary shake in my forearm had gone almost immediately. I realised it was the shock of the moment, genuinely and only the moment of realisation. There was no aftershock; it hadn’t possessed me. Indeed, I was self-possessed. My breathing was shallow. I was the expressionless cleric as I passed the large, fitted gilt mirror in the hall that had come with the house, pale, offering no signals in my face because there was no one there to offer them to.
I did some paperwork, read some cathedral project proposals for art exhibitions, wrote some standard letters to donors. But I phoned the women-bishops group and made my excuses, flat-voiced and administrative, for not attending a briefing in Westminster. I wasn’t going to leave the house. Not in the state it was in. Not with the bodies in the study. I couldn’t yet leave the scene.
I rehearsed what I was going to say, I remember. Not for the purpose of delivering an effective speech. I needed to build my case, to identify and articulate what I thought, so that I was normal and right. On the side of the angels, I suppose. I made a small split-bean salad, enough for one, with some pitta bread and hummus. The afternoon wore on. I drank tea. I was normal; I hadn’t been to the edge of the abyss after all. And I waited, not with impatience. I was curious to know how it would turn out.
I turned on the television for the news and turned it off again. Put the radio on and the evening news magazine was running. Made more tea. Read a book on female witness in the gospels that I was to review for a theology periodical and noted with satisfaction that I could concentrate on it, make notes. It’s what I did then, before I found the deeper abyss.
And he arrived home – though, as I write that, I know now that I’d stopped considering it home, even then – at a little after six. He must have worked later than five, or had a quick drink with one of his mousy colleagues, maybe the one he’d had here. I heard the key and my mood didn’t alter, no start at the base of the throat, no gall rising. Briefly, I wondered if this was how violent episodes started, placidity turning to a sudden red mist, the sort of event we read about in the papers and never have a clear idea what really happened. One of us left dead.
But no, the surface remained as calm as my interior. It was a strange atmosphere but I wasn’t inclined to break it. I was in the kitchen at the end of the hall, a cavernous and heartless chamber that had presumably been a garden room when the kitchen was in the staff basement. I could picture the scene as he saw it: the gloaming of the hall, the brightness of the kitchen, the radio on softly, me sitting at the table with book and notes. “Hi,” he said, from the door.
“Hello.” I looked up. But didn’t stand. Just stared at him. Not with disgust, actually completely thoughtlessly, taking nothing in. A pause.
“What’s up?” he said, sensing something.
“I think you’d better tell me what’s on your computer.”
“What do you mean?” he said, straightening up.
“I think you know. You left your browser open. Something to titillate at dawn. Your Daily Office, as it were.”
He took a step into the room and exhaled like a collapsing tent.
“Oh, Jesus. It was only a bit of curiosity. Some pop-ups came with some spam and I clicked them. I’m not interested in that stuff, just clicked to see what it was.”
I was on my feet now.
“Interested? What the hell do you mean? I don’t care what you’re looking at with your pants round your ankles. But if you’re an illegal pervert – and you are – you need to be banged up and you’re not taking me with you, capisce?”
This was unplanned. Where had it come from? I wasn’t angry. I was still calm. But why was I doing this and where was I going with it?
“Hey, don’t do this,” he said, his voice rising over mine, one hand out, palm down, conciliatory, reasonable. “It’s just a bit of porn. It happens. A stupid mistake. I don’t get off on this stuff. If I was used to it, if I were a user, I’d have concealed it, wiped my history. Come on. It was just a couple of curious clicks.”
I’d walked towards him. That surprised me. I hit him on the upper chest with the palms of both hands, like one of those percussionists with a circus troupe, smashing
