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Chapter Text

We are kept all as securely in Love in woe as in weal, by the Goodness of God.

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

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Thomas had been in camps like these before. With the late Holy Father, he had visited Lampedusa and Kakuma in Kenya, and had been duly saddened at a world where abundance for the few means scarcity for the many. But, of course, for all the hawking eyes and probing questions, official visits mean very little in way of knowing the actual reality of a place. The late Pope had compared it to travelling for business and seeing only hotels and airport lounges.

Months earlier, in London, Thomas had met a consultant for the UN Refugee service. This consultant, a keen-eyed Human Rights lawyer named Marisa Loff, explained the dynamic of where he was going. Zaatari, she said, is different than Lampedusa, different than the refugee camps in East Africa. It is essentially a city, they have businesses, electricity for about ten or twelve hours a day. From an organizational point of view the problem is to coordinate between all the different people and agencies working in the camp.

“There will be more women than men,” Marisa said, “and many of the men will be children or teenagers. There will be a lot of children. There will be a lot of sick and disabled people.”

Thomas took notes. Those months, prior to his arrival in Jordan, were all like that. Meeting after meeting, where he asked questions and listened, thoughtfully, gravely, to the answers.

He is being brought in to the camp by UNICEF, after his name was suggested by Salvador Hernandez, head of the Jesuit Refugee Service, who praised his organizational skills: a man who won’t lead troops into the battle, but the kind who ensures they’ll be fed and clothed.

You’re a manager, the late Pope had told him, so manage.

He had been in camps like this, but it was a different thing to live in one. He had to pack light, there was no space for luxuries. Be practical, Hernandez had told him. It’s hot in the summer, cold in the winter and often very cold at night. Most people won’t care if you’re a priest, but you are not there to evangelize. If Christians come to you, you can offer them your services, but that’s it. You have a doctorate, you’re a professor are you not? You can be doctor Lawrence, or Professor Lawrence, but not Father Lawrence, let alone Your Eminence. Hernandez stopped himself there. “Apologies. I sometimes forget.”

Thomas had smiled. “Yes, so do I.”

“Well, there will be at least one cardinal in the camp,” Hernandez said. “Vincent Benítez will be there.”

Thomas knew this and rationally he also knew that it had nothing to do with his decision. And yet he’s too old and too honest to lie to himself. The Archbishop of Kabul had left a deep impression on him, and when Thomas was stripped of his Cardinal’s hat, in those days where he doubted everything, from his actions to his life’s work to his fate, he thought of Benítez’s belief in him and it sustained him.

Still, he didn’t think that he would see that much of Benítez. Benítez occupied an important role in health management in the camp and Thomas was going to have his hands full. Perhaps they’d see each other for Mass, a few days a week.

But of course, Benítez surprised him again, just as he had every single day of the Conclave. When Thomas arrived at the camp, just as soon as he exited the jeep that drove him from Amman to the Zaatari camp, Benítez was there to greet him with his shy smile. He looked different. Thinner, which concerned Thomas a little, and his hair was longer, so much so that he wore it tied with a black elastic. To further his surprise, Benítez came up to him and hugged him. “It is so good to see you,” Benítez said.

“And you,” Thomas said, tongue tied, trying to regain his footing.

He’d taken liberties, Benítez said, but he hoped it was alright. He knew how daunting this place could be, how long it takes to get used to it, to learn how to navigate it. Benítez was talking in a fast, animated way. It struck Thomas, for the first time (although he wouldn’t have had the opportunity for this epiphany before) how different Vincent Benítez was out here, in the open and the wild, dressed in old jeans and a simple black shirt with an unassuming dog collar.

“Your Eminence…” Thomas said and Benítez flinched. “I mean…”

“Please, Father Lawrence, just Vincent. No titles here.”

“Yes, of course, and you must call me Thomas. But I don’t understand what you mean. What liberties?”

“I hope you do not mind, but with Father Francis gone – Francis was sharing with me – I asked for you to be lodged with me. I understand you’d prefer to have your own space, but as you will soon find out, space is limited here.”

“Sharing? You mean a tent?”

“Not a tent, thank the Heavens, a prefabricated shelter,” Benítez confirmed. “I apologise for my presumption…”

Thomas’s hand flew to Benítez’s sleeve.  “No, no, no, please. I will need you. Absolutely. It is a relief to have you here to guide me.”

Benítez smiled an open, bright smile, his shyness gone in an instant.

Thomas was right. He needed Benítez. The first few weeks were an onslaught of information and a kind of change unlike any Thomas had ever experienced. He was introduced to, it seems to him, thousands of different people each day. Working directly with him he had 2 programme officers, 5 project officers, and 8 administrative assistants. Between the fifteen of them they were meant to coordinate and manage 32 schools and 13 kindergartens, including about 950 volunteers, a reading programme, a digital literacy programme, skills building programmes and all kinds of recreational activities. He was aware of these numbers before he came, but in the here and now the task seemed impossible.

Benítez told him, “It was done before with success and by people as good as you. You’ll manage even better.”

He struggled: it was March when he arrived and although the weather wasn’t too harsh, he was unused to the landscape and to living in such dire conditions. In Italy, as a Cardinal, he had attendants, a nun who kept his house, a cook. Here he slept on a camp bed, ate preserved food from cans, and could only enjoy electricity during the day. During the night the fridge ran without electricity, which meant they had to be careful with food that spoiled easily, and they had to move around with flashlights.

The language was another issue: Lawrence spoke English, Italian, French, and German. He understood Spanish and Portuguese and even a little Mandarin. But he didn’t know Arabic, which limited his communication. Many people in the camp spoke English and some of older refugees remembered enough of their French, but many did not speak a language that Thomas could understand. As a former diplomat, this shamed him slightly.

And then there were his living arrangements. The prefabricated shelters were modest and often in dire need of repairs. Theirs had been fitted with a kitchenette and a small bathroom, but they still had to transport water from a communal well into their tank. Benítez tried very hard to give him his privacy. In fact, Benítez himself seemed bent on a privacy that bordered on puritanism. It had been several weeks since they began sharing the shelter, yet Lawrence hadn’t seen more than Benítez bare feet or forearms.

Even so, it took Thomas a while to get used to seeing another person inhabit his personal space. Feeling Benítez move on a camp bed near his, hearing water sounds in the morning, which meant Benítez was showering or brushing his teeth, was all very new to him. He hadn’t shared a room with anyone since his seminary days, save for the rare occasions where he was forced into a hotel room with a colleague. Benítez was an easy man to live with. The staff got the same rations of water and foodstuffs as everyone else, but Benítez had clearly mastered the art of doing much with remarkably little. He insisted on cooking for the both of them, which embarrassed Thomas to no end until he realised that Benítez enjoyed it. To make up for it, Thomas washed dishes and tried to keep the dust and sand from settling on every surface of their shelter.

To Thomas’s endless surprise, for the first weeks, indeed the first couple of months, they never mentioned the Conclave or even the Vatican. Life at the camp was so new, so harsh, so different from anything Thomas had experienced before, that the only way to make it was to be fully absorbed in it. During those first months, all their conversations were about practical matters: their work, the rhythms and rules, clear and unspoken, of the camp, and all the people Benítez knew (it seemed to Thomas he knew everyone) and introduced him to.

Yet they didn’t allow themselves to forget who they were. Every day, Benítez, Thomas and a few other priests working in the camp said Mass together. There were Christians at the camp, and there were Masses on Friday and Sunday. Thomas’s lack of Arabic prevented him from celebrating them, which saddened him and prompted him to ask Benítez to teach him some of the language.

He made this request one evening, as they were preparing to bed. It was easier to live in tandem, going to bed when the other was going and waking up at the same time. Benítez was washing his face over the bathroom basin. He’d left the door open so the light from his flashlight wasn’t contained to the bathroom and Thomas watched him for a moment, in the dim, white light, his long sleeves rolled up to his elbows, rubbing his face with soap and water.

“Would you teach me Arabic?”

Benítez turned to look at him. Droplets of water ran down his cheeks to his throat.

“Of course.” He looked around just then. “Perhaps we can start in the mornings, before Mass? With the sunlight?”

They started with the sunlight. Benítez still had the books he himself had used when he was learning, worn and scribbled over. Thomas smiled at the small, neat, almost childlike handwriting. Benítez was a gentle teacher and Thomas a quick study. Still, Arabic was very different from the languages Thomas knew. His only advantage was that he was fully immersed in it. In his two months at the camp, he managed to pick up a few words, and even full sentences: shukran (thanks), min fadluk (please, masculine), min fadlik (please, feminine). He could identify himself and even ask for directions. His pronunciation was subpar, however, and Thomas couldn’t help but admire how the syllables waved off Benítez’s tongue.

Apart from early mornings and late evenings, they spent their days apart. Benítez did for the health agencies what Thomas was doing for education, coordinating between organisations and volunteers. His work was herculean, even more so than Thomas’s. Clinics across the camp had closed due to lack of funding in the last few years, and those that remained were almost hopelessly overstretched. Thomas had always thought of Benítez as a monastical type, above worldly considerations, unable to hold his own in meetings with stakeholders or click his way through spreadsheets. But he realised, slowly to his shame, that this couldn’t be true. Unlike Thomas and many of his fellow cardinals, Benítez lived in the real world, the world of hunger, suffering, pain, and violence. And hadn’t Benítez shown in the Conclave just how insightful, and how tough, he could be?

And he was beloved by everyone, despite the fact that he had only been in the camp for little over than eight months. One of Thomas’s project officers, a canny Syrian woman named Myriam, adored him as did her family. Father Benítez, she said, was a gift from God. Yes, he is beloved and he talks to people, and finds a way into their heart in that effortless way Thomas had always envied in others. Another one of his sins, envy, something else to confess.

“I never asked you,” Thomas began, “how you came to be here.” He asked the question one Friday evening, after Mass, when they were walking back to their shelter. The evening was abuzz with activity, voices, lights from flashlights and candles, the occasional shout, the crackling water from the tanks. And even in the dark, children found a way to play football outside. “I know,” Thomas added, “that the Vatican forbade you from returning to Kabul.”

“Yes,” Benítez said and shot him a look that Thomas couldn’t decipher. “It was thought too dangerous after the Taliban returned to power. I have often wondered whether you were not involved in that decision.”

“Me?” Thomas said, bewildered. “My dear man, by the time that decision was taken I was no longer, unofficially of course, allowed into the Apostolic Palace.”

“Forgive me, I did not mean to offend you.”

“No, no, you do not offend me. I was not involved in that decision, but I don’t disagree with it. You’d be a martyr by now. It would have been a senseless tragedy. There is much good you can do the world, and many ways you can still serve God.”

Benitez didn’t answer the praise. They had arrived at their shelter – home, the word formed in Thomas’s brain, shocking him. Is this home now? Benítez had the key, he opened the door and they went in. There they were, their paltry personal belongings: books, a radio, a small altar to the Virgin, a rosary made of olive wood from Palestine. There was a candle that smelled of rosemary, a gift from an Irish volunteer. Home, apparently.

“I knew several of the officials working in the camp, or in connection to the camp, from my time in Africa. I had worked in healthcare in refugee camps before, and when the previous coordinator left, Francesca Gentileschi, from the UNHCR, contacted me. I was in Veracruz at the time.”

“You went back to Mexico?”

“Well, yes,” Benítez stumbled a bit. Under the rosemary candle’s light, Thomas saw a blush creeping up. He stifled a grin. “I have my sisters there, and nephews and nieces.”

“That is good, it is a good thing you have a family, Vincent.”

“I don’t see them a great deal.” He gave a rueful smile. “But they are kind.”

“And so you came here?”

“I wanted to return to Kabul, but it was impossible to get a permit. I abandoned my flock.”

This sentence, said in a thoughtful simplicity, hit Thomas like a blow to the stomach. “You can’t possibly think that.”

“But it is true, is it not? In Kabul, they numbered somewhere around 800 people. I knew most of them personally. Most were Embassy personnel or very brave people who worked for humanitarian organisations. A few Afghans converted after the Americans invaded and they had no option but hide their faith. I lived in the Italian Embassy. The authorities accepted my mission only because I spent most of my time in foreign ground and because the Americans knew of my experience in difficult humanitarian situations. I hid myself behind this work. And yet, even though I too lived a duplicitous life, I saw fear of my flock and their trust in me. And I was unable to meet them in their courage.”

“Duplicity? Vincent, forgive me, but you have a very warped view of yourself and the events. Guilt, I can understand, but you’re holding yourself to an impossible standard. One might even say you are seeking martyrdom. I know for a fact it was not like that. There were threats to your life, even assassination attempts. You stayed behind, even after the American left. You were in the Italian Embassy and even then, under the direst of circumstances, you tried to aid your flock. You had to be smuggled back to Italy for the Conclave, for goodness sake. And you told us you would find a way to return and face the consequences of your faith!”

Benítez was silent.

“You came here…you live here” Thomas said, slowly, understanding dawning on him, “to atone?”

“I came here,” said Benítez, “because this is what I know what to do. This is what the Lord called me to do. I don’t know how to exist in the world in any other way.”

Thomas’s new colleagues were another thing he had to adjust to. Prior to Zaatari, he had worked mainly with men of the cloth. There had been, of course, women in his daily routine, but they were usually nuns and, Thomas was ashamed to say it, their valuable work often went unnoticed and unappreciated. Now, most of his colleagues were Syrian women from the camp, who had come as refugees and found jobs at the UN agencies. These were Muslim women, highly qualified, often with children, whose husbands had either died or stayed behind, fighting, in Syria.

His 2 programme officers, however, were not refugees. Guilherme Prado was a Brazilian from São Paulo and Carolina Gurezeta, a 40-year old Spanish woman who had worked at UNICEF for well over a decade. They had been at the camp for a couple of years, and while they did not live onsite (like many of the camp’s foreign staff, they elected to live in Mafraq, the closest town to the camp), they moved around with great ease.

It was funny how, during those first few months, Thomas felt his that his Syrian staff received him, a middle-aged priest, more openly than Guilherme and Carolina. Later, Carolina would laugh remembering the long conversations with Guilherme about their new boss, trailing through online news about him. Guilherme, whose catholic education resulted only in making an atheist out of him, could hardly believe that he had left Brazil, crossed an ocean to live in a desert only to end up on the receiving end of a priest’s orders. Carolina was more measured, and furthermore, she had heard Benítez’s view of Thomas and taken it to heart. Still, she approached him with caution, even a hint of suspicion. She had a way of looking at people that took them out at their knees.

Once more, it seemed, Benítez came to his rescue. He and Carolina shared a language and a love for 60s music. Benítez had somehow conquered Guilherme too, whom he called Guille, in the Spanish way. Guilherme affected a toughness that Thomas couldn’t piece out as genuine or an act, but he softened around Benítez. By showing them how highly he thought of Thomas, Benítez led them to shed their preconceived notions of him.

One Thursday evening, in the early days of summer, Benítez and Myriam showed up at the caravan where Thomas worked to invite him, Carolina and Guilherme to a birthday party. Thomas wanted to refuse: he was tired and sweaty and he wanted nothing else other than to cool down inside his shelter – their shelter – in the dark. But just as he was about to make his excuses, Guilherme turned to him and asked, come on, boss, you can’t say no, there’ll be baklava. Thomas looked up at Guilherme and spotted Benítez smiling behind him. He said yes. And there, among pastries and music, he learned about Benítez’s and Carolina’s love for Joan Baez and Patti Smith (“what about Bob Dylan?” he asked, and Carolina replied, “the worst kind of poser!”). He learned Benítez had a sweet tooth, that Guilherme played the guitar, and that Carolina thought of herself as Basque first and Spanish second. In turn, they learned that he liked detective fiction, that as a child he had wanted to be a RAF pilot, a dream which crashed and burned when an eye doctor told his parents he lacked peripheral vision.

At one point, Thomas got up to help with the dishes and was followed by Carolina. Side by side, with a flashlight hanging over them on a white-painted cupboard, Thomas washed plates and Carolina dried them up with a cloth. “You don’t wear your collar,” Carolina remarked.

Thomas hesitated before saying, “No, I don’t. I was warned against it.”

“Hernandez?”

“Yes.”

“No one is as pragmatic as a Jesuit,” Carolina said. Thomas looked at her, surprised. “What, Lawrence, do you think I can’t tell one priest from another?”

“Far from me to make any assumptions about you. I haven’t been here for very long, but I know enough not to underestimate you, Carolina.”

“You’re doing better than I thought, you know?” She said, changing subjects as a car changes gears.

