Seventy-Two Virgins (11 page)

‘Ah, Felix,’ said Roger, and they adopted attitudes as transparently insincere as Molotov hailing Ribbentrop.

‘My dear fellow,’ said Felix, shaking his grey locks.

‘And how is Felix this fine morning?’

‘Felix is little short of superb,’ said Felix.

‘I saw your proprietor the other night,’ said Roger, who knew how to irritate a journalist.

‘Ah,’ said Felix, and made a face of holy hypocrisy, like a cardinal discussing the health of the Pope.

‘I think I should let you know that he thinks the media are a seething mass of mushy-minded anti-American pinkos, especially on his own papers.’

‘You amaze me.

‘Not that you’ll be doing any of that anti-American stuff today, not in your sketch.’

‘I’d sooner be dead,’ said Felix.

‘The usual knockabout?’

‘Good, clean fun.’

‘Tremendous.’

Felix had turned to go, fishing for his press gallery pass. Roger Barlow felt temptation welling up. ‘Hey Felix.’

‘Yes old man?’

‘I wonder whether I could beg a favour off you.’

‘Provided it doesn’t mean reporting one of your speeches.’

‘No, no, it’s nothing, it’s … Well, you know in newspapers .

‘Yes.’

‘Well, in newspapers you chaps probably have a pretty good idea in the morning what you are going to put in the paper that day.’

‘Well, I don’t have the faintest idea.’

‘Not you, I mean the chaps in general. The top chaps, what do you call them, the sub-editors and things, don’t they draw up some kind of list of the main items of the day?’

‘Yeah, yeah, the newslist, yeah.’

‘Right. The newslist.’

‘Is this going to take much longer, old boy, because I’ve got an urgent appointment with a cup of coffee and a jam. doughnut.’

‘Absolutely, we’re just coming to the point here now. This newslist: this is something which is presumably accessible to anyone who is in the newspaper.

‘Yeah, but . .

‘And you are in the newspaper.

‘Well, I am on the newspaper.’

‘Exactly. You are on it. Is there any way, Felix, that you could have a squint at that newslist for today?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t normally.’

‘I know, but if you had a spare second, do you think you could conceivably flip it up, dial it up, download it?’

‘Do you mind my asking why?’

‘To be perfectly honest, and this is very embarrassing, I want to know if they are doing an article about me.’

‘An article about you?’

‘Yes, and if they are I promise I won’t make a fuss or do anything about it. I just kind of want to know, because it has been eating me up.

‘And what kind of article might this be? Are you making a speech?’

‘Well, actually I am making a speech today.’

‘About?’

‘It’s about water fluoridation, but I don’t expect the article will be about that.’

‘Right.’

‘It may well be about something else.’

‘Right you are, guy, I’ll keep my eyes peeled for an article about Roger Barlow, not mentioning water fluoridation.’

Felix went into the press gallery whistling Papageno’s Song, and Roger felt the accustomed sweat of shame and idiocy on his brow. Everywhere people were coming and going as they got ready for the ceremony: reporters, MPs, researchers, security men and camera crews.

POTUS coming through now.

The bawling in Parliament Square reached a crescendo. On the roofs of the Cabinet Office, Portcullis House, the Treasury, the Welsh Office, the Foreign Office and all the way down Whitehall, police marksmen lay in the July sunshine, their black weapons soaking up the heat.

Eyes gazed through scopes. Fingers curled on triggers. Toes shifted in the guttering.

In plotting the route of the cavalcade, Colonel Bluett of the USSS had reasoned that the Embankment, being built up on only one side, offered fewer opportunities to the sniper.
Whoomf,
went the Chevrolet people carriers, stuffed with bulging security men, as they now approached Millbank, passing the knots of people behind the security barriers. It was not their speed that was impressive, so much as the air they displaced.

Whooomf
went the Cadillacs, the hugest Cadillacs anyone had ever seen. With their high roofs, athletic flanks and shredproof tyres they were preposterously suggestive of a dominating class, the functioning, air-conditioned American version of a discredited Soviet idea.

