Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Read online

  They came here to the Calthorpe, I replied, entering into the spirit of his memories. But only, I added, those back-stabbers who were the most determined and secretive. He settled back as though I were about to narrate a home movie of his life.

  It was best, I said, to sit outside on the benches if you did not care who saw you. That was always supposing you could focus your eyes away from the swirling-seabed, green-and-yellow tiles around the walls. Most of us used to go inside. You could squat down in the back bar with the chloroform clowns from the Eastman Dental Hospital along the road. This was privacy – at only a small price that most were always happy to pay.

  Lew’s eyes were bright in the sickly gloom. Normally the clearest words at the Calthorpe were about the cost of gin. The dentists would shout out as they mixed it with the beer, laughing as though they were still sniffing their anaesthetics. If a newsroom reporter wanted a conversation that he would later want to forget, one that never happened, this was the nearest place to come. That was what I told him.

  My old boss listened carefully. He stared up at the pub sign of two loin-clothed bodyguards between a red-tongued, red-eyed beast. There was one of those meaningless mottos for which Latin was long judged so useful: gradu diverso via una: one way by different steps. I had an immediate desire to ask about the Cleopatra project I had left behind. Had Big Oil Times ever finished what we had begun? He cut off the question, talking again about old newspaper days, the great figures he had seen, worked with, worked for, seen at the same bar. There were characters, professional characters of the trade, who had no personality at all; and there were personalities whom it was hard to characterise. Character-building was the hardest art.

  He sat back deeper in an unsteady chair. He pulled from his pocket a swimming hat, which he pushed to one side, and a damp envelope which he pushed towards me. Inside the envelope there were some identically sized photographs, clinging together like a pack of cards rescued from a drowned man. Lew looked around but no one else was looking. At the bar there were only two dazed dentists and a plasterer speaking to himself in Welsh.

  The pictures were a peculiar mixture. If they were for a card game, it was not clear what the game might be. The first showed the body of a defiant young woman seated on a table beside a matronly marble head, a juxtaposition of two types of nakedness, the living and the dead, stockings and grey stone, both classical in their different ways, one with black lines of eyebrow and pubic hair, the other with pale curls and lips. The second and third were shots of Elizabeth Taylor on a horse and with a dog.

  The fourth card of the pack showed a sultry, broad-shouldered matron with her hand to her ear. On the fifth was a poster of Miss Taylor on the wall of a Big Oil filling station. The sixth portrayed an ecstatic angel with a snake. From the seventh a gauzily clothed girl stared out, while being herself inspected by a balding carpet-seller. In the eighth and last a sharp-faced man with a wreath on his head looked anxiously sideways at a woman who was scratching her ear. Lew looked them over like a gambler who could not believe there was so much bad luck in the world.

  I was confused. I mumbled. Had the lost Big Oil collection finally been found? Was this it? Had there really been an Antony Brown? Did he know that my school had been founded by a man with the same name? Lew scowled. We looked at the pictures together again.

  None of them looked much like corporate art, like lost John Pipers or illustrations suitable for motoring guides or calendars. The woman in the black stockings was magnificent. There was something memorable about the chancer in the laurel wreath. But there seemed no reason for them to be lying on a Calthorpe table, smelling of chlorine, absorbing yet more moisture in spilt beer.

  Lew’s mood was in steep decline. He took each picture in turn, dealing it face down. Then he tore the whole sodden pack into small pieces, the model with the classical prop, the velvety titillations, the bizarre souvenir from the Morocco souks and the old woman snatching a pearl earring while her husband ate oysters.

  He snorted. He had the dry nasal irritation of the long-distance swimmer. Of course, these were not the lost masterpieces of Big Oil. They were the ‘fucking Cleopatras’ that his staff had given him. RT and RJ had been taking him for a ride. They had found Elizabeth Taylor with Lassie. They had not even got a decent Needle.

