The Senecans Read online

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘Her enemies mostly, the people whom she thought should be our own enemies too. No one who worked for a university or the BBC would have overheard us without anxiety.’ I mention those enemies in particular because I am trying to tease Miss R who herself is some sort of historian, part of ‘a project’. That is what she claimed in her letter. But she has a toughness that comes from somewhere very different from here. She is not easily teased.

  I am answering the question that I think she has asked. I remember many details of that Thatcher lunch. It was the first of its kind for me. I was new then to the game that Miss R now wants to replay.

  She said in her letter that she wanted details. I give her details. ‘The Prime Minister was tugging at her necklace, twisting the clasp to hide the pearl that was stained. She was wearing brown and gold, a dress that could have smothered a small child or curtained a bay window. Britain’s first female Prime Minister wore an acidic scent which, if it were a wine, would have been corked, but as a perfume was the spirit of Christmases long past. She looked and spoke like a vinegary sponge.’

  ‘How did you respond?’

  ‘There were about eight hosts around the table, the Editor of The Times at that time (his name was Charles Douglas-Home), and the heads of our main departments. Sycophancy or silence were the only choices on the menu. Most of my colleagues chose the sycophancy. As the most junior I like to think that I picked the silence but I cannot be sure. Once her enemies had been dispatched, the ingratitude of friends occupied much of the time between the Marks & Spencer melon balls and the mints.’

  She checks that the numbers are changing on her machine as once reporters used to check the whirring of tape.

  ‘The knowing colleague whispered that the melon balls were the same as those we had endured a few weeks before with the Irish Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald. Mrs Thatcher heard only the word FitzGerald and frowned. She liked neither him nor the pale green fruits and changed the subject.’

  ‘“What shall I say when I address a Joint Session of Congress in Washington next week?”, the Prime Minister asked.’

  ‘“Tell them that you are the same exciting and radical woman that they fell in love with when you were first elected five years ago”, said the lizard on my left, a man whose fragrance was as fresh as the Prime Minister’s was not. This was the Business Editor, Kenneth Fleet.’

  ‘Mr Fleet was a man of the smoothest confidence, my first departmental boss. Before I arrived in newspapers I had never met anyone like him. He lost his way only when he starred in advertisements for Prudential Insurance.’

  Miss R does not laugh. Her face has turned away. She looks out towards the faraway sea – away from the site of Thomas More’s execution on Tower Hill, down along the cobbled dockland street, up to the East London sky to the tower blocks and churches. She looks back at me across the crowded office carpet, the boxes awaiting the removal men, this floor-scape today like an architectural model of the buildings outside.

  Her eyes say that this is not what she wants to hear but that she will hear a bit more anyway. I recognise that look. I remember looking that way when I first asked questions for a living myself, asking questions that some superior wanted to be answered. Sometimes an interviewer has to set a subject free. Sometimes we profit from answers to questions that we have not asked. Most often we are too impatient.

  ‘Listen to me again’, she says, more sharply than an interviewer should. ‘Seeing Margaret Thatcher doesn’t mean meeting her, having lunch with her, talking to her at a party or doing whatever else you did later.’ She speaks as though to a child or a suspect in a murder investigation.

  She wants us to get to the menu selections and sycophancy in due time. She wants to get to her four courtiers, one by one. What she wants to know first is something from long before that lunch, something very simple: when did I first see Mrs Thatcher ‘in the flesh?’

  She pauses. We both pause. The words ‘flesh’ and ‘Mrs Thatcher’ seem somehow ill matched.

  ‘Even if it was only the flesh of her face’, she continues as though correcting her own vocabulary.

  ‘Fine.’ I will tell her. She is pressing me for stories. I understand that. It can be a thankless task.

  More melon-ball memories from 1985 would have made better stories. The single conversation that I had alone with Mrs Thatcher that day was about Anthony Berry, son of the sometime owner of the Sunday Times, her Deputy Chief Whip and one of those who died at Brighton in that bombing where she was the one intended to die. It was she who raised his name.