Whoomf
went the first decoy presidential car.
Whoomf
went the second decoy presidential car.
Whoomf, whoomf whoomf

Just so must the tribes of Britannia have stood by the same gleaming brown river in AD 43, not knowing whether to cheer or boo, as the muddy legions of Claudius marched into Londinium, fresh from settling the Atrebates or the Belgae. Just so had the Saxons crowded round when the Norman conqueror was crowned on Christmas Day 1066, setting up such an ambiguous roar that the knights thought it was a revolt, and cut them down.

Except that Britain wasn’t a colony of America, was she? She could hardly be called a vassal state, could she? No, she was an ally, a close and trusted ally, though she stood in relation to America as the most loyal member of the Delian league had stood to Athens. Or so it seemed to some of the more cynical folk who lined the route.

‘Fact is, America has got bases, military bases, in places like Uzbekistan,’ said a scruffy history professor to his wife as they walked up behind the railings.

‘I mean, twenty years ago those places had missiles pointed at us.’

‘Unbelievable,’ said his wife.

‘Of course, most people in this country don’t give a stuff about American dominance, do they? They just think all human civilization has been pyramidal in structure since, well, since the Pyramids. They just think America is the boss and that’s all there is to it. No point moaning. And this demonstration is really pretty small beer compared to the anti-Vietnam demos in the sixties.’

‘Didn’t we use to go on pro-Vietnam demos?’ asked his wife.

‘We did, darling, but times have changed.’ The professor and his wife sat on their shooting sticks and took out their placards. In quavering magic marker the mediaevalist had written: ‘Hop it, Yanks!’

‘I don’t mean you, of course.’ The professor smiled at a group from the Rutgers University debating team, who were out with plastic stars and stripes to support the President, and having a tough time of it.

‘That’s all right, sir,’ said the well-bred students.

‘Yay,’ they shouted now as the cavalcade shot past them like a black river of steel, and their cries were drowned out by the British mob.

The noise of her President’s arrival made the hairs prickle on Cameron’s bare arms, and she clacked ever faster in her strappy shoes down the stone tunnel that led to Portcullis House, and the turquoise tiles of the Tube station.

She felt a pang. It was guilt. But — if you considered the enormity of what she was about to do — it was only the tiniest frisson of guilt. In her current mood she could feel herself squashing her guilt like an aphid on a rose.

When she had become a researcher at the House of Commons she had signed a formal promise, dedicated to the Serjeant-at-Arms, that she would never do precisely what she was about to do. Ah, so what, she thought: think of the men in your life, darling, and think of your loyalties. There was Barlow.
Yeuuech.

What was it with these English guys? What did he think he was doing, grabbing her lower jaw and fiddling with her teeth?

And yet apart from Barlow’s absent-minded attentions, her eight months in England had been an unremitting tale of tepidity, frustration, and — let’s be brutal — flaccidity. She had been taken on ‘dates’ only to find that the man’s idea of a romantic climax to the evening was to escort her to a bar and meet a couple of his ‘mates’ from ‘school’, where school meant Charterhouse or Bradfield or some other fee-paying haven of hunnish practices. She had fought down her incredulity when a series of good-looking and allegedly heterosexual men had taken her to the zoo, to a game of cricket, to an Inuit art-house movie, and to an ice-skating rink; and on one occasion it had been seriously suggested to her that she pay.

She had stood almost in tears amid pastry-cutters and casseroles as a supposedly red-blooded Englishman had baked, before her eyes, some kind of faggot upside down cake with pineapple and glacé cherries. At the crucial moment one man had slipped from the room and returned with a porn video, which he had laid before her with all the moronic enthusiasm of a cocker spaniel that has brought in something disgusting from a ditch.

And always, at the end of the evening, there were these delicate manoeuvrings that cast her as the naysayer, when she was not at all sure that she wanted to say nay. Was there no one in this goddamn country who wanted to take her firmly in his arms and give a girl the time of day? Sometimes she wondered if it was not fluoride in the water, but bromine. Sometimes as she lay awake, on her own, in her little flat in Claverton Street, Pimlico, she would wonder whether it was to do with their mothers, or public schools, or nannies, or hot water bottles. Sometimes, at her most vulnerable, she would open her mind to the (sob) possibility that it was something to do with her.