“Am I?”

“I didn’t think you’d last a month living out here. The Dean of the College of Cardinals? A former diplomat and Secretary of State? Living in a prefabricated shelter in the middle of the Jordanian steppe? It is something, that’s for sure.”

“Should you add a man my age too?”

She barked a laugh. “No, no, I am not ageist.”

“Vincent is more a Cardinal than I am.”

“Vincent’s Cardinal hat hinders him. He was made for this.”

Thomas glanced back at Benítez just then, who was sitting on the floor with Mahmoud, Myriam’s seven year-old son. They appeared to be putting together a LEGO set. How seamlessly Benítez fit in so many different roles! Leader, priest, manager, friend, brother, father. Just a few weeks ago Thomas would have envied him, but with each passing day, he felt Vincent’s gentle way of sliding into people’s hearts for what it was: a blessing.

“Vincent. May I?” Lawrence approached him one evening. To keep a modicum of privacy, a curtain divided Benítez's bed from Lawrence’s.

“Yes, of course.” Vincent was sitting cross legged on his bed, dressed in a white, long-sleeved shirt and grey tracksuit trousers. He was reading the Bible under the light of a candle on his bedside table.

“I am interrupting your prayers, aren’t I?”

“Not at all, please. Tell me what I can do for you.”

“I was wondering about something you said when we were in Conclave. You offered to help me pray.”

“I remember. Are you wondering if the offer is still standing?”

“Yes, I rather was, yes.”

Vincent smiled at him. He closed the Bible and placed it on his bedside table. “Please sit,” he motioned to the end of his bed. Thomas obeyed him, sitting near the border of the bed. “Is it alright if I ask you some questions?” Thomas nodded. “Do you sleep well?”

“Not always. I have trouble falling asleep.”

“Do you feel anxious? Stressed?”

“Stressed, perhaps. I am…it’s all very new here. My responsibilities are considerable. There is much at stake.”

“You don’t need to explain yourself to me, Thomas. Your feelings are valid, they don’t need a justification. Why is it hard for you to pray?”

“I feel that I no longer know what is the voice of my reason and what is God’s.”

“The voice of your reason. When you talk to yourself, are you always reasonable?”

Thomas smiled a little. “I certainly try.”

“But that is not true, my friend. Our thoughts are jumbled. We are often anxious, afraid, stressed. Or we are too elated, too angry, too excited. What is reason in the middle of this? Reason is a process, Thomas. We get there slowly, picking and unpicking from an assortment of thoughts, through discernment.”

“And what is God’s voice, then, Vincent?”

“God is what allows us to discern,” Vincent said. “What else prevents you from praying?”

“I feel distracted. My thoughts wander. I cannot…it’s hard to feel God’s presence.”

Vincent stood up then and instructed Thomas to sit against the wall and stretch his legs across the bed. Open your palms against the blanket. Close your eyes. Can you follow my voice? Just breathe, breathe, in and out. If your mind starts to wander, just focus on the feeling of the blanket under your fingers. The texture, the material, its warmth.

“Thomas,” Vincent murmured after a long while. “Think of a happy moment, any happy moment. Picture it in your mind clearly, the location, the people if there were any. Think of what you felt, bring up that feeling in your heart. Do not rationalise it. It doesn’t matter why you felt happy, only that you were happy. That, Thomas, that is God’s presence. That is what God intends for you.”

It was August when he got ill. After a trip to Amman for a meeting with the Jordanian Department of Education, he returned to the camp feverish and exhausted. He thought, mistakenly as it turned out, that he caught a cold, and his mind was so muddled that he didn’t register the absurdity of a cold in the hottest month of the year.

He woke up sick in the middle of the night. He ran to the bathroom, worried about not disturbing Vincent’s sleep, but to no avail. Vincent was a very light sleeper (this was the kind of knowledge tidbit that came from hearing a man sleep just a few palms away from you), and when Thomas returned from the bathroom, stumbling into their room again, Vincent was there to steady him.

“Are you feeling better?” He asked in a soft murmur.

“Not really,” Thomas groaned. He was being led to the bed. Vincent set his pillows against the wall and told him to lean against them.

“Don’t lie down,” Vincent ordered. “It will make the pain worse. Breathe.” He gave him a glass of water. “Slowly.”

Vincent helped him drink, his left hand on the side of Thomas’s face, cool and gentle.

“Christ,” Thomas said, ignoring that specific mortal sin. “This isn’t good.”

“Maybe it was something you ate in Amman? And the hot weather can’t help.” Vincent’s hand is now on Thomas’s neck, before moving to his forehead. “You have a fever.”

He had a lamb leg at a restaurant with fellows from the Department of Education. He hadn’t had lamb, or red meat for that matter, in quite a while. It was meant as a nice treat. Well, this is what he got for his hedonism. The thought brought him a breathless laughter.

“What?” Vincent asked. He produced a wet, cold cloth, and dabbed it on Thomas’s forehead.

“Just thinking that maybe this is a sign I shouldn’t leave the camp.” In the dark, Thomas could feel Vincent’s smile. “Maybe I shouldn’t leave you.”

Vincent’s hand had returned to the side of his face, now over his ear. His fingertips reached the back of his head and he was moving them slowly, gently, against Thomas’s hair. It had been such a long time since anyone had touched him like this, soothingly, in the kindest of attempts to lessen his pain. The last person Thomas could remember doing it was his mother.

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” Vincent agreed.       

Vincent brought a doctor who diagnosed Thomas with food poisoning. His condition will have to be monitored, but I believe he can withstand this without medication. Tea, just a little bread with butter, if he can eat, pears or apples that would be good too. And sleep, the doctor added, there’s nothing like sleep. Vincent knew Thomas coped poorly with the heat, so he had the shutters closed and the fan running during the hottest hours. For two days, Vincent worked from their cabin, hunched over his laptop on the kitchen table, while Thomas slept his illness away in the bedroom. At regular intervals, he made Thomas tea and flatbread toast with a little butter.

Thomas was aware of all this. He was aware of Vincent’s measured gestures, the way in which he blew on Thomas’s tea to cool it down before passing it on to his hands. Aware of how Vincent peeled his fruit and cut it in quarters, as one does with a child. Aware, above all, of Vincent’s hand on his brow, the wandering manner in which his fingers trailed his cheek or his hair.

When the pain began to lessen, and he was able to move around and sit up without groaning, Vincent returned to work in the camp. Yet every couple of hours, he either returned to check on him or he sent him humorous texts about his day. Vincent was, in fact, as Thomas had discovered, funny in a self-deprecating way that reminded Thomas of home.

It took improving, returning to work, and starting to eat things other than bread and apples for Thomas to realise how much his thoughts had revolved around Vincent during his illness. How much he looked forward to seeing him, how much his affection for Vincent had grown. It was odd to think how this man, of whom he had known nothing for many years, had become in a matter of months so central in his life. Breaking bread with him, sleeping near him, talking to him. This was intimacy, Thomas realised, this was the thing that people, other people, people other than priests, talked about fondly, when desire and passion was gone. This knowing of another was what remained.

Chapter Text

The news that Thomas had resigned as Cardinal and Bishop (or been gently pushed away, as an Italian newspaper had put it) had garnered a good deal of attention in Catholic media. A Cardinal who resigns is, after all, a very rare occurrence, especially when that same Cardinal had occupied such senior positions in the Curia. Rumours abounded in Catholic circles, which took many months to die down. However, the news that the former Dean of the College of Cardinals, former Secretary of State, was now working in a refugee camp in Jordan, living in the camp, and in the company of another Cardinal, harnessed worldwide attention. Every day, Thomas was showered with emails, and even the occasion phone calls, requesting interviews, quotes, even articles for the newspapers’ Sunday editions.

So far, he had refused them all, sending only the briefest of quotes explaining that he worked in Zaatari not as a priest, but as a UNICEF employee. Yet he knew that one of the reasons he was brought into this position was because of his connections and who he had been before all this.

He discussed the subject with Vincent. There could be a way of working their fame to their advantage. The camp was in need of funds. Years ago, Zaatari had been the focus point of the plight of Syrian refugees: politicians, celebrities, religious authorities all had come to the camp. Donations had flown in, which allowed key improvements to be made, but with the rise of other conflicts, and the world’s natural tendency towards forgetfulness, Jordan’s refugee camps became an inconvenient reminder. In October, Thomas was meant to go on a tour of British Universities, trying to find funding for scholarships for Zaatari students – his students, as he had come to think of them. It couldn’t hurt to do so with some positive press on his back.

Vincent thought it all depended on which newspapers to invite, which journalists. They measured the pros and cons together, and finally arrived at 2 candidates: the Italian La Stampa and The Guardian. La Stampa requested a long form interview, and to their surprise, the Guardian was sending out a journalist and a photographer, stationed in Jerusalem, to do a long feature on him. It worked out better than he had imagined, Thomas thought, a new fear assailing him. He was living here not detached from the world, but so absorbed by the camp and the daily crises of his work, that he forgot what it was like to be in the spotlight.

The journalist, however, a young man called David Spencer, put him immediately at ease. He was a Yorkshireman, which endeared him to Thomas, and had considerable knowledge about the workings of refugee camps and the UNHCR. The piece David wrote painted him in flattering colours:

Thomas Lawrence, former Cardinal and lifelong Vatican official, looks strangely at home in the caravan that doubles as his office and meeting room. Donning a simple white shirt (two buttons undone, no collar!) and black trousers, Lawrence ambles comfortably through the labyrinth of tents, cabins and shelters that make up one of the largest refugee camps in the Middle East. His Arabic is rudimentary, he says apologetically, but he is learning. For a man who has only been in Jordan for five months, I would say his Arabic shows remarkable signs of intelligibility. His work is almost unmanageable and it is a wonder that he manages it so well: with a stalwart team of less than 20 people, Lawrence oversees the education structure of the camp, ensuring the thousands of children, aged 5 to 18, learn to have a future. “Is this easier than managing a Conclave?” I ask and he raises his eyebrows at my cheekiness. “They present different challenges,” he says noncommittally, like the diplomat he once was.

(…) Unlike several of his colleagues, Lawrence chose to live at the camp. “Is it a penance?” I ask. “Are you fulfilling a monastic ideal?”

He laughs. “No, it’s not a penance and it’s not a calvary. I wanted to understand the difficulties people who live here undergo. But I didn’t want to fetichise their suffering, I didn’t want to other them more than the world has already done. With my background, which is so privileged, it made sense for me to dive in and understand the reality on the ground. It didn’t make sense to live anywhere else. I needed to know the reality of these people and to do that, I had to walk with them.”

The feature was accompanied by several pictures. Thomas had no trouble choosing his favourite. It was taken at the trailer. He was at his desk, Myriam stood behind him, leaning against the wall with a wry smile, Carolina was sat on a counter, her legs not touching the floor, laughing. Opposite her stood Vincent, holding a mug of coffee, and smiling widely. They were laughing because of him, because Thomas had made a silly joke about the road conditions between Mafraq and the camp. He had made them laugh and forget the photograph’s presence. It was a charming picture. He thought, this is what Vincent talks about when, in our praying sessions, he asks me to focus on God’s presence.

He emailed David asking him for a digital copy and had it framed in Mafraq.

The number calling him was unidentified. Thomas stared at the screen for a long time before dragging his finger up.

“Thomas Lawrence speaking.”

A brief silence was followed by a breathless chuckle. Thomas recognized it immediately. 

“You never used to answer the phone like that. It’s very American.”

“You never used to call me from unidentified numbers, Aldo. It appears many things have changed.”

Thomas looked out of the caravan’s window. The sun was setting; he could hear children running around outside. In a few minutes, he knew Vincent would knock softly on the door, so they’d return together to their shelter. Their little routine, going back together, was quickly becoming Thomas’s favourite part of the day. 

“I imagine I deserve that.”

Thomas swallowed – repressed, that’s more like it – a sigh. “I am sorry. Let’s start again. Hello, Aldo. How have you been?”

“I am well. Always a little tired these days, but I think that’s what happens as you get older.” Tedesco had said something similar to Thomas at the beginning of the last Conclave. Men our age all have ailments, or something to that effect. “And how are you?”

Happy, Thomas wanted to say. I am happy. Everything that worried and caused me anxiety when I lived in Rome vanished almost overnight here. There are new worries, but they are better worries. More worthwhile worries.

“I am well. I feel very well. And how’s the Vatican?”

“Oh, you know…” Aldo trailed off.  “Not much has changed. I am afraid your recent interviews have been the most exciting thing to have happened.”

“Goodness, not much is going on then.”

“You definitely caused a sensation.”

“I don’t understand how that is possible. I barely talked about the current state of affairs in the Curia. In fact, I did my best to avoid talking about the Vatican.”

“That’s the issue, don’t you see?” Aldo sounded almost exasperated. “That’s the issue, Thomas. Forgive me the risque analogy, but it’s a little like ditching a lover and going around the whole world saying you don’t think about them anymore.”

“But I don’t,” Thomas said. The silence on the other side of the line made him close his eyes. “Or rather, obviously, I think about the people I worked with, about you, and Ray, and Sister Barbara, and I miss Rome very much. But I don’t…Aldo, I don’t have the time to think about the Curia here. I don’t have the mental capacity. Many other things take priority.”

“Yes,” Aldo said. “I see.”

Another stretched out silence followed. Thomas found they wearied him.

“I think the problem,” Aldo began again, “is that you seem to be acting too independently.”

“I am not working for Catholic agencies, Aldo. And in any case, I keep Timothy, my bishop, well informed about my comings and goings. In fact, I am meeting him in London in November. I haven’t heard anything but approval from him.”

“Timothy likes you too much,” Aldo said. 

“I can’t immediately see how that’s a bad thing.”

“Thomas be serious, please. I am trying to help you. There are pitfalls that come from excessive independence. You and Benitez…”

“What about Benitez?”

“He’s also working for the UNCHR, not the Church. And in healthcare, which is even more a sensitive topic.”

“Preventing people from dying of infections and vaccinating children is controversial now?”

“No, but other aspects of healthcare, such as family planning, can be.”

“Listen to me, Aldo,” Thomas barely had the time to register how cold his voice had grown. “If the Curia wants to come after me, and if His Holiness sees fit to punish me for my misdemeanours, real or imagined, I will be here to accept it and to answer for my actions. But if it occurs to anyone to go after Benitez, who is the best of men, I will not take it quietly.”

“What does that mean?”

“I worked for the Vatican for the best part of 30 years, Aldo. No one knows the College of Cardinals better than me, not even you. I am loyal to the Church and to the Pope, but I am a sinner like any other, and I protect my own. Do not push me, I am begging you.”

Aldo didn’t answer for a long time. Thomas knew he had shocked him. He had never spoken to Aldo like this. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken to anyone like this. 

“You’ve changed, Thomas,” he said, softly, sadly. “I…I fear you will never forgive me for taking the Holy Father on his offer.”

“Tremblay’s actions…His Holiness’s actions are not on you, Aldo. You did what you thought best. From His Holiness’s point of view, I imagine it seemed like I was plotting against him.”

Perhaps I should have plotted harder, Thomas thought. Perhaps I should have taken O’Malley at his word and pushed him for more information. I should have gotten to the bottom of that conversation between Tremblay and the late Pope, I should have investigated who truly got that poor nun into the Conclave. I should have used those documents I found, but I was too much of a coward, too fearful. I am making up for it now. 

“Alright. But be careful, Thomas.”

“I spent my life being careful, Aldo. I am going to be an old man very soon. Maybe it is time to stop being so cautious, don’t you think?”

When the call ended, Thomas threw his phone over and it skidded from the table to the floor. He let his head fall on his hands. He couldn’t believe what he’d just done. He’d spent the last year trying to avoid this exact situation, trying to escape these absurd machinations, and now here he was. And what was that about Vincent? He’d been in control of the conversation until Aldo mentioned Vincent and something had broken loose inside Thomas. It frightened him a little. He was never like this. The late Holy Father had chosen him as a special envoy to places like Russia and China for his diplomatic acumen and care with words. He’d been a Vatican ambassador in the United States and he had managed to be liked by liberals and conservatives alike. And now, here he was, threatening the whole Curia over a single man. 

Vincent found him like that, staring blankly ahead, his hands on the sides of his neck. “Thomas,” he said, his voice warm and full of concern. “Are you alright?”

Thomas allowed his gaze to roam freely through Vincent’s figure. He was wearing a white shirt and dark blue jeans. His hair was tied in a bun. He’d probably need to trim it soon. The white, Thomas thought, looks lovely on him.

