Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Read online

  Soon it was lunchtime, a hallowed hour in Big Oil world. How to leave the office was a recognised business skill, requiring the skills of a silent waiter sliding a kipper onto a breakfast plate. If the fewest questions were to be asked, a conjuror’s arts could be useful too. On the desk of the fifth member of our little team, Miss P, secretary, assistant, knower of all things, ‘lifer’, as those near retirement called themselves, was a list of where everyone was and how long they might be. RT and RJ were seeing the printers and had a meeting at 2.30. Miss Q was with her mother and had a dental appointment at 3.00. There was a question mark beside both of these entries.

  Beside the name Peter was a blank space followed by the words ‘dry cleaning in wardrobe’. This meant that in our largest grey steel cabinet was my grey suit from Walters of the Turl, purchased in Oxford for interviews four years before and perfect now for Big Oil; also a pink button-collared shirt, one of three bought from a sale in Jermyn Street for my first job, advertising trainee and strategist for Curly Wurly chocolate bars, enthusiastic participant in meetings where the names of chocolate boxes were dreamed and tested. A narrow horizontally striped tie in petrol shades was also from Jermyn Street, bought singly, very sensibly too, despite the advice from my ad-man adviser that clothes should always be bought in volume to show consistent style.

  RJ’s desk was the only one by the window. Such pale light as came through the grimy gauze and glass was reserved exclusively for our resident artist. The note about how to behave when Mr Brown arrived was the most visible part of a small wedge of paper keeping apart the frame and sill and allowing a very slight breeze to rustle the motoring pages of Exchange and Mart. It was impossible to look out and see Cleopatra’s Needle. But I knew it was standing outside with a pigeon on its tip. There was always a pigeon on the tip of what had to be the oldest work of art in London. Part of Lew’s advice during the blue-pencil session had been to note carefully the first thing thought or said about a story, the first words about it delivered at the time. Often this first thing was the story itself, the peak of the pyramid. So often in his news-editing days he had heard the real story from a reporter’s lips and then found it nowhere mentioned in the copy. That was a lesson worth learning. Back at my own desk, this was the first of my points, not necessarily yet in the right order, but a start.

  1) Oldest thing in London; carved from Aswan granite about 1500 BC. Correction: oldest work of art in London outside a museum; oldest man-made object open to rain and pigeons every day. Not a great fate for an obelisk sacred to the Sun god and designed to bring old friends back every day from the dead.

  2) First erected near what is now Cairo in the reign of Thothmes III to celebrate his third celebration of the festival of Set. Interesting? No.

  3) Cleopatra did not build pyramids. This was one of the questions that Lew had asked. A lesson of the blue-pencil session had been the need that a reporter should answer his editor’s questions. Ideally, he should give a positive reply. It was not possible to pretend that Cleopatra had ever built a pyramid. Cleopatra cared more for theatre and politics. A good show was cheaper than rocky reality – and better for posterity too, since who remembers any Egyptian Pharaoh’s death better than hers? As for the main point: no pyramids.

  4) The energy industries of ancient Egypt were the slave trade and what we know now as ‘alternatives’. The annual flooding of the Nile was the greatest alternative energy source in history. Its source was a secret like the Philosopher’s Stone. It too turned earth into gold. Cleopatra had less land and fewer slaves than the great Pharaohs of the past, including the one who had her needle made. But she still had a unique source of water power (a fashionable ‘alternative energy’ subject for Big Oil in the seventies and one on which a Newsletter was already planned) as well a level of slavery which only her most ambitious competitors could match. As for oil, in her Arab territories a black ooze sometimes rose to the surface and could be sold at a good price for making primitive forms of cement. We might say that she had a modest bitumen business.

  Almost two hours had gone by. There was still a stuffy silence in all our offices and in the corridor outside. Not even Miss P was back, which was odd since she had the most limited of excuses why she should not be at her desk. Twenty yards away Miss R, oblivious of my failure to see her, was holding important conference calls about profits from the North Sea fields. I read again my Cleopatra points and wondered which to choose next.

