The Greening (12 page)

Mrs Newell said, “He’s going to resign and start afresh as a consultant. Our main worry is that he may lose his pension. But we’ll manage. Once this is all over.”

Alex and I snatched a hurried lunch in a coffee shop. He looked tired and unwell. “What was up with you last night?” I asked. “You were very evasive.”

“Not at all. I was tired.”

“Are you taking drugs?”

“Jo, if I were I wouldn’t tell you. Is that good enough?”

“No, of course it isn’t. And what about the boozing?”

“Well, you’re not exactly abstemious,” said Alex.

“I don’t like it as much as you do.”

“Men can accommodate more.”

“Don’t be flippant with me!”

“Sorry. Look I’m OK, OK?”

“The Editor’s hot on drugs. If you get caught you’ll get fired,” I said.

“That’s a laugh. I’d hate to think what goes up his nose.”

“What goes up his nose is one thing. What goes up yours is another. Alex, you think you can handle it but you can’t.”

“Jo, you’re becoming boring.”

“Insults won’t stop me nagging you.”

“OK.” Alex drank a mouthful of his coffee, then asked, “Did you hear about Imran?”

“What?”

“He’s resigned.”

“Why? He did a brilliant job on the arms story,” I said.

“I don’t understand it. You know, he got all the East Timor quotes, all of them, including those from inside the country. His uncle got him the contacts, he’s an academic in the States, specializes in Third World politics, very well connected, used to be an opposition politician in Pakistan. I can’t get anything out of Imran. It makes no sense.”

That afternoon I made an opportunity to talk to Milo. I asked him what was happening with Imran. Milo tapped his nose knowingly, saying, “Wheels-within-wheels.”

“What do you mean?”

“Our little friend has upset someone,” said Milo.

“That’s his job!”

“Wake up, Meredith. This isn’t a kindergarten. Sometimes I wonder about you. I think you have a bit of a problem with objectivity.”

“What do you mean?”

I was stunned. Now I wondered if this was the reason why I had been taken off the arms story, notwithstanding the approving memo I had been sent by the Editor. Was my position on the paper in jeopardy?

The news from Parliament that day was that the government was being given a rough ride but not yielding an inch. That evening I treated myself to a good bottle of wine. I drank more than usual and was on my third glass when the phone rang. It was Patrick.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“Not bad,” I replied. “You seem to be holding the line. Do you really believe those things you’re implying about Dr Newell?”

“Whose side are you on?”

“That’s not a fair question, Patrick.”

“Well, let me make it a little more specific. The United Kingdom or the enemies of the state?”

“You’re being ridiculous,” I said.

He became suddenly angry. “It’s so easy for you bleeding-heart liberals, isn’t it? You’re all so good at pointing the finger and criticizing those of us who are doing our bloody best to protect this country. You write what you want to write, you and your little fifth columnist friends – so-called Brits when it suits them, happy to come over here and take everything this country can give them, but marching to a very different tune when the chips are down.”

I was shocked. “What are you talking about? You sound paranoid.”

“Oh forget it!” He slammed down the receiver.

I threw the phone onto the floor. It was so unfair. I had to do my job. Patrick should understand that. I had no sooner picked up the phone and replaced the receiver than it rang again.

“Jo?” It was Alex. “Sorry to ring so late. Are you OK?”

“No.”

“Look, I’ve got something to tell you.”

“What?”

“Not over the phone. Try to find time for us to talk tomorrow.”

“Tell me now. What’s wrong with everyone?”

“Tomorrow. Night.”

Sleep would be impossible now. I took up the journal again, counting on Anna and Julian to bring me through a night that I knew would yield little rest.

My world has fallen apart. Mark is married. He told me, suddenly, as I was serving lunch. For a moment I thought I had imagined the words. I felt as though I had been slapped very hard. The room swam around me as I put down the dish of pasta and collapsed onto a chair. I felt giddy and sick and could not speak. Had he really said what I thought he had said?