He decided in a split second that Vincent couldn’t know about what had just happened. But then, Vincent came closer and kneeled next to him. “My friend, you look catatonic and it is alarming me a little.”

Thomas opened his mouth with an excuse on the tip of his tongue, but instead he found himself relating word by word his conversation with Aldo. 

Vincent raised his body towards him. By looking down at him, Thomas could see the fine lines around his eyes as well as the small smile threatening to break. 

“You shouldn’t have done that, Thomas,” he said, very gently. “And there was no need to do that. I am not a child and it’s not my first time working with international agencies. I know how to protect myself.”

“Yes, but…I know some of your clinics offer family planning.”

“Unofficially. And I am not directly involved in that. It goes through Lina, who’s the head of gynaecology, and Francesca.”

“Still, Vincent…”

“My conscience is clear. Most of the time, they are used for medical purposes and not contraception.”

“You know that’s a too fine distinction and unlikely to be theological sound.”

“And honestly, many of the girls are too young. I do not think teenage pregnancy is desirable, Thomas. They could easily die here. We do not have the capability to deal with premature babies, which is a high possibility when the mother is too young.”

“Vincent…”

“In any case,” Vincent interrupted. “I am not directly involved in any of that. Do you understand?”

Thomas understood, but it didn’t lessen his worry. “They threatened you to get to me. That is insulting in ways I can’t even begin to count.”

“Is there anything you want to change?”

“Change?”

“I can move out of the cabin, or you can, and find someone else to share with. We can limit…”

“No! No, no, of course I don’t want that. Vincent, no, I am not that much of a faithless friend.”

His agitation was such that Vincent laid a hand on his forearm to placate him. “I know you are not. So, if there is nothing we can do now, and nothing we want to change, there is no point worrying about it.”

Thomas sagged back into the chair, breathing deeply. Yes, Vincent was right. One crisis at the time. Tomorrow will worry about itself. 

By one of those coincidences that are too much on the nose to be called luck, and which men like Thomas and Vincent would call God’s grace, Vincent was invited to speak at a conference on healthcare held at the University College of London precisely during the week Thomas was going to be in the United Kingdom.

Thomas did not know where the yearning to show Vincent his home country came from. He hadn’t lived in the UK for over 30 years. He was educated in France, worked in Italy, Germany, Spain and the United States. After his parents passed away, his trips to the UK became even rarer. The last time he had seen his brother was over two years ago. Yet here he was now, fantasying about showing Vincent around Norwich, about taking him to dinner in London.

Painstakingly then he came with an itinerary that involved him changing one or two meetings with the universities he was going to visit. It wasn’t strictly professional, but he told himself that he was doing it for Vincent, so he could have a break, a kind of holiday. Vincent must have been stunned by Thomas’s initiative because after Thomas expounded his plan, he kept his silence for so long that Thomas feared he had just committed a massive blunder.

“Of course, you do not have to, if you’d rather just take the plane back on Thursday, that’s fine, but I am sure Francesca would happily approve a couple of days leave, and obviously, I would pay for the ticket back to Amman…”

“No,” Vincent said, suddenly. “I will pay for it. You’ve already gone to the trouble of planning all this out.” He smiled, then, wryly. “I am not so destitute you have to pay for my ticket, Thomas. I am a Prince of the Church, after all.”

Thomas smiled in relief and in something that tasted distinctively like happiness.

Thomas spent nearly a week in the United Kingdom before he went down to London to meet Vincent. By this time, he he’d been to Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester. He was exhausted of repeating the same lines and facing the same mixture of awe and bureaucratic resistance. Yet he arrived to London with a grim sense of triumph. The Guardian feature had had an effect that not even he, in his careful laid out plan, could have predicted. People had been duly impressed by him, open to listen to his numbers, to his stories about his students. He managed to extract promises, and was meant to sign papers and agreements soon.

In London, he met first with Timothy Collins, the Archbishop of Southwark, and now, on the back of Thomas's stunning resignation, Thomas’s current superior.

Collins and Thomas had known each other for a long time. For a time in their youth, they had been priests in London's dioceses under the same Bishop; then Thomas went to France to complete his studies, and Collins remained in England. Thomas went on to posts as a Nuncio and positions at the Curia, while Collins had, almost accidentally, climbed the ranks of English clergy. Throughout the years, they retained a more or less frequent correspondence and a sincere affection for one another. Collins was a good, honest man, who had remarkably little ambition. He liked pastoral work and had no wish to ascent higher than his current position. In fact, as he told Thomas, he lived in fear of being made a Cardinal. Their lunch went very well, and Thomas had the opportunity to verify that all that Aldo told him had not made its way to England, or if it had, Collins didn’t think it was important enough to caution him. The niggling worry he had had over this matter could rest for a while now.

After lunch, he finally met Vincent, whose speech at UCL left him slightly puzzled over his celebrity. It appeared that the Guardian feature, combined with a memory of the last Conclave, had worked in his favour too. Thomas took him to a small wine bar near Holborn tube station, where they were both recognised by a young woman, who approached them to congratulate them for their work. It amused Thomas to no end to see how, despite being impressed by both of them, she was a bit more taken with Vincent.

By the time she left, Vincent had turned a curious shade of pink, which brought a smile to Thomas's lips. “It’s the hair, perhaps.”

“What’s wrong with the hair?”

Vincent had it cut before coming to London, but it was still long enough that locks touched his neck and fell over his forehead.

“Nothing, nothing at all. It’s very nice.”

Before dinner, Thomas wanted to go to Mass. He hadn’t been able to attend Mass in the past days and it was a week since he had taken Communion. He picked a Church in the middle of Mayfair and there he and Vincent were also recognised. At the end the priest came and shook their hands, thanking them for having come to his Church.

Dinner, thankfully, was a different affair altogether. Thomas’s brother, Joseph, invited them to a nice, quiet Italian restaurant. How long has it been since you’ve seen him, Vincent asked. Two years, but I don’t imagine he has changed much.

Joseph hadn’t. He looked like a younger version of Thomas, perhaps with a little more weight around the waist. But he had an expansiveness and a blithe sense of humour that Thomas didn’t possess (“he gets it from our mother”, Thomas explained later). Joseph’s wife, Nirmala, was also present. She was an obstetrician who had worked in Sierra Leone a couple of decades ago, and it was clear to Thomas that she was more interested in Vincent’s work than in her stuffy brother-in-law.

Thomas had forgotten how much Joseph amused him. Out of all the people from his past, Joseph was the only one who never seemed particular impressed by his Cardinal big brother.

“And how is Sussex?” Thomas asked, referring to his brother’s work as a professor of psychology at the University.

“The bad news is that students seem to get dumber each year. Perhaps we should give your refugees some scholarships too. They might improve the pool.”

Vincent somehow had managed to get Joseph to talk about their childhood.

“Thomas is essentially the first Catholic in the family, didn’t he tell you? True Catholic, I mean. Mum and dad were Anglo-Catholics, but Thomas crossed definitely to the other side. I keep saying it was Mum’s fault, she did name you after Newman.”

Vincent frowned. “After Newman?”

“Yes, that’s his name. Thomas Henry Lawrence.”

“Thomas Henry,” Vincent said, later, as they were walking from Waterloo tube station to their hotel. “Does anyone call you Henry?”

“No, no. No one ever did. I always preferred Thomas in any case.” He gave Vincent a side look. “What about you? Do you have second names?”

“My full name is Vincent Rodrigo Cruz Benítez.”

“Rodrigo,” Thomas said to himself.

“My sister Salomé calls Rodri. Or Rodriguito.”

“Rodriguito?” Thomas smiled and Vincent diverted his eyes.

“We were children…it stuck.”

“It’s…”

“Yes?”

“It’s endearing. It’s the kind of thing sisters do, I suppose.”

“I liked your brother,” said Vincent. “And his wife.”

“We are very different. Joe is…well, he’s Joe. I have always been the quiet of the two. Which is why I became a priest and he became a married man who still plays football on the weekends.”

“You are more discreet, perhaps,” Vincent said.

“Perhaps.”

They arrived to the hotel and in silence entered the lift. It turned out their rooms were on the same floor, though at the opposite ends of the corridor. The wild notion of inviting Vincent in for a drink crossed his mind, only for him to almost physically recoil from it. He’d never seen Vincent drink alcohol. Thomas, too, didn’t drink much these days.

“You must be exhausted,” Vincent said.

He was, very much so. He wanted to sleep for a thousand years. And yet he was loathe to part from Vincent’s company.

“Yes.” They looked at each other. Vincent’s black hair gleaned in the bright light.

“I…I will say goodnight then, and let you rest.”

There was in Vincent’s voice just the briefest of hesitations and had Thomas not been so familiar with his friend as he was by now, he would have missed it. But he didn’t.

“Goodnight. Knock on my door tomorrow, around eight?”

Vincent nodded and turning his back, he walked down the corridor to his room. Thomas watched him go.

The next day they attended Mass before taking the train to Norwich. At the station, Thomas browsed WH Smith and bought a crime novel, much to Vincent’s amusement. They both had kindles, which was the only way they could read at night in the camp, and through the months Thomas had grown familiar with Vincent’s tastes. He knew Vincent enjoyed classics, Latin-American literature and even sci-fi, but he had never heard him say he was reading detective fiction.

“I read Agatha Christie when I was younger,” he said at the shop, as way of an excuse, which made Thomas buy him the same book he got for himself: the Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz.

“Maybe we both read it, and we can compare notes.”

They sat across from each other on the train, reading the same book. Thomas couldn’t help but wonder what other people thought of them. Would they recognise them from the Guardian article? Would they think they are, what, friends? Colleagues? Brothers?

Lovers?

And the word, which magicked itself in his mind, made him set the book down. He looked around him. The carriage that morning, just after rush hour, was almost empty. A girl and her boyfriend sat a few seats from them. Their hands were linked and her head was on the boy’s shoulder. It was the kind of scene Thomas had seen countless times before, everywhere around the world. Here, however, he found it particularly moving. Here he felt, or he thought he felt, too, a stab of envy.

Thomas had booked a car rent, which they collected from a garage near the train station in Norwich. It was the first time Vincent drove with him, and the fact made Thomas a little nervous. He was a cautious driver, but he was admittedly out of practice. The ease with which Vincent seemed to trust him was a wonder.

Th cottage that had belonged to Thomas’s parents, and which now belonged to Thomas and his brother, was in Wroxham, a waterside town a few miles from Norwich. His parents, Thomas explained, had bought this place following their retirement. Joe and I were born in Norwich, and we grew up there, but my parents always wanted to live near the sea. This was the closest they came to it.

“Does your brother come here often?”

“Not lately, no. He prefers the South of France. I believe his daughter, my niece, comes in the summer. Her boyfriend is from around here and she went to University of East Anglia.”

Vincent nodded. He looked uncomfortable, shrunken into himself. It dawned on Thomas: Vincent could withstand much, but this kind of humid, bone chilling cold was perhaps a bit too much for him. Joe had warned him that Britain was seeing very low temperatures this weekend on account of some cold front coming from the North Sea.

Following a mad impulse, Thomas’s hand flew to his neck and, sliding his red scarf off, he handed it to Vincent.

“No, no, I am perfectly…”

“Vincent, you’re practically shaking. Please.” Still, he hesitated.

“It’s my own fault, Thomas, I should have brought one, or bought one in London.”

“You can buy one in Norwich tomorrow. But for now, please. Please,” Thomas repeated. “For me.”

Vincent took it, finally, and wrapped it around his neck, inhaling deeply. From the corner of his eye, Thomas saw Vincent’s body relax against the car seat.

“Joseph?”

“Thomas! How are you? Did you get to Wroxham alright?”

“Yes, we’re fine, but listen, Joseph, the heating doesn’t seem to be working.”

“Oh, shit, really? Are you sure?”

“Yes, I am fairly sure. There’s something wrong with the boiler. The needle’s on the red.”

“Do you have hot water?”

“Not downstairs.”

“You’ll probably have hot water upstairs, though, the upstairs boiler is newer. So that’s the good news.”

“There’s no heating upstairs either, Joe.”

“No, there wouldn’t be, no. Heating is on the downstairs boiler.”

Thomas sighed. “What are we supposed to do?”

“Well, I can call a man for you, but it’s Friday afternoon, Thomas. He won’t be there until Monday.”

“Not very useful that, is it now?”

“I suppose not.”

“Joe, I dragged a man who was born in the tropics to Norwich on the assumption that he wouldn’t freeze to death.”

“Your Vincent seems tough, I’m sure he’ll make it through the night.”

Thomas wanted to bristle at the possessive pronoun, but at the moment there were more important things for him to be annoyed at.

“It’s going to be minus 2 tonight, Joseph.”

“Listen, there’s a fireplace in the living room and the sofa is a sofa bed. We got it for Liz when she was at University, so she could bring her friends over. If memory doesn’t fail me, there’s always some logs of wood in the pantry. That should get you through the night and you can buy more tomorrow. You should be fine sleeping there.”

Chapter Text

Vincent assured Thomas that he did not mind sleeping on the sofa bed, that in fact, he had slept in far worse conditions, a sofa bed wouldn’t rank even in the top 10 most uncomfortable places he had slept on. “That is not as reassuring as you think, Vincent.”

“It is not?” He asked, puzzled.

“I understand why you put yourself through hardship, and I admire you for it. But it does not mean I like thinking of you in pain or discomfort or danger.”

“But my point is that there will be no hardship here.”

Thomas, still mildly mortified, showed him around the house. He thought Vincent would like to see his father’s former study, with his old green lamp and rows of leatherbound books that Thomas and Joseph never had the heart divide between themselves. Your father, Vincent said, you mentioned he was a teacher?

“He taught English and Literature at the local grammar school. Mother was a primary school teacher.”

“So you grew up with books.”

“Yes.”

It was dark outside. Thomas turned on the lamp on the desk and watched as Vincent looked through his father’s shelves, his fingers caressing the spines. He sat down at his father’s desk and absentmindedly opened the drawers. Papers, old pens and pencils, a calculator. These belonged, evidently, to either Joseph or Liz. Except for one object, a case in the back of one of the drawers. Thomas recognised it immediately. It contained his father’s old watch, a golden Longines his father had bought in Switzerland during a summer holiday. Thomas, a child of seven or eight at the time, had gone with his father to the watch shop, and distinctively recalled his feeling of wonder, the smell of fine leather and perfume. He also recalled his father asking which of two models he preferred and taking his view so seriously that he chose the one Thomas had liked best.

Thomas had thought, once, that he might inherit the watch, but as time went by he forgot all about it.

“Is this you?”

He snapped to attention. Vincent was holding a framed photograph. Thomas got up and went around to meet him, putting his glasses on. Yes, it was him. Him, Joseph, Mum and Dad, somewhere in a quaint little village in the countryside, perhaps near York, during a day’s outing. Joseph and Thomas were already teenagers and their parents bordering middle age.

“Ah yes, I think that was…I believe this was when we went to Harrogate for my mum’s birthday. Yes. In fact, that is a happy coincidence. It would have been her birthday tomorrow, 7^th of November.”

“Really? Is that…?” Vincent seemed surprised.

“Yes, when I lived in Rome I used to have Masses said for her on her birthday. Why are you so surprised?”

Vincent, to Thomas’s astonishment, blushed. “Well, you see, it is my birthday tomorrow too.”

“What?” Thomas’s voice grew several octaves.

“When you proposed this trip, I thought you knew, but then I realised that was rather presumptuous of me and I didn’t want to…”

“I cannot believe it…”

“It doesn’t matter, Thomas.”

“Of course it matters, my dear fellow! You…you came here, it’s cold, I’m making you sleep on a couch, you probably would have rather stay in Zaatari with Carolina and Guilherme and yet you’re here…”

“Thomas! Please, do you really think I would be here, I would have come here, if I didn’t want to? It doesn’t matter, I never cared much about my birthdays.”

“I have nothing organised for you, I don’t even have a dinner reservation for tomorrow. I don’t even have a present.”

Vincent was biting down a smile. “How will I ever cope without a present?”

Thomas, however, was so embarrassed that he insisted on booking a nice restaurant in Norwich for the following day. He also interrogated Vincent as to which jam was his favourite (raspberry) and whether he preferred white bread or wholemeal (wholemeal), as he was just driving in to Tesco to get them some food and other essentials (“I can go with you”, “no, no, it is too cold, stay and try and make yourself comfort.”) He left in the car around six and returned an hour later. During this time, Vincent had managed to use the logs to light up the fire, unfold the sofa bed, and even procured linens from some closet whose location was unknown to Thomas.

