Seventy-Two Virgins. Boris Johnson
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breakfast, Habib was now eating a tub of hummus, spooning it down with a tongue depressor he had found in the glove compartment.
‘Why do you eat it now?’ asked Haroun.
‘Show me where it is written a man may not eat on the eve of battle.’
‘But we are all about to die.’
‘We’ll be lucky,’ said Jones bitterly.
He tried to concentrate on all the things he had to get right in the next five minutes.
On leaving Parliament Square, the plan was to turn left up Whitehall, and then, just before the Cenotaph, to turn right at the Red Lion pub. There Dr Adam would supply them with a parking permit.
It was very important, when they saw Dr Adam, that they acted their parts convincingly. The man called Adam knew something, but he did not know everything.
The only person who knew everything was Jones.
Then the lights changed and in defiance of the satnav they trickled forward to the last set, and came once again in full view of Roger Barlow – had he chanced to look that way.
Not that anyone in his right mind would look at an ambulance, when he could behold the face of Cameron Maclean.
He watched her come towards him across the road, and the crowd parted around her like a zip. She looked like a character in a hairspray ad, with glossy evangelical skin and lustrous eyes. She was twenty-four, full of energy and optimism, and she had the dubious honour of being Roger’s research assistant.
Not for the first time, Barlow was seriously impressed by her efficiency. If his memory served him right – and he kept a vague eye on her romantic career – she had been off in Brussels last night, and here she was in less than five minutes.
He beamed. He knew that Cameron had long ago lost any reverence she may have had for him or his office, but what the hell.
‘Your wife left a message on my mobile. It must have been while I was on the Tube.’
‘My wife?’ Barlow felt a prickling in the roots of his hair.
‘Yeah. She sounded kind of pissed.’
‘Pissed?’ Roger’s mind boggled. It was less than an hour since he had left home.
‘I guess you guys would say pissed off.’
They sorted out the pink pass, and Barlow entered the security bubble.
‘Did she say what about?’ he asked, thinking as he did so what a foolish thing it was to ask.
‘No, Roger.’ He scrutinized her. Was that contempt? Was that pity? Who could tell?
Roger was indebted – England was indebted – to Cameron’s former political science tutor. This was a languid Nozickian with whom she had been in love and who had baffled her, candidly, by his refusal to sleep with her. At the end of her last winter term she had come to see him in his study. The snow was falling outside.
‘What shall I do, Franklin?’ she had asked him, stretching her long legs on his zebra-skin rug. ‘Where shall I go?’
‘Go work in Yurp,’ he said, meaning Europe. ‘Go to London. Why don’t you go work for one of those British Tories? They’re in a whole lot of trouble right now.’
So she’d written to about ten MPs whose websites proclaimed them to be interested in North America. Barlow was the only one to answer, with a laconic scrawl, inviting her to appear for work in December. Eight months later, Cameron was finding that her political convictions were somehow wilting under prolonged exposure to Roger Herbert Barlow MP.
Her first job had been to sign all his Christmas cards. These were late.
‘Uh, Roger,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what style you want me to use. Do I say Mr and Mrs or do I say Justin and Nell? Or what do I say?’
‘Tremendous, tremendous,’ he said. ‘Look, I’ll catch you later.’
‘But what do you want me to say? Best wishes Roger, or Love Roger, or Happy Christmas from Roger and Diana?’
‘Yup yup yup yup,’ he said. ‘Gotta go.’
Since this was among her first meetings with Roger, she hardly dared say what she felt: that it was grossly rude to treat friends and constituents in this way.
So she knuckled under, and signed 500 cards ‘Mr Roger Barlow Esquire MP’ in that flagrantly American piggy-knitting handwriting, with the r like a Russian ya sign. It would have been more believable if she had written ‘David Beckham’.
When, inevitably, there was a revolt in his constituency about this breach of etiquette, he was so low as to seek, somehow, to blame her.
‘Oh Gaaad,’ he said, groaning and running his hands through his hair, to the point where she felt like kicking him.
Just what kind of a Conservative was this guy, anyhow? It was soooo disappointing. She’d been with him at a meeting in a church hall in Cirencester, and someone had stood up and said, ‘Mr Barlow, do you agree with me that there is far too much gratuitous and offensive sex on TV? And will you’ – the man’s hands were shaking as he read out his question – ‘take steps to ensure that Ofcom protects children from the current tide of filth?’ Barlow had given an intelligent answer, about the difficulties of censorship, and the watershed, and that kind of thing, and then thrown it all away with some flip aside.
‘Of course, I tend to rely on my children to tell me what it’s safe to watch, ha ha ha …’
Cameron felt her stomach contract with irritation. Didn’t he understand that these guys cared about this question? He was their servant, paid with their tax dollars, to represent their views in Parliament.
A young lady had asked him about abortion, and his answer had been protozoan in its invertebracy. It was all about ‘grey areas’ and ‘moral continuums’. The nearest he came to a statement of principle was to say, ‘Frankly it’s all a bit of a tricky one, really.’ But the worst thing had been his answer on gay marriage. Now Cameron had graduated from Rochester University NY (motto: Meliora, or Better things) as a pretty straightforward moral authoritarian neoconservative. In the run-up to the war on Iraq, she had stuck a poster in her dorm, saying, ‘Let’s bomb France’.
At the height of Francophobia she had moved a motion in the student body. Many American colleges were to rebaptize French fries as ‘freedom fries.’ She wanted to go one better.
In honour of Tony Blair, she said Rochester should call them ‘chips’, like they did in Britain. The motion did not attract much support, but her Nozickian professor gave a wan smile.
Before she arrived in London, she had presumed that if Barlow were a Tory, he would be sound; he would be staunch; he would stand full-square and broad-beamed in favour of family values and all the rest of it.
By the time of the church hall meeting, barely a month ago, she had put up with a lot: his political evasiveness, his moral evasiveness, and indeed, dammit, his sheer physical evasiveness. Half the time he would give her some great project and then evaporate, muttering about the ‘whips’ or the ‘1922’ or ‘Standing Committee B’.
She coped with all that, and she endured his jelly-like answers about censorship and abortion; so she was thrilled when he seemed to take some sort of stand on gay marriage. His answer was indistinct, no doubt deliberately so, but she heard him say something to the effect that gay marriage was ‘a bit rum when you consider that marriage is normally thought of as taking place between a man and a woman’. Whoopee!
At once it was as though she had chanced upon a knuckle of principle in the opaque minestrone of his views. He was actually AGAINST something, she thought, almost hugging herself with excitement. He was against a cause espoused by people who might actually VOTE for him. And then, of course, came the disappointment.
She was charged with drafting