Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (28 page)

I left to meet Maurice – and found him offering free Drakkar Noir samples to some youthful Welsh choristers. He was playful,
happy, as happy as I had seen him in years. He had met his product’s tormentor already, he said. He did not think there would
be any further problems. The smell of journalism was disgusting (how dare we cast aspersions on any perfume?) but he appreciated
the chance to check that I was still alive, that I was prospering in office life, and that the irrelevancies of Cleopatra
were being supplanted by worthier ends.

We talked and drank for more than an hour, telling each other, as ever, what each thought the other should know. He loved
the problems of the Rout. He was a natural impresario. He thought that £25 a night for a Scots Guardsman was particularly
cheap. He hoped that the £200-a-night jugglers would at least be young. Then suddenly there was a crash of bodies through
the door. No one looked up. A heavily bearded man, who spoke as though he was heavily entitled to be heard, began instantly
abusing the Editor of
The Times
. His companions nodded. No one else took any notice.

Maurice stopped his pricing of the Rout and began playfully spraying from his little black bottle. Drinkers began moving away
– both from the newcomers and from us. The combination of beer, sweat and Drakkar created an air like that of a small car
in which teenagers have failed to enjoy sex. Maurice pointed. For the first time in years he made the shape of a big beard
around his face. He made the same shape of a big beard around my face. Did I not know who the agitator was?

Did I not recognise him? Was I an expert on Cleopatra or not? Did I not remember our ill-fated, sherry-fuelled attempt at
drama? This, he said floridly, was Canidius in Elizabeth Taylor’s movie. Did I not
recall the dumb messenger’s sign? Did I not recognise the same man now?

I was still not sure. Maurice was absolutely sure. This was Canidius, the general who would get his
ginestho
, aka Andrew Faulds, actor, MP, Palestinian activist, hounder of Mrs Thatcher over the sinking of the Argentinian ship
Belgrano
, here in the Blue Lion with a noisy delegation. He had either just seen CDH – or was just about to see him. He was agitated,
angry, leaning forward in a notably more confident way than when he had been booming bad news to Rex Harrison’s Caesar. He
was complaining most of all about the disgusting smell in the bar.

This same Andrew Faulds, Maurice hissed, had also been the radio voice of Jet Morgan, the Englishman in space to whom we listened
on our home-made transistors when we were six. This man, this voice, was almost a family member. Perhaps we should introduce
ourselves. I disagreed. In one weird way, from Cleopatra the First to Cleopatra the Eighth, the Member of Parliament for Warley
East was the single thread that held the story together. In other ways, he was no part of it at all.

We moved to the back of the bar. Had I heard from V, Maurice asked, switching from Canidius to Rothmans, Brentwood and the
cinema story we had talked about as we planned our Cuppers theatrical coup. No, I said. Then be grateful, he continued, waving
a letter he had received from her about us both, attacking me for being part of the media-capitalist conspiracy and him for
merely being a capitalist.

I felt guilty. I had never mentioned to him V’s arrival on Gray’s Inn Road during the shutdown nor the revelations about her
role as a statue in his Red Tents. I could have discovered if she was telling the truth. I was not as frank with Maurice as
I should have been. There was so much in our lives that was now not shared with the other.
Instead I let him gently pass on her taunts. According to V, he said, I had had ‘ideals once’.

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.

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 funeral 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?

I was not convinced. The view from the Metropole seemed calm enough to me. But Socratis insisted. When arrests began, it was
never clear when the arresting would end.

So I have come here to a desert petrol station that is also a motel, a shop and a place for repairing lorries. I am in the
corner of the car mechanic’s store. It is not as bad as it sounds. The exact location is a little obscure: Khat Rashid was
the last sign I saw before we stopped. But to be ‘left alone’ is still what I want most. In my mind is an oil painting that
is 350 years old. Mahmoud objects to visitors projecting upon modern Alexandria their images of the past. But to replace a
dirty garage window with a Dutch master requires no one else, offends no one and does no possible harm.

The picture is Jan de Bray’s dark family portrait,
Banquet of Mark Antony and Cleopatra
. I did not know it when it first appeared as one of the damp picture cards that Lew crossly crumpled in the Calthorpe Arms.
But since its second appearance, on the wall of Hampton Court Palace during the Rout, it has been always with me. It looks
very much at home in Khat Rashid – as in one way it should.

A puzzled man, a pugnacious woman and a bright white pearl are as
though freshly painted on the wall in this soldiers’ garage. The still life on the dinner table is alive, glowering, glowing,
indestructible. This mysterious banquet scene can assemble itself anywhere for me – in hotel rooms, airport lounges and hospitals,
on advertisement hoardings on Al Hurreya or the Gray’s Inn Road, in place of poster invitations to buy beer and soap, to vote
Mubarak or Conservative.

It fits neatly here now, merging its painted parts with the windows, ledges and walls. The grey of army uniforms and spanners
behind the sand-smeared panes becomes Cleopatra’s oyster supper, the meal that Antony thinks so strangely modest. A Koranic
exhortation to military mechanics is the tablecloth, freshly unfolded, ready to be smoothed by a final touch. A fading spot
of neon is the pearl. Anywhere and at any time in the past twenty-five years I have been able to summon Antony as a red-cheeked
bearded man, almost Christ-like in wonder, and the sterner face of Cleopatra, defiant, dominant, holding her right hand to
her left ear and a wine glass in her left hand. Their children look puzzled and playful, the servants serene and there is
Plancus, the dark man with an axe who supervises the revels.

Jan de Bray was a Dutch artist of the seventeenth century. In Haarlem, just after 1650, he portrayed this bourgeois Antony
and Cleopatra at the decisive point of their notorious competition over which of them can provide the costliest banquet. Antony
is confident that he can outdo the miserable plate of shells at Cleopatra’s table – until she takes from her ear the world’s
largest pearl, sits straight-backed, staring back, poised to crush it, dissolve it and drink it. The moment is absolutely
still. The morality of the tale is untold, left to tell itself. The steadiness in the surrounding faces is intense, as if
they are watchers at an execution.