  Where was Lew now? Probably on his hundredth Olympic length, recognisable only by grey curls and a clear plastic goggle strap on the back of his neck, halfway to France in his mind and in a hot-metal print room in his dreams. No. Suddenly he was back, without his document bag, without his jacket, with a memo in his hand, red-eyed and ready for a hard afternoon.

  He wanted a meeting immediately. There was ‘a flap on’. ‘Is it to do with Mr Brown?’ asked Miss P who had arrived like a rabbit in a half-successful conjuring trick, just a few seconds after her boss and carrying two plastic bags. ‘Never mind that,’ said Lew. ‘Where is everyone?’ Miss P consulted her list and read it aloud from printers to dentist, omitting any words like lunch or mother that might not be helpful. ‘Well, we’ll just have to wait,’ he moaned. ‘You come on in now,’ he barked at me, ‘and at least we can get on with fucking Cleopatra.’

  His office was much as it had been before, the scent of chlorine a little sharper, the limbs of its occupant less taut, almost languid. ‘So what have we got?’ he said. ‘Anything yet for me to see?’ I had hoped that this conversation could have been postponed, even forgotten. I pushed the pages of Cleopatra points across the cratered surface of the table, more to show effort than usefulness. They were not even typed since Miss P had not been there to type them.

  He read slowly and in starts, like a man reading a railway timetable. ‘A good start and some good appreciation of the problems’, he finally announced. ‘So how does the story go?’

  ‘Do you mean our Big Oil story? I hadn’t quite got the angle on that.’

  ‘No, not yet,’ he replied. ‘I was thinking about this during my conference across the river, a lot of interminable nonsense that you wouldn’t believe, and I was just wondering what went on at all those parties. You’ve seen the film, the one with Elizabeth Taylor?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but do you really want to know?’

  He leaned back, half-closing his eyes: ‘I’ll tell you when I’m bored, and when I am you can go back to the Alternative Energy Newsletter.’

  ‘Right, this is the potted version,’ I began breezily.

  ‘Never patronise your readers,’ he snapped, subsiding further into his deep executive chair as I meandered through marble colonnades, libraries and lighthouses. After the third course of wine, women and jewellery, he seemed to be fading into sleep. I asked if that were enough for now. Lew hardly moved. ‘Enough for ever?’ Then the mood changed. ‘We have to get you doing something. Get RJ to sort out some pictures. We’ll want Taylor, of course. Were there other versions? And then, of course, there’s the bloody needle. He can get one of his extortionate photographers to take that. It’s amazing how much they charge for taking pictures of something that doesn’t even move, that hasn’t moved for a hundred years. What did Cleopatra eat? Did she watch her weight? Don’t forget the centenary angle. But we can come back to that.’

  He crossed the corridor to find Miss P still in solitary charge of five desks. ‘RJ and RT will like this idea, nothing to do with oil, or not much, and great for photography.’ This was not the time to say – or even to think – that, however attractive an idea this might be for Big Oil Times, it was not one which RT and RJ would like if it came from Lew D. If Lew were enthusiastic – and it seemed strangely as though he was – it might be better if this initial keenness were first allowed to cool. Fortunately neither of them were yet back in the office. Miss Q, according to a note on my desk, had called to say she would be away till late tomorrow morning. I left the same message: I was going to be
‘in the library’. If Mr Brown had come then for his picture check, he would have been guaranteed all the lack of disturbance that he was alleged to crave.

  On the way out in the corridor I saw Miss R herself. Miss R was never normally seen out of her office. There were rumours that she sometimes slept there. To my amazement she invited me in, almost pulled me in. She ignored the toppling ashtray.

  My plan had been to ask whether there might be a better job for me somewhere, maybe in her own department. But before I could speak she placed her square face within inches of mine, pushed two tweed-covered elbows towards me across her desk and asked what I was doing in Big Oil at all. After a few minutes of feigned interest in North Sea oilfields, I told her about both Cleopatra projects, the long-standing and the latest.

