Seventy-Two Virgins (22 page)

‘But perhaps the most obvious difference to an Englishman in New York or to an American arriving in London is that we do not drive on the same side of the road. It was that curious distinction, adopted on I know not what principle by our founding fathers which was almost fatal to this relationship at its moment of inception. It was in 1931 on Fifth Avenue that a great Englishman stepped into the traffic and was surprised to find it moving in an unexpected direction. We today must thank providence that the taxi driver braked before his fender connected with the form of—’

By this stage the audience of MPs had settled back. For a short moment some of them had hoped for an attack on the tyre approval of European motor cars, but they knew where he was going now. In any Anglo-American context his name was the name invoked with liturgical predictability.

—Sir Winston Churchill. If that taxi had not braked, ladies and gentlemen, we in the United States would have lost the most fervent advocate and admirer to be found in all the ranks of European statesmen. If that taxi driver had not braked that vital friendship between the British Prime Minister and President Roosevelt would never have been forged. If that New York cabby had not been paying attention then your country would have lost its greatest wartime leader and the history of the world would have been bleak indeed.’

Bleak indeed! thought Sir Perry Grainger, who fancied himself as a bit of a rhetorician and never turned down an invitation to debate at the Oxford Union: that was a bit of a diminuendo, that wasn’t exactly a climax for his ascending tricolon. But it was consonant with the general crapness of the speech, he thought.

Sir Perry was out of sorts. It had been embarrassing enough to present the leader of the free world with a Toby jug, worse to find the Americans had nothing for him, only a pair of boots for the Speaker. ‘Mm,’ he said as the President wittered on about Churchill’s American mother and his odd habit of nudity in the White House. Like so many men faced with a choice between thoughts of nudity and listening to a speech, his mind wandered.

Nee-naw, naw-nee
went the ambulance, straight through the traffic lights at the end of Whitehall. Quite a large proportion of the police manpower had now been diverted to suppressing the threat from Raimondo Charles, and those who did watch its progress made instinctive waving-on gestures.

As they turned into New Palace Yard, through the big wrought-iron gates, Jones hit the siren button on the far right of his console, and the machine changed its note.

Whoo-whup, whoo-wup, whoo-wup,
said the ambulance, and the blue madness throbbed and strobed at its temples.

With the despairing entreaty of an emergency vehicle it approached the last security boom between the President and Jones the Bomb.

Cameron heard it, and knew in her heart that something was badly wrong. Adam heard it, and felt deeply puzzled. Surely this wasn’t the plan? Or was it? What had Benedicte intended?

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

1007 HRS

Doo-whup. doo-whup,
said the ambulance. In their black-painted booth, the police looked at it with bafflement. Under any normal circumstances, a vehicle was to be stopped before the tank-trap. It would be asked to ease gently over a device fitted with lights, cameras and mirrors, so that its underside could be properly surveyed. Its bonnet would be lifted, and only after a search lasting perhaps five or seven minutes would it be allowed down the cobbles and towards the colonnade and Westminster Hall. But these were not normal circumstances. The President had just begun speaking, according to their timetables. It might be, as the seconds crawled by, that to stick to routine was madness. The hand of authority hovered for a fraction over the phone, and over the red buzzer that lifted the boom; and for a fraction that hand hesitated between its options.

Such was the thickness of the ancient walls and so tiny the windows, that the audience in Westminster Hall had hardly heard the earlier sirens, let alone the tropic surf of the crowd.

This one was different. It sounded as though it was approaching the south of the hall by New Palace Yard and it was getting closer.

Up on the roof above the Press Gallery, deserted by Indira and with no one to keep him company but his gun, Jason Pickel now looked at the ambulance with all the acuity his training had imparted.

He had caught sight of the vehicle earlier, as it left the car park, because he could see perpendicularly between the blocks right down Cannon Row. But then it was lost in the buildings of Derby Gate, its siren muffled for the next seconds as it moved from Whitehall to Parliament Square. At first it did not occur to him to wonder why the British emergency services had stationed an ambulance in Norman Shaw North, nor did he attach any real interest to the emergency. Perhaps some conscientious old biddy had sustained a heart attack. Perhaps, God help him, some policeman had used too much force to restrain a rioter and bloodied his or her obstreperous nose. From his vantage Jason could make out the odd detachment of media representatives with their cameras and sound booms.