As a result, the living room, which included a small dinner table, was far warmer than the rest of the house. Soon, the kitchen also grew habitable, as Thomas turned on the oven to roast some precut vegetables he had found at Tesco and 2 salmon fillets.

He had also bought a bottle of Italian wine. “I have never really seen you drink,” Thomas said, nearly apologetically. “I should have asked before.”

“It is true that I do not normally drink, but I am not opposed to a glass of wine once in a while.”

They sat down at the table, waiting for the oven to finish their roasting their dinner, and they drank and they talked. You asked me about my parents, said Thomas, but you never told me, really, about yours. It was Vincent’s turn to smile as if he were apologising. It’s not a very interesting story. My parents were very poor. Initially, there were four of us, but a young brother died when he was five. My father was a street peddler, my mother a seamstress. She was very devout, and raised me and my sisters in the Church. By the time I was a child, perhaps 9 or 10, the local priest, knowing I did well in school, but that my parents would need me to work and so I wouldn't be able to advance further than the mandatory school age, asked if I would like to join the Seminary. So I did. I had to wait until I was 13, because that was the age cut for the Seminary in Puebla. During those years, alongside school, I worked with my father in the street, selling mangoes and avocados.

“Forgive me if I am overstepping, but it doesn’t feel like you had much choice.”

“It is a fact that the circumstances made it easier for me to join priesthood. However, it is also true that there were many children like me at the Seminary, who took advantage of the education it gave us and then left later on, and went on to steady middle class jobs. I was aware of this, so were my parents. So was the priest who came up with the idea. I could have left at any time. But I heard the calling. I knew at 14 just as I know now. I was blessed, in my youth at least, in that I never underwent the doubts or the pangs of…despised love, as your Shakespeare puts it, that afflicted many of my brothers.”

The salmon was ready. Thomas insisted on serving Vincent, and the conversation turned to Zaatari and their colleagues. Thomas expressed how difficult it was for him, initially, how he felt that that neither Carolina nor Guilherme liked him very much. Vincent smiled at him.

“I think they were wary. A little. I did my best to assuage their fears. Guille in particular, hasn’t had the best experiences with priests.”

“I see.”

“They like you, Thomas. Truly.”

“Guilherme remains a little standoffish.”

Vincent chewed carefully. Thomas enjoyed seeing him manouver the world around him. There was a gentleness and a delicacy to Vincent that fascinated him.

“It’s nothing to do with you. He struggles, sometimes, with being in Jordan, away from his partner.”

“I didn’t know he had a partner.”

“He does, yes. He lives in Paris, works for UNESCO. He’s friends with Carolina, as well, I think that was how Guilherme and Carolina met before.”

“He?” Thomas repeated.

Vincent gave him an amused smile. “Guille is gay, Thomas. Most people in the camp don’t know, and he tends to keep his private life to himself, but I thought you would have suspected. When we went to Nawal’s birthday party, he spent all of five minutes arguing with Carolina about who is the most handsome Formula One driver.”

“I don’t think I was there for that riveting argument,” Thomas said, provoking a pearl of laughter from Vincent. “Is that why he was so…wary of me?”

“Partly so, but I don’t imagine that was the main reason. He is not open about it, especially not in a workplace context. I think he simply didn’t know what to expect from you.”

“How do you know then? Does he confide in you?”

“His family is in Brazil, he has a few friends scattered everywhere. Francisco, his partner, is essentially the centre of his emotional life. It’s not easy for him.”

Thomas wanted to ask whether, somehow, Vincent related to Guilherme. His family was far away and he too had lived a scattered life. Where were Vincent’s friends? Did he have anyone he could confide to apart from his confessor? God is at the centre of our emotional life. His Love sufficed, most of the time. Yet the idea that Vincent had felt, at any point, lonely, helpless or forlorn was unbearable to him.

They lingered together. Vincent insisted on washing the dishes, in spite of Thomas’s protests. The night grew colder and they settled on a Turkish rug by the fire. The wine, which Thomas was no longer used to drinking, went down warm and sweet. He spoke about his childhood, the love he had for his mother, the admiration he held for his father. Their hidden disappointment when he became a priest, the slow but inevitable estrangement when he moved to France and then Italy.

It was midnight when Thomas forced himself to stand up and face the climb to his cold, dark bedroom. Vincent watched him, half of his face obscured and flames dancing on the other half. Thomas opened his mouth to say goodnight, but words were stuck. The other man looked ethereally beautiful. This was a thought Thomas couldn’t remember ever having about anyone.

“Thomas,” said Vincent, gently. “Why don’t you stay here? It must be freezing upstairs. We can share the sofa.”

We can share the sofa bed, he was saying, the word bed conspicuously absent. Thomas knew Vincent’s intentions were innocent. He was moved only by his concern, by his ever-present awareness of other people’s needs. But still Thomas was aware, in some ineffable way, without being able to define why or how, that there was something not entirely appropriate to this idea.

“Yes,” he said, “you are right.”

The last time Thomas had shared a bed with anyone was more than 35 years ago. He and a group of seminarian brothers decided to go on a camping trip to the Peak District. Despite it being May, the weather was a horrid, grey, humid thing. They huddled in their tents, too cold to talk to each other, or sing, or exchange jokes. Thomas was forced to share a sleeping bag with Ben Parker, a loud scouser, who thrashed in his sleep and spent the night kicking him. He was never able to rid himself of the notion that sharing a sleeping space with anyone was an unpleasant experience, and in his lightest moments even joked to himself that it was indeed a good thing he had chosen a life of celibacy, as at least he had a bed to himself.

Vincent was not Ben Parker and his brother’s sofa bed was not a cramped sleeping bag in the middle of a forest. The sofa was comfortable, even more so than his own bed at the camp. The room was warm, the fire crackled on beautifully. Their bodies, under the duvet, formed a cocoon of warmth. Although they were not touching, Thomas was aware, almost painfully, of Vincent’s every small movement, every change of breath. He thought Vincent took a long time to fall asleep, perhaps because he too was aware of Thomas’s unnatural stillness. Eventually, Thomas lost track of time, and lulled by the warm and the softness of the fire, he fell asleep.

He woke up hours later to find their positions changed. They went to bed with their backs turned to each other, but Thomas opened his eyes to Vincent’s sleeping face. Strands of hair fell over his forehead and nose. Vincent slept with parted lips, which allowed Thomas a glimpse of his white teeth, and with his hand half opened in front of his face, a curiously childlike posture that clutched at Thomas’s heart.

He couldn’t help himself. His own hand came up and his fingers skimmed, very lightly, Vincent’s open palm. Unfortunately, this meant that Vincent, surely the world’s lightest sleeper, frowned in an anticipation of wakefulness. Thomas withdrew his hand, like a naughty child caught doing something he shouldn’t. This gesture was all he was capable of hiding, as when Vincent opened his eyes, Thomas was still staring, unashamedly, at him.

Vincent stared back at him and a small smile touched his mouth. “What time is it?”

“Early,” Thomas whispered in a tone of voice so low and soft he hardly recognised as his own. “Too early. Go back to sleep.”

Vincent’s smile widened, but he obeyed, and closed his eyes again.

Thomas wished he could stay, stay and watch him fall asleep, but there was now a clear sense of danger in this endeavour. Furthermore, he had had an idea.

He tiptoed his way into the upstairs bathroom where he showered and dressed all the while shivering like a leaf. It was pitch dark outside when he left the house, using the back door so as to not wake Vincent up, and still when he arrived to Norwich, he had to wait in a Costa for an hour until the watchmaker’s shop opened. The woman behind the counter examined his father’s watch with a hawk-like gaze: in less than half an hour, she changed its batteries and cleaned so thoroughly it looked brand new. She handed it back to him saying it was a lovely, classic piece.

He returned home to a freshly showered Vincent, sitting at the kitchen table reading the Magpie Murders, with a steaming cup tea in front of him. Thomas’s eyes widened when he saw him.

“Did you forget I was here?” Vincent asked, eyes full of mischief. Thomas resisted the temptation to hide the bag in his hand behind his back.

“No, no, I didn’t realise it was so late. Happy birthday, Vincent! My apologies for leaving you, but I had to drive to town for an urgent errand.”

Vincent glanced at the bag, his mirth increasing. “Was your errand successful?”

“Exceedingly so.”

“Did you eat?”

“I had some appalling coffee.”

“I am sorry,” Vincent poured him a cup of tea. “So, what are the plans for today?”

Thomas wanted to take Vincent to Norwich and show him around the town centre. There were many Churches in Norwich, several of them beautiful, and they could go to a couple of bookshops. If there was anything Vincent wanted to do this weekend, he should of course say so. The sea, Vincent said, perhaps tomorrow we can go and see the sea.

Throughout that day, the first day he and Vincent ever spent entirely dedicated to themselves, Thomas noticed a disturbing trend in himself: he couldn’t tear his eyes off his friend. Every gesture, every word, every look from Vincent held immense fascination for him. He was entranced by how Vincent listened while he explained obscure aspects of Norwich’s history, giving him his full attention. Fascinated by how Vincent talked to people, from the waitress at the restaurant where they had lunch to the ticket lady at one of the Churches they visited. Vincent exercised a kind of artless, effortless seduction. People liked and trusted him instantly. Thomas also began noticing things about him he’d never noticed before: how his hair was so chaotic it changed form from one day to another, the way he crossed his legs when he sat down and linked his hands over his thigh. Two things particularly mesmerised him: the way Vincent walked, at once graceful and masculine, and his slender, elegant hands, with prominent veins and small wrists. At a local bookshop, Vincent picked Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love. Thomas watched him read a passage, his dark eyes traveling through the page. He ran a hand through his hair, as he did, absentmindedly, when he concentrated hard on something.

Before dinner, they attended 6 PM Mass at the Cathedral of St John the Baptist, which they had visited earlier in the day. Even during Mass, Thomas was too conscious of Vincent’s every move. When they kneeled to pray, Thomas stole a glance at him and was impressed by the intensity of his friend’s stance. Thomas tried to focus on his praying. In the past couple of months praying had become easier than before, when he lived in Rome, in the centre of Christianity. If his recent past was marred by difficulties in talking to God, then his work in the service of others, rather than simply the Church’s hierarchy, brought him closer to God. He wondered if proximity to Vincent had brought him closer to God, too.

This is getting out of hand, he thought then, opening his eyes. Christ on the cross rose in front of him.

They returned home in silence. The dinner had been lovely. Thomas had asked Vincent about his work in Veracruz, trying to imagine him a young priest, willingly risking his life and facing up to slum lords and drug dealers. “It was in the course of work that needed to be done. I didn’t seek out danger. I certainly didn’t seek martyrdom, as you once accused me of.”

“I didn’t accuse you, Vincent,” Thomas began, but settled down on seeing the smile in Vincent’s face. “I was concerned about you. I sometimes think I’m going to wake up and find you managed a way to smuggle yourself back to Kabul.”

“Your concern touches me, Thomas, and is appreciated. I have accepted that I will not be getting back to Kabul. My mission, for the time being, lies elsewhere.”

Still, despite there being nothing awkward in their dealings with each other, the conversation trailed off. Perhaps they were tired. Perhaps, Thomas thought, Vincent, like him, was thinking about the stretch of night ahead of them. Back at the house, Vincent busied himself with the fireplace again. Thomas prepared some camomile tea to steady himself. He didn’t know exactly why he had delayed this moment so much. He could have brought it up before. Vincent’s birthday was almost at an end.

“Vincent?”

Vincent, kneeling before the fireplace, stood up. Thomas approached him with his father’s watch case in hand.

“Many years ago, when I was a child, my father took us to Geneva. It was our first holiday outside England. It was the first time I was ever in the Continent. There he took me to a watch shop and bought this watch. Of all those he showed me, this was my favourite. That was why he chose it. To be frank, I’d completely forgot about it until I found it yesterday in a drawer here, in the study. Just after I found it, you told me it was your birthday today, a birthday you share with my mother. And I thought…well, I thought it was too much of a coincidence.”

He opened the dark wood case, revealing a golden watch with a brown leather strap. “I would like you to have it.”

Vincent’s raised eyebrows spoke of a kind of incredulity Thomas had never seen in him.

“Thomas,” he murmured. “This is too precious for me. It should be yours or your brother’s.”

“I texted Joe. He’s an Apple watch man, I’m afraid. I confess my first thought was to take it for myself, but if it is mine, then I want to give it to you.”

Vincent stood motionless, his face unreadable. After a long while, he raised his wrist, rolled down his sleeve and took off his Casio, pocketing it, before reaching, careful and slow, for Thomas’s gift. Thomas watched, transfixed, as Vincent wrapped the strap around his wrist and fastened it, using the last hole to tighten it safely around his wrist.

“It is a beautiful watch,” said Vincent. “A beautiful gift, Thomas. It honours me greatly.”

“May I?” Thomas asked. Vincent gave him his hand, and Thomas took it, gently, fingers playing on the underside of his wrist. His father’s watch belonged on Vincent. It suited him perfectly. He was so glad he hadn’t kept it to himself. Do this in remembrance of me, he thought.

“I hope…” he began. “You might look at it and think of me.”

“It is a lovely gift, Thomas. But I don’t need a gift, or any object, to think of you.”

Thomas raised his head to meet Vincent’s gaze. They were very close. He could see, oh, he could see everything. The laughter lines on each side of his nose, the little wrinkles on the corners of his eyes, and his lips, thin and beautifully drawn.

Thomas understood, all of the sudden. I want him. This, all this, all this watching, these little obsessions, is want. Was he truly so naïve, so out of practice, so cowardly that he shunned the danger completely before even facing up to its reality?

The realization unbalanced him. He reached out, a desperate, searching hand finding purchase on Vincent’s chest. He wanted to fall to his knees in shame and fear.

“Thomas…” Vincent whispered, his hands on Thomas’s arms, steadying him against him.

“I…” Thomas started. I what, what is there to say now? I am sorry? Forgive me? Forgive me, I knew not what I was doing. But would Vincent believe him? How could all this be interpreted as anything other than an elaborate yet pathetic attempt at seduction? “I didn’t…” he tried again, but failed.

“Thomas,” Vincent said, his voice clear. “Thomas, I know. Look at me, please.”

Thomas raised his head to find Vincent looking at him in grave tenderness. “Thomas, I know.” Vincent’s hands moved from Thomas’s forearms to cup his hands, fastening them together against his chest. “I understand. There is nothing to be afraid of. God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love.”

Thomas gave a breathless chuckle. He felt near tears. “You forgot “self-discipline” in that verse.”

Vincent nodded. His hands gently left Thomas’s and, to Thomas’s surprise, settled on the sides of his face. “I didn’t, I promise you. That verse has been on my mind lately. But I trust you and I trust in us. And above all, I trust in God. I know He put us on each other’s paths. If nothing else is certain, please believe in this.”

He did. God help him, but he did believe. He moved his head a little to the left, placing a kiss on Vincent’s palm. He felt his friend’s hand tremble under his lips. “I believe.”

Like the previous day, they prepared to bed separately, Thomas in the upstairs bathroom and Vincent in the downstairs toilet. Like the previous day, it was cold and they decided, without words, to sleep on the same bed. Thomas thought that even had they wanted, and perhaps they should want it very much, they wouldn’t be able to part from each other.

They lied down facing each other this time. The weight of Vincent’s gaze intermingled with the silence and the intimacy of the fire was too much. “Talk to me,” Thomas begged.

Vincent smiled. “About anything in particular?”

“Anything. Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

“I like football. I used to play in Mexico, in the streets, and then in Africa and sometimes, even, back at Zaatari. I am not entirely terrible. I am small and fast. In the camp, the kids call me the Mexican Messi.”

Thomas gave a small smile. “Do you have a favourite team?”

“As a child, I was a Monterrey fan. Then there was a Galician nun in Congo working with me, who was a fan of Celta de Vigo, a Spanish team from Galicia. I adopted it as my European team. Generally, I like playing more than watching.”

“I never quite got the point of football,” Thomas said.

“Your English card might have to be revoked.” Thomas chuckled. He was beginning to feel lighter.

“I used to swim. As a child, at school, and then in New York and Rome. I was never very athletic. Nothing like His Holiness,” Thomas said, referring to how Tremblay had won swimming competitions in his youth.

“I can see you as a swimmer. There’s a freedom to it.”

They paused. To Thomas’s shock, it was Vincent who breaks first. His raised, wandering hand landed on Thomas’s cheek, his fingers tracing a line from the corner of his eye to his chin. Thomas was unable to suppress a shiver. “I can draw,” Vincent murmured.

