Anyway, I constructed a case for my ordained ministry from that insight. I made one of my male examiners weep, while I stayed resolutely dry-eyed. He revolted me. How dare you cry over the starving, you worm, you pathetic sentimentalist, sitting in an over-heated meeting room on the outskirts of a provincial cathedral town. I bet you give your children’s clothes to Oxfam and make up a shoe box of bewildering northern-hemispherical gifts at your parish Cristingle service and then go and play six-a-side with the youths that you wish you were still among, preparing them for the secular lives that you didn’t dare to try. Instead, thin man in casual wear, you sit in front of me in a chair for old folks while indulging your feminine side, reaching for the carton of tissues that were meant for me, as I spare you no morbid detail of how a child under five in southern Sudan could not even know that they had a right to life.
I was asked again about why I thought priesthood was for me by a woman examiner who seemed more preoccupied with whether the male applicants were gay. This time I said: “Because I’ve touched the hem of his cloak and I’m healed.” Which I thought, at the time, was true. And maybe it was.
Anyway, it worked. They recommended me for training.
I used that examiner to get what I wanted, of course, to be a signed-up rep of the only truly durable world movement in history that was available to a Western white woman, founded by a strange figure who had stood by these nameless and worthless creatures and told them they were whole human beings. They presumed I loved Jesus of Nazareth, as they signed my paperwork for my Diocesan Director of Ordinands. But I was prepared to use Him too – though, of course, we are required to talk about that the other way around – by standing in his number against the pointless little games played out by political scientists and bankers in bunkers and marketing men and aid workers and moist little volunteers in easy chairs in malodorous conference centres, all of whom in their busy little ways starve babies to death, or at least let them die.
And so I had a career. I was employed by the Church of England, but my ministry was in foreign aid. I became something of a poster girl, I suppose, for women priests without a proper job. And I liked that too. It was who I was and who I still am.
Years later, Sarah and I met in one of the City chaps’ wine bars in Paternoster Square, dark inside, but pleasant enough outside under the awning when it wasn’t too cold, close to one of the autumn’s first-lit gas burners. She was scooping hot Camembert on to toasted focaccia while I toyed with an anchovy salad.
We’d laughed about how we’d graduated from the Kentish Town greasy-spoon we used at the agency to a place that sold Petit Chablis for twenty-three quid, which, to be fair, only Sarah could afford.
I remember watching as she looked at her prematurely wrinkled fingers and swollen knuckles. Her nails were good, I noticed, not dirty and cracked as they’d been when she’d been in the field.
I’d just asked her a difficult question. If the Nobel-aspirant Russian oligarch she was working for now was so keen on finding a solution to Palestine, why was he using American dollars?
“It’s just the international currency.”
“How many of them?”
She looked at me for emphasis. “About a billion.”
It was the first time I thought she might like money and it shamed me.
“Is that a thousand million or a million million?”
“Does it matter?”
She popped a lump of bread and molten cheese in her mouth and sucked her finger. We were girls again and it was fun.
“I don’t do money, Sar, you know that,” I said. “It sounds like a job for suits. It’ll be one of those ghastly gigs with name badges. Davos with matzoh balls.”
“It needs to be done.”
“Does it? I mean, does it really? What difference can money make when people hate each other?”
“They can hate each other in more comfort. They can hate each other as social equals. Money makes people forget they hate each other anyway. They can despise each other’s garden furniture instead.”
“So your man’s an economic engineer.”
I looked out across the dazzling lake of new paving stones towards the Temple Gate.
“Engineering’s part of it.”
“I think we want people to stay poor. Keeps us in a job.”
“The Church or Aid?” asked Sarah. She was always so easy to talk to. “The poor are always with us.”
There was a pause as she tore off some softer bread from the basket and wiped her bowl with it. A young Baltic waiter came and poured more wine.
“I really want you to come to Jerusalem, Nat,” she said. “We get to be peace envoys. With the Centre’s money. And I’ll be there. What’s not to like?”
I was silent, as if considering it.
“Ade and I are finished,” I said. She was looking at me and chewing at half speed, so I paused for dramatic effect. “I mean Adrian.”
And we laughed out the tension of the moment.
“He bonked who?” she asked, after I’d given her the highlights.
“I don’t know. Someone from the office.”
“Don’t you want to know?”
“What difference would it make?”
“Then it’s settled.”
“What is?”
“You have to come to Jerusalem. An away-break to save the world.”
When I think of my own investment of
