Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Read online

  Maurice said he did not remember any of my ideals but, if he did remember one, he would let me know. He might also give V my address if I did not buy him another drink. He was being sympathetic in his own way. Much more importantly, he wanted to know everything about what was happening at The Times.

  I tried to hold his attention, never an easy task for long. I described a lunch that CDH had held that week for Margaret Thatcher, the disapproval of the leader writers, the sycophancy of the executives, the courage of CDH himself who was in constant pain through every course. It seemed odd to me then how much Maurice wanted to know about our office politics, and how many people also wanted to know. We were a court of reporters and writers. We were attracting the attention of reporters and writers. It was like living between two mirrors.

  For the next few weeks the office workers of The Times saw more of CDH than they were used to. Every few days he would limp around the corridors checking the cleanliness of carpets, the perils of half-removed partitions, the off-whiteness of paintwork and the fluorescence of bulbs. Sometimes he was accompanied by men with tape measures and attaché cases falling from languid wrists. Duke Hussey was almost always there too.

  The Editor was a disciplined delegator but he could not delegate the marking of a royal progress around his newspaper. The protocols, the timetables, the receiving lines and even the redecoration – or rather the parts of the paper not chosen for redecoration – caused trouble. ‘I hope that the paint-line at the beginning of our corridor does not mean that the monarch will miss Business News,’ the Business Editor asked with a hostile smile. ‘Having sat through two bicentennial television documentaries that did not mention me and my team at all, it would be too much to bear.’ The reply was characteristically non-committal. ‘I hear you,’ the Editor said. When he wanted to register understanding without agreement, he often used this old Scots phrase.

  A fortunate few, chosen to be introduced personally to the Queen, had to produce a three-line biography for the Palace briefing book. The Editor well knew the prolixity of his colleagues. But even he was amazed at the lengths to which these journalists would go to gain a few more lines of type. ‘Do not in any circumstances cut the bit about my beagling,’ said the Arts Editor. ‘It’s a shared interest, you know.’ The Editor already knew.

  According to the programme, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were to arrive at 10.30 a.m., shake hands with the three-line-biography brigade, tour various departments, avoid Business News, attend morning conference and return home for lunch. In the evening they would be back to watch the printing of a special royal edition in which their day would be described with suitable respect.

  At the appointed time the electricians outside the Editor’s office were still fiddling with fluorescent bulbs. The corridor light was deemed too harsh for a woman of sixty. Fifteen minutes later she arrived. Her Rolls-Royce ceased its purring in the road between the twin newspaper buildings. The reception-line machinery – manned by well-polished reporters, new-suited executives and an Editor in a blue V-neck jumper and less-than-usually frayed cuffs – began its own smooth purr.

  The Queen and her Duke shook their way down the first line in the Editor’s office. Everyone smiled back loyally. The royal party passed into the newsroom where the writers, sub-editors, photographers and diarists were clumped around pillars, propped against the glass cubicles and generally attempting the impression of an office at work. After witnessing an extraordinary variety of bows, extraordinary to me if not to her, she was seen speaking for several minutes with the Labour Editor, a proud Yorkshire man and probably the journalist closest to the then national bogeyman, victim of some of our most virulent leaders, the National Union of Mineworkers’ leader, Arthur Scargill.

  With a look of nearly-all-over on his face the Editor rested his back beside a grey metal desk. He had watched with satisfaction and barely concealed amusement as his newsroom staff imitated gymnasts, jack-knives and circus elephants in the depth and rigidity of their bows. He even had a friendly word for the hovering television and radio reporters who had been invited to present The Times in a favourable light in its bicentennial year.

  I was a few feet away with nothing to do but watch what happened next. In a place that was briefly and unusually quiet and without stories, there were suddenly just two words, ‘one’ and ‘man’, one story.

