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Mid-February 2009, Monday morning

I don’t think I slept much, that Sunday night…

Nine o’clock the next morning, Lawyer Number Two. Not in yet. Ring back mid-morning.

Oh, what?

Mid-morning, at last… I read him the email.

Forget it, he said. As soon as they know Shaun has a job, the deal will be off.

But what about all our trauma? The injuries Shaun has sustained? Everything our children have been through?

The church picked this fight with us: it wasn’t our idea.

(Or rather, Pinky and Perky, representing the church. As I’ve said before, most of the people of God in that place would have been appalled at what was being done to us.) Over and over again, I had begged: could we not be collaborative? They would ruin us, this way. They didn’t need to persuade us to leave. Why not simply help Shaun to a new job, as friends and fellow Christians?

Rather than shoving us to the gangplank and making us turn and fight...

Now that we had spent a considerable amount of time researching and detailing our grievances, we knew they were considerable. And legitimate.

Well yes, the lawyer said. If you really want to put your energy into a court case, for years and years to come. You could do that.

But I would let it go, he said.

(Yeah, well you probably have your own house, already.)

What the church is frightened of, is an Employment Tribunal, he said. And if Shaun now has a job to go to, there’s no case to answer.

If you remember, Lawyer Number Two had personal friends in the church.

“What your husband should do, Mrs Atkins, is get a job and take the money. Both.” I could still hear Mark Jones’s words (Lawyer Number Four) clear as the winter wind blowing across the Fens, as Serena and I had walked through Trinity a few weeks earlier.

Would you prefer, I asked Lawyer Number Two, that we take it to a different lawyer?

His relief was audible.

Mark answered immediately.

He had a few hours, to achieve the impossible. After getting up to speed. The meeting was at eight o’clock that evening.

Would he take it on?

“Yes,” he said. “I will.”

Wow.

I sent him the email, received the previous night, adding the new condition: that the agreement would only be binding if Shaun had no job to go to. The challenge was to invalidate that proviso, without alerting them as to why.

As you see. Impossible. No way to do this.

Nevertheless, Mark is an absolute, complete, total, amazing, brilliant... every superlative I can think of (though he does split his infinities – probably a lawyer thing, to confuse the opposition) ... life-changing, wonderful genius.

And friend.

And hero.

Taking on a case like that at eleven on a Monday morning.

But even Mark couldn’t achieve the impossible. Presumably.

I felt sick all day.

That afternoon I was appearing on the Titchmarsh Show again. Second time in a week. Shaking far too much to drive. Too late to ask them to send a car.

Shaun drove me. He couldn’t have done what I was doing. And I couldn’t have driven. Teamwork.

All the journey there and all the journey back, on the telephone to Mark. He spent all afternoon on that letter. Most of it in his own, un-invoiced time... I discovered later.

I had to ask him.

I’d never felt so churned in my life. Head in a vice. Stomach going round a washing machine. And then shrinking in the tumble dryer.

Thus I would feel, if I were robbing a bank.

Pounding, non-stop. Tightened in a winch, and then some.

Thus must Bink feel, every moment of her waking life. And perhaps quite a lot when she’s asleep, too.

“Can I ask you a very important question?”

Mark is a highly principled Christian with impeccable integrity. This much was obvious.

(If slightly less integrity in his grammatical infinitives.)

“Is what we’re doing wrong?” I asked him. Were we being greedy? Should we just let it go?

I’ve never heard anyone so definite in his answer.

“Absolutely not.” Mark was very firm and sure. “Their lawyer’s duty was to get the best deal he could for the church. (Not a very good job done, in my view, but that’s not my business.)

“My duty, to get the best for you.

“You are not doing anything wrong.”

We got back in the late afternoon. Still much to do.

That cottage was so small, you could see right through the ground floor just by glancing in from the street.

Some instinct prompted me to send everyone upstairs. Just as well. When the doorbell rang, most insistently, we were able to ignore it. Without diving under the kitchen table.

Mark had drafted the letter, at last.

“Most disappointed at this extra condition being imposed... Last minute changes... Not the agreement... You have not remembered our conversation correctly... not an accurate record of it.”

Copy it out it by hand, by fountain pen, I told Shaun. (I didn’t quite add that he should flick a few schoolboy blotches on it, to make it look spontaneous.)

Email from Pinky just before seven. Have been trying to contact you for three days. Email, telephone, even calling at the cottage in person. Will assume the deal is off.

No time for that now.

Everything in A4 manila. Contract signed – two ways. Mark wanted the money paid one way, but didn’t want that to snag business so had prepared both in case someone baulked.