“You can draw?”

“Yes, not very well. Doodles. I drew you.”

“You made a drawing of me?”

“It’s a small thing. I did it after I learned that you were coming to Zaatari.”

“Oh.” Vincent’s hand had moved to the fine hairs on the back of his neck. “Can I see it?”

“When we return to Jordan, yes, I can show it to you.” It was Vincent’s turn to look a little abashed. “I do it often. I have a drawing of Carolina and Guille, of Mahmood and Nawal, some children playing football.”

“I imagine,” Thomas said, “that there is also a freedom to it.”

“Yes, there is.”

Thomas closed his eyes. A heaviness fell upon him. He was very tired. Still, before drifting away to sleep, he found the strength to ask, “did you have a good birthday?”

“I had a lovely birthday, Thomas. Thank you for being here with me.”

Chapter Text

Thomas woke up alone the next day. He was sure to have felt, at some point, a soft kiss upon his forehead, and the sudden absence of warmth. When he did wake up, his first thought was of Vincent and as he sat up he found Vincent looking at him from the armchair.

He was fully dressed, his shirt buttoned to the top, and he held Julian of Norwich’s book in his left hand. He had bought it the previous day at the bookshop, and had asked Thomas to sign and date it. For a moment, they faced each other. Thomas was again struck by Vincent’s elegance, by the tenderness of his expression.

“Good morning,” Thomas breathed. “What time is it?”

“Around eight.”

“You’re up early.”

Vincent pressed his lips together. Thomas knew him well enough to know that this signalled something wrong. He’s regretted all this. We made a mistake. “I went for a walk,” said Vincent. “I needed to pray.” Thomas slid from the bed, straightened his back, and went to kneel before Vincent, all the while aware of how closely Vincent was watching him.

“Should I be concerned?”

Vincent placed his hand on Thomas’s cheek. “That remains to be seen.” He took a deep breath. “There is something I must tell you. Something that to the best of my knowledge only one other person in the world knows, apart from me.”

So he told him. He was born in a very poor household; born at home, from his mother and with the help of an old midwife. There were no doctors, no hospitals apart from the mandatory vaccinations. I was born as a boy, raised as a boy, my parents believed me to be a boy. I went to the Seminary as a boy, where we were meant to behave modestly, and there I was never privy to any evidence that contradicted the basic premises of my sex. As I grew up, I realised there were certain features that were perhaps a little different, but they didn’t concern me very much. I put them down to the quirks of each individual body. And then, in my late 30s, just after I arrived to Baghdad, I had to have an urgent appendectomy and it was found that I possessed both ovaries and uterus, and further testing revealed that I had traditional female chromosomes.

Thomas listened on, in silence. He listened as Vincent described his struggle with his newfound condition, the many months of despair and doubt, how he felt himself in a constant state of sin and contemplated leaving priesthood, and how he decided to tell the Holy Father everything.

“He knew?”

“Yes. By the time I made the decision to offer my resignation, the late Holy Father had been elected. We knew each other from my time in Congo, and he had suggested me for the mission in Baghdad; so I flew to Rome to talk to him in person. We met, prayed together. He dissuaded me from resigning and ordered me to go and reflect more. He told me: “you come from a city by the sea. Go to the sea and pray.” I obeyed him. I spent 2 weeks in Naples and there I realised that there was no point in changing who I was. I felt, in my heart and soul, as I had always felt. I was, and am, one of God’s creatures. The more I prayed the harder it was to conjure that sense of wrongness I had felt in those first weeks after my diagnosis. In fact, I began to feel ashamed of having given in so easily to hating myself. I was appalled at how frightfully easy it is to believe in a kind of inherit original sin as if Christ did not die to redeem us from it. I had made an appointment at a gender affirmation clinic in Switzerland, but I realised during those weeks in Naples that I wished to change nothing about my body. Six years after this, I became head of Catholic Mission in Kabul, followed by the Cardinal appointment. And then the Conclave happened, and the rest you know.”

Thomas sank back onto his knees.

“You barely shave,” he said, slowly. Later he would realise how stupid it was that he focused on this. Vincent smiled. “I’ve hardly ever seen you shave.”

“That is true. I only have to do it once, perhaps twice a month. It is one of small idiosyncrasies that I always had and never thought much of. It’s not that uncommon, I gather.”

“And…you never…” he trailed off. “There’s a shyness to you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without a shirt.”

“I have never seen you without a shirt, Thomas. Isn’t this just how we were raised?”

Thomas’s eyes can’t help but search his figure. But looking for what? Signs of his femininity? He thought back to how obsessively he watched his friend in the past days. Was there anything at all that denounced this secret? It is absurd, he thought, if Vincent himself couldn’t figure it out for decades, how would Thomas’s insistent gaze decipher the secrets of his friend’s body? And this put him before a much deeper question: what right did he have to inquiry into this man’s body? What were they doing, what was the endpoint of the kind of relationship they had began here?

He stood, using the armrest to pull himself upwards. Vincent looked up at him. He appeared calm, but Thomas detected a tremor in his hands.

“I am going to dress and then maybe a walk. I feel…I feel like you, and that I need to pray.”

“Alright,” Vincent said, softly. “I will be here.”

Thomas did. He dressed and went on a walk across the town, crossing Wroxham Bridge and meandering the margins of river Bure. His thoughts were all over the place. He wanted to focus on prayer, but was unable to. Why had the Holy Father refused Vincent’s resignation? Or at the very least, why did he offer him the Archbishopric of Kabul and a Cardinal hat to boot? Thomas could understand how dragging Vincent from priesthood would be a cruelty, but exalting him was equally dangerous, a danger bordering on madness. Vincent would have been happy, certainly even happier, as an ordinary priest. Carolina had put it perfectly: Vincent’s cardinal hat hindered him. What if one day he was elected Pope? He had a respectful media presence and was a young man, especially for a Cardinal. He would have at least two or three Conclaves ahead of him.

“You’re equivocating,” a voice said in his head. It was the voice of Father du Gard, his thesis supervisor at the Sorbonne and unofficial spiritual director. The man was dead and buried, yet the voice of his conscience sometimes – still – resembled his.

He was equivocating. He was afraid of considering the implications of Vincent’s revelations to him and their relationship.

 “Be honest, Thomas,” he murmured to himself. Yes, honesty. He was attracted to Vincent. He knew this feeling went beyond mere carnality and lust. He wanted him in some way that brought together romantic and fraternal love, eros and agape all mixed together. Did Vincent’s revelation disturb him to the point of disgust? Was prejudice what laid behind his current predicament? He didn’t know. He thought about last night, about the effect of Vincent’s touch on his skin, about his graceful gestures, his eyes, his cheekbones, his lips. Perhaps what he feared was not that his present disgust, which did not exist, but rather that disgust would rise eventually and jump on him all of the sudden and that he wouldn’t be able to hide it from Vincent. The idea itself was almost too horrid to contemplate.

Because throughout this turmoil, one thing remained: his concern for Vincent. The idea of his struggle, the loneliness and despair made Thomas ache.

What are the priorities? How can you best serve those in need and the universal Church? How can you help Vincent strive? He can see how Vincent is a blessing for the Church. A blessing for everyone who came across him. He is, as Myriam had put it, a gift from God. The world would be poorer without him.

And so would I, Thomas thought. How to live a life without Vincent now that he has known a life with Vincent in it? Vincent who had given him back his ability to pray, to talk to God, to take joy in his work. Vincent who despite all the suffering he had witnessed and endured, still looked at God’s creations in wonderment.

Thomas is hit by his own wonderment of Vincent. He marvels at his strength and faith and beauty. And all of the sudden, a Revelation burst into him, answering all his questions: I love him. I want him to be.

He rushed back home: he wanted to run, but he was too out of shape and he didn’t think collapsing from a heart attack would redeem his earlier behaviour. When he got in, in a near frenzy, Vincent was no longer in the living room. “Vincent?” He asked to the house.

The sound of running water brought him to the kitchen where Vincent was washing a tea cup.  “I made some tea,” he said. His eyes ran over Thomas, a guarded, almost wary gaze. Something broke inside Thomas, but he salvaged it: he walked to Vincent and threw himself onto his arms.

Vincent’s arms closed around him, tightening him to his body almost painfully.

“I am so sorry. Please, forgive me, Vincent.”

“There is nothing to forgive.”

“I should never have left.”

“You needed time. There will always be moments where we need to be alone.”

Thomas pulled away just enough to look at Vincent in the eyes. He took a deep breath. “I am not…I am too English, too much of an old priest to express how just how precious you are to me. But you are. I want you to be. Do you understand?”

He saw in Vincent’s face the same want Thomas had felt the previous night and the same grace of understanding that had dawned on him just half an hour ago by the river.

The rest of the day was theirs to recover from. Thomas drove them to the beach because Vincent had wanted to see the sea. It was overcast and freezing, but Vincent had – thankfully – bought a scarf in Norwich. They didn’t talk much. At one point, Thomas reached and took Vincent’s hand, lacing their fingers together. The beach was deserted, apart from a couple of people in the distance. If they see us, Thomas thought, they’ll assume we are together.

And you are, Thomas, du Gard’s voice sounded again in his head.

They had lunch at a pub and from the window they watched as a faint drizzle began washing over Wroxham. Thomas gave Vincent a look of amusement. “You’re about to have the quintessential British experience of being caught in the rain without an umbrella.” Drizzle became an outpour and they rushed from the pub to the car and from the car to the house. Thomas took charge of the fire while Vincent fetched towels and blankets. Guilt stabbed at him when he looked at Vincent and read the exhaustion on his face. Come, Thomas said, come here, and they settled before the fire on the Turkish rug, just like their first evening.

“You didn’t sleep last night,” Thomas said, his fingers drawing irregular circles on Vincent’s dark hair.

“No,” Vincent admitted. “I had a great deal in my mind.”

“You could sleep now.”

“I will if you continue to do that to my hair,” Vincent murmured.

“Maybe that is my intention. Let me do this for you.” This, let me redeem myself, he meant. Let me carry this burden. Prove to me, he meant, truly, that you still trust me.

And Vincent let him.

They went back the next day. They packed, closed the house, released the car and took the train first to London, then to Heathrow. A five-hour flight landed them in Amman.

Thomas noted subtle changes in the way they interacted with each other. They were much freer with touch, and in fact, seemed to be unable to spend five minutes without touching each other. These were innocent touches: a hand on a shoulder, a squeeze of fingers. They sat closer to each other, their shoulders and thighs touching. At the airport, Vincent found himself fixing Thomas’s scarf, and Thomas placed his hands over his friend’s. The way Vincent looked at him then nearly brought him to his knees. They were, however, in the busiest airport in the world, and were now, as they learned in London, increasingly recognizable figures.

“We’ll need to take care,” Thomas murmured more to himself than to Vincent.

“We will,” Vincent said with what Thomas judged an enviable confidence in their abilities not to denounce their newfound relationship.  The contours of this relationship, of course, were almost impossible to explain. No vows had been broken, he thought to himself for the umpteenth time. No vows will. He feared, though, that Carolina and Guille would be able to tell something was up with just one look at them.

They returned to new and impeding disasters.

A month before, Hamas had attacked Israel, killed and kidnapped several hundreds of people, which resulted in a large-scale Israeli offensive in Gaza. Everyone immediately realised this was just the sort of event that had the potential to bring on a massive humanitarian crisis and further destabilize the region. At the camp, many had friends or relatives in Palestine, and a strong sense of solidarity was felt towards their Arab neighbours.

Thomas and Vincent took part in several Zoom emergency meetings about the situation, Thomas on the part of UNICEF and Vincent for UNHRC. There were meetings in Amman, whose sombre tone alarmed even Vincent, who was used to the worst kind of humanitarian situations. The fact that Vincent was a Cardinal working in the region and Thomas a former Cardinal and Secretary of State prompted the media, in particular the Catholic media, to search avidly for their views. This resulted in more meetings, more discussions, more plans to be made, and press releases to be drafted. Vincent had, in addition to all this, his very diminished Archdiocese in Kabul, which occupied much of his mind.

In the middle of, it seemed to Thomas, constant and successive challenges, they barely had time to think carefully about how to hide their newfound intimacy. In their cabin, Vincent took down the curtain separating their beds and pushed them together because, as it turned out, neither of them could sleep if they were not sharing the same space. They were both overworked, and the half an hour they spent wrapped in each other in bed before falling asleep from exhaustion, felt like a reward for long and difficult days.

No vows were broken and Thomas was increasingly hard pressed to feel that there was anything wrong about what they were doing. Every week he went to confession (one Franciscan friar working in the camp was kind enough to listen to him) but still he hadn’t been able to put to words what the reality of his relationship with Vincent was. To confess to lust and desire was one thing, but to confess to love, to tenderness? How could he say to a priest in the confessionary that every night he tucked his chin on the hollow of Vincent’s neck and breathed in, that he knew by heart the scent of Vincent’s soap and shampoo, that he loved Vincent’s soft and calm voice as read to him from the Psalms, which they did almost every night, or that he liked to wake up before Vincent and bring him from sleep by stroking his hair?

One afternoon, just a few days before Christmas, Thomas had to rush to their cabin in the middle of the day to find himself a phone charger. To his surprise, Vincent was inside, at the bathroom sink washing what seemed to be a shirt. His shirt, Thomas assumed, as Vincent stood there shirtless.  

“I…” Vincent said. Then closed his mouth, hesitated again, and finally said, “I spilled coffee on my shirt.”

“Did you burn yourself?” Thomas asked, concerned, taking a step towards him.

“No, no, it was lukewarm.”

He needs to eat more, Thomas thought, stupidly. He’s too thin. But Thomas also took in how the bones of his neck jutted out, making him look like a beautiful Greek statue. Apart from the hair under his arms and on his forearms, he was hairless. His nipples were small and brown, his waist narrow though his hips widened out a little. He had to suppress a gasp as his gaze wandered down Vincent’s torso. His abdomen was smooth and even taut, except for the large scar on his lower right side from the appendectomy. There was another scar: on his right arm, a ragged ugly thing that looked old.

“Many years ago, when I was in Veracruz, I was visiting some of our parishioners in a rather dangerous area of the city and I was caught in a crossfire.”

Vincent seemed to have resigned himself to Thomas’s examination. Goosebumps formed across his skin. Thomas tore himself away and picked up another of Vincent’s shirts from the closet. “I can wash that,” he said.

“Thomas.”

“I am sorry, I shouldn’t have stared.”

“Your curiosity is flattering,” Vincent said, lightly, but Thomas suspected he was not entirely comfortable with his examination.

Thomas faced him again, holding a black shirt. Vincent’s hand came up, almost involuntarily, to be placed on Thomas’s right cheek.

“They’re just scars, Thomas. They don’t hurt. The bullet just grazed me.”

Thomas stared down again. His free hand came to hover over Vincent’s lower belly. Very, very carefully his fingers brushed over the scar tissue. He heard Vincent’s sharp intake of breath and watched as Vincent’s abdomen contracted against his hand.

“Sometimes, because I am with you every day, your feats start to seem ordinary. Your courage, your love of others, your sense of duty towards God, I take it all for granted.”

“You are flattering me now.”

“I am honoured, truly,” Thomas said. “By the trust you placed in me. I know that from the moment you decided to share your space with me here, our intimacy would grow and you would be tempted to expose your secrets to me. It was a leap of faith.”

“Not as much a leap as you think, Thomas. You sell yourself very short, as usual, and you rank me too highly, as usual too. I trusted you when we first met, in Rome. I saw you for who you were, who I know you to be. A good, kind, fair man.”

“I fear I disappointed you, back in Norwich.”

“I know you fear that, but what sort of man would I be if I didn’t understand your doubts? And if I didn’t admire how quickly you overcame them?”

Thomas held up the clean shirt he had taken from the closet. Vincent slid into it and tried to button it, only to be stopped by Thomas, who, wordlessly, began doing it for him. When he finished, Vincent, who had been giving his utmost attention to his actions, kissed his forehead and his closed eyes.

Chapter Text

Christmas was busier for Thomas than in previous years. They celebrated Christmas’s day with the camp’s Christians. Roasted lamb, fruit cakes, roasted chestnuts, semolina pancakes. Thomas was certain he didn’t eat this well or this much in the Vatican. He told this to Vincent, who laughed and said that Christmas at the camp reminded him of Christmas back in Veracruz. Thomas would have liked to know more about Vincent’s Christmas as a young child, but in truth, he barely saw him during those two days. He seemed to be everywhere at once: making or serving food, washing up, playing with the children, talking in groups to people in a fast, easy Arabic. During the festivities, Thomas overheard Lina, Vincent’s colleague, a middle-aged Italian woman who reminded him of Sister Agnes, say in vague awe, Everywhere I look, there Vincent is.