  I may have been the last man to see Sir Anthony alive, our paths crossing on the stairs at the Grand Hotel after the Party Conference after-parties, his steps directed upwards after walking his dogs by the sea, mine downwards and out into the hotel next door. In the next thirty years I hardly ever saw Margaret Thatcher again when she did not mention this dead heir to a newspaper dynasty.

  Sir Anthony was not her own sort of Conservative. He was a privileged part of the party coalition she had to keep together if she could. He was in Brighton that night only by accident, only because someone more important had to stay behind in London to fight the Miners’ strike, the conflict that, in the year before the battles of Wapping, was the biggest item on her inventory of industrial unrest.

  Bombing of Grand Hotel, Brighton, 1984

  Nor was he well known. He was hardly known to me at all, nothing beyond a smile across a room of wine glasses, Tory Treasurer Alistair McAlpine’s glasses that night of the bomb, one bathtub of champagne bottles and another hiding the explosives. Margaret connected us because she had heard me describe the dogs on the stairs. It was a connection she liked to make.

  Miss R looks down again at her recorder. ‘We need to start much further back than the Brighton Bomb.’

  She wants me to make her story easy, one thing after another she says. I don’t see how my first mere sighting of Mrs Thatcher is a significant story at all. And I am good at spotting a story.

  I will answer her anyway. Miss R is aiming to be a historian and in the job I do now at the Times Literary Supplement we respect historians. We don’t tell them what they should ask and how they should write. Recognising small details that seem unimportant is what great historians do best, journalists too. Bits and pieces can be something or nothing. Every day there are facts that die before darkness.

  Before I can follow her direction she suddenly changes it. She says that she is from Essex as though that were suddenly relevant. I say that I was once from Essex too. She points to her white shoes with her first smile, a reminder of once popular jokes about ‘Essex girls’, not the kind I have so far expected her to make. She draws her feet back to the sides of her book pile. She begins her questions again, impatient, Impatience on a Monument you might say.

  There is not yet a pattern here. Apart from her claim to profession, I know only how she looks and seems, contained, clawed, mostly careful. Her hair is clipped tight. She is five shelves high when she is standing, maybe about five foot six. I guess that she is about thirty years old but I can do no more than guess. I have checked by Google and there is no trace to guide me. She has not written a book before, or not under the name that she has given.

  We stare out away and past one another. I share her appreciation of the view from this sixth-floor window. I look out on it myself as much as I can. Below me sits my landscape of three decades, the places where I used to write about politics, edit The Times, walk, talk and plot with political people, all of the names on Miss R’s list. Now I merely look down on those rooms and roads from this temporary home in a neighbouring tower, from 3 Thomas More Square down on to the gatehouse, to old black bricks, new pink doors and bicycles, and soon I will not even be as close to my past as that.

  So yes, I tell her what she wants to know. When did I first see Mrs Thatcher? ‘It was August 1979 in London, four months after she became Prime Minister, five years before she escaped assassination at
Brighton, six years before the sycophants’ lunch. It was only a year after my life as a journalist had begun.’

  I point down river. ‘I was in Greenwich, South London, not near to the usual Thatcher haunts, not Chelsea, not Westminster, not anywhere I ever heard Margaret say a fond word about, at least not while she was in power, not until, after three election victories, they forced her to resign.’

  ‘They? Who were they?’

  ‘Most of them were Tories who never wanted her at all except as a winner of votes they could not win themselves.’

  I am wondering if I need to go through her triumphs into Downing Street one by one, 1979, 1983, 1987. Miss R must know these few unassailable facts.

  The first win was after Labour’s Winter of Discontent when striking trade unionists let trash pile in the streets and the dead go unburied. The second came after the Falklands War and the third when while winning she lost too much, too many of her friends and something of her mind. Beside crumpled letters and a recording machine Miss R has a calendar of the decade on a spreadsheet, the kind our accountants keep.