Here, Ben! Drive into Oxford. This must reach Pinky by eight. That’s when the meeting starts. In the church. If necessary, interrupt them all, to make sure they have it.

It must be in his hands by eight o’clock.

Then I rang an old friend, due at the meeting. Spoke to his wife. He’d had a prior commitment: it had been too short notice. She promised to bicycle to the church there and then, and make sure the documents had arrived.

Bless you!

Phew. All done.

Just after eight. Pinky’s number ringing mine. Over and over again. I can’t ignore people. No idea why. Weakness of mine.

“Hello?”

Straight in. No pleasantries. “Has Shaun got another job?”

When I was about five, I lied to my mother that I’d cleaned my teeth. She knew immediately – my toothbrush was bone dry, and exactly where I’d left it that morning – and I’ve had a bit of a thing about lying, ever since. Can’t really do it.

Don’t believe in it.

“You’ll have to ask him,” I flustered.

All the time we’d lived in that cottage, we’d complained about the terrible mobile reception. You had to go across the road, to talk.

I love the way God uses our complaints, sometimes, to bless us.

“Hello?” I said. “Hello, hello? I can’t hear you. What did you say? Are you still there?”

I hung up. He tried a few more times, but I didn’t bother any more.

I rang Mark, never expecting him still to be in the office. (Or as he would say, to still be.)

He was.

I told him.

I’m sorry, he said. I tried.

(Gosh. A lawyer. And he really seems to care. Or even, seems to really care.)

They knew Shaun had a job to go to.

It was pretty inevitable, all along. There would not be any deal. Once Pinky had realised his mistake.

“Joanna,” I rang next door, to the Manor House. “Can we come over? We need cheering up.”

Friendship

Mid-January 2009

[Spot the date, above. So you don’t get as confused as I am, most of the time. With all these spaghetti threads of story waving their drunken Hydra tendrils, constituting my life.

For instance yesterday… spending four and a half hours the moment I came out of a meeting: asking my father’s care provider why she hadn’t told me on Thursday that she couldn’t get care in place for him to come home from hospital, so Shaun and I rushed all the way back from Norfolk to welcome him only to find his room empty; sending texts to all the carers I could think of asking if they were available; finally getting care in place for the weekend… and then discovering the provider had pulled it because she doesn’t like the client making the arrangements; ringing another provider at five o’clock yesterday afternoon asking if they could produce 24-hour-care out of a hat till Monday; ringing the ward half a dozen times to say don’t cancel the ambulance… so my father could come home, where we’ve promised him he can die. Not that I think he will, now he’s home. Not immediately.

Settling him by his fire and Shaun’s pouring him far too strong a whisky and just being glad he’s here. Welcome home, Daddy. Can we resume our Virgil tomorrow? We’re nearly at the end of Ænead IV: please don’t leave us before Dido does.

(And now, of course, determined to sack the care provider since I’m the one that has all this hassle every time… but this will mean sacking all the familiar faces around a dying man.)

Next time you read about bed-blockers, this is what it takes. And about £800 of my father’s money, to free up his hospital bed for the weekend and have him home… Not willing to waste a penny of the NHS, am I, given the nothing there isn’t for Bink?

We resume the story we left off a week ago, after Shaun received his letter of accusation. You remember: he was guilty of Gross Misconduct. Four pages of it.]

So I went upstairs, with my telephone, into that bathroom piled high with cardboard boxes full of books and other possessions as the whole cottage was, and locked the door.

I’ve no idea why. I suppose I didn’t want Shaun to hear me. And worry any more.

You may have read my earlier post, The Sun King, about our dear, wonderful and generous friend Louis. And his gorgeous pad in Scotland which became my home for three lonely and beautiful months, when we had nowhere to live.

Louis and I were at Oxford together. Then we lost touch, and reunited some years later when he came and helped lead the Christian CYFA Venture Holidays Shaun and I used to run together.

The first time he bailed us out – he often has since – was after a house-group he came to in our sitting-room during Shaun’s second curacy. House-groups are smaller groups within a church, which get together in someone’s home for bible study, prayer and being nice to each other. After you’ve poured over a passage of Scripture and asked rather-too-obvious questions, you usually share prayer needs; and earlier that day I’d bonked our car against someone else’s bumper on the school run and was terrified we might be stung for £20 or so. (It was presumably another Christian driver, since our children were at a Christian nursery school… actually thanks to Louis, now I think about it, as he’d told us about it. Sadly, sometimes – not usually, in my experience; but occasionally – Christians care about their cars as much as the next man. Fair enough.)