Vincent said Midnight Mass dressed in white and with a green stole. He’d asked Thomas to concelebrate with him, but Thomas refused. It had been a long time since he had said Mass to a large number of the faithful, and the longer he went without doing it, the more resistant he was to doing it. He saw that Vincent wanted to insist, and to probe into the matter, but that day they were too busy. “You’re better at it than me in any case,” Thomas said in half a joke.

“That’s not true.”

“It is. I am not flattering you, Vincent. I wouldn’t want to rob our faithful of you on this day.”

Vincent, reluctantly, let the matter go. Yet Thomas grew maudlin as the 25^th wore off. He didn’t quite know why. Perhaps he did indeed miss saying Mass publicly. He had gone too much over to the other side, was too much of a civilian now. However, he suspected that part of his ill temper was because he hadn’t seen much of Vincent in the past days. The feeling sat badly with him. Vincent was doing his duty as a pastor, a duty he undertook with joy. Thomas shouldn’t – couldn’t – resent the attention he was giving other people. God forgive me, he thought. It was a sin; it shamed him and it shamed Vincent. But it was also, he sensed, dangerous. I depend too much on him, I need him too much.

That night he retired earlier than usual, despite knowing that he still could be of use in the festivities. He hoped sleep and rest would cure his ill humour. He undressed, put on his pyjamas, and prayed, Lord, please, help me overcome this pettiness that comes to me at my most hopeless moments.

He was half asleep when he felt Vincent slid into the bed with him, wrapping an arm around him. Thomas’s hand met Vincent’s on his midsection. And Thomas relaxed against him.

They did leave the camp on New Year’s Eve. Guilherme’s partner, Francisco, was spending Christmas and New Year in Jordan, and Guille invited Carolina, Myriam, Vincent and Thomas for a small party.

Francisco was born in Paris of exiled Chilean parents. He was a little older than Guille, but it was easy to see how they complemented each other. Where Guilherme was anxious and fidgety, Francisco was a tall, reassuring presence. Where Francisco was quiet and soft spoken, Guilherme came forward and made him laugh. Francisco was also Carolina’s old friend, as they had studied together at the ENS*. The first part of the night was spent listening to their adventures in the early 2000s in Paris.

Thomas was a little surprised by the interest Vincent showed in Francisco’s past, and then realised that, of course, they shared not only the same language, but a similar cultural and social space. Soon, Francisco was telling Vincent about his father, a former trade unionist, and his mother, a History teacher, who were forced to flee Pinochet’s regime following a threat of almost certain arrest. Vincent listened carefully and asked questions. Guilherme observed the conversation with a small smile which grew and grew, until he picked up his guitar.

“Vincent, I know you like Patti Smith and Joan Baez and Nina Simone, but what about Latin American singers? What do you listen to?”

Vincent seemed caught unaware by the question. Thomas, with a glass of wine in his hand, frowned. Vincent did listen to music sometimes when he worked. Thomas knew of his love for 60s and 70s rock, for Leonard Cohen, which Thomas shared, and his devotion for Dvorak, which Thomas absolutely did not understand. But Thomas couldn’t remember discussing Mexican or Latin music with him.

“I am quite eclectic in my tastes,” said Vincent slowly.

“Right. What does that mean? Do you listen to, I don’t know, Shakira and Buena Vista Social Club?”

“I like cumbia, for example. There are some milongas I like very much.”

“Hum,” said Guilherme. He had settled on the couch facing Vincent, his hands playing absentmindedly some odd cords on his guitar. “Anything else?”

“From your country, I like Gilberto Gil, for example. Milton Nascimento. Lenine.”

“Ah, you like Milton! I love him. He’s great.”

There was another pause. Thomas noted Carolina and Francisco were following the conversation attentively, and for the first time he had the feeling there was something at play here he was missing out. Vincent’s gaze seemed fixed on Guilherme’s guitar.

“Is there any Chilean music you like?” Francisco asked.

Vincent’s gaze turned to him. He looked as if he was trying to puzzle out a difficult riddle. The silence stretched for much longer than such an easy question warranted. “There are some songs by Victor Jara I like very much. I like Inti Illimani, especially the Viva Chile album. However, perhaps my favourite Latin American singer is Mercedes Sosa. So an Argentinian.”

Guilherme tapped his finger on the side of his nose. “I knew it.”

“What did you know?” Thomas asked.

“That Vincent here would have very good taste.”

“I like Calle 13,” said Vincent.

“Oh I didn’t expect that,” Guilherme said. “Really?”

“Why is that so strange?”

“Just didn’t picture you as a hip hop guy.”

“They won Grammy’s” Vincent said, calmly.

“That they did,” Guilherme agreed.

“My mother,” Francisco said, suddenly, “used to say that in Latin America a priest is either a revolutionary or a traitor.”

Vincent smiled. “That is a little bit of an overreaction, perhaps.”

“Is it?”

Vincent didn’t answer for a long time. When he answered, he did so in Spanish. “I am not, nor have I ever had the desire to be, a revolutionary. I do think of History as a process of liberation, in which men and women are able to consciously trace their own destiny. In the Bible, Christ is presented to us as bringing liberation. Christ frees men from sin, the ultimate root of enmity, injustice and oppression. Christ makes humankind truly free, which is to say, he enables us to live in communion with him; and this is the basis for all human fraternity.”

“Vincent,” Francisco said almost kindly. “That is Gustavo Gutierrez.”

 “Yes. Yes, it is.”

“They were testing you,” Thomas said the following day, back at the camp. They had gotten back from Mafreq quite late and had only slept for about four hours. Duty had, however, compelled them to go back to work, and afraid that Vincent hadn’t properly broken his fast, Thomas interrupted his morning to bring him a pastry and coffee. “Yesterday, Francisco and Guilherme. They were trying to gauge your political views.”

“My theological views, more like it.”

“When I asked you, when we were in Conclave, about whether you agreed with Tedesco’s views, you said you believed in God.”

Vincent gave him an amused look before biting into his baklava. “I do believe in God, Thomas.”

Thomas thought about all the times he and Vincent had discussed politics. Vincent’s views seemed broadly aligned with the late Pope’s. He preferred to talk about practicalities than theory. When speaking of poverty, he spoke of his years in Mexico, when speaking about war, he spoke of Baghdad, when he spoke of violence, he spoke of his experiences in Congo. He had noticed in Vincent an almost obsessive spirit of independence and the tendency to ask well placed questions. There was something almost Socratic about Vincent’s methods. Thomas had picked up that he did not particularly like Americans, and perhaps that explained his antipathy towards Tremblay, which had been there even before Thomas approached him to ask him to transfer his vote to Tremblay – which Vincent never did. But of course, he now understood, his antipathy was a political feature, not a personal one.

On the drive back to the camp the previous night, Thomas thought of other moments, little moments where Vincent’s political views came to the fore. In a conversation with Carolina a few months ago, he’d spoken of social sins, poverty, inequality, racism, systemic violence.

“Thomas,” Vincent got up to approach him. “You seem to be upset, but I don’t understand why. All that I have said yesterday was contained in my prayers at the Conclave. Remember when you asked me to bless our first meal? I serve God through my service to the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the lonely – the poor. The women who serve men and get no thanks and the women and children who are invariably the first victims in war. And yes, I do believe, surely as you do too, that Christ came to preach the good news to the poor, to release the prisoners, to grant sight to the blind, and liberate the oppressed.”

“No, no I am not upset. I suppose I didn’t…I suppose there are still so many parts of you I don’t know.”

“There are parts of you I also don’t know,” Vincent said, his voice low. “But I am learning, yes?”

The months went on, the war in Gaza intensified, and the world seemed to close in on them. The images of dead children, despairing parents, blown cities became inescapable. One evening, in conversation with Carolina and Guille, Vincent and Thomas agree that they shouldn’t want to escape those images, that if they can do nothing else at least they should be confronted with their horror.

They did try to do something. Vincent was invited to Jerusalem to meet with Enzo Ré, the Cardinal Patriarch. They had met at the Conclave, and Vincent had liked him, and had kept a more or less regular correspondence ever since. Ré was a scholar of ancient scripture, who stumbled his way into becoming a Cardinal. He was fluent in Hebrew, both modern and ancient. His Arabic, however, was subpar, and he felt he needed Vincent’s help. As a result, Vincent flew to Jerusalem to a whirlwind of meetings with government representatives, from the Israelis, to the Americans to the Palestinian authority. The media was paying more and more attention to him and for 2 weeks, Thomas couldn’t open a Catholic – and even on occasion a secular – online publication without seeing Ré and Vincent.

Vincent returned from Jerusalem exhausted and yet, despite Thomas’s admonishments, threw himself onto his work in the camp, as if he was trying to make up for having left its people and his team for 2 weeks. Thomas tried to be understanding, but grew more and more frustrated after a few days. It had bothered him to sleep – to exist – without Vincent for those 2 weeks. He couldn’t sleep for more than a couple of hours straight without waking up, and feeling the disappointment all anew when he realised that Vincent wasn’t there. It was, of course, a little pathetic. He’d slept alone all his life. And it was dangerous, another sign that Vincent had a hold on him that bordered on the unhealthy. And yet, he was reassured by the fact that above all this was his concern for Vincent’s well-being.

It was a Friday evening when he got to their cabin to realise that Vincent wasn’t there. He looked around, shook his head, and marched out again, feeling a little (again!) like the Dean of the College of Cardinals trying to get 108 stubborn men in line.

He knocked at the door of the UNCHR’s caravan where Vincent worked and went in without waiting for an answer. Vincent looked up, mildly alarmed, but smiled upon seeing him. “Hello.”

Thomas came to his side of the desk. “Vincent,” he said and trailed off. I want to scold him, but he has only to look at me for my words to die on my lips. “Vincent,” he began, softly, “stop this. Do you know what time you have been going to bed for the past week? And I know you weren’t sleeping properly in Jerusalem.”

“Thomas, there’s so much to do, so much work that was delayed…”

“It will be here on Monday.”

“Monday?” Vincent said, stunned, as if the idea of Monday was egregious. “No, no…”

“Vincent. Please. For me, if not for you. I worry, we all do.”

Vincent gave a deep sigh and pulled himself to his feet. “You’ve been talking about me behind my back,” he said, with a smile.

“Lina sends me messages when you skip lunch.”

“I’ll have to talk to her about that.”

They were very close, and so it was easy and natural for Thomas to lean against him, his arms going around Vincent’s torso. He lowered his head, so his lips brushed Vincent’s neck, and felt the tremor that went through Vincent. “I have missed you, too. This isn’t entirely selfless.”

Vincent relented and they went home, where Vincent fell asleep within minutes of lying his head down his pillow. He woke up, hours later, to Thomas reading his kindle next to him. “What time is it?”

“About midnight,” Thomas whispered, as they usually did in their nightly conversations. And as in such conversations, their inhibitions also faded away in the dark. Vincent placed his head on Thomas’s chest.

“I’ve been neglecting you.”

“No, Vincent,” Thomas’s hand flew automatically – instinctively – to Vincent’s hair. “That’s not the point.”

“I have. I apologise.”

Thomas frowned in the dark. “Do you want to talk about what happened in Jerusalem?”

“I need to think more about it. To pray on it.” He paused. “I admire you even more now. My work has been largely anonymous. I am not entirely comfortable with this amount of scrutiny. In my experience, violence lacks subtlety. A man with a gun who shoots at you, men who pillage villages…their intentions are clear. I know where I am standing there. But this…diplomacy. I am not used to having to hold a candle to men’s hearts, to second guess their intentions.”

“You hold a candle to mine,” Thomas said. “You bring your light to it. You do the same to the world.”

Thomas’s birthday in early March was celebrated at Vincent’s insistence. He would have been happy with a quiet dinner with some four or five people, but Vincent seemed keen to have half the camp there. It was an attempt, Thomas knew, to drag him a little from his shell and from his comfort zone. It was, too, an attempt to show him how beloved he was. People did come, and although a small voice inside told him that they came for Vincent, he had fun. He sat with Lina, Carolina and Myriam, discussing Lina’s youth in Naples and how it compared to Damascus and San Sebastian. “After Naples, nothing fazes me anymore. You could tell me the aliens had come and I would nod and go about my day. No place is as beautiful as it is insane, there is an energy of desperation in the air. It’s the Vesuvius; we all know that we are five minutes away from dying if it decides to erupt again. Vincent,” and she looked at Thomas, “thought the same when he was there.”

Naples. Go to the sea and pray, the Holy Father had said, and Vincent had obeyed. He went to Naples. Lina, who was from Naples, who was a doctor…but his thoughts were derailed by Vincent’s arrival, who crouched next to Myriam, holding Mahmoud by the hand. “He wants cake, is it alright if we go get him some cake?” Myriam rolled her eyes, but winked at Vincent and said, share it with your sister. Vincent picked the boy up and took him to the sweets table. The act distracted Thomas, who couldn’t keep from following him with his eyes.

Carolina nudged him, then. “Yes?” He asked and she gave him what could only be described as a knowing look.

She whispered, “lo miras como si te volviera loco dejar de mirarlo”. (You look at him like it would drive you mad to stop looking)

Thomas couldn’t fight the blush burning on his cheeks. “Carolina…” he said in an attempt at censure. He lowered his eyes and looked around.

“Relax, not everyone is as observant, or as close as I am to both of you as I am.”

“And Guille?”

“Well, yes, he too, but he has some sort of gift, a sixth sense.”

“A gift?”

“He sees these things. We’re not talking about it all the time, don’t worry.”

“That’s not exactly reassuring,” he murmured. “It’s not what you think. It’s not at all like…and Vincent would be distraught if he learned that people…”

“There’s no people, there’s just me and Guille. Well, and Lina…”

“Good Heavens,” Thomas reached for his pomegranate juice.

“It’s fine, don’t worry. Do you think you’re the only one who cares about him? No one would stand for anything to be said, or done, against him. And, also, we like you too, by the way.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

There were presents: Carolina gave him a volume of Miguel de Unamuno’s works, Guille gave him a brand new pair of airpods, as his had recently died. Myriam and her daughter Nawal had sewn him a red and white shemagh, similar to the one they had made for Vincent over Christmas, though his was green and white. Their gift, in particular, moved him. He knew how long they had spent making Vincent’s scarf and it was humbling to know that they had decided he was worth an equal amount of effort.

Vincent gifted him a small icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe. “I asked my sister to send it over for me. She went to the shrine last year. The necklace was my mother’s.”

“Your mother’s?” Thomas repeated. It was a copper chain which had grown dark with time. Vincent met his gaze and looked at his own wrist, at the watch Thomas had given him and that he barely ever took off. Thomas wanted in that moment, more than anything, to ask Vincent to help him putting the necklace on, but there were too many people around, staring at them. He did it himself, and as he fumbled, he could feel Vincent wanting to intervene. Carolina saved them by stepping forward and managing the clasp.

Later, much later, when they returned to their cabin, Thomas wanted to bring it all up, but Vincent interrupted him, as excited as a child. “I have something else for you.”

It was a drawing. Ever since they returned from Norwich, Thomas had tried to get Vincent to show him his drawings. He did; drawings of the camp, the desert at night, Carolina and Guille playing cards (which they did every Thursday evening). There were other, older drawings, from Baghdad and Kabul, veiled women in markets and men smoking pipes around cups of coffee. They were very good, exceedingly so, full of grace and elegant lines, just like their creator. But he never showed him the drawing he had made of Thomas.

This one was a drawing of him. It was made in charcoal; Thomas was lying in bed, glasses on, with his leg bent, reading from his kindle. Light emerged from the screen, which lightened his face, and from a candle on the bedside table.

“It’s not necessarily my best piece, I spent some time working on it, and sometimes that’s not good, not for me, anyway, it often works better if I just sit down and do it on one sitting but…”

“It’s lovely,” Thomas, to his horror, felt his eyes fill with tears. Vincent had clearly put so much work, so much love into it. He kept staring at the drawing and when he raised his eyes to Vincent, he saw in him the kind of smile that lightened his features. I want to kiss him, Thomas thought, taking half a step towards him. His hands came up to his chest. He felt Vincent’s hands on his waist and had to repress a shudder. “It’s lovely,” he repeated.

“I’m glad you liked it,” Vincent murmured.