‘Vermin,’ he thought. ‘Cockroaches.’ And he looked at them as genocidally as a Hutu beholds a Tutsi. If it hadn’t been for that
Daily Mirror
guy, thought Jason.

It is always a tricky moment in life and literature when a returning warrior opens his own white picket gate and walks up to the terrifying ambiguities of his own frost-paned front door. The Greeks called it nostos, the moment of return, and nostalgia is technically the longing for what should be a joyful occasion, but often isn’t, of course.

Odysseus came back to find his house overrun by strange men trying to go to bed with his wife. Agamemnon returned to find the little woman in apparently good spirits. He gave her a loving kiss and said he was glad to be back after ten years. She congratulated him on capturing Troy. ran him a bath and stabbed him to death.

‘Jason, honey,’ his wife Wanda had exclaimed, with every sign of enthusiasm. But he was made nervous by the brightness of her eye and put off by her red lipstick.

In the days that followed he had entertained doubts about his wife, more than entertained them. He had invited them round, given them bed and board in his heart, he had listened with gloomy resignation as the doubts rabbited on into the night, refusing to take the hint no matter how much he coughed and stretched and signalled that their welcome was outstayed. And then she had clinched matters. She had referred to what had happened in Baghdad as a ‘massacre’, and lamely tried to excuse herself.

Pickel had hit the table, and she had cried. Two days later Wanda announced that she would be going scuba diving every evening after supper at the local pool. Sometimes she wouldn’t come back until 10.30 p.m., and although she always seemed showered and shampooed, she sometimes smelled of chlorine and sometimes did not.

Jason would stand by the big picture window of the living room and wait until he could see her headlights come down the street; then he would quickly go to bed and pretend like a child to be asleep.

After a while he asked to be transferred, and nine months later, thanks to his skill as a sharpshooter, here he was.

About twenty feet below him, in one of the tall, badly ventilated chambers of the Parliamentary press gallery, a journalist opened a drawer. It had to be here somewhere. It just had to be .somewhere. His fingers skittered like hamsters in litter until he found it.

‘There,’ he thought, pocketing an expenses form. It was the quickest way to make money and would give him something to do during this wretched speech.

As he rode down in the lift to the ground floor and Westminster Hall, he looked into the polished brass of the doors and admired for perhaps the 20 billionth time, his fantastic meringue of hair. Barry White pushed out his lips as if to blow himself a kiss.

Roger Barlow might not have admitted as much but he was naturally fitter than most men of his age. Late nights, cigarettes, alcohol: none of them had removed a certain undergraduate stamina. But now as he scooted back towards the colonnade, up the stairs, down the stairs, round the corner, along the corridor, he was starting to feel that burning sensation you get in your lungs at the end of a cross-country run.

The soles of his shoes were leather and he found it hard to gain traction on the polished tiles. His coat flapped, his shirt tails came out, his spongy elastic cufflink exploded, his cuffs waved in the air, and his tie slip-streamed behind him. In the fond imagination of one Commons secretary who crossed his path he had the air of a man who had just burst through a hedge after running through a garden having climbed down a drainpipe on being surprised in the wrong marital bed.

‘You gotta help,’ he gasped to that kindly face. ‘Yes Roger, she said. She felt the contrast between his hectic grip and her own, which she knew to be a lovely cool and calming thing, redolent of cold cream, and she transmitted through her palm her willingness, at least in that instant, to help him in any way he chose.

‘We’ve got to get the ambulance,’ he said.

‘That’s all right, Roger,’ she said pointing up to the gates of New Palace Yard. ‘I think it’s on its way.’

Roger made a plosive noise, snatched away his hand and ran out of the colonnade on to the cobbles and up towards the gate where the ambulance was now dawdling before the barrier. Whop-doo-whop, it said, and now Barlow still had twenty yards to run before he reached the police box, where there must be men of good sense. He could just about see through the darkened panes of the booth where the coppers appeared to be having an argument. One of them was on the telephone and Barlow wondered who the hell he could be talking to, who could leave him in any doubt — surely to goodness old Stogumber, the Pass Office man, had let everyone know that this ambulance was travelling under false colours?