  The Queen and the Labour Editor, it seemed, had been noting the progress of the miners’ strike, the bitter battle between Mrs Thatcher’s government and Mr Scargill’s union. Under harsh fluorescent light BBC reporters were talking to our Labour Editor; Times reporters were talking to the BBC reporters and Times executives were talking to each other. Heads were turning. CDH, for whom the war against Scargill was a personal crusade, kept his head still. He stared at Duke who stared at me.

  The whispers accelerated. The Queen had said that the strike was ‘all down to one man and very sad’. This ‘one man’ was Mr Scargill. She was thus backing the contention that the miners were good men led by a bad man. Quotes and misquotes spread, each amplified and extended to sharpen the criticism of the miners’ leader, to align the Queen more closely with Mrs Thatcher’s position and to improve the story for publication. The two words spread at epic speed. New arrivals asked me what had happened. Duke asked me what had happened. Somehow I was expected to know. I soon decided that I did know.

  ‘One man’, one queen, one way of thinking about why things happen: it was a respectable way of thinking were it not for the convention that the monarch does not think aloud on such matters. CDH, a cousin of Princess Diana as well as a nephew of a prime minister, was writing a book on royalty and politics in the modern age. He remained supremely indifferent to this ‘stamping of media feet’. Within minutes we all moved off to the next stop on the tour, the safer zones of the diary column and the Arts Editor who shared our visitor’s interest in beagling.

  Eventually the morning was over. The planners slumped in the chairs in the Editor’s office. The daily news and leader conferences – rarely witnessed by outsiders – had gone well. One of our leader writers had objected that his name on the seating plan was in the form of ‘Ronnie’, an over-familiar diminutive that he did not wish the Queen to see. Even this last, awkward detail was attended to in time, Her Majesty’s copy being individually corrected to remove the abbreviation. To CDH someone’s name was not a trivial thing.

  The time was now almost one o’clock. The television was switched on. We anticipated perhaps a gentle coda to the bulletin in which the Queen would be shown in graceful pilgrimage to the most famous newspaper in the world.

  Instead, ‘our news’ came before ‘the news’. The Queen’s ‘unprecedented attack’ on Scargill was labelled the ‘gaffe of her reign’. A swift call to the Palace found a team of courtiers congratulating themselves on a ‘thoroughly natural and relaxed visit’. This was code, apparently, for a great success. So success had somehow to be restored.

  It seemed an impossible task to me. This gaffe was already an event. It could not be disinvented. But I was naive and wrong. Everyone rapidly agreed that there had been a ‘severe’ distinction between what the Queen had said and how reporters had interpreted her views. Rumours of a tape recording of the conversation proved unfounded. After a few hours the story became a newspaper embarrassment – a comic interlude rather than a constitutional row. By the time the Queen returned in the evening, all was forgotten. CDH apologised to his guests for the ‘nonsense’ and was assured that it had all been nothing. The special edition flew off the presses in due order.

  I made some notes for my Cleopatra files. What were the rules of a court where the Queen’s words made things happen, whether she uttered them or not? Were Cleopatra’s words made and unmade too? There was barely more than a single page before I had to stop and stuff what I had done into my desk drawer.

  18.1.11

  Hotel Metropole, Place Saad Zaghloul

  In the following weeks of 1985 newspaper life continued
with as much normality as it ever could at this time. On the first Sunday of May CDH telephoned me at home. I listened intently to compensate for the quietness, sometimes the blurring, that the painkillers now brought to his voice. He spoke instead with drugless clarity. He was going to be in hospital for the next two or three weeks, he said. There was no question of an ‘acting editorship’. He was going to edit the paper via the telephone and a ‘squawk box’. For most of the staff, he said, it would not make any difference.

  The squawk box was a polished wooden loudspeaker case that in recent weeks had been sitting uncomfortably on the leader writers’ table, as out of place as early television sets in drawing rooms. There would in future be another similar box by the Editor’s hospital bed and he could bark orders into it or contributions to debate. In the leader writers’ conference this object became a wild, unnatural talisman watching over us. Whenever it squawked into life, it was like an oracle, leaving its hearers either instructed or bemused. From the technology of this box, as well as from the Editor’s character and mind, came that dying voice which friends saw as boldness and enemies as bombast.