The sudden, unthought-of savagery of it, the bald stating of a fact – as though it were some mundane, natural and acceptable thing – was shocking. My body recoiled from the force of what felt like a door slammed hard in my face. He
said, “I’m sorry. I should have told you. But I didn’t want to lose you.” He touched my hand but I shrank from him. He said he hadn’t meant to deceive me. He had been divorced but married again ten years ago. He says he’s truly sorry and that he loves me. He wants me to trust him and give him time to sort things out so that we can be together. But how can I believe anything he says? He has broken his word.

The man who has been watching us is a former business associate with a score to settle. He happened to see us together, then decided to follow us and threatened to tell Mark’s wife. Mark says his wife is unwell. He says he needs to take time and choose his moment carefully. If the truth about us were to come out now, he says, his whole world would fall apart. It felt as though Mark had thumped me in the chest, leaving a chasm where my heart used to be – the thought that he would have gone on deceiving me, but for the man in the park. But he says he would have told me soon and that it makes no difference. He still wants us to be together. He has begged me to give him time to handle things properly. He has taken care of the man in the park.

Mark’s confession has shattered me. I feel as though I’m in a thousand tiny pieces and can never be whole again. I don’t know what to do. I thought I knew him so well. How did I fail to see that something was wrong? Have I just been too ready to see what I wanted to see? How could he deceive and betray me? I trusted him with everything.

I can hardly bear to breathe or think or be. Every waking moment is torment. The thoughts revolve ceaselessly, taunting and torturing me. My poor heart is broken. I picture it as a sore, tremulous thing, very timid and afraid, and I am once again the child who learned to cry silently, her head bowed, her hair shading her face, hiding all signs of pain and vulnerability, in a pretence of reading her book. My heart’s tender innermost self lies unprotected as a naked, newborn child. I feel this great rent as a heavy wound upon my soul. Despair.

It’s three in the morning. After hours of guilt and turmoil I went to bed at midnight and sobbed myself to sleep. I’m grateful for the refuge of my journal, for I have no other. Why has Mark led me into this maze, where I am lost in my love for him but no longer feel sure we have a future together? I thought I was safe and secure, but I no longer know what to believe. In a brief moment, the framework of my life has disintegrated.

I long to be with Mark. The connection between us is so strong, I feel it can never be broken. But I can no longer allow myself to believe I can have him. At the very moment when I need to feel his arms around me, to comfort and reassure me, he is with his wife. And how many times has he lied to me, pretending to be away at meetings when he was at home with her? How can I ever trust him again? Yet I know he wants to be with me. At last real happiness is within my reach. Surely I cannot be meant to give it up? But how can this be right? The thoughts go round and round. I think I shall never know peace again.

It’s morning and at last I feel a gentle peace in my heart. Last night as, exhausted, I drifted into sleep, I saw a candle’s flame burning bright, illuminating the pages of Julian’s book, and felt the light taking me through the book and into another place. There were the spring daffodils, in their jug by the window, the light seeming to shimmer and glimmer around their yellow heads. The place I had come to felt safe, a sanctuary.

A figure approached me from out of the shadows, a woman in a simple medieval gown of brown cloth and a white wimple. She was small and sturdy, with a merry, round face that was creased and furrowed by the loveliest and most loving of smiles. Her welcoming warmth touched me in my heart and made me feel that I was, perhaps for the first time, home.

She called me by my name and asked me to sit with her by her window, which looked out across a garden to a seascape beyond and on to infinity. We were enclosed in a circle of light. The smallness of the space within the vastness gave me comfort.

She said, “My dear, love is to be found within yourself, where God’s love lives eternally. The search for love is the search for God. When you are truly part of God, then you will know how to give and accept love. Then the giving and accepting will feel natural and right. You will not doubt or fear. Your heart will be at peace.”

“I am afraid,” I said. “I have done things that are wrong.”

“To feel miserable and guilty about our mistakes is blindness. God does not judge us or blame us and we should not blame ourselves. It is our own pain that blames and punishes us and it will do so until we are led so deeply into God that we honestly and truly know our own soul.

