He didn’t take his hand away, but moved his other across, topping mine, joining the game. He had decided it was over. Whatever he’d come for, he’d received. Or he was giving up.
“You’re an extraordinary woman, Natalie. Our recruitment is good, but we must have had no idea what we were taking on with you. I hope we can work together again soon.”
He dropped his eyes and took his hands away.
“Take care, Natalie. Take very good care of yourself.”
It was a threat, of course.
“No, Roger,” I said and I leaned in much further. “You’re going to take very good care of me.”
It was intimate in a creepy way. I broke the spell. “Drop me here,” I said to the driver, as we pulled level with Paternoster Square. “I’m sure the gentleman doesn’t mind paying.”
I closed the door and stood at the window a moment.
“What a glorious day the Lord has made,” said Roger, smiling now, resigned.
“Let’s rejoice and be glad in it,” I said and let go of his door.
I stood on the edge of the cobbles as the cab swung around. Roger didn’t turn to look at me. I let him slip down the hill, disappearing among buses, before I turned my back and headed towards the Chapter House.
Epilogue
I suppose it’s a commonplace to say that we spend too long on the past. But we do.
We try to live with it by suggesting that memory is unreliable or that others see it differently, or that it can come back and surprise us, or that we simply make our own history. But it’s all an avoidance strategy, because our future is entirely unmanageable too. Nothing turns out as we expect it to.
I know that people always say that, but they don’t really know what it means. They mean the course of their lives is unpredictable, or that some episodes don’t turn out as they might have done. But I mean something different: nothing, nothing at all, absolutely nothing turns out as you might expect, because we’re remade by every new event that unfolds. So that means that our expectations are always on the change, and subtly, imperceptibly, develop like the appearance of lines on a face.
I understand that now, my relationship with my future, and it’s not too late for me. As the man might have said, the future’s another country, we’ll do things differently there.
I told you at the start that I’m writing my life assurance and I still am. But it’s my confession too. Near the same window seat where I began, I’m now set up at a helpful little trestle table that makes it easier to type at the laptop. Let me just tell you about the day I started to write all this down.
It wasn’t an epiphany and I didn’t suddenly have an urge to make a record of what had happened to me and what I’d done. That would imply that I was joining in, engaging with others, and it wasn’t like that. It was quite the reverse; it was because I was, for the first time, truly alone and I realised that I was.
I’ve never felt more alone. Not in my little backroom prison in northern Israel, not with the dying in Sudan, not being married to Adrian. No, I was never more alone than when I stood in the late low winter sun of Oxford’s South Park, holding my baby son.
I was standing about three-quarters of the way up the hill, looking down to the river and across the town, and though the odd cyclist passed and some adolescents in baggy black tracksuit trousers were kicking a football about not far away, as they had on a rec ground in suburban Nazareth, their cries carrying through the oily membrane of what I might once have called my bubble, I seemed to be the only one here, with all the world over there, where the godly towers popped up from the melee of roofs, as they may once have done in Jerusalem.
I was deliciously alone, feeling my stretched body, like the flesh of fruit, held compactly by firm skins of clothing, the outer layer a dog-tooth coat of some vintage I’d bought for five pounds in a charity shop with Hugh.
Absurdly, I still wore the headscarf Yusef had given me – a link to him, I suppose, the man I would never see again – and it now completed the retro-forties anachronism that stood on a metalled path, a ghostly figure, looking like she was wondering how to spend her ration, her simple husband killed in a distant war somewhere.
Alone, not despite my baby in the crook of my elbow, but because of him. We were, we are, one body, he and I, and standing there, as one, we were complete, independent of anyone. He, this tiny child, has done more than anyone to burst the bubble in which I existed, more than the kindly doctor lady that I now see twice a week, and to put me in the world. There is nothing like being put in the world for feeling so totally alone.
He was wrapped, in a similarly absurd counterpoint to my headscarf, in a little pink cot blanket, because Hugh had been so sure that he would be a girl. In the three days since his birth, his face had unfolded like a flower and now his shiny nose had reddened slightly against the cold and the waffle-weave was folded down over his forehead like a cap, concealing his cloud of dark hair, the only visible clue to which were those jet lashes that now sealed his eyes in sleep, the quiver of a lower lip, hidden in the tiny fold of his pout, the surface sign