  ‘Finally “they” got her out, forced her to pretend that she wanted a Barratt Home instead, Dulwich not Greenwich, I think, not that she stayed there long. Dulwich? There it is. South and east and down away over there somewhere across the river. As if they could ever get her to spend her time pottering about in Dulwich – or West Harwich, East Greenwich, any of the wiches not far from here beneath the clouds blowing today towards us.’

  ‘Why were you in Greenwich that night?’

  ‘I was there to write about a play. I was a part-time critic at the time and the play was called The Undertaking. Its writer was an actor called Trevor Baxter. Its theme was the way that people want to be remembered when they are dead, the very different ways from those that will be chosen by their relatives, lovers and friends.’

  ‘A little way offstage was a tomb in which the powerful paid handsomely to lie in the uniforms of their lifetime’s passions, their dressing-up clothes not their business suits, a financier in a ballet frock, a general in the loving arms of his batmen, an eminent scientist trussed like a chicken. It was a good story. I remember it now as a good play too but I did not say so at the time. I was a young critic. I thought I should be critical.’

  ‘Margaret was a new story then but no one thought she would be remembered so much now. No one shouted at her in 1979. The “Poll Tax” was still a 600-year-old error made by Richard II. Not many loved or even hated her. She was new. She was a woman. She was not Ted Heath, the sexless sailor whom, to his unforgiving horror, she had succeeded. There was a wall on stage and, behind it, an orchestra rehearsing a new symphony to celebrate the soul of the European Economic Community, the “soul that is Love”.’

  I see a smile. Miss R is perhaps at last hearing what she wants to hear. She sits back on her pile of books, novels at the top, lives of Romans and Tory ministers underneath, and finds that there is a bookcase for her shoulders not far behind. Her feet slide forward. She looks as though she is about to be photographed for a magazine. She almost laughs.

  ‘Was that the time’, she asks solemnly, ‘when the EEC was beginning to become something less Economic and more Community, when Britain still had its “British disease”?’

  ‘Yes, exactly. I don’t think I ever enjoyed myself more.’

  She adjusts a second electronic device, the pad on which she makes her notes. She straightens her back, a struggle when on a frail support of print. She is speaking as though from a script to a lecture hall of students. I begin to explain but she puts her finger to her lips. That EEC and strikes question, she silently says, is hardly a question at all, not one I need to answer.

  So I continue with my answer to the first question, the one she is so insistent on, with what I remember from the day on which I first saw ‘that woman’ as she would become, the woman who afterwards would hover high and low over the buildings down there on the ground. I am looking again out towards Greenwich. The theatre was somewhere under one of those incoming clouds, perhaps beneath that bit of pale blue sky, the bit by the bend of the river.

  ‘The Undertaking was a play of scenes designed to shock. A Tory lady was looking forward to the “black meat” of “a bulging brute” whom she might enjoy on a trip to Africa, the kind of language that was just still permissible in 1979 as long as the character was a Conservative. Inside the tomb, alongside the grand-passionate and perverted dead, was the dream-delivering undertaker himself, dressed to ape both Leopold II of Belgium and Lenin.’

  ‘There was also a duplicitous Foreign Office mandarin. To Mrs Thatcher all FO men were “mandarins”, never a term of endearment from that day till the day she died. There was a young girl, apparently buried alive, an old woman newly risen from her grave, and much talk of memory, law and order, more than two hours of it with only the briefest interval.’

  ‘I was there that night with the man who is first on your research list. Perhaps you know that already?’

  ‘It was David Hart, political adviser, wealthy fantasist himself and then a very new friend to me, who, soon after the play was over, pointed out Britain’s first female Prime Minister in the back of a low black car. She had just returned from a holiday in Scotland, David told me knowingly. She did not look relaxed but then she hardly ever did, he said. She was dressed in a coat that may have been a dress, with a scarf that scoured her neck as she turned her head, waving to my friend through the grey glass window, or so he said.’