“God is endless love and there is no judgement and no anger in him. If we sin, we have, through our shame and sadness, a wonderful opportunity to be utterly vulnerable and childlike, and in this state run to our Mother God, to find there immediate acceptance and a continuing confirmation of our identity as her beloved, her darling whom she will never abandon.

“God tells you that you are beloved through all eternity and held safe in an embrace that will never let you go. But the love he offers requires us to turn our lives upside down.”

She smiled so sweetly and lovingly that I thought I should like to stay in that quiet place for ever. “My dearest one, I want you to understand that hope, authentic hope, always lies through and beyond despair. To discover hope, we must move into the darkness and risk the loss of the few remaining reference points that seem to make some sense of the bewildering landscape. In time, each one must come to Calvary, where hope and sorrow meet, and endure the crucifixion of the earthly self. Always remember, nothing happens by chance. One day you will give thanks that everything in your life happened as it did.”

I awoke in the early hours to find the light still on and the journal lying, half-open, on the counterpane. I felt restless and angry – on Anna’s behalf and my own. I was angry with Patrick and
angry with myself. Why did love have to be like this, so full of hurts and snares and wounds? Why could it not be gentle, sustaining and kind? Maybe Mark loved Anna, but he was so weak, too weak for such a lovely woman. And did Patrick love me? If he did, why did he make me feel uneasy, unsettled and unsure? I continued reading the journal, hoping to find solace.

Julian, from whom I had wandered away in the excitement of my love affair, is suddenly back in my life, with her assurance of a love I can depend upon. When I take up my copy of
Enfolded in Love,
I long to step into that line drawing on the cover, open and vulnerable as the child being gathered up into a loving embrace. If only it were that easy…

There is at least one cause for relief: the stranger in the park was an opportunist blackmailer and not some far more threatening character from Mark’s murky, terrifying world of kidnappers and ransoms. I need no longer worry about his safety. But the worry about our future is intense, as is the guilt about sleeping with a married man. Though I no longer go to Mass, those old traditions that were welded in childhood to my growing sense of identity retain their hold, like great iron gates of intricate design that clang together when my spirit fears its freedom. And, more than that, there is a belief I have, a principle that I respect. If I was never persuaded in my heart by Father James, I was taught well by Sister Mary Theresa the difference between right and wrong. Where does the loving act lie? My dream about Julian offers me balm for my pain, reminding me of the comforting assurance in her book that God does not judge or blame me… Can Julian’s wisdom guide me through this nightmare?

I have been seeking guidance in Julian’s book. She says sin is inevitable, that it had to be. Jesus told her “You will sin”, but “I will hold you securely”. She saw sin as “no thing”, something
known only through the pain it causes. And though sin is vile and we must fight it, “We need to fall and we need to see we have fallen. For if we never fell we should never know how poor and weak we are on our own; nor should we ever fully know the wonderful love of our maker.” We have only to acknowledge our mistakes and fallibility – nothing more – to become humble and accept the forgiveness that is always waiting for us. Julian tells me that I must not allow my guilt to stand in my way, because God understands and does not blame me.

I sit quietly and allow the healing balm to enter my heart. The frightened child is soothed. “Rest, be still, accept the love that surrounds you. Take it into your heart and hold it there.” These words come into my mind. I am comforted. I feel I am loved for myself, just as I am. How my father, the collapsed Catholic, would have welcomed such acceptance.

Julian was told in her vision that God allows us to sin and will not punish us for it, and that the worse our sin, the greater our glory and honour in heaven. I find this so puzzling and perplexing. And so did Julian. She asked Jesus, during the vision, how it could be true. Eventually, though, she set aside her doubts and accepted a promise that everything would be explained by a Great Deed, to be performed by God “in the last day”.

How hard must it have been for Julian, after a lifetime’s dedication to interpreting her visions, to set down her failure to reach a satisfying conclusion? How hard must it have been, when her intellect remained unsatisfied, to report faithfully and to resist the temptation to trim the facts to make them fit her limited human understanding? She had not been so afraid that she had to cling desperately to what she knew.