Seventy-Two Virgins by Boris Johnson Page B

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