Cathy, who was professional enough to disguise her disappointment that she wasn’t going to find out any of the finer details about Holly’s reportedly more intimate dealings with her MP, smiled and thanked Holly, and then gestured to the camera person to stop filming. ‘Just between us,’ she said in an undertone, ‘I fully support your campaign. Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you to cover and I’ll be there like a shot. My sister died two years ago after waiting too long for a lung transplant. Anything I can do to make other patients’ lives more comfortable, I’m happy to support.’

‘Thanks, Cathy,’ Holly was touched by this admission. ‘And thank you for continuing to show up at events like this. It’s more support than we’ve had from some people not a million miles from here.’

Cathy’s eyes twinkled. ‘I’d love to hear about it, off the record sometime!’

Holly laughed. ‘That’s one story that I’m keeping under wraps for now. Sorry!’

‘Fair enough.’ Cathy moved on to talk to other demonstrators. ‘Good luck, Holly,’ she called as she left.

Inevitably, as a cause of the favourable media coverage, that lunchtime Holly once again found #GreenGoddess trending along with the regular hashtags. If it made a difference, Holly was more than happy to claim the title. She hoped that Charlie, probably sat in his office in Portcullis House a stone’s throw away, was seeing what real political action looked like.

41

He’d behaved like a twat. There was no getting away from it. Charlie put down his iPad in exasperation as he realised he’d been staring at the same article in the online newspaper he subscribed to for the past twenty minutes. Twitter was a better source of news these days, anyway, he thought.

As the train to London Paddington ground and rumbled its way out of Reading, slowing almost to walking pace as it hit the London suburbs, Charlie didn’t even care that he was going to be late again. What did it matter? His career was in jeopardy over the medication question and his love life was equally in tatters. He wasn’t even sure why he was bothering to turn up to the House today; the Secretary of State for Health wouldn’t be pleased to see him.

But there were other things to do, he reminded himself irritably. He was not the centre of the political universe, no matter how it sometimes felt that way when he was back in Willowbury. He’d glanced at the discussion papers for today before he’d eventually fallen asleep last night and he knew there was, as usual, plenty to be catching up on. Perhaps a day of parliamentary debate was exactly what he needed to take his mind off this whole mess.