Which was absurd, because ever since she was a tiny little girl, she had been told how beautiful she was. Sometimes she began to worry that she was going to lose it altogether — not her virginity, obviously, but her initiate status. Perhaps her hymen would actually regrow. At one point she seriously considered the rights and wrongs of an affair with Roger. Once you got over the nicotine-stained teeth, and the goofy sense of humour, there was something vaguely compelling about him: the gaunt face, the brown eyes that seemed perpetually amused, the beer-drinker’s thatch. She’d briefly taken to walking into his office and staring at him for no particular reason, but he hadn’t seemed to notice; and she had soon given up.

Just when she was about to abandon the English male as a contradiction in terms, she met Dr Adam Swallow, former Hedley Bull reader in International Relations at Balliol, now director of Middle East studies at Chatham House.

In contrast to Roger, with his gelatinous ability to see both sides, Adam was a believer, a man of ideological certainty.

The first word she heard him utter was ‘bollocks’.

That is, he said it once, and then he repeated it, and then he said it again.

He was sitting only two away from her in the Strangers’ Gallery in the House of Commons, as steeply shelving as an ancient amphitheatre. In principle, she should have been offended.

By the second, and certainly by the third bollocks she should, in all propriety, have said:
‘Sst.
Oi, do you mind?’ Because there, the object of the apathetic attention of everyone who could be bothered to sit on these bum-polished green benches, was her poor Roger.

It was a big set-piece Iraq debate, on a weaselly Opposition motion, and the subject was Britain’s continuing commitment. Loads of members on both sides had given vent to little peeps of concern. Cameron thought Roger was making, by his standards, a respectable speech, jabbing his scrunched up notes and sometimes seeming quite emotional. From time to time, however, he let fall some parliamentary platitude, and this earned her scorn.

‘And I just want to say, Mr Deputy Speaker,’ he said somewhere near the beginning, ‘that this has been a very good and important debate with many excellent contributions. .

Cameron was actually groaning to herself, and wishing that MPs didn’t always use this formula to describe a series of shallow and repetitive speeches by people who, as often as not, had been gestapoed into performance by the whips.

‘Bollocks,’ said the man to her right with the Aztec profile, and she shot him an approving glance.

‘And it goes without saying, Mr Deputy Speaker, that we in this country have the best and most dedicated armed forces in the world, and I join other hon membs in paying tribute to the courage and professionalism with which every man or woman has been carrying out his or her duties.

Just as Cameron was wondering why it was necessary to extol ALL members of the armed forces, down to the last pistol-whipping NCO or fornicating Wren, the dark-haired young man exploded again. Some people shifted and snorted at the blasphemy.

At the top of the stairs behind them a man appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in a black tailcoat with a huge gold seal at his belly; and since he was shaven-skulled and had the physique of Big Daddy, Cameron divined that he must be a parliamentary bouncer.

The Aztec’s third interjection was provoked by what Cameron thought was one of Barlow’s best passages.

‘Many people on both sides of this House, and many people in this country, have the profoundest doubts about some of the reasons we were given for going to war. All those of us who took on trust the Prime Minister’s claims about weapons of mass destruction have reason to feel let down. We were told that Saddam could launch a chemical or biological attack on Britain in the space of forty-five minutes. We were told that Saddam was buying uranium from Niger.

‘These claims have not, to put it mildly, been vindicated, and I am sure that most people will have been as disgusted as I was by the Government’s attempt to cover its embarrassment.

‘And then we have had the appalling revelations from Abu Ghraib and other jails. There is no question but that we will pay a price for this disaster, and I am sure it is accepted on all sides of the House that nothing is more calculated to inflame Arab sentiment than the spectacle of female torturers.

‘But that still does not mean that the case for the war has been entirely vitiated.

‘I have recently been to Baghdad, with Unicef’ — he paused, looking as self-important as any other MP — ‘and I saw some pretty awful things. This is a country in many ways still in shock. The electricity supply is fairly ropy. The sewage system is frankly screwed up.’ Cameron winced, and there was an unintelligible intervention from one of the few Members who was listening. ‘But everywhere I went, I kid you not, I met people who were genuinely cheered and bucked up —no, in some cases overjoyed,’ he said, as though suddenly remembering a conversation, and there was a little catch in his throat, and people in the Chamber finally stopped gassing, and eyeballed him moodily, ‘yes, in some cases overjoyed to have been liberated by American and British arms from one of the nastiest and most unscrupulous tyrannies of modern memory.