  The queue of new Metropole arrivals has disappeared. The table-tennis team went elsewhere. I watched them leave. The others must be somewhere on this site of Cleopatra’s temple for Caesar, maybe with views like mine. It would be odd to stay here and not want a room overlooking Old Zaghloul and the Mediterranean Sea. Now that the street outside is awake and honking, the guards inside are calmer. As long as I am on the first floor for breakfast by 10 a.m., I can stay all morning. My room may even be cleaned while I am away.

  Back at the Calthorpe in 1979, Lew wanted to continue his tour. He was tired of the ghosts of journalists and wanted to meet some real ones. Instead I could describe only where the reporters used to sit. I could describe them because I could almost see them still there, plotting, gossiping, boasting, the big men of the business who had written thousands of words that year about miners’ unions, coal stocks, strike strategies, flying pickets, secondary action and peak power. That is just one of the oddities of journalism: we acquire the most detailed knowledge when we need it. When the story changes, the facts disappear. They have all gone now.

  I took Lew next to the Blue Lion on the other side of the road. There were two newspapers then on the Gray’s Inn Road, both with Times in their title but not much else in common. The Times was the older and grander. It was The Sunday Times that made the money, paid the bigger salaries and noisily prided itself on everything.

  The Times was very much ‘the other occupant’ of the street, a 200-year-old institution, the most famous paper in the world, proud but more quietly so. The spirit of The Times was a resentful modesty, one well befitting an indigent who had been moved from his City home to where he might more easily live off his richer younger brother. For those who worked on the two papers there was not much shared drinking time. The two offices were connected by a bridge, but only in the least meaningful manner.

  The Sunday Times office held the printing presses for both papers, the massive metal monuments that ought decades ago to have been melted for scrap or exiled to a museum. There was not much encouragement for any journalist ever to visit them. The printers jealously guarded their exclusive rights; they rightly feared that computers and keyboards would end their hereditary grip on their jobs. On the rare occasion when a reporter visited ‘the machine room’ he risked abuse as well as raging heat. On the rarer occasion when a reporter from one paper joined the staff of the other it was like a man sleeping with his wife’s sister. It was a family affair – but not in a good way.

  The Blue Lion had no pub sign. It kept its armorial enamel under its eaves, altogether smarter than the Calthorpe. It was a place where the top Sunday Times reporters went to be seen, where their ‘space barons’ held court, where bylines were won or lost over pints of Greene King, where the black marks on the ceiling came from someone’s detonator souvenir from the Lebanon.

  These ‘space barons’ were the men of power. In 1979 newspapers were small in pages and large in staff. Most of what was written never appeared in print. For a century Times correspondents had grown used to writing despatches read by no one other than the editor and his so-called ‘leader writers’. That was one reason that the paper’s opinion was so respected: it was based on original research, facts that the readers never knew.

  In the expansive sixties more stories had appeared each day, some even with the byline of the writer attached. But even in 1979, if any story were published at the length it had been written, it was a miracle, and almost certainly a mistake. ‘Space’ was the prime asset of the paper. The ‘space barons’ were the men who dispensed it, who decided what was published and what was not. On The Sunday Times, with only one publication a week and dozens of teams and hundreds of indivi
duals wanting to fill it, the barons were like kings. The Blue Lion had been their court.

  Lew also wanted to visit the Pakenham Arms, a place on a corner of two empty streets at the back of the offices. The Pakenham was an ‘anywhere pub’ that might have been in Brentwood or Chelmsford, a place of satisfyingly small distinction. He had been told that this was where ‘the Business News boys’ met most nights, the reporters whom he might sometimes need (or pretend to need) for his own Big Oil work. This was partly true. I was a Business News reporter myself. My new colleagues did meet there some nights, but not, I said, most nights.

