Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Read online

  It was probably Dellius himself, Continuator and pimp, who first described that breathless scene. Cleopatra’s unwanted guide may have both planned the competitive banquets and gifts and then, to make sure his work was not wasted, put them into words, describing first the seduction, then the twins that arrived in the following year, the boy and the girl, the Sun and the Moon.

  Plutarch repeated the picture in his Life of Antony two centuries later. Shakespeare made the scene indestructible. It is almost irrelevant to wonder how much of it Cleopatra had ever made happen.

  CLEOPATRA THE SIXTH

  A job in one of the world’s biggest business bureaucracies was not what in 1977 I either wanted or expected. But a job was a job. A job in the oil industry, after failed experiments with advertising and the BBC, seemed at least a different kind of job. Maurice approved, but from a distance. V had disappeared from our lives. Cleopatra was fading with them.

  In Big Oil House the grey was the greatest shock, not the greyness itself but the kind of grey. It was like neither the light polished slate on the walls where I had worked briefly to sell chocolates, nor the heavy steel of newsrooms where I had for an equally short time reported pub bombings and cricket. The grey in the office where I was due to meet Miss R meant neither fashionable frivolity nor public seriousness. It resembled rubber erasers last seen in winter classrooms.

  At the end of a long carpet was an empty chair whose green leather had long lost its lustre and beside it, rather than behind, a peculiarly ill-balanced desk, the left of the surface piled with pale files, the right supporting a cinder volcano in a rolled-glass ashtray.

  The closest to life, as well as whiteness, came from the birds whose droppings dripped and dried down the outsides of the windows. There was an equally stark black briefcase with a matt metallic combination lock. Everything else in view was from the median tones of smoke. I waited as long as I dared until the prospect of causing offence seemed greater than the potential benefits of being where I ought not to be. Miss R, I had been told, was the woman who could help me most with my problem but, after five minutes and without achieving any part of my aims, I turned around and left.

  Back in my own, smaller office, filled with many desks, I and my new ‘Employee Communications’ colleagues had other problems. The latest instructions from above were both studiedly imprecise and perfectly clear. Those of us on the Big Oil House fifth floor in the summer of 1977 were not to know when ‘A. Brown’ would arrive. But when he did arrive we knew what we had to do. We had to avoid looking at him or disturbing him in his work. We had to be helpful, if we were asked to help, but otherwise we had to continue with our own work. We should not conceal any items relevant to Mr Brown’s investigation. Neither should we point out anything on the walls that he might have missed. We were not authorities on the paintings, prints and drawings owned by the Big Oil Company and somehow now misplaced. We were not authorities at all. If there were any difficulty of any kind we were to direct Mr Brown to someone who had been appropriately briefed.

  There was only modest debate among us all about what this might mean. Our desks were scattered. The raising of voices was discouraged. To be standing suggested one was not working. So that too was discouraged. These were ancient days before computers and there were no electronic means of ruminating upon which artwork might have gone astray, whether there had ever been any art in any room where we had ever been, and when Mr Brown would come. A brief meeting around a drawing board produced the consensus that the chaos in the mysterious upper levels of management was no greater than usual. Then we all went back to our places.

  The board belonged to RJ, the designer of Big Oil Times, a magazine for employees made in the then fashionable manner of the Sunday Times Magazine. RJ’s desk was the centre of my working world. He was a leather-vested, thin-lipped man in his early thirties whose over-the-collar black hair was shiny at his forehead and dull at the back, like the metalwork of a not-quite-new machine. His pride was in the ownership of a red Ferrari which no one had ever seen and was always a few parts and ‘a few grand’ short of what he needed to put it on the road. For regular use – although he came to work from Deptford by train – he had a white Lamborghini.