  Miss R stands up from her books. ‘I will be back on the next day but one’, she promises.

  4.4.14

  The next day but one has now arrived. Miss R has not yet come and it is almost evening.

  Maybe I have already missed her. Earlier this morning there was an office outing to the funeral of one of my Times Literary Supplement colleagues, Richard Brain, by name and nature, our foremost stylist in grammar as in dress, whose choice for burial, if he had the chance to make it, would have been a pink cravat and a blue pencil.

  Instead of waiting for my interviewer I was waiting for mourners in a monastic relic of the City, remembering little, merely learning that every Charterhouse brother (no sisters allowed) has a number signifying his seniority; and that every death there, and they are very regular, means promotion for those lower down the ladder.

  Even on a non-funereal Friday the TLS is quiet at this late afternoon time. It is no trouble for me to be waiting here beside the grey sky, in the same position as yesterday, where I sit most days, writing about the political excesses of two thousand years ago, editing book reviews, and, most important now, separating rubbish from relics for the removal company. Distinguishing between the two is not easy and I have avoided it for decades. Everything that Miss R saw on Wednesday is still here though it will not be here for long.

  A single ‘when did I first’ question will not be enough. I know already that she wants to ask about others who linked me and Margaret Thatcher, other questions about Mr Hart and the courtiers I came to call the Senecans. ‘When did you first see Mrs Thatcher?’ is only one of these questions.

  I sense that she will keep our appointment and there seems to be no reason not to see her again. I am flattered that a historian would want to see me – or ask when and what I have seen. It is a long time since I have played a part in anything ever likely to be history.

  Her first means of arrival should maybe have alarmed me more than it did. She appeared in this office, six floors in the sky, suddenly and without warning, an unusual feat in a modern tower where there are no corridors, few walls and even those are walls of glass. As I will tell Miss R if she asks me, David Hart, her subject and my friend, liked to arrive at his own parties that way. He used secret passages, doors without handles, opened by his touch on a spring, a butler’s lift too, as I recall, adapted so that a single stout host could be among his guests without ever welcoming them.

  Miss R wrote in her letter that she wanted to know as much as she could abo
ut David Hart, his power and pretensions, his games, his dogs, his pleasure when the young people drank wine that was older than themselves. He seems to be the man at the Thatcher court whom she has studied the most. Then there are the older men, Sir Ronald Millar and Lord Wyatt, rewarded by titles for their labours, and the dark, comic journalist Frank Johnson too, a cast of gilded ghosts who used to strut on the Wapping stage.

  I am not sure why she has picked precisely this cast. To me they are united in many ways, most peculiarly by our Latin lessons in a shabby Wapping pub, shared studies of grammar and Seneca, a secret that sometimes surprised even ourselves. Maybe she has somehow learnt about these lessons.

  She is a researcher and determined. That much is certain. How did she get in here? She could have been a terrorist, an affronted author, an unpublished poet, a publicist. She could have been someone I offended while editing The Times, a supporter perhaps of the England football manager (Hoddle, yes, that was his name) whom I forced from his job because of an interview in which he professed some primitive form of Buddhism. For years I was abused by friends of Glenn Hoddle. It is easy to give offence as a newspaper editor, necessary I would say.

  I tried not to seem surprised to see her, successfully I think. She had our letters but there was no call from Security, no summons to meet her from the lift. Perhaps she came with someone else. This place is not what it was. Surprises happen more often. We are moving very soon. Our boxes are packed. No one cares as much as they once did.

  So, when finally she arrives tonight I am not expecting her. I have my back to my desk, my eyes towards East London and the sea and, when I turn back to work, she is simply there. She stands on the thin grey carpet and starts to speak, snapping and smiling by turns. It seems churlish not to return the smiles.