  Next morning the formal announcement of physical absence was posted on the noticeboards. It was described as an ‘internal memorandum’. Politics swept by. Through the squawk box we denounced the plans for a US–Soviet summit. A leader, headlined ‘The Heart of the Matter’, blasted the stubborn evil of inflation. Next morning the squawk box said that it was time to call for the sacking of one minister and his replacement by another. Somewhat drowsily, these instructions dawdled their way into The Times.

  Preparations for the Hampton Court ‘Rout’ meanwhile took some unpredicted turns. There was the problem of protocol and the African ambassadors. To put it tactfully, which Duke did not always do, there was the requirement that the longest-serving diplomats – ‘some Communists, some cannibals and some of them both cannibals and Communists’ – be deemed senior in the seating plan to newcomers from more important countries: thus Ethiopia might be better placed than the United States. This, said Duke, was a nightmare from which only venerable Luxembourg – ‘a splendid fellow’ – could save the day.

  There was disagreement over how much the Prince of Wales should be made to act out the extravagance of his predecessor as heir to the throne in 1785. Prince Charles had rejected the ‘Prince Regent’ plan that he leave the Rout by carriage, escorted by flunkies for a mere few hundred yards until he reached his car. Duke thought this a shame.

  Then there was the staff. The first impression among the reporters had been of a giant office party, reminiscent of the days when the proprietors took their workers away to country estate afternoons. There was always a certain readiness to deride such hospitality; but there was none for the revelation that this was to be no staff party at all. Maurice and a few friends of mine (designated as coming figures of influence) were sprinkled among the very great and very good on a secretly circulated list for invitations. Barely half a dozen Times writers or editors were going to see the dancers, escapologists and jugglers, to sup with the Prince and Princess of Wales, to be offered ‘jellied borscht if the lobster cardinal was not to their taste’.

  The journalists organised an unofficial rival ‘Not The Hampton Court Gala’ in the nearby Hampton Court pub. The Editor suggested, with sincere reluctance, that the newspaper would pay the costs. The damage, however, had already been done. When the invitations went out to a bicentenary staff party in the Domed Room of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the venue was immediately retitled ‘the Doomed Room’. Worse, when some of the secretaries asked if they could have tickets for the ‘Not the Hampton Court Gala’ they were told that the event was for journalists only. Plans were then made by the secretaries for a ‘Not the Not the Times Gala’.

  News leaked out of a rehearsal at which the finger bowls had been deemed too small, the portions of potatoes too large and the asparagus too dull. Our advertising agency, the same one into which Maurice had pushed me a dozen years before, suggested spending some of the bicentenary party money on restarting 200 stopped clocks in public places.

  For the big event itself, the Editor freed himself from hospital. It was a perfect summer night. There was the free Times champagne, the costly Times troubadours, almost everything that Duke had wanted except the illusionist, the Regency coachmen and the lady with the dove. There were Green Jackets instead of Scots Guards. The Editor’s recourse was to grit his teeth, grab the lapels of his white jacket, grin and bear it as best he could.

  While drinkers drank and thinkers drank and everyone but the Editor drank, Duke introduced the doyen of the diplomatic corps to the wife of the Lord Chief Justice – and performed a hundred other such acts. Royal attendants watched anxiously lest any liquid be poured on porous pottery or any elbow pierce a piece of canvas. Duke seemed to have endless time, enough to point out a faraway picture from the palace collection. ‘The banquet of Antony and Cleopatra’, he declared rotundly. It was a portrait of a Dutch lady taking an earring from her ear, modest, severe, surrounded by a smiling husband and seven children of assorted ages around a small table.

  I was unprepared. ‘Have you never seen it before?’ he said again, before another ambassador tore him away. I gave an empty nod. I did not want to admit that I had not seen it before. We few hosts had to concentrate on our acrobats, fireworks and examples of living royalty. Anyway, it was a very odd picture. Antony and Cleopatra looked like actors in a pantomime.

