Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (21 page)

Alexandria Courthouse, Route du 26 Juillet

The meeting between Antony and Cleopatra on the Cydnus became one of the most famous of all meetings. Shakespeare made sure
of that. ‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, Burn’d on the water. The poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails,
and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them.’

It was probably Dellius himself, Continuator and pimp, who first described that breathless scene. Cleopatra’s unwanted guide
may have both planned the competitive banquets and gifts and then, to make sure his work was not wasted, put them into words,
describing first the seduction, then the twins that arrived in the following year, the boy and the girl, the Sun and the Moon.

Plutarch repeated the picture in his
Life of Antony
two centuries later. Shakespeare made the scene indestructible. It is almost irrelevant to wonder how much of it Cleopatra
had ever made happen.

CLEOPATRA THE SIXTH

A job in one of the world’s biggest business bureaucracies was not what in 1977 I either wanted or expected. But a job was
a job. A job in the oil industry, after failed experiments with advertising and the BBC, seemed at least a different kind
of job. Maurice approved, but from a distance. V had disappeared from our lives. Cleopatra was fading with them.

In Big Oil House the grey was the greatest shock, not the greyness itself but the kind of grey. It was like neither the light
polished slate on the walls where I had worked briefly to sell chocolates, nor the heavy steel of newsrooms where I had for
an equally short time reported pub bombings and cricket. The grey in the office where I was due to meet Miss R meant neither
fashionable frivolity nor public seriousness. It resembled rubber erasers last seen in winter classrooms.

At the end of a long carpet was an empty chair whose green leather had long lost its lustre and beside it, rather than behind,
a peculiarly ill-balanced desk, the left of the surface piled with pale files, the right supporting a cinder volcano in a
rolled-glass ashtray.

The closest to life, as well as whiteness, came from the birds whose droppings dripped and dried down the outsides of the
windows. There was an equally stark black briefcase with a matt metallic combination lock. Everything else in view was from
the median tones of smoke. I waited as long as I dared until the prospect of causing offence seemed greater than the potential
benefits of being where I ought not to be. Miss R, I had been told, was the woman who could help me most with my problem but,
after five minutes and without achieving any part of my aims, I turned around and left.

Back in my own, smaller office, filled with many desks, I and my new ‘Employee Communications’ colleagues had other problems.
The latest instructions from above were both studiedly imprecise and perfectly clear. Those of us on the Big Oil House fifth
floor in the summer of 1977 were not to know when ‘A. Brown’ would arrive. But when he did arrive we knew what we had to do.
We had to avoid looking at him or disturbing him in his work. We had to be helpful, if we were asked to help, but otherwise
we had to continue with our own work. We should not conceal any items relevant to Mr Brown’s investigation.
Neither should we point out anything on the walls that he might have missed. We were not authorities on the paintings, prints
