I’d returned a day early from a conference in Cambridge on women’s ministry in Muslim countries, which we’d abandoned when the final keynote speaker had phoned in sick, and I’d jumped a fast train and made straight to the house. No one knew that I was here. Except, now, Adrian and his tea lady, or whoever she was. I sat for about half an hour, drank a cappuccino with an extra shot and pretended to read the paper I’d had on the train, to attract no attention.
It wasn’t long after eleven when I’d arrived at the house. Adrian sometimes took an early lunch to go to the municipal gym when it was less crowded, but this was mid-morning, for goodness’ sake. I guessed that they’d both slid out for their tryst, perhaps attending a cancelled work meeting somewhere. That and being partially clothed in the sitting room meant that she hadn’t been an overnight guest. Adrian wouldn’t be leaving me, I knew that. That would involve too much initiative. They used the house because they were too poor or mean to use a hotel. She was either married or lived too far away, or both, though that was of little real concern to me. So what was of concern to me?
I resolved, after staring listlessly at the weather forecast in the back of the newspaper, that I wasn’t going to throw him out, at least not immediately. It was too high-maintenance an option, would mean transfer of belongings, too much talking, and I had a shedload of work in submissions to General Synod on provision for those opposed to women bishops, which already had to be compressed by the conference I’d just co-organised. In those days, I thought that was important. On such prosaic considerations were my life decisions made back then.
So I suppose I decided to forgive him. Or tolerate him, which is pretty far from forgiveness. But we’re in the forgiveness business, Christians. Given all that unfolded subsequently, this was Jonah bound on a calm sea for Jaffa before being flung into the belly of the whale.
I met Adrian in the crypt cafe of the cathedral early that evening. He was largely silent as I knew he would be. He had the grace not to offer excuse or apology. He sat, staring up the cavern of mausoleums towards the military dead, and said at one point: “I don’t know what’s going on. I never wanted any of this.”
I let the ambiguity of that hang in the musty air. Then told him we’d live separately in the house for a while. It was a big house. We’d look at each other from a bit of a distance and see what was left of us to salvage. It was an aggressive version of giving each other some room, which was the kind of expression we were taught in priestly training.
“I don’t know what happened to us,” he said.
“We hung out and got married,” I replied.
He swung aside in his seat. Then he stood and slowly walked out, giving me time to catch him up, which I didn’t.
Adrian’s not the sort of man women notice, but he had a quiet commitment that I took for strength when we worked in our overseas aid outfit in Kentish Town. The regular cast passed through. Earnest young women making a difference, young men with shaven heads ameliorating the plight of the proletariat, distracted girls filling in before marriage; our generation’s spare parts finding no other purpose for themselves in the nation’s economy.
We pitched ourselves as The Fed, a charity started a decade or so earlier by Jake Sorresen, one of those self-starting hipsters with a thirst that couldn’t be sated on peace and love. He was alpha-male meets folkie, Surrey goes to Lindisfarne, long and languid, loose and smiley, hair like metal wool tied behind a monkish pate, his clean-shaven, weather-beaten face set against the power-beards of the big foreign-aid charities, with their centralised executives and bibbed chuggers outside the Tube stations.
His was a flat organisation, a federation of autonomous cells in Britain and the US, which commanded their own relief missions, the only resource from central office being intelligence. Famine or floods, we were quick. Jake’s office would call for resource and like a mini-cab firm putting out a fare, a team of two or three could be in the field within thirty-six hours. These pathfinders would assess and advise, calling down the right response, very often from the big agencies. Yes, it was exciting.
Sarah Curse passed through. She was by then working properly for UNHCR and was seconded to the Russia Centre in Cambridge. She came to us on a kind of internship for three months, but really it was to see whether we were good enough for UNHCR recognition. On the day she arrived, she waved her stick – just one stick now – across the office at me and said she’d heard I worked there.
“What does the Russia Centre actually do?” I asked her in the Italian coffee shop we took to using in Fortess Road, a Formica anachronism with big glass pouring jars of sugar.
She shrugged. “It funds Middle East projects mainly. Infrastructure projects commercially. But philanthropy too. Trying to support a two-state solution.”
“Right,” I said, flopping back in undergraduate, post-ironic style. “Not money-laundering or trading American passports then.”
“I don’t think so. Sergei Sarapov is – or was – close to Yeltsin, but he’s one of the good guys. His wife was killed in a gangster hit in Moscow and he lives in Vienna now. It’s in Cambridge, I think, because that’s where his daughter went to uni.”
“The charidee oligarch,” I said, determined not to buy it. “I must send him a begging letter.”
“Stop it,” she said with a quick smile that showed her neat teeth. “Whatever it takes. That’s my view.”
“Yeah, whatever it takes.” I looked out of the window
