Seventy-Two Virgins

After a suitably deferential pause, he is followed by his partner, a nervous silken-haired young courtier called Sir Charles de Spenser. The King announces that he will serve. Sir Charles says this is a first-class plan.

The King is inspired to make a joke: ‘I may be born to rule,’ he says, ‘but I was also born to serve.’ Sir Charles laughs so much he appears to be on the point of vomiting. ‘Tenez!’ yells the King. He then bounces the ball with his racket for an off-puttingly long time. Sir Charles sways like an osier on the chalked baseline, feebly wondering which stroke it would be most politic to play.

Twang! The monarch’s first serve sails past his ear, comfortably out on all directions. ‘Bien joue, sire,’ cries Sir Charles, but the King is having none of it. Phtunk! He hits the next one with the wood and it dribbles into the net.

‘Good shot, my liege,’ exclaims the courtier, but no amount of flattery will coax Henry’s ball into the service court. The King is beginning to go red. A certain jowly savagery is creeping over his features, later to be captured by Holbein. He serves, he misses, his racket vainly harvests the air and yet the fruit drops on his head. A sinking dread is forming in the pit of Sir Charles’s belly. The King is angry.

‘I’ faith,’ he cries, snapping his racket over his vast knee, ‘I don’t believe it,’ and commands Sir Charles to serve. Palms wet, the courtier tosses up the little leather sphere and it plops over the net in a slow undulating dolly that even a maddened monarch cannot miss; and the King makes the most of it.

He brings his new racket forward in a gigantic forearm sweep and crashes the catgut into the leather with all the impetus of his seventeen stone. For a fraction of a second the ball is sucked back into the web of the racket, as the enormous physical force turns the strings into a kind of warpo model of the space-time continuum, and then kapoing, it breezes off and away, far over the head of the extravagantly cowering Sir Charles, off one of the side walls, up over the hammerbeams and then honk honk bonk, it bounces into some cranny known only to the architects.

Sir Charles de Spenser sinks to his knees, deciding that he had better make the most of it. The King’s shot, he declares, was glorious, it was passing glorious. ‘Odd’s bodkins,’ he says, the world has seen nothing so awesomely ballistic since Tamburlaine the Great pelted Samarkand with his trebuchet of skulls. The King decides he likes this man’s style and if Sir Charles fails to earn himself an earldom, he is at least spared execution; and if he loses graciously again, he might achieve a baronetcy.

And as for the ball, it lies alone, unseen and untouched, wedged on the upside of one of the beams, in a little dark coign, for almost half a millennium. Blacker and blacker it grows, as it is covered with the fumes of successive technologies: coal fires, gas fires, petrol engines. Empires wax and wane around it.

Britain is supplanted by America, whose very existence has only been revealed to Europeans forty years before the ball is whacked aloft.

So in principle the ball might stay there forever, lost in mid-rally, frozen in a perpetual present tense all of its own, except that it is now only inches away from Jason Pickel’s scrambling foot, and about to rejoin the narrative of history.

He could make his way back up to the gun, he reckoned, if he somehow hauled himself up the joists, which were about two feet apart. It would mean crawling upwards and backwards, hanging on like Spiderman. It would need amazing prehensile strength in his hands, but Jason had confidence in his physical strength; and he needed that rifle. Mind you, if he fell, it would be almost eighty-five feet and he felt a twinge for whomsoever he might land upon.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX 1044 HRS

‘My love.’ Cameron had decided to try tact, and she turned to Adam with what she hoped was a tender look.

‘Yes,’ said Adam, distantly.

‘When we went to NATO …’ Cameron hated to ask him this. She couldn’t bear to destroy him in her own eyes as, in one way or another, she had destroyed all her previous boyfriends; but details, recollections, oddities were now crowding in upon her memory and innocent acts of the loved one now seemed pregnant with suspiciousness.

‘Yes,’ repeated Adam. ‘When we went to NATO.’

Over their heads Chester de Peverill was ranting about GM crops and Frankenstein foods, while Haroun, Habib, Benedicte and her two accomplices played the muzzles of their Schmidts over the crowd, as if pretending to hose them with bullets.

‘You know when we went inside the main building to see Brady Cunningham.’

‘Of course. Brady Cunningham.’ He pronounced it the American way, as though describing a particularly wily piece of pork.

‘Did you know he was a friend of my father’s?’

‘Yes, of course I did. You told me he was.’

‘I mean before we went to NATO, before all the trouble, did you know we might meet him?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said miserably, ‘I don’t know what I mean.

What happened was this. Yesterday morning, before their drunken lunch at the Ogenblick, they had been out to NATO to protest against the President, who was making a speech to what is called the North Atlantic Council, comprising the nineteen NATO Ambassadors. As the reader will know by now, Cameron had mixed feelings about this, but went along with it because it was kind of amusing.

The dirty don and his wife were full of teenage insurrection. ‘You know in 1986 I think I went to demonstrate against the Greenham Women,’ he said.

‘We both did,’ said his wife.

‘Good Lord, how plastered we must have been. Anyway look at us now,’ he said, and the Mercedes shook with laughter. When they arrived at NATO HQ in Evere, on the Brussels ring road, they found themselves outside the perimeter fortifications of a building that looked like — and, indeed, had been constructed as — a suburban maternity hospital. As a quartet they did not really fit in with the rest of the crowd, who lacked their urbanity and air of mild derision. The mob was a smaller, more dedicated version of the one outside Westminster Hall today, with a higher proportion of nose rings and Socialist Worker Party badges and Yasser Arafat headscarves; and more angry brown faces.

So Cameron didn’t participate in the stuck pig squealing as the cavalcade arrived, nor did they make oink oink oink noises in honour of the police. Nor did they try to rush the steel fence, as the hard cases did at 11 a.m., just as the President was slated to speak. But when the dirty don accidentally dropped a half-empty champagne bottle, from which they had all been swigging, a group of three riot cops converged.

Their leader was a burly Fleming with a scraggly black beard over his pockmarked cheeks. He appeared to be shaking with anger. ‘I’m so sorry,’ said the dirty don, hoofing the pieces together with his foot and putting them in a plastic bag. The cop, blue suited, black booted, demanded their passports. His hairy hand crawled over the shiny leather holster at his hip.

‘It just sort of slipped,’ said the academic.

‘Ayez lagentillesse,’ screamed the policeman, looking up from his methodical leafing, the veins standing out in his neck, ‘de parler un des deux langues de mon pays.’ Speak in one of the two languages of my country. Cameron wanted to tell him that they were on his side.

She and Adam agreed: they didn’t see why the whole world should speak English, just because the Americans spoke English. The don, who spoke fourteen languages fluently, and who could read the script of many more, came to her help. He tried to soothe the cop, he addressed him in good Flemish and then French and then German, since German is one of Belgium’s three official languages, with substantial German minorities in the eastern towns of Eupen, Malmedy and Sankt Vith. But when faced with an outraged Flemish policeman, you have only limited options.