He was almost at the booth, waving his arms, when to his amazement he saw the boom go up. The ambulance yowled through the gap, bonnet bouncing, lights flashing. For a split second he stared into the eyes of Jones the Bomb. He stared for long enough to see that Jones would have no hesitation about running him down and then he jumped out of the way.

Fifty yards away, on the other side of the crowd control barriers, the two large Americans looked up from the agreeable business of beating up Raimondo Charles. Information was crackling into their ears via the Curly-Wurly tubes and they both turned to stare at the ambulance as it went through the gates into New Palace Yard. They dropped Raimondo back on the turf, bloodied and visibly reduced as a risk to presidential security. ‘Bastards,’ said the journalist. Though he was not in truth badly hurt, this marked his transition from a right-wing to left-wing polemicist.

‘Yer bastards,’ agreed a member of the crowd and others added their curses. The security men stood like bovine robocops as more news was pumped into their ears. Then as one, they reached into their blazers and drew out their big Glocks with the weird plastic oblong barrels.

The crowd screamed, and a figure emerged from their ranks.

Many artists have memorialized that pathetic moment when the battle is done, and the crows circle, and the warriors lie with broken helms and spears knapped asunder on the greasy grass, and the womenfolk come out to mourn. So Sandra the nanny, she who had chucked the ostrich egg, stood in pietà-like lamentation over the bashed-up Raimondo.

‘Oh Raimondo,’ she said.

‘Sandra,’ he replied, introducing for the hell of it an extra quaver into his voice.

‘You meathead,’ she shrieked at Matt, ‘I threw the egg, not him.’

‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ said Joe, turning. ‘We have to go right now.’

With a yelp Sandra leapt up and fastened her limbs on his back, digging her fingers into his ears.

And as the siren wail could be heard moving round the yard, the American President had reached a moment of glutinous sentimentality. For ages his team had been looking for a testimonial to the special relationship by a British Prime Minister other than Winston Churchill. They had checked out Macmillan, but he was mainly famous for that crack, allegedly made to Eden, that the British were Greeks to the American Romans. Macmillan’s point was that the Brits were learned, subtle and subservient, while the Americans were crude, energetic and dominating. This displeased the President’s speechwriters as being patronizing to just about everyone. Also, it sounded kind of kinky, like something a prostitute might stick on a card in a phone booth. ‘Greek Service Available’, ‘Roman Offered,’ ‘I’ll be Greek to your Roman’.

Then they had found a few useful phrases from Margaret Thatcher, but were told that you could not mention Thatcher approvingly at a London dinner party any more, let alone in an important Presidential speech.

They briefly investigated the works of Edward Heath. A White House staffer read a book called
Sailing
in the hope that it might contain a reference to the beauty of transatlantic links, or an account of the shock of joy in the breast of that old matelot as he spied the coast of Newfoundland. He was disappointed. Heath did not seem to like America much.

The White House researcher did not bother to consult the oeuvre of Major or Wilson or Callaghan on the ground that any citation would lack the necessary uplift, and everyone had frankly forgotten about Sir Alec Douglas Home. So it was with a joyful cry that late one night in the West Wing a bright intern called Dee came upon the following emetic passage recited by A.J. Balfour to a Pilgrims’ dinner on his return from a visit to America in 1917: ‘We both spring from the same root. Are we not bound together forever? Will not our descendants say that we are brought together and united for one common purpose, in one common understanding —the two great branches of the English speaking race?’

Of course it was over the top and yet in a funny way it caught the imagination of hundreds of people in the hall. MPs thought mawkishly of the conflict they barely remembered but which their parents and grandparents certainly did, and perhaps took part in. Cameron felt a flush on her neck. How odd, she thought: for all his bumbling inarticulacy, this President had somehow captured her anterior feelings about Britain and America, before they had been stewed with the cynicism of Adam and his friends.