  Unpredictability was a useful tool. Business writers then were not as open to businessmen as they later became. They were often hard for businessmen even to find. The best qualification to be a business writer was to hate business. Theatre critics loved actors; the Labour staff loved trades unions; cricket writers batted and bowled every Sunday. The correspondents in Washington and Cairo and everywhere else were men who loved their temporary homes. But business writers deeply distrusted businessmen, and much preferred talking to each other. When they wrote biographies, they were like the historians of ancient Greece and Rome; they wrote in bold colours, for purposes of occasional praise and frequent damnation, about people who would never meet them and whom they never met.

  By the time we left the Pakenham that evening it was almost nine o’clock. A large black car stopped beside us and a large limping man stepped onto the pavement. This was a rare sighting of the boss of bosses at Times Newspapers, a man whose destination was the office back entrance and who could not at that time have safely had a drink in any of the bars where Lew and I had been. Marmaduke Hussey, or Duke as he was known, was the man charged with modernising the machinery, making the unions as museum-worthy as the presses. He had much on his mind. His campaign was not going well. He was not producing any newspapers at all. Each week their readers were fleeing to rival titles still in print.

  He noticed me only because, unusually, I was wearing a blue Trinity tie embroidered with the black griffins of the college crest. He was wearing the same. He asked my name and I introduced him to Lew who knew much more than I did about the Chairman, an industrial hero of the Thatcher age, and was delighted to meet him in person.

  V signalled her imminent arrival at The Sunday Times, just as she had done at Oxford, with short, mocking, mildly abusive messages, each signed with her initial. The notes did not arrive with quite the regularity of the Trinity post. On one visit I found three. Our post came in sacks that stayed unopened for weeks. Our strike-struck offices were on a form of bureaucratic life support. We were alive but not functioning, anaesthetised, ready to be brought round at a moment’s notice, a moment that was perpetually postponed. No one knew whether the unions or the management would be the first to crack.

  Every few weeks we came to Gray’s Inn Road to hear the news of the dispute. We held trade union chapel meetings and news conferences on ‘long-term projects’. Lew was surprised that I had joined the journalists’ union but as a newcomer, and a latecomer to newspapers too, it had seemed a good idea. There was no other way to hear of management tactics or the printers’ response. Lew thought that ‘Duke’, whose hand he had proudly shaken, would defeat the printers, become a Thatcherland hero and need never again skulk into his office by the Pakenham Arms’ back door. V, as was clear from her notes, hoped for a very different outcome.

  My old friend scrawled that journalists were ‘scabs’ who should ‘back your brothers’. My old boss thought that every trade unionist was a threat to the national order. My own view was somewhere in between. The dispute was yet another chance to continue with Cleopatra while, for the first time, being able to claim that that I was being paid to do so.

  Most journalists took other jobs – and thus were being paid twice. At every meeting we listened to fraternal delegates from faraway places and prided ourselves that, without our appropriately paid inactivity, there would be no newspapers to reopen when the dispute was over, whichever side claimed the victory.

  None of V’s notes prepared me for the shock of first seeing her in the newsroom, swinging her legs on a grey metal desk during an explanation to us of what expenses could and should be claimed for work which, while not producing stories for next week’s paper, was necessary for maintaining contacts, conducting long-term investigations and generally ensuring our permanent readiness to return to life.

  I recognised her immediately. I did not expect her to be there, not in person, but she was dressed more or less as she always had been, in black, in a short skirt and shaggy sweater (my mother, and probably hers too, would have called it ‘old dishcloth’) but hardly different at all from my rough-book drawing of a dozen years before. The only addition was a badge in support of NATSOPA clerical, one of the many warring union branches.

  She looked superior and smug. She refused to meet my eye. My only aim was to work my way to the side of the room and get her out as fast as possible.

  Out on the broad grey pavement she laughed and pointed across the road. I wondered which of the pubs was the least unsuitable to take her. The Blue Lion was too public in every way. The Apple Tree was always packed with printers. Journalists there were generally discouraged. The Pakenham maybe? She would have felt at home among the anti-capitalist reporters of our Business News. But I was not sure I wanted my prickly new colleagues to meet my prickly old friend.