  ‘Then why are you wasting your time here?’ she replied, tapping hard on the table and turning the ash-mountain into a long grey river. She reminded me of V. ‘The only thing worth anything here is what the engineers do and what I do. They get the oil out of the ground. I make sure we pay as little tax as possible on it. The rest is rubbish. Get out while you can. Stick to Cleopatra but get her right. Remember: raising money, spending money, taxing, avoiding being taxed: that is most of what there is.’

  What about Mr Brown and these lost pictures? ‘Please, please,’ she grimaced. ‘Don’t tempt me. There was once an Antony Brown here, somewhere in security. Now it is just a house name. Antony Brown is whoever gets the pointless job. You can’t imagine the nonsense that keeps men, mostly men, employed in a place like this. But then if you can imagine it you will never escape it.’

  In the library the following day there were only three readers at 9 a.m., a teenager with a Morning Star under his arm studying The Guardian on a wooden rack, a stooped woman whose size, shape and mackintosh colour matched precisely the revolving bookcase into which she peered, and a man with a briefcase and a knife who was neatly transferring dust-wrappers and the occasional illustration from public ownership to his own.

  Half a shelf of Roman history survived here, like the obscurest part of a forgotten empire. Its books had not been knifed, deprived of their jackets or touched much at all except to push them tight together to make more room for the twentieth century. They always seemed to squeal with relief when taken down and spread upon a desk.

  Lew wanted to know what Cleopatra ate. Chicken was the new dish of the time, more fashionable than pigeon, quail and ostrich. She had caraway, flax, lettuce, sunflower and sesame seeds and the now-extinct silphium of Cyrene. There were olives, cabbage, courgettes, raw onions; coriander, scattered in tombs, was popular for taking to the next life. Was this what he wanted to know?

  I had to imagine what the readers of Big Oil Times wanted. I would not be the first – or last – to write a book like that. A very short summary for Cleopatra the Sixth took only an hour and a half. The thin man had not even opened his Morning Star yet. The woman and the revolving bookshelf were still entwined in indecision. The book thief had just begun to read The Rachel Papers, after removing its black-and-yellow wrapper, and had not reached much beyond the conflict between the young Martin Amis and his shaving mirror. At this rate Cleopatra could care for three children by two world leaders, make a bad call in one of the world’s most important battles and die in mysterious circumstances, possibly involving snakes, and all before Lew had begun his daily assault on the Continent.

  All that I have done in the unusual absence of both Socratis and Mahmoud is to remember events that I barely ever think about at all, a patch of colourless Big Oil past that is a part of this Cleopatra story because it would be incomplete without it. James Holladay had said that bureaucrats and trimmers were the key to historical understanding. The people who made things happen might be grey. The prisoners going in and out their buses today are particularly grey.

  15.1.11

  Hotel Metropole, Place Saad Zaghloul

  In the early morning darkness, beside the check-in desk at the Metropole Hotel, no one is as calm as yesterday. A pale waiter in a white robe delivers coffee as though it were the alcohol of his reluctant evening work, each cup like a liquid explosive cursed personally by his imam. The guards are not only awake beside their electronic gate but alert. The woman who two weeks ago greeted me reluctantly to the home of ‘Cleopatra and her Antonio’ is now not even pretending a welcome. There is a line of supplicants in front of her desk. The stained light from the Versailles Garden staircase falls on foreigners seeking rooms.

  From my armchair by the window, I can see both the empty sidestreet and the queue inside. There is the guide I last saw at Pompey’s Pillar, the one who was lecturing about Tutankhamun. The same young women are behind her, maybe a table-tennis team, and behind them a man, dressed for winter, with a Canadian passport in his hand.

  Closest to me, in the space where guests sit to check their messages and their bills, and wait for taxis, is the picnicking family from the Roman Theatre, the ones who had hoped for better weather but were making the best of the cold. Wherever all these people have been staying before, this morning they want to move here.

  Journalists learn a sense of when there is news. ‘Has something happened?’ I ask the guide. ‘Not here’, she snaps as though I were about to molest one of her team or seize one of her rooms. The Canadian stamps his feet. The picnickers punch their phones.

