The Greening by Margaret Coles

without answering to others. She needed privacy, to compose her book without outside knowledge or interference. She needed to be outside the system and yet an accepted part of it. She needed to pose no threat to anyone powerful. Most of all, to the men who ran the society in which she lived, she needed to appear to be under control.
    But even as I search for clues, one thing is expressed so clearly in Julian’s book that I cannot ignore it. She asks us to forget her and to focus upon God. Was it too fanciful to imagine that the destruction of the church by a German bomber had been intended to limit speculation and discourage attempts to discover Julian’s origins – and perhaps even make a shrine of her burial place? Intriguingly, a few hours earlier, an unknown young woman had taken her paints and easel to the church and made the only picture of it that exists. Julianwas probably buried in the original church, but now we shall never know.
    I was gratified to see that Anna was at last back on Julian’s trail. Now I hoped she would guide me into Julian’s treasure house. I, who had always cherished books, was being drawn towards a book I had never read, never held, but wanted to read more than any other. I understood what Anna felt about Julian, because I, too, was beginning to feel a gentle, irresistible attraction. Something was moving and changing in my life.
    The telephone rang. To my relief, it was Alex. He was just back from Newcastle and sounded on good form.
    “How did the story go?” I asked.
    “Great. Great story.”
    “How are you?”
    “Great. Fine. You?”
    “Fine. I’ve been worried about you. You sounded weird the other night.”
    “Oh, I was just pissed. I hit another bottle when I got home.”
    “It didn’t sound that way.”
    “I’m a bit weird when I’m really pissed!”
    “Alex…”
    “Jo, I’ve got to go. I’ll see you tomorrow. Are you OK? I hear Smoothie-Chops is going to be on Newsnight .”
    “Yes. I’m about to switch on. See you tomorrow.”
    I turned on the television and heard the opening credits for Newsnight . They were leading on the illegal arms story. Patrick’s interview came about ten minutes into the programme, after a package giving the background to the story: Indonesia’s illegal occupation of East Timor, now in its twenty-sixth year, and the continued collusion of the UK and the US, despite ten United Nations resolutions calling upon Indonesia to withdraw. There was an interview with José Ramos Horta, East Timor’s roving ambassador. There was some library footage that was several years old, but no recent footage, since journalists were not allowed into East Timor.
    For once, Patrick’s confidence had been misplaced. He took quite a bruising. As he might have put it, he was on a losing wicket. The government’s position was indefensible. It had been caught out in flagrant contravention of its own avowed ethical foreign policy. The Foreign Secretary had made a false statement to the House of Commons – in anyone’s terms, a resigning matter.
    Patrick fudged around the issue, claiming that ministers had been let down by their civil servants. There had been massive errors in communication, he said: the wrong message had been conveyed. There was no substance to claims that Indonesia was using British arms to suppress the East Timorese. The blame for the miscommunication lay with a senior civil servant. He did not name Dr Newell as being at fault, but implied that he had in some way failed to be as rigorous as he ought to have been. Certainly, Dr Newell ought not to have spoken publicly, which was a grave dereliction of duty, said Patrick. His outburst, as Patrick described it, had put the country’s security at risk. He did not say from which source, and I could not imagine that the East Timorese were about to let loose a campaign of retribution on UK soil.
    The tough questioning to which he was subjected could not budge Patrick to say anything further. He