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 pieta-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
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.
She liked the idea of two branches. For some reason she momentarily visualized this happy pair of boughs against the bright blue sky. She and Adam were the ultimate twigs of each vast ramification, caressing in the upper air before bringing forth their buds. Her eyes searched for him now, and found him standing up against the wall on the right on her side of the chamber.
He looked back at her so humorously, his teeth contrasting with his fabulous tan, like a row of Orbit sugar free chewing gum tablets, that she felt oddly ashamed. She felt embarrassed at having succumbed yet again to the pan Anglo-Saxon myth and bashful about loving him so much.
He mouthed something. Instinctively she knew the word must be ‘bollocks’.
She sent back reciprocal waves of approval and between them the French Ambassador gave a saurian wink:
With a ping of sadness, Cameron whisked away her vision of the Anglo-American branches, as one might hide one’s embarrassing painting at the school exhibition. Of course Adam was right, and she knew one of the points he would make.
Britain slavishly followed America in the war on terror. She helped her take out the Taliban. British taxpayers coughed up more than 5 billion pounds to gratify the neocons of Washington and remove Saddam Hussein. Whither thou goest I will go, said Britain to America as Ruth said to Naomi. When the war on terror yielded its first spoils and British subjects were arrested in Afghanistan on suspicion of being members of Al-Qaeda, Britain dutifully assented to their incarceration without trial, without due process, without any regard to the ancient principle of habeas corpus in a mysterious camp in Cuba.
From time to time the men were pictured in the British press, kneeling blindfolded behind barbed wire or being ferried on stretchers in their orange prison suits when they engaged in a hunger strike. British citizens were being held without charge or access to lawyers in the a-legal extraterritorial fourth dimension of an American army camp on a communist island on suspicion of being on the slightly more anti-Western side of a war between two sets of bearded Islamists somewhere in Central Asia. It requires concentration, however, to remain scandalized over a matter of principle.
Soon the British public had forgotten about the infamies of Camp X-ray, eclipsed as they were by the scandals of Abu Ghraib. The Prime Minister made the deathless remark that he would not seek the return of these Britons to Britain because there would not be much chance of securing a conviction. He got away with it, so completely was Britain prepared to subordinate her interests.
And how had the Americans behaved, Adam would say, when Britain was fighting her own war on terror? Irish Republicans blew up pubs and fish and chip shops, and cars and rubbish bins. They tried to blow up the stock exchange in Canary Wharf in plots that could have been as calamitous as the bombing of the Twin Towers. They murdered and maimed hundreds of civilians, and yet Americans moronically passed round the hat for them in Boston and in New York. American Presidents invited IRA leaders to the White House and shook hands with them on the lawn in defiance of the wishes of Downing Street.
They didn’t care whether they gave legitimacy to these cruel and bitter men; they cared about the Irish vote. And when Britain wanted to extradite Irish terrorist suspects to the UK to face the due processes of the law, Washington did not want to know.
‘That,’ said Adam, ‘is the American idea of a war on terror.’ Now she could hear — as could everyone else in the hall — the perplexing noise of a siren moving round the yard outside. It could be a police car, thought Cameron; it could at a pinch be a fire engine.
But deep in her guilty heart she knew it must be an ambulance. She looked again for Adam, but now he had his back to her.
In the Metropolitan Police Ops Room, both Purnell and Bluett were standing and shouting.