  I wish that they were not here. I have worked long and hard in these quiet armchairs, longer and harder than at any time I can recall, perhaps since my attempts to restore some academic reputation for myself in Oxford forty years ago. Honour Moderations was the name of the exam. This too is like an examination. I have no books, only a few scraps of paper in Room 114 upstairs, final revision notes as it were. It is remarkable what remains catalogued under Cleopatra in my mind when I have forgotten so much else.

  CLEOPATRA THE SEVENTH

  A year after leaving Lew D in Big Oil House, after he had wished me good luck and made a joke about ‘fucking Cleopatra’, I was with him again. We were on a tour of pubs that he had especially requested. I was showing him the places that had ‘once been favoured’ by my fellow journalists at The Times and The Sunday Times. Lew wanted to see where his hero Harold Evans worked. He wanted to drink in the Blue Lion, the Calthorpe Arms, the Pakenham Arms and the Apple Tree.

  We were in bars likely to be favoured no more. For only three of the past nine months had any copies of The Times newspapers been published. In one of the angriest industrial disputes even of those disputatious days, all of us were ‘shut down’ or ‘locked out’ (the language depending on one’s political position towards the unions, the management and the government) and it was far from clear to the journalists that we would ever again open up or be allowed back in.

  I was now the newest recruit to the Business News section of The Sunday Times. Lew was touchingly pleased to see me out of Big Oil and into journalism, the opposite direction to the route he had taken himself. But he was sad to find that I was so soon describing the legendary haunts of his newspaper heroes as though I were a tour guide here in Alexandria, offering disappointment, decline and neglect.

  He was wearing a leather jacket that I had never seen before. Maybe it was what he had worn for work at the Daily Mirror. But he had the same gaze, the same reddened eyes and watery smile that got him each day from one meeting to another and from Dover to distant yachts at lunchtime. We had barely sat down in the Calthorpe Arms, a quiet hovel where even in better times it was possible often to find a table and read or write, before he declared himself equally determined that I should give up Cleopatra.

  That was the main message he had come to bring me. I had a proper job now, he said. I had been lucky enough to leave Big Oil. I had been even luckier to get a job on The Sunday Times. I was a newspaper man. If I had to write about someone else’s life, surely I should at least take on Margaret Thatcher instead. I tried gently to change the subject. I would be wrong to make quick decisions. Surely he understood that. No, he did not.


  I said I had just returned from Syria on a Lufthansa flight for journalists. Any free trip that kept us out of trouble was an approved assignment when there was no real work. I had visited Palmyra, an ancient site that Lew had reluctantly visited in his youth. We had talked about it before in Big Oil House, the ruined palaces of Queen Zenobia who, two centuries after Cleopatra’s death, had idolised her memory, dined on her dinner plates and even briefly conquered Alexandria. This time Lew remembered only how ill he had been in Palmyra.

  He took a sip of Calthorpe ale. Margaret Thatcher was what he most wanted to talk about. She was new. She was a big story, whether or not she crashed and burned or came out on top. I had already met her. He was respectfully impressed by that. Yes, there were journalists who thought and hoped she would be here today and gone tomorrow. That was all the more opportunity for a young man with a future in newspapers. And yes, there would always be newspapers. The shutdown would be short. We journalists were still being paid.

  Was he suggesting, I asked, that Mrs Thatcher was somehow like Cleopatra? Was she somehow a modern substitute? No, the beauty of her was that she was not. She was nothing like her. Why did she have to be like anyone that was old and gone? I needed to ‘get real’. That was the beauty of journalism. Its characters had to be real. He did not mean the people writing the stories: some of them were fantastical and always had been. He meant those they were writing about. If I did not understand that, I would never succeed.

  My Big Oil writing tutor was rambling a little and suddenly he seemed about to fade. For someone who talked much about drink he did not drink well. His Big Oil Times staff had often joked about that. Then just as suddenly, with a fresh burst of nostalgic enthusiasm, he abandoned his lecture on newspaper skills and asked, as though he were a tourist, where all the ‘back-stabbers’ now came, reeling off the names of pubs around Fleet Street where it seemed that many backs had been stabbed, the King & Keys and Coach & Horses, places where I had never been.