  It had to be the Calthorpe. A few minutes later V became the first woman that I had ever seen there amid the medicinal gas, the sea-coloured tiles, the club-wielding bodyguards and the Welsh. I bought us two beers in bottles, the safest choice. After some brief words about teachers’ union solidarity committees, threats to craft skills from foreign capitalists and other cries from the chapels, we continued almost as we had done in 1971, as though we were continuing the same conversation, first reprising the main points lest there was something we had forgotten.

  ‘How are Maurice and Cleopatra?’

  I had not seen Maurice for a while.

  ‘He is still advertising,’ I said.

  ‘Himself?’

  ‘No. Dog food. He met a very nice boy a few months ago at Crufts, while persuading the champion chihuahua’s owner that he owed it all to the chunky goodness of Maurice’s client.’

  She smiled but not for long.

  ‘And Cleopatra?’

  ‘Well, it’s not easy,’ I said, ‘what with all the uncertainty of the dispute.’ I had just written a peculiarly dull passage about the Perusine War, a string of battles in which Antony and Octavian, still nominally allies, had fought through proxies over the fate of unfortunate Italian towns. I was not feeling very confident.

  As before, my floundering did not go unremarked.

  ‘I don’t think you are going to get Cleopatra round here.’ She looked around the Calthorpe as it slowly filled with middle-aged anxiety.

  ‘What about the useless males Cleopatra had to deal with? Remind me again of those.’

  ‘Canidius, the general, the one you thought was stupid at the beginning of the film?’

  ‘I don’t think he would get you very far.’ In 1979 no one yet knew about Cleopatra’s handwritten assent to his tax-breaks for wine, the exemption certificate that had lasted two thousand years in a coffin.

  ‘There is Hirtius. We talked about him once. Greedy, pompous, a writer.’

  ‘Better.’

  ‘Or Dellius, the pimp, Cleopatra’s escort to Tarsus. Also a writer.’

  ‘Too easy.’

  ‘Plancus. What about him?’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘He changed sides. He was famous for changing sides. He was the closest man to Antony and then abandoned him. He thought Cleopatra was a bad influence.’

  ‘Promising.’

  ‘A big man at Oxford once told me he was the most important of them all. He was not in the film, or in Shakespeare, but he did at least two other things that once made him famous, well infamous really.’

 
; ‘You mean the pearls?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the slithering about in a mermaid costume?’

  ‘Yes. How do you know about that?’

  She ignored the question.

  ‘You should write about what you know. You don’t know Cleopatra.’

  ‘I don’t know Plancus – except that he judged the contest between Antony and Cleopatra over who could put on the most expensive dinner.’

  ‘Yes, and she dissolved a huge pearl earring in her wine to win the prize.’

  ‘Plancus did stop her dissolving her second earring too.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She nodded and pulled a piece of cardboard from her beer. We were undeniably raising the tone at the Calthorpe Arms. ‘There was also the time that he slopped around Cleopatra’s throne as a sea god with a mermaid’s tail, full blue body make-up too. Unusual for a Roman Consul.’

  ‘Well, it was a probably a fancy-dress party. All Alexandrians liked dressing up. But anyway, why do you know so much about Plancus?’

  V paused. She knew she had a good line ahead. ‘Plancus was always in the Red Tents. He had an axe and a cane. He was the man in charge.’

  ‘What Red Tents do you mean?’

  ‘Maurice’s Red Tents. Plancus was the MC, the ringmaster, the man who kept us in order.’

  I tried to hide my surprise, unsuccessfully as ever. She paused.

  ‘Don’t worry. I wasn’t one of his mermaids under the carpet with their legs stuck out into the corridor. Those were nearly always boys.’

  ‘I was one of the statues around the sides. We wore veils and not much else. Sometimes I was the one who played Alexander the Great’s sister and asked for the password. And once I was Cleopatra when the usual one was away. Our Cleopatra was never available to customers either. She liked to watch. She had finished her exams by then.’