  The Editor of Big Oil Times was RT. RJ helped RT to make the ordinary look exciting. While The Sunday Times in those days would show the inner tubing of a Big-Oil-powered aero engine only when its failure had spread a hundred bodies over the Atlantic Ocean, Big Oil Times would show the same engine when it was working as it was supposed to do, powering the economy, empowering civilisation, making every employee proud to come to work, even those in Big Oil House whose closest experience of engineering was a well-turned paperclip.

  RT needed RJ because RJ knew about airbrushes and other modern means to make a printed page appear aluminium. RJ needed RT because no one else would pay him handsomely enough to satisfy the Ferrari repair-man. Together they satisfied the Big Oil management view that, in the best spirit of John Betjeman, John Piper and other calendar-artists commissioned by Big Oil in the past, it was worth spending substantial sums on making customers and employees feel the soothing power of paint. It was only unfortunate that some of these past masterpieces, their prime purpose of distinguishing July from August long ago fulfilled, had gone missing and that this Mr Brown had to be given the job of finding them.

  RT himself, a square-faced, blue-blazered man from Clacton-on-Sea, had no interest in oil or engines or any kind of machinery. His passion was for fiction with original unclipped dust jackets. He had a shiny briefcase divided into two internal compartments, each tightly sealed against the other, one filled in the morning with egg sandwiches and apples so that he did not need to waste his lunchtimes sitting down for lunch, the other filled in the afternoon from his midday book trafficking through Covent Garden to the Charing Cross Road.

  A modest antiquarianism did not make RT an unsuitable man for Employee Communications, the department in which we all, in different ways, were paid to work. Big Oil Times was created to encourage outside interests amongst employees, some sense of what lay beyond, but not too far beyond, their daily workplace. RT knew a good deal about Guides and Calendars, the Art Deco architecture of Big Oil House itself, its clock with the coffin-shaped hour hand and the cricket-bat minute hand, one of the biggest in London, known to older wits as Big Benzine. He knew why the colour yellow was used for safety helmets.

  He did not know much about how a refinery worked but that hardly mattered. Most office workers, the readers at whom his magazine was aimed, had no knowledge of refineries either. RT’s job was to employ writers who could explain catalytic cracking and associated mysteries, to choose photographers and artists who could remove the grime and make the crackers glow, and then, much his most important responsibility, to make sure that anyone in the company with a right to complain about his magazine had the chance to complain and correct the pages before they went to press. In Big Oil UK this was a large number of people.

  RT always preferred the articles about the bees and water voles, some of the many creatures whose lives, we wrote, were studied and enhanced wherever oil was discovered, sold or used. In 1977 there was the added excitement of North Sea exploration, offering him the chance to show not only floating rigs and storage buoys the size of Nelson’s Column but monstrous fish from depths that fishermen had never reached before. The illustrations of these were, in RT’s view, the equal of any lost thing that Mr Brown might be seeking.

  These men had the job of introducing me to bureaucratic life. Both James Holladay and Mr W had stressed the role of the office-worker in understanding Alexandria. This was the year in which Cleopatra the Sixth lived only between nine and five. The story quietly recommenced – beyond the perfumed barges on the River Cydnus – in between reporting on inter-refinery football matches and the social responsibility demanded of pipeline-layers. It was always better to be seen doing something than nothing.

  Everyone in Big Oil had an assistant. Many had an ‘opp
osite number’ too, sometimes a person whom they had never met, who did a similar job, often the same job, in the other part of the company whose offices were in Holland. This was part of a political accord in which neither the British nor the Dutch should dominate the other. It was a system whose balancing intricacies would have fascinated the courtiers of any time and place, one which mere communications assistants like me (though not ourselves possessing doppelgängers in The Hague) had also to understand. There was never just one executive with whom we could ‘clear’ copy or pictures for publication, whom we could ask whether the screw-top of a million-gallon oil barrel was an industrial secret, an environmental hazard or a technical triumph to be paraded for employees. There were always at least two ‘clearers’, normally many multiples of two, not always in the places where it seemed logical that they would be.