“You’re very good,” Thomas said, for lack of something else to say. His eyes roamed Vincent’s face, taking in his eyes, which looked a shade darker than usual, his nose and his lips.

“Thomas,” Vincent said in the way they talk to each other way when they’re alone. Gentle, full of compassion and understanding. It meant: I know, love, I know. We can’t, but I know.

Thomas raised his head and kissed Vincent’s forehead. “The necklace,” he said. “That was beautiful too. Your mother’s chain…you didn’t have to do that.”

“I didn’t have to, no, but I wanted to.”

Chapter Text

Sex was not something Thomas was used to thinking about. It was, partly, how he coped with celibacy (“don’t even think about it!” he had been told by his spiritual director as a young man). When he was in his 20s and 30s, it was harder. Then he got older, and became used to it, and sex became a somewhat distant entity, something he was aware of, the mechanics of it at least, something he could think about without feeling ashamed. When he turned 50, his regrets were not sexual in nature, but more generalised: lack of a family structure, loneliness, old age. And then Vincent happened in his life.

It was clear that he and Vincent desired each other. It was very difficult to untangle this desire from their deep affection for each other. Thomas was not even certain, at times, whether he would want to have sex with Vincent. As much of a man of the world as he was, it was hard to overcome his feeling, ingrained in him since his youth, that there was something dirty and wrong about sex. He feared what this desire – sexual desire for a man – meant for their vows; a problem he was, still, unable to puzzle out. Above all, he feared tainting Vincent somewhat, that his desires were a way of humiliating him. Other times, Thomas, who could separate the reality of life from Church Doctrine, who had read books and understood something about human frailty, knew that this was all internalised prejudice. There was nothing dirty or inherently wrong about sex. There was also nothing particularly beautiful or sanctifying about it. Sex was, at heart, a morally neutral activity.

Yet he thought: how beautiful Vincent would look during orgasm, his hair mussed, head thrown back. How his skin would feel against his.

To think of sex more naturally also became easier simply on the sheer, immutable fact that he was sharing a bed with another person, and a small bed at that.

The first time it happened to either of them, funnily enough, it was to Vincent, who always seemed to Thomas more unaffected by the erotic aspect of their relationship. It was dawn when Thomas woke up. They often slept entangled in each other, and on this occasion, Thomas’s back was against Vincent’s chest, Vincent’s legs entwined between Thomas’s, and Vincent’s erection against his lower back. He failed to register it, at first. He only realised when he came to, started moving, and Vincent hissed – a sound Thomas had never heard from him before – and said in a somewhat weaker voice, “Thomas, don’t do that”.

“Do what?” He whispered.

“Move against me.”

Vincent disentangled from him, slowly, and laid on his back. His breathing was heavier than usual. Thomas turned around to look at him, making a herculean effort not to look at his pelvis.

Vincent chuckled. “Well, that’s certainly new. It’s been a while since…” and he trailed off. “I was always lucky, I was never very afflicted by this sort of thing.”

“Not even when you were younger?”

“A bit more when I was younger, certainly, but the fact that I came to live and work in rather stressful environments was not exactly conducive to this.”

“So you never felt tempted?”

Vincent looked at him. In the dim light of dawn, Thomas could see his lips curl up in an amused smile. “Not until you.”

“Lina…” Thomas said, suddenly. “She knows, doesn’t she? She’s the other person who knows. About your situation.”

“Lina was the doctor who operated me back in Baghdad.”

“Oh.”

“There was a shortage of doctors and my situation was an emergency, so we had to make do with her. She was a surgeon, but her expertise was gynaecological issues. In hindsight, it was a blessing. She left the Hospital and Iraq shortly afterwards, but she did me the special favour of erasing my medical file from the system. And she also took a special interest in my case. She was the one who arranged for an anonymous analysis of my chromosomes. She said, says still, that, apparently, I am something of a miracle of biology – her words, not mine. My condition is rare, but rarer still is to live for so long without knowing about it. People who have it, often also have related medical conditions that need addressing.”

“And you never had any of that?”

“Apart from certain features, which, as I told you, I never thought were very significant, no. They didn’t bother me or disrupted my life or even alerted me to my condition. For a while in my teens and twenties, I had some abdominal pain, but frankly, I was too busy to attend to it, and it came and went anyway. Perhaps these were things I should have checked with a doctor, but I admit that I was raised with a certain suspicion of doctors. When we were sick as children, my mother made teas and homemade remedies.”

“It is interesting that you came to work so closely to healthcare, with that suspicion.”

“The irony doesn’t escape me.”

“It is because you are so self-sacrificing. You ignore your pain, but not that of others.”

“My pain was not great, Thomas. I often thought it was just something I had eaten, or a virus, or some issue like that. And who knows, perhaps it was. And eventually it went away.”

Vincent pulled himself up, sitting against the headboard.

“May I ask…” Thomas began. “We never talked about how you see yourself. If your condition, your chromosomes ultimately, changed the way you see yourself.”

Vincent smiled. “Are you asking me how I identify, Thomas?”

“I suppose I am, yes.”

“When I was a teenager at the Seminary, one of our teachers said that I treated my body like a minor inconvenience. He meant that I didn’t take sufficiently care of myself – a complaint I know you also have. The fact was that I never particularly cared very much for how I looked, or what I ate or how much I slept. I cared about other people, God, books, learning. As I grew older, of course, I understood that our bodies are divine creations. We are made in God’s image, after all, and it was my duty to take care of myself properly.”

“An endeavour you are not always successful at, I must say.”

Vincent laughed. “No, not entirely, I don’t think, but take heart in the knowledge that I’ve gotten much better. I never suffered from any kind of dysphoria. My conflicted feelings after I learned about my condition turned out to be temporary. Now of course…they made me realise that I never thought masculinity was very important. I come from a very patriarchal culture and that power and violence that men exercise over women always repulsed me and I always tried to act in ways that contradicted that violence, even small ways. Throughout my life, my behaviour was modelled on Jesus Christ our Lord and against many of the men that I met in my childhood. And so, in my head, more than being a man, I was always Vincent. Even before I found out about my internal organs, I preferred to think of myself as one of God’s creatures.  One might argue that my work with Veracruz’s streetwalkers or those women in Congo, my sympathy for them, is a somewhat unconscious sign of my condition. It is possible, although it feels a little essentialist to see it like that. Furthermore, I can’t forget that…” here he stopped. “When in Congo, those men went about killing and raping women, they did it because they were women, because they looked like women, and the violence they suffered was, partly at least, on account of what they were, of what they looked like. I was never, and I would never be, the target of that kind of violence. And when I approached those women to help them, even though several of them came to trust me, many recoiled because when they looked at me, they saw a man. So, while I have come to appreciate the female part of my body, because my process of finding out about it and deciding what to do allowed me to see the world, and people, from different angles, perhaps allowed me greater empathy…the truth is that I am as you see me: a man.”

Thomas reached for his hand and stroked the back of it. “It is rather ironic that you say you don’t care very much how you look.”

“How so?”

Thomas offered him a kind smile. “Vincent…when you arrived at the Conclave…half of the whispers that first evening were about how handsome you were. I overheard Cardinal Perez say you looked like Rubens’ Saint Sebastian. The girl in London at the bar, do you remember? She was mesmerised by you.”

To Thomas’s delight, Vincent blushed a deep shade of red. “What about you?” Vincent asked. “What did you think of me when you first saw me?”

“I thought you were the picture of innocence. And then at your blessing, I thought there was a hidden strength about you that I hadn’t detected. And I was right.” He paused. Be truthful. Thomas raised his free hand to touch his hair. “I thought you were beautiful.”

Vincent took his hand in his, and kissed it.

The second time it happened to Thomas. It was about a month after their conversation at dawn. The weather was warmer now, and they were slowly but surely slipping into summer. Thomas slept on his back and Vincent, contrary to their habit, slept on his side, with his head leaning against Thomas’s shoulder.

Vincent was jolted awake by Thomas sitting up, suddenly, and cursing. “Damn it,” Vincent opened his eyes.

“Thomas? Are you alright?”

For a long moment, Thomas sat on the mattress, his head bowed, trying to control his laboured breath.

“Thomas?” Vincent sat up in obvious concern.

“I’m alright, I…” he leaned to turn on the flashlight. “I need to change.”

He got up. It took Vincent a moment, but when Thomas reappeared wearing different pyjamas trousers and a towel in his hand, he burst out laughing.

“I’m glad my humiliation amuses you,” Thomas grumbled.

“Perhaps we should start reading St Thomas Aquinas before going to bed.”

Thomas slid into the bed again. “I don’t recall that solving anything for me when I was a teenager.”

Vincent reached and kissed his brow. “It is not a humiliation, Thomas. It happens.”

And just like that, Thomas’s guilt and qualms about his sexual feelings for Vincent disappeared. They knew where each other’s limits lay, they knew how to control themselves. It wasn’t an effort, it wasn’t, as so many men put it, an insupportable chore. It just was how it was. It was there, their desire, burning a slow, low fire. They could acknowledge it, respect it and let it pass.

It was summer. Lina Scano was leaving to become the clinic Director of a Hospital in Rome. They all gathered in the kind of celebration that was periodical at the camp. Some people came, some left. So was life. At the end of the night, sitting around the caravan, only the six of them remained: Vincent, Thomas, Carolina, Guille, Myriam and Lina. Guilherme had brought his guitar and Carolina had acquired recently a tambourine, which, as she told it, her grandmother taught her to play.

“Come on, Lina, give me a song,” said Guille. “An Italian song, so we can give you a proper send off. One I know, preferably, so none of those obscure Napolitan love songs I can’t pronounce.”

Lina smirked, and looked at Vincent and Thomas. “Thomas, you lived in Italy for many years. Surely, you gained an appreciation for Italian music?”

“My tastes,” said Thomas, “are woefully old fashioned.”

“Bella Ciao,” Carolina said in a burst of inspiration. “I know you can play it.”

Guilherme gave a wide smile and began in a soft voice that grew more confident as the others joined him.

 Una mattina mi son svegliato

O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao

Una mattina mi son svegliato

Eo ho trovato l'invasor

O partigiano porta mi via

O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao

O partigiano porta mi via

Che mi sento di morir

E se io muoio da partigiano

O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao

E se io muoio da partigiano

Tu mi devi seppellir

Mi seppellire lassù in montagna

O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao

Mi seppellire lassù in montagna

Sotto l'ombra di un bel fiore

E le genti che passeranno

O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao

E le genti che passeranno

Mi diranno: "Che bel fior"

È questo il fiore del partigiano

O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao

È questo il fiore del partigiano

Morto per la libertà

It was the end of summer. As Gaza’s humanitarian situation worsened, Thomas had somehow stumbled into becoming an important party in meetings of UNICEF Middle East, and began spending more and more time in Amman. He didn’t like to drive at night back to the camp, so he spent several nights in a row in a small hotel in Amman, from where he called Vincent. The habit was developed of talking to Vincent until Thomas fell asleep.

In one of those occasions in Amman, he met Cardinal Ré, who seemed very happy to see him. In fact, he took him by the arm and didn’t let go until he convinced him to go to dinner with him that evening. Thomas liked Ré; he always had, even when he was Dean of the College of Cardinals. He also suspected that Ré had been one of those that had voted for him in the beginning of the Conclave; either for him or for Aldo. He’d never asked.

To his surprise, Ré had spent half of the dinner praising Vincent. He’s an angel, Ré said, he’s been so tremendously helpful. He combines a gentleness and a firmness the likes of which I have never seen in anyone else. He is tough, you just have to talk to him for five minutes to see that. Everyone in Jerusalem is very impressed by him. I conveyed my feelings to the Vatican, but they have not been very forthcoming. I was hoping, and here Ré lowered his voice as though afraid they were going to be overheard, I hoped Aldo at least sent him a message of encouragement, but it appears our Pope is more jealous than his predecessors.

“Jealous?” Thomas repeated.

“Yes, Thomas.” Ré gave him a look as if wondering whether Thomas had lost his bearings. “Vincent is, well, he’s good, you see? Very good. He’s well-spoken and brave. He’s been making a modest but important headway in the media. I am not saying that the Curia is threatened by him or anything like that, no, not at all! Don’t get me wrong. But I have noted in my dealings with the Curia, these days, that they are not very appreciative of anything that can’t be traced directly to His Holiness.”

Thomas lowered his head to his plate. He’d ordered fish, and began the meal quite hungry, but his appetite was vanishing. He had come to feel such an instinctive distaste for these absurd subterfuges that hid only pettiness and vanity.

Instead, he made an effort, and smiled, affecting a lightness he didn’t feel. “Enzo, I must say that I feel very separated from all this. And I believe so does Vincent. Of course, I can’t speak on his behalf, but I have come to know him in this past year when we worked together at the camp, and I believe he is absolutely without ambition. He cares only to serve God and His people.”

“Oh, I am sure they know that at the Vatican, they are not so devoid of understanding. Vincent is not a threat, Thomas. He’s a blessing. Apologies, this is my frustration speaking. And you are no longer involved in this, and as shocking as your resignation was, and although you are more missed than you know, I would say it is likely for the best; at this point, it’s best not to be involved in any of it. But I can’t lie. It’s been hard. Tremblay has a mean streak yet at the same time he's trying to please all the wrong people. Everywhere I turn…” Ré paused, in a rare show of frustration. “People are dying, Thomas. Three percent of Gazan Christians have been killed. If it goes on like this, they’ll all be gone before there’s some kind of agreement or ceasefire. There’s been Christians in Gaza for 2000 years! And Tremblay…is worried about the American Bishops Conference…this is why we should not have elected an American. Did you know Salvador Hernández raised his voice at him?”

“What?”

“They met in the Vatican a month ago. From what I’ve heard, Hernández complained that the Jesuit Refugee Services hasn’t been receiving as much support from the Papacy as in previous years and well…apparently, he had to be forcefully reminded that the Jesuits took a vow of obedience to the Pope.”

“Good Lord.” Thomas had an image of Hernández’s wiry frame and his forbidding eyes. He was not a man to be crossed.

“So, this is where we’re at. A prominent Jesuit losing his patience with the Pope.”

That night Thomas had some of the worst insomnia he could remember having. Not even during the Conclave had he slept so poorly. He indulged briefly in the idea of calling Vincent, but he thought better of it. Vincent slept little as it was, he didn’t need Thomas bothering him at 2 in the morning.

He spent the following morning in Amman, and was only able to return to the camp in the afternoon. He went straight to Vincent’s caravan, only to be told by one of Vincent’s officers that some kids had come with a brand-new football and a present for Vincent and dragged him away from work. A miracle, Thomas thought.

“What kind of present?”

“A football jersey.”

Thomas found him and a group of seven teenagers in one of the camp’s improvised football fields. Vincent was wearing a sky blue and white shirt with the number 10 and the name Messi on the back. Thomas watched him for a while: Vincent walks around the field, until he suddenly breaks into a sprint, receives the ball and dribbles up, and then passes to a boy near the goal. Thomas realised that Vincent had been, as usual, too modest. He was clearly good and with his Argentinian shirt and his black hair he did look a bit like Messi.

“Salah!” Vincent shouted in Arabic. “Dawoud is coming up on the inside, you have to pass, come on, lad!”

Thomas smiled with sincerity for the first time in 24 hours.

At one point, Vincent spotted him and came to greet him. Sweat was shining on his brow. “You’re back!”

“I am. I believe you’re having fun,” Thomas said.

“Yes, it’s good to do this once in a while. But you look troubled.”

“I’m just tired.”

Vincent shook a finger at him. “You’re lying to me, Thomas.”

Thomas bowed his head to hide both his eyes and the smile that would denounce him. “I am going back home. I need to rest.”

“I’ll be there shortly,” Vincent promised, but it took him another 2 hours to show up at their cabin. Thomas was lying in bed, reading from his kindle, with a candle on the bedside.

“There’s some hot water left,” Thomas told him, as Vincent made a line for the bathroom. When he re-emerged, hair dripping wet and wearing his pyjamas shirt and tracksuit trousers, Thomas had long given up on his book. Instead, he sat on the bed, waiting for Vincent, with a red folder in his hand. Vincent sat next to him, gave him a small smile, and squeezed his free hand.

“I met Ré in Amman,” Thomas began. “He’s rather smitten with you.”

“He’s a good man.”

“We talked about the Curia and the Holy Father. Almost a year ago now, you were brave enough to tell me your secrets and I thought, as we came back here, that I should tell you mine. But…I never did. I thought you would think less of me. For the past year, I have often thought to tell you, but I would delay it. I’d think, not today, it’s been so lovely today. Next week. And then next week would come and I would think, no, no...”