In those days, living on a curate’s income or more accurately lack of as we were, £20 was enough to reduce me to a helpless sobbing jelly before lunch: as when the washing machine broke down (which it often did as we had a second-hand one and washed several bottom’s worth of nappies every week) and a friend fixed it for us… but the engineer can’t be cancelled now love ’e’s on ’is way so you’ll still have to pay the call-out when he turns up. Waaah-waaah. For several hours.

So please, I said, could we pray that the other driver couldn’t be bothered, as we hadn’t got £20?

Louis had a quiet word with me afterwards, and told me to send him the bill. The worry fell off me like Pilgrim’s burden.

Louis is Ben’s godfather, and adored by all of us. He is a very, very special friend, and the rest of our lot are pretty fed up with Ben, for bagging him at the font.

(I can say all this freely, because the chance of Louis’s reading my blog is nil. I was once reduced to mentioning him in the acknowledgements to one of my novels, in the hope that it would shame him into reading it. It didn’t. Hello, Louis?? Anybody out there? Helloooo?! I’m about to smash your grandfather Louis’s priceless set of Louis XIV crystal champagne glasses! See? Silence.)

So I locked the door, and dialled his number, and got his voicemail as I’d expected to. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, when Louis is presumably a tad distracted, running the London Stock Exchange.

I knew he wouldn’t be there, answering what he calls his cellphone, but I couldn’t think what else to do. I don’t usually leave a message for busy people.

“Hi Louis. We’re in deepest shit. Um. That’s it really.”

I don’t think I even say goodbye, before hanging up.

It was nearly twelve hours before he returned the call. Gone ten thirty. Ready for bed.

At that time you could still have two people on different handsets on the same line, so I listened in upstairs while Shaun spoke to Louis downstairs. Mind you, the cottage was so small I probably could have heard most of the conversation anyway.

The first thing he said, I could have predicted.

“Get a lawyer.”

Obvious. When you live on a clergy stipend, you don’t always think of the obvious.

It was the last thing, however, that was and remains so precious.

He and Shaun had been talking for about fifteen or twenty minutes, and suddenly Louis sounded almost vulnerable. Perhaps I imagined it, but there seemed a tremor of doubt in his voice. Almost as if he were asking us for reassurance.

“We’ll get through this, Shaun. Won’t we?”

We.

Not you. We.

“Yes,” I suppose Shaun said. “We will.”

That is friendship. That’s why Louis is so special.

Fear

January 2009, from my diary

“When I wake in the morning – or rather, just before I wake, in the moment when my consciousness begins to stir – I have a sense of foreboding, every day. A sadness that another day has dawned and yet again, I am not home. Where am I? Somewhere wrong, I know, but I can never quite remember where. The worry squeezes me, like a bully with his hands in a vice either side of my head, pushing in.

“My body is so much heavier than it used to be. I used to wake every day at about seven, shake the sleep off my ears like a dog coming out of water, sit up and relish my mug of tea and the sun on my bed. Now, the sleep drags me back down under, I can’t rouse myself, can’t push it off and open my eyes. My leaden body weighs down on the bed; I can’t lift a limb, an eyelid, my head.

“The entire household waits for me to wake them, take them tea, rouse everyone one by one – sometimes over and over again through the morning and sometimes well into the afternoon. I must get up, must wake up, I must. Pull myself out of this bed.

“Evan Davies is visiting a designer in California. The Bishop of Southwark is doing Thought for the Day. It must be ten to eight.

“If it were the Chief Rabbi speaking, surely I could wake...

“I am pulled back down into the darkness of wherever it is I have come from.

“It is half past eight and the Today Programme sports roundup. I am panting heavily, breathless, as if I have run too far and burnt my lungs. As if I am ill.

“Suddenly and with an abrupt movement I find enough will power to make myself sit up. I push myself onto shaky legs and stumble into the bathroom like an old person, shuffling, bent.

“I am like this every morning now, and have been for four years. Mornings used to be my best time: now they are filled with despair, every day, for the first ten or twenty minutes – or perhaps two hours – till my consciousness mind can take over, shake me out of it and make me face the day.”

I had never been so frightened in my life.

We had been homeless once before, for eight searing months in 2005-6, when Shaun was first employed by the Oxford church and they failed to provide anything after the rental accommodation ran out.

That time, we always knew it would end.

This time, if we lost the roof over our heads...

On the face of it, we just had to sit tight. Shaun was entitled to work. He had offered to return. Repeatedly. He simply had to turn down the offer and keep reiterating this.

You are in an aeroplane which is plummeting towards the ground. You know you have to keep calm, strap on your parachute, jump out, count to twenty, pull the cord. You tell yourself over and over that parachutes work, they are carefully checked, this is what they are for.

There is nothing to be frightened of.

Is there?