  Miss Q was RT’s assistant, tall, tightly strung in the muscles around her eyes, elegantly tailored in red, as financially extravagant as a Ferrari. She spent much of her mornings on telephoned arrangements for nights out with men who sounded much older than her when she spoke to them and much, much older still when she spoke about them to her girlfriends the next day. Some, we gathered, were powerful and famous, some not. She seemed masterful in balancing their interests against her own interests, successfully for herself for the most part. She knew a great deal about the oil industry through her mother, who was close to a senior man of Whitehall. She also knew where one would most likely find a missing John Piper. Chelsea galleries were like childhood homes for her. But none of this expertise seemed to serve her professionally as well as she hoped.

  Big Oil information had to flow, like the oil itself, through the proper channels. RT had not appointed Miss Q himself and they did not speak very much. It was RT who had told me about the ‘chain-smoking depressive’ of immense seniority whose office at the end of the Public Affairs corridor was labelled Political Relations. This Miss R, it seemed, was the controller of everything. But she would no more have consulted someone from our own office about petroleum revenues than keep her mouth free of a Marlboro. The mysterious Mr Brown might possibly have more sense. But more likely he would not. Miss Q did not do much at all. But then none of us did much at all. Doing much was not a virtue in our part of the oil industry. Those who did too much faced all the usual dangers of the active, as well as some that were unique to this strange time and place.

  RT’s boss – and mine – was a long-distance swimmer. Lew D had been a successful provincial journalist, tempted into Big Oil first because his journalist wife, whose job was better than his, had wanted to work in London, secondly because he could not get a job on Fleet Street himself, and thirdly because nowhere else could a man make the equivalent of a cross-Channel swim each week in the office pool. He was a gentle superior who enjoyed gentle domination by women – by Miss R in the office and by his wife at home. Each one trained him for the other. He looked like a kindly weasel, lean, sharp, short, quick-moving, with darting eyes. He modelled himself on the then best-known editor in England, Harold Evans, whose ability to be everywhere at once, in the newsroom, on the squash court, on war fronts and in swimming pools was already a thing of legend.

  Lew supervised four publications, each with their own editor, for which he had the ‘higher responsibility like that of a regional editor in chief’. Or that was how he put it when we first met. As well as Big Oil Times, there was Big Oil UK News, a tabloid for refinery workers and tanker drivers, and Explore News, a paper stapled like a school exercise book containing inspirational prose for our North Sea pioneers, only a few of whom spoke English. Last and least there were the Newsletters, an occasional series aimed at communicating certain specific corporate virtues, such as how carefully the company restored the countryside after it had built a liquefied natural gas pipeline.

  Lew affected disdain for those who stood above him in the towering ladders of seniority. His own editors felt the same way about him, not just the superior creators of Big Oil Times but the polyestered man who promoted Transport Cafe of the Year for Big Oil News and the Nordic-faced thriller-writer who printed safety warnings and helicopter timetables for riggers from Korea. If an idea came from above, it had to be considered, managed, minuted with care but, ideally and if at all possible, not commissioned for publication. Therefore suggesting a story to Lew D was something that only a newcomer would do, a 25-year-old graduate with brief experience in chocolate advertising, some very nominal training in journalism at the BBC and an ambition to write a book of ancient biography.

  The most defined of my responsibilities was for the Newsletter series. But there was not, it seemed, a consistent need for picture books of arable tranquillity over pipes of refrigerated high explosive. RT had tried me out on a trip to Heathrow Airport to describe how smoothly Big Oil fuelled the planes; RJ had allowed me to write captions for a colour spread of Scottish wasps; Miss Q had shown me how to help her clear copy through some peculiarly impenetrable thicket of the company organogram. A few months after I arrived some even more senior figures decided that we should aim to make the area around Big Oil House ‘come alive’ for our fellow workers. This was the first time I had heard that phrase since Geoff the Editor introduced me to James Holladay.

