But I should tell you why I was there. My beautiful boy – still unnamed then, as I recall us standing alone on that hillside – was born at the John Radcliffe Hospital early on a February morning. It had been a relatively quick delivery, they told me, quicker than I’d feared and in all honesty the pain’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
He arrived in a slither of lilac, “a little undercooked”, the nurse said, and Hugh, whose forearm I gripped throughout, wept like a woman. They put him straight on my breast and then he slept like he’d just come from a sweaty day in the fields, and Hugh threw the blanket over him, stammering something silly about the dangers of being gender-specific. And we cried and laughed some more.
They put him under a lamp because he was a little jaundiced, so we were stuck there for a day or two. But as soon as Hugh was gone, I just wanted to get him and me out and away from there. They tried to make us wait. I filled out forms and on the line about parents I just wrote “Father unknown”, because it was right.
We were meant to see another doctor, but on the morning of the third day, while it was still dark, I packed my little bag – yes, the same little bag – and we left, catching a bus into town, the old women in the queue cooing and nodding knowingly and me smiling proudly.
On Headington Road, I won’t say I panicked – God knows, I don’t do that now – but as the city approached I knew I needed to get out, I knew we had to be on our own, to have some time on our own. So there I was in the park, holding him, and I don’t have to imagine myself back far to know the woman who stood there.
She had landed back in Britain feeling like a stranger reoccupying an alien existence, like a Palestinian coming home. She knew no one any more, but they behaved as if they knew her. And now it was as if the gash in time that had accommodated my life in Israel and Palestine and Lebanon had healed over, leaving only scar tissue. It was a subcutaneous scar and one that no one need really notice, but I could still feel it, like an old injury that wasn’t spoken about in polite company.
I saw Adrian twice and then no more. I doubt we’ll ever meet again. I’d borrowed the master keys from the Chapter House and the house was dulled by human absence, not unlike my apartment in Jerusalem. Adrian had vacated, computer and clothes gone, and surprisingly little space was left by his departure. I phoned his office like I was calling a utility service. I didn’t even have to pause before making the call.
We met at the house, but he didn’t come in – just returning his keys, he said. I didn’t ask where he was living and he didn’t ask where I’d been. Then I called him at the office again when I knew I was pregnant. I don’t know why. I took him some post and a Hungarian language course he’d left behind. We met at a coffee house near his office. He snorted derisively when I told him, but he didn’t ask who the father was, so I couldn’t tell him I didn’t know.
Dean saw me in his rooms again and murderers, rapists and the like must give off noxious fumes that only someone of his sophistication can detect, because his nostrils flared like someone had served him a dog-mess sandwich at a General Synod fete. I told him I’d been to see the Bishop – I made the appointment as soon as I got out of Roger’s cab – and had asked for a new job.
The Bishop had said he would see what he could do, but in the meantime I should take some time out. Go on retreat. Get my strength back. He was his old kind self and treated me pastorally like someone who’d had some kind of breakdown. I wondered what his security-service friends had told him, if anything.
I wasn’t about to tell him anything – I’m tired of being treated like I’m mad. Dr Shirley here in Oxford doesn’t treat me like I’m mad, not like old Dr Gray.
The Bishop said that when I was refreshed, I was to speak to him again. My ministry wasn’t to be wasted, he said, and the Church of England needed a bishop like me. So perhaps he knows nothing of what happened in Israel. I have called him. I took a bit of a gamble and said that I doubted he wanted a divorced (well, as good as) woman bishop with an illegitimate, mixed-race son.
“You mean a single mother,” he said, “with an adopted Middle Eastern child.”
So he knows something, but no more than I could have told him. I’ve been lucky to have him. Blessed am I among women, eh?
So I came up here, to Oxford, like a Victorian woman in a delicate condition, awaiting her time. Hugh has these dear friends at the uni, he a Philosophy don, she a psychiatrist. Dr Shirley I call her, and I have their old nanny’s flat at the top of the house. And that’s where I’m writing – have now written – this, my confession.
My son sleeps quietly in a carry-cot through the bright-white folding shutter doors that are always open over the warm and expensively rough oatmeal carpet.
I may take him out in the buggy later. We can go down into the town and I may buy him something