“Thomas, ya gharami,” Vincent interrupted. “Oh, You of little faith…do you doubt me so much?”

“No, that’s not it. I…”

“Thomas,” Vincent said, firmly. “Tell me.”

“During the Conclave, I broke into the late Holy Father’s room. I did it because I wanted to find out about the then Cardinal Tremblay, now Pope Paul VII. I suspected that Tremblay had a hand in bringing that unfortunate nun to Rome to discredit Joshua. When I was in his rooms, I found this,” he handed Vincent the red folder. “Essentially, they are notes and documents on the most important cardinals at the Conclave, but Tremblay featured heavily.”

Vincent leafed through the documents without stopping to read them.

“Tremblay,” Thomas said, “was guilty of simony. He got those early votes because he paid for them.”

Vincent was silent, and Thomas went on, “I thought to reveal the whole scheme to the Conclave. I talked to Aldo, who refused to have anything to do with it. I realised that Tremblay had, in the meantime, offered him a position as Secretary of State. And I lost courage. I thought, perhaps Tremblay is the lesser evil. I was convinced Tedesco would be worse and Aldo no longer stood a chance. And, frankly, after talking to Aldo, I no longer felt inclined to vote for him. By then, of course, I had had arguments with Tremblay and he knew I was onto him. That’s really the reason why he forced my resignation. The Vatican created the fiction that it was my decision, and of course, I never contradicted that version of events, but everyone knows that I was pushed away.”

Thomas let his head fall on his hands. “I voted for Tremblay in the last vote. I stood before God, and I voted for a man who I knew was dishonest and unworthy. And the worst of it all is that I suspected, together with Ray O’Malley, that there was a chance the late Pope had dismissed Tremblay just before he died. So, I betrayed not only myself and my vows, but my Pope.”

Thomas had closed his eyes and he reopened them to stare at his shoes. Vincent, by his side, was silent. Thomas began fearing the worst. This is it, he won’t forgive this.

Suddenly, he felt Vincent move, to kneel just before him. With a kind of gentleness that brought tears to a man’s eyes, Vincent raised his chin and made him look at him.

“Oh Thomas…Why are you so afraid of me? Have I ever given you reason to be?”

“No, no, of course not.”

“Listen, I can’t begin to imagine the kind of pressures you were under during those days. Did you act correctly? Wrongly? I cannot tell you. I can’t give you assurances or take away your guilt. You did what you thought was best at the time, and surely that’s what can be reasonably asked of most of us. You are only a man, Thomas. You are not God. What matters is this: it’s done and it’s been 2 years now. You have taken this experience and learned from it. I daresay you are doing more good here than you would be at the Curia had you remained there.”

Thomas shook his head. “You forgive me too easily, Vincent. You are too lenient towards my failings.”

“But that is what Our Saviour taught us, Thomas. To love and forgive and move forward. Wasn’t that what you said in your homily at the opening of the Conclave?”

 Thomas closed his eyes again. He felt Vincent’s forehead lean against his, Vincent’s hands holding his weight on Thomas’s forearms.

“O my God, I am heartily sorry…” Vincent murmured. “for having offended Thee And I detest all my sins because of thy…”

“…thy just punishment, but most of all because they offend Thee…”

“Thee, my God, who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve…”

“…With the help of Thy grace to sin no more and to avoid the near occasion of sin. Amen.”

“Amen,” Vincent said, and raised his face to kiss his forehead.

Chapter Text

Vincent had nightmares. It took Thomas a while to realise this. When they slept apart, it was impossible to tell, but once they began sharing a bed, their existence was slowly revealed. Still, it took him a while: Vincent did not thrash in his sleep or moaned or cried. A few times a month he woke up, usually bathed in sweat, and slowly extricated himself from the bed to go wash his face. Sometimes he did not return to bed for many long minutes, preferring to sit on their small couch, or at the kitchen table with a glass of water.

To his great shame, Thomas did not always wake up. For the first couple of months when they slept together, he failed entirely to realise what was going on. One night, when he himself was suffering through a bout of insomnia, he heard Vincent’s sharp intake of breath, and watched him as he sat on the bed, his head bowed, trying to regain his breath. Thomas placed a concerned hand on Vincent’s back, only to feel the dampness of his shirt.

“Vincent, are you feeling well?”

“Sí,” and he left the bed. Thomas heard water running in the bathroom. Vincent reappeared a few minutes later and sat on the edge of the bed, without meeting Thomas’s eyes.

“Vincent,” Thomas started in a low voice. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.” The word came in English, and as sharp as Thomas had ever heard Vincent use with him.

“Is there anything I can do?”

Vincent shook his head. Thomas sat against the bed’s headboard in a compelled silence, watching Vincent work through the dregs of his nightmare. It was not an easy sight to behold: with his elbows on his thighs and his head bowed, Vincent looked small and troubled. It was wrong. A man like Vincent shouldn’t look like this.

“Vincent…” he said, at last, unable to keep it in any longer. He thought back to the term that Vincent had begun using to refer to him: ya gharami. My love. It was significant that Vincent did not use English or Spanish’s terms of endearment. Love, amor. Perhaps it was easier to speak Arabic, the language that adopted them, the language of the place where they came together. Thomas couldn’t even do that. He wished he could be better than he was, he wished he could use language, any language, to express his feelings. He pitied Vincent in that moment, stuck here with a man who couldn’t even muster enough words to console him. “Please, let me help.” Vincent turned his head to him. Thomas could barely make up the whites of his eyes in the weak light of their flashlight. 

A few heartbeats later, something in him seemed to give in: Vincent dragged himself to him, collapsing on the top of his chest. Thomas cradled him in his arms, kissing the top of his head as one does to a hurting child. Vincent shivered against him and Thomas pulled the sheets up to cover them. He felt, with a small sense of triumph, Vincent’s heartbeat slow down against his chest.

Ever since that occasion, Thomas felt, perhaps a couple of times a month, a shift in how they fitted together at night: Vincent’s arm tightening around his waist or Vincent rolling into Thomas’s chest. In those moments, Thomas’s body, even in his sleeping state, accommodated him: he turned around and opened his arms to gather him against his chest or he placed his hand on Vincent’s neck, his lips grazing the other man’s brow.

It amazed Thomas: they knew each other, their bodies recognised each other even in near unconscious states. Even in the world outside, it had become so much easier to read Vincent, to know, just by looking at him, what he was feeling, whether he was tired, happy or frustrated. He knew Vincent could do the same to him: all the times Vincent brought him a cup of coffee precisely when he felt like one or squeezed his shoulder when he was tense or distracted him with a silly anecdote. What a feeling of safety and wellness Vincent’s presence always exuded! Thomas knew that when Vincent showed up, no matter the situation, everything would be alright. Thomas wondered if this was what happened to other people, people who fell in love and had relationships. Was it always like this?

It happened just a week before of what Thomas had come to think as their anniversary: a year since Norwich, a year since they first shared a bed together, a year since Vincent told him his secret. Thomas would remember that day, and all the days that followed, keenly, with obsessive and analytical detail. It went like this:

Vincent and Thomas were in their cabin. It was late in the afternoon, after work. Vincent was taking advantage of the last hours of electricity to cook them dinner, and Thomas had just finished showering and was shaving before the bathroom mirror. From Vincent’s CD player, flew around the shelter a soft and slow Bossa Nova. An impatient knock on the door and Carolina’s voice, “open up you two!”

Thomas cleaned his face with a towel and went to the door. Carolina waltzed in, brandishing her phone. “Well?”

“What?”

“You haven’t…you didn’t…you haven’t seen the news?!”

“No,” Vincent joined them, having turned off the music. “What happened?”

“For God’s sake,” and she showed them, breaking news from the BBC.

The Pope was dead.

A barrage of phone-calls followed: Ré called them, Thomas called his old contacts in the Vatican, Ray O’Malley, who’d been sent to some God forsaken post in Poland, called Thomas, Francesca and Lina called Vincent. It had been a stroke; apparently, the Holy Father hadn’t felt well for a few days, but everyone put it down to tiredness and stress. His blood pressure was fine; Tremblay, famously, had the health of a bull. A few hours after waking up, on the Wednesday, he collapsed: a vein had burst in his head and he died almost instantaneously.

That evening a Mass was said for him in the camp. The homily was delivered by one of the Franciscan brothers and it was, even for all their generosity and good will, weak in praise. Thomas couldn’t help but think, all that mendacity and duplicity for this. Even the Franciscans are unable to find it in themselves to celebrate him. God forgive me, but he was a weak-willed man, and he won’t be happily remembered. It was an ungenerous thought, one that didn’t dignify him and one Thomas wouldn’t dare voice aloud. But, still, it was true.

They debated whether Vincent should attend the funeral; but he was too busy, and he was already going to be absent from the camp for an unknown while during the Conclave. His mission, in this at least, would have to take precedence. Perhaps his absence was more felt than they thought, because a few days later Aldo Bellini, Secretary State, called Vincent. He didn’t answer at first; He'd spent the morning in an hours-long team meeting, but Aldo insisted and called him during lunch. “I suppose it will be easier to travel from Jordan to Rome, than from Kabul.”

“Indeed, Your Eminence. I will be in Rome in three weeks, as scheduled.”

“Good, that is good. We will be waiting.”

Thomas wondered why Aldo had called Vincent in person. He knew from personal experience that this was not the done thing. He imagined that Aldo was not calling him in any official capacity. Was it a soft rebuke for Vincent’s failure to attend the funeral? He and Vincent discussed the issue at some length, with Vincent suggesting that maybe Aldo was trying to figure out, through him, whether Thomas was returning to Rome too. Thomas had dismissed the idea, but Vincent seemed convinced of it. “He’s your friend and he cares about you. He must miss you greatly.”

Those three weeks went by without Thomas discerning the dangers of their situation. Vincent’s birthday on the 7^th of November was celebrated as a big party, organised by Carolina, Thomas and Guille. Vincent surprised him yet again: Thomas found out that somewhere along the line, Vincent had learned how to dance the dabke, and proceeded to spend half of his birthday party teaching the basic steps to Guille and Carolina. Gifts were exchanged, and although Thomas wasn’t able to match the significance of last year’s gift, he had been successful with a case of Faber-Castell colour pencils – at least judging by how Vincent’s eyes light up when he opened it.

One early Friday, he woke up, Vincent still sleeping next to him, and realised that this was the last night they would spend together for at least, if they were lucky, 2 weeks. If the Conclave took 3 to 4 days, then Vincent would get back before the month was out. He prayed God it would be so. He kissed Vincent’s brow and caressed his hair. He watched, happy, as the other man smiled and buried his face in his neck.

He worked from home that day, checking emails on his computer while Vincent finished some phone calls and made sure that he hadn’t forgotten to pack anything. It took Thomas’s keen eye and profound knowledge of Vincent to sense the nervous energy in the air.

“You don’t want to go,” Thomas said, coming up to him.

“Not particularly, no. I am not proud of it. This is a duty I am meant to undertake with joy. It is important.” He sighed. “But what do I know about the Curia? What do I know about Rome? How can I make a meaningful contribution? Furthermore, I have a lot of work to get done here. Aisha,” he said, referring to one of his programme officers, “is very good, but I don’t like to overburden her.”

Thomas took his hands. “You underestimate your capacity for clarity, my dear Vincent, of which Conclaves are often lacking. Your knowledge of the world will be very useful. And in any case, it will be over soon and you will come back.”

Vincent looked down at their joined fingers. “I confess I am…not looking forward to be without you.”

“Ah. So it is not just me,” Thomas murmured. The room seemed to have shrunk around them. Thomas could see and feel nothing else other than Vincent’s skin against his.

“Of course not, Thomas. What you feel for me, I feel for you. I sleep poorly when I go to Jerusalem and whenever you’re in Amman because I miss you.”

“You’ll come back,” Thomas said. “You’ll come back here in no time.”

Vincent’s eyes met his. There was a strange intensity to them, one that Thomas, for once, could not decipher. He felt Vincent’s hand curl around his neck. And he said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, “Te amo. Mi alma pertenece a Dios, pero mi corazón es tuyo.” (I love you. My soul belongs to God, but my heart is yours).

Thomas felt as if his breath was robbed from him. Vincent’s eyes, deep and dark, bored into his as if trying to reach out to the depths of his being. “Vincent…” but he didn’t finish. Vincent’s hand on his neck pulled him forward and their lips met.

The last time Thomas had been kissed was as a teenager 41 years ago. A girl from Norwich, on a warm summer holiday, Jane had been her name. It had been nice, but not nice enough to tempt him away from his path. This was different. Vincent kissed with all the inexperience of a virgin, and all the fierceness of a man in despair. Thomas wondered, briefly, what prompted this, but the thought soon dissolved, along with all the others, when Vincent cupped his face, deepening the kiss. A moan escaped from the back of Thomas’s throat and he parted his lips, which spurred both of them on. Thomas felt himself being pushed against the door; he groaned. Vincent stopped immediately, “are you hurt?” and Thomas, unable to speak, shook his head, and went for another kiss, because even a small break was too unbearable to countenance. His hands, one was on Vincent’s hair, the other found its way under his coat, and as his fingers tightened on the cotton of Vincent’s shirt, he became aware that there’s only flimsy fabric separating them. All those months, all that time, and it was just cotton separating them.

Kisses, Thomas found, have taste: Vincent’s taste of coffee, and a hint of toothpaste, and something else that he couldn’t quite place, but he wanted to spend the rest of his life trying to figure out.

He also discovered that if you kiss someone for long enough, eventually you have to part for air. When they did, eventually, surface, they held each other close, foreheads linked, their breath mingling together. “Vincent,” he murmured. “Vincent,” say something else, a voice whispers inside him. No, he thought, rebelling: if his name were the last word on my lips, I would die happy.

Vincent’s fingers stroke the skin under his ears. His thumb crossed Thomas’s upper lip.

“I am yours,” Thomas whispered with a fervour that was alien to him. He nearly didn’t recognise his own voice. “I love you. I will always…” he closed his eyes, trying to get his breath back and with it a measure of reason. Vincent kissed him again, a soft, gentle kiss, different from the others they had just shared. His hands came to hold Vincent’s face. “Vincent. Come back to me. Promise me you’ll come back to me.”

“I’ll always come back to you, Thomas. I promise.” This time, Thomas was the one pulling him to a kiss, and from then on, they lost track of time. Thomas thanked God for the door holding him against Vincent, otherwise he would have sunk to his knees long ago.

There was, at some point, a knock.

“Boys,” it was Carolina. Her voice was just behind the door against which Thomas was pressed. “We have to go.”

Yes, she was meant to drive Vincent to Amman.

Vincent pulled away in a feat of self-discipline that Thomas would always think extraordinary. Thomas’s eyes widened when he took him in: His hair in disarray, his lips swollen, his collar and shirt rumpled. Carolina was going to take one look at Vincent and guess what had happened. Vincent read his thoughts, and smiled, “she already suspects, Thomas. I trust her.”

Thomas took his hands again. “We…You’ll have to go to confession before the Conclave.”

“I am sure to find a priest in Rome who can confess me.” And as if to underscore some point, he leaned and kissed Thomas’s lips for the last time. “I will call you when I get to Rome. Que Dios te bendiga, Thomas.”

“Yes,” Thomas said. “Have a safe journey. May God keep you.” And he watched as Vincent hauled a backpack onto his shoulder, opened the door, and left.

For years afterwards, Thomas would think that Vincent had known. He had known, in the way that we know such things, through grace and instinct, that he wasn’t coming back. He would have the opportunity to ask Vincent about this and Vincent would deny it. And although Thomas would never accuse him of lying, he thought something had been created in that moment between the two of them which had allowed Vincent a clarity that Thomas didn’t have.

And hadn’t Thomas, perhaps, known too? Why else would he have begged Vincent to come back? Love has its mysteries, but so does fear. Yet fear obscures, while love reveals.

The possibility did occur with clarity to Thomas the day after Vincent left, after a horrid night of tossing and turning, where he only managed to fall asleep around 4 in the morning and woke up with his alarm 2 hours later.

He thought, what if they elect him? The thought struck him like a ray of lightening, and he tried to enumerate the reasons why that would never happen. They were good, solid reasons. No, Vincent would return to the camp, would return to him. They would learn themselves anew.

What if he doesn’t, the dark whisper in him insisted.

He will, Thomas insisted. I will not doubt this. He will return.

He will.

He didn’t.