  The summer atmosphere was torpid. Not even the imminent arrival of Mr Brown seemed quite as surprising or urgent as it had before. When Lew asked to see me, I was quite unreasonably surprised. Had I thought any more, he asked, about the things-to-see-around-the-office instructions? What could we say about the statues that stood between Big Oil House and the Thames? Would one of them make a little feature for the News or Times? I was ready for this. I had taken a look while on a walk to the other side of the river, home of Big Oil’s bigger international brother, the place of fabled free office lunches and Olympian facilities for swimmers.

  The Victoria Embankment Gardens were full of bronze figures, mostly social reformers and fortunate soldiers, all well past their date for inspiring anyone. Also suitably nearby was a war memorial given by the people of Belgium in thanks for their liberation by Britain in the First World War, a curved white stone wall encompassing three figures in a blob of bronze. But our Dutch friends were, it seemed, unpredictable on the subject of Belgians, Germans too, especially recent Germans – indeed on all modern history, since a good oil company had so often to be a good friend to all sides.

  My suggestion instead was that we cross the Embankment and describe Cleopatra’s Needle, the thin granite column, watched by two bronze sphinxes, where the pleasure boats picked up tourists for river trips. This was something, possibly the only useful thing, that I already knew about. Its pink sides and pigeon-spattered tip could be seen from any window on the Thames side of our building. If there were to be a direct line drawn between us and our international centre, Cleopatra’s Needle was the pencil that would draw it. Any office messenger on his way to the pedestrian bridge might briefly stop and ask himself where it came from, why it was there and what the signs on the side (notably better preserved than those of the Belgian War Memorial) might possibly mean.

  And he might also ask ‘Who the fuck was Cleopatra?’, said Lew, interested enough to push his pencil jar away but worried perhaps that his feature story could become a tutorial in hieroglyphics. ‘Yes, we can explain that too,’ I replied, ‘though I should say now that Cleopatra probably didn’t do much more with her needle than move it from one part of Egypt to another. She may not have even done that. It was already more than a thousand years old when she was born. We gave it her name because she was the most famous Egyptian we knew when it arrived. We hadn’t discovered Tutankhamun in 1877.’ I was stumbling. Lew looked up as though he was just about to call a halt. A blue pencil, spun between forefinger and table-top, was rolling towards him. He wrote down the date on his pad. One form of impatience turned instantly into another. Pulling his shoulders back, he said: ‘So it’s been here a hundred years, it’s a centenary, let’s do it.’

  I was not quite qui
ck enough to grasp the point. This stimulated a diatribe on how an anniversary was the perfect approach to any story like this one. Not to see that immediately was a failure. Then quickly we were back to Cleopatra. This was going to be a test. He had to go to a meeting across the river and while he was away I was going to write down a list of points about her that would interest Big Oil readers. ‘Put the most important first. Then build out from there. Remember what I said before. A news story is like a pyramid, the main point at the top, then gradually expanding and falling away until the bottom points only survive if there is nothing else to print. Yes, a pyramid, rather appropriate for this story, don’t you think?’

  He rummaged in his centre desk drawer for his swimming trunks. Did Cleopatra build her own pyramid? He mused with a smile as though it would simply be nice to know. Anything to do with oil? He asked this second question with more seriousness. His first trunks, blue, damp and smelling of dust and ammonia, were found, sniffed and discarded into his holdall to take home. He took a second red and dry pair from his briefcase, wrapped them inside a yellow towel from another drawer, wrapped the whole seaside roll in a bag marked ‘Documents’ and said we would talk further when he was back.

  I have spent a whole day at this cafe table by the courthouse, the first day of seeing neither Socratis nor Mahmoud. Perhaps their lives have returned to normality and they are working. Mahmoud has a job in an office that is part of the court system, not here in the old city centre where the prison vans ply back and forth, but somewhere out to the east nearer the empty palace of King Farouk. Socratis said he was going west to collect up his cars before the police did – and to make sure that his mother was getting the due attention of her son.