  Afterwards I had to describe it all to Maurice. His own invitation, along with those of all my influential ‘businessmen of the future’, had been culled. Maurice’s place had been taken by a Moroccan who held higher seniority than the Papal Nuncio. That was what I told him. If he had not been invited in the first instance, he would not have cared at all. But, once whetted, his appetite for information, like all his appetites, was high.

  On a Sunday at the end of September the Editor telephoned to say that he had nothing to write that night. He asked me to call the senior leader writers but gave no idea of what I should tell them to say. Anything new, even a matter as simple as a massive earthquake in Mexico, was too much to consider. His telephone voice, which for so long had been his badge and tool of editorship, was frail and rasping, like paper rubbed on paper.

  Leaders became ever more difficult. At the same time the journalists’ union at The Times was threatening a strike over pay, computer typesetting, a four-night week and whether a writer covering an African famine should be allowed to take photographs without a photographer being present.

  On Wednesday the Editor presided over the news and leader conferences in person. The strain was patent. The corners of his mouth turned down into dark chasms. As he listened to limp talk of monetary reform, his eyes were deep in his temples. At that time I had never before seen a brave man dying.

  Soon CDH was in hospital again. We had just taken delivery of a new improved squawk box which was so sensitive, he boasted, that he could even hear in his bed when a leader writer’s eyebrow was raised. The sense of vacuum was now oppressive. Journalists want even bad things to happen quickly – as though some phantom edition of the newspaper is waiting for the news. Or they become bored while waiting. Or they want a new story, a new Editor to tell stories about, or anything new at all. Within a day we had all that we wanted. On the morning of Tuesday, 29 October 1985 there came the stately sadness – and the arrangements: ‘the funeral will be on Friday; the memorial service, attended by the Prince of Wales, will be at St Paul’s’.

  The death of the Editor was the chief item on the news conference list. Behind his empty desk, somehow invisible before, were photographs of coffee beans, the proof of a new book on constitutional monarchy in Spain, a child’s picture of a goldfish in the weeds, a painted boat against a large round sun and a Thank You for Not Smoking sign. They were joined, at around six o’clock, by a small carton from the hospital, a radio, a colour TV and a bright new wooden squawk box.

  Duke was prominent at the fun
eral alongside the Prince of Wales. Two decades later the Prince, like many others of the same mourners, was at Duke’s last service too.

  The old world of newspapers did not last much longer. New technology required a new place. Outside the Blue Lion, the Calthorpe and the Pakenham Arms there was this time a decisive industrial battle. The journalists moved eastwards, and to drinking places unknown. I left the Times building on its last night with nothing but a portrait of a Victorian foreign correspondent and a case of wine. Crowds gathered in the street, spilling out from all the bars. All printing machinery had stopped. Order was temporarily fragile. Security was provided by competing forces of management and labour. Later seemed time enough to collect any last possessions, the various bits of my Cleopatras inside my locked desk drawers. Next day the desk was still there but the drawers were gone.

  A loss? Probably not. I was only briefly even angry. Biographies of ancient characters are always bolstered by background information that is only indirectly relevant. In studies of Cleopatra these usually include Alexandrian obstetrics and fashion, the ethics of vivisection, the properties of extinct herbs, the propagation of corn in mud and the superstition (a favourite of Octavian’s too) that seals protected sailors against lightning. Chapters and paragraphs on all of those and more were in that desk – alongside easy musings on the links between past and present, too easy thoughts that were best left unsaid.

  Khat Rashid

  For two hours the lorries of vegetables and soldiers have been thundering past this desert service station, far out east beyond Montaza. The ground is scattered with rubbish sacks. There are wrecked cars that not even the keenest pimp could use. This is where Socratis said that I should stay for a day or two. Zaghloul Square was once again a problem. The police were picking up Sudanese and Tunisians. Who knew where they might stop?