he had been shot at that day.
As the Oedipal four-year-old had once told him with a withering look, when refusing to unlock the French windows to let him in: ‘I am sorry. You are not an Aztec.’
The President had reached a delicate point in his speech. He had invoked the spirit of Anglo-American cooperation. He had taken his audience with him and stormed the Normandy beaches hand in hand. Churchill had been cited so often that the French Ambassador was calling for
Now, however, he was required to justify Anglo-American cooperation in Iraq. He sucked, and gave a birdy squint around the hall. So when the camera crew slipped in through the door down on the far right, the President was one of the few who noticed. He also observed the flustered fellow who followed them, a few seconds later, and stared around.
Not that the President saw anything sinister in these arrivals. He was just thinking what a grim old place this was and wouldn’t it be nice if they covered those dungeon walls with paintings, but he got on with his homily. ‘It’s easy to have friends in the good times. Everybody wants to know a man when he’s up. It’s when you’ve taken a big knock and you’re down and you’re frightened. That’s when you find out who really cares. That’s how you know who your real friends are. And that’s how we in America feel about Britain.’ The President had felt so passionately about this bit that he had tried to draft it himself. He’d shoved in lots of biblical stuff about the road to Jericho and falling among thieves, and those who passed by on the other side.
The State Department had warned that his savage rebuke against the Priest and the Levite might be taken as some kind of reference to France and Germany, and the President had said too damn right it was a reference to France and Germany, but the striped pants would have none of it, not at a time of building bridges. So the President just got on with eulogizing Britain, the Good Samaritan, aware that his audience was becoming restless, and of the peculiar camera crew sidling fast up the right-hand wall.
Roger Barlow might have gone after them, and fully intended to raise the alarm. But he was intercepted. ‘Roger,’ cried someone, grabbing his arm and hauling him into the empty seat beside him.
‘Oh, hello, Chester,’ said Roger warily. He hadn’t seen Chester for more than twenty years, or at least not in the flesh. He had seen him plenty of times on TV. He had watched
‘How do you know you prefer steak & chips,’ read Chester’s Valentine card, ‘When you have never tried foie gras?’ Roger thought this cheeky. To his slight annoyance his girlfriend thought it amusing. And so after university it was with some prickliness that he had watched Chester’s TV chef persona —laddish but just pissionate, pissionate about food — rise and swell, like one of his very own souffles.
What the hell was Chester doing here, anyhow?
‘Oi,’ he gasped, as the Arab film crew continued up the left-hand wall.
‘What’s up mate?’ Chester whispered. Among the chef’s affectations, even though his family came from Godalming, was a faux Australian accent.
‘You see that lot there.’
‘Which lot, Roger, mon ami?’
‘The chaps with the cameras and what not.’
‘The film crew?’
‘Yes, I think something pretty ghastly might be about to happen.’ Roger lurched to his feet and several people nearby went
Chester gripped his arm again. ‘Sit down, Rog, or you’ll embarrass us all.’
‘But I think they could be Arab terrorists.’
‘If you want to make a complete wazzock of yourself in front of a thousand people while the President of the United States is speaking, you go right ahead.’
‘But it’s my fault they’re in here.’
‘Good for you, cocker, and frankly I’m glad to see that someone from your party is supporting a bit of ethnic TV.’
It came back to him that Chester de Peverill was thought to be stonkingly cool. His whole schtick was to recreate mankind as a hunter-gatherer with himself, Chester, leading the rediscovery of ancient flavours. He would be filmed scrumping for crab apples or gorging on offal rejected by even the most outre of game butchers. No weed or windfall was deemed too ridiculous for his hammered copper saucepans.
Across the Home Counties girls boiled up nettles for their men, so persuasive was his advocacy, and when suppertime ended in gagging on the hairy stalks, they didn’t blame Chester; they always blamed themselves for getting the recipe wrong. They loved his ‘I eat anything’ approach, with its flagrant sexual message.
At one point Chester’s PR people had let it be known that he had kept his wife’s placenta in a fridge and then fried it up with some little Spanish onions — a revelation that was false, but which did nothing to damage his popularity. ‘You poseur,’ Roger thought, not without admiration, ‘you shameless poseur with your clustering curls.’ But he stayed in his seat.
‘As you know,’ the President went on, ‘it has become a cliche to say that the terrorist is like a mosquito. He’s difficult to spot, he causes an awful lot of bad feeling, a paranoia wherever he goes, and his bite is lethal. That’s why it’s no use just standing in the dark and slapping ourselves. That’s why we decided to drain that swamp. We did it together in Afghanistan, we did it in Iraq. And I believe, in the words of Winston Churchill, that our liberation of those countries will go down as one of the most unsordid acts in history.’
The French Ambassador stuck out his tongue, placed his right index finger upon it and made a retching noise.
‘Whatever people now say, we know that Iraqi regime had developed weapons of mass destruction, and had Saddam remained in power, we can be certain that he would either have used them or shipped them to other rogue states around the world.’
‘Yeah,’ said a satirical English voice, loud enough to be heard by ten rows forward and back. ‘Like America.’
It was Barry White, who had slipped efficiently into a seat near the back. It would normally have been unthinkable even for a tosser like Barry to heckle the President, never mind that he was leader of the free world, whatever that meant these days.
He was a guest of the country and it was just rude to talk during his speech. But there was something funny in the air, a pre-menstrual irrationality, the panting swollen-veined tension that precedes a downpour in July.
The President didn’t catch the remark but he saw its effect ripple out as a gust might catch a particular patch of corn as it passes over a prairie, turning up the dark undersides of the ears. ‘And we all know that there are people mad and sick enough to use those weapons.
‘Yeah, like you,’ said Barry White, and the crowd swayed around him again, some indicating that he should put a sock in it.
‘Upon innocent people.’
‘You said it, pal,’ said the heckler.
‘And to all those who blamed my country for overreacting to the threat, I say to them that the terrorist is no respecter of frontiers or nationalities. There were 67 Britons who died in the World Trade Center. There were 23 Japanese, 16 Jamaicans, 17 Colombians, 15 Filipinos, and …’
‘And a partridge in a pear tree,’ said Barry White, to the disgust of those around him.
‘…a total of 32 other nations lost lives. It was an attack upon the world, and I believe that it has been the world’s fight that we in America have been fighting.’ The President had feared that this was the most controversial part of his speech. It had echoes of that line — those who are not with us are against us — which had particularly cheesed off the cheese eaters. He feared with one lobe of his brain that the British Labor guys would all stand up now, and whip off their jackets and reveal ‘Not In My Name’ T-shirts, or perhaps that this would be the moment for
