“You OK, love?” he said as soon as he came on the line.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “Busy day at the office.”
“The Bishop is beside himself with pride. Never has he had such cause to be grateful for our partnership in the gospel,” said Hugh, invoking one of the bishop’s favourite pay-offs. “Did you have to do any last rites?”
“Nah, wasn’t like that, Huge. Emergency-services pastoral, mostly. Any messages?”
“Your husband called several times. Wanted us to guarantee that you weren’t doing anything stupid. I said it was a bit late for that and he bit my head off, sorry. He wanted to be sure you weren’t going underground.”
“No danger of that either,” I said and smiled.
Then I went to dial Adrian, changed my mind and texted him. I told him I’d make supper.
10
Adrian had been very anxious to find out how the child porn had got on his computer, though he may have been further signalling his innocence. He’d made a huge fuss with the internet provider, but seemed to assume that it was solely a failure of technology. So now it was down to me to interpret its real provenance.
I sat in a coffee shop on Ludgate Hill, watching the quantum of humanity on the pavements and a shunting line of traffic edging down to the Circus. There was a cold and low sun. Neutral tones. Chidden of God. I was at a small brown table, with a cappuccino cooling, beside the glass wall that separated me from all the atomised energy outside, witnessing the chaos theory of commercial life. A matching brown stripe made a horizontal bar across the window, the cafe brand printed on it next to me, presenting itself to the world beyond. It was my fourth wall and I watched the street performance beyond it, entirely alienated.
It was like being in a tranquillising advertisement for coffee – like one of those in which everyone in the background moves faster than the heroine. I remember wondering, as I waited, whether this was depression. I was barely thinking. I did have a sense, I think, of being washed along on a tide. I’d thrown the rope ashore.
In an overpriced coffee shop in east-central London, my feet were losing their purchase on the silt of a slippery seabed and I was being carried away by a current. And I was letting it happen, willing freely to be washed out to sea.
So when Toby arrived, I was surprised by my serenity. My neck moved my head only slowly as he approached, yellow and navy college scarf hanging loose in the collar of a smart new grey coat that I guessed his mum, not a girlfriend, far less a wife, had bought him for Christmas.
He stood for a moment, smiling inanely down at me. No, thank you, I didn’t want another coffee. I didn’t think I’d ever want another coffee again.
“I’ll just get something,” he said and bounced to the counter.
I resumed watching the world perform its quantum mechanics for me.
“Thanks for calling and sorry I couldn’t speak to you,” he said as he tore the top off a narrow sugar sachet like an aidie opening a swab. “How are things?”
I doubt this easy-going intro was part of his training. It was just the way he was.
“I’ve changed my mind. I’ll go to Israel,” I said.
I hadn’t actually planned to get straight to it. But I was in a kind of meditative trance and it was as if the words bubbled up natur-ally. Maybe I was speaking in tongues.
He expelled one beat of a surprised laugh.
“Really? Well, that’s fabulous news. I’ll tell the office right away. They will be pleased. Well, after we’ve had coffee, I’ll tell them, huh.”
He could have been a salesman winning a photocopier contract. Then he talked about speakers at the conference and I didn’t listen. I waited until he’d finished his flapjack.
“It’ll be great working with you,” he said.
Clearly the little matter of the extra job as a postal service didn’t merit a mention. It was all part of the same mundane package to him.
When he fell silent, I asked: “The people you work for, Toby. How far would they go to get me to do it?”
He cocked his head in one short half-turn.
“They wouldn’t pay you, if that’s what you mean.” He overemphasised his words to show he was joking.
“That’s not what I mean,” I said sweetly and smiled. “Would they put child pornography on someone’s computer?”
Toby sat back slightly and pursed his lips against a thin line of coffee foam. Then he wiped it like a boy, on the back of his hand.
“What?”
“They put child pornography on my husband’s computer.”
Pause. “Who did?”
“Somebody at your end.”
He tried to look like he was taking the allegation seriously.
“Why would anyone do that?” he said.
I smiled and let a little silence run out.
“Never mind,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
He stared at the table and drew the corners of his mouth down, rubbing his palms slowly together, in a praying position. I took this to indicate not so much disbelief, but that he simply wasn’t prepared to go there, not into the deranged dysfunction of a client’s married life.
“It’s OK, Toby. I’m not paranoid. I’m sound. But it’s true.”
He looked like he had something to say, took a decision and leaned in on the table.
“Look, Natalie, they don’t do that. They wouldn’t know how to. We just want you to speak at a conference. And to help us a little with a drop.” He paused, then he said: “I’m sorry.”
I suppose he was being sympathetic, breaking it to me that he couldn’t offer me a way out of the discovery of Adrian’s horrific online habits.
“I believe you, Toby,” I said, because actually he wouldn’t know. Too young, too unworldly, and that was some sort of comfort. “But it doesn’t matter. That’s not why I’m doing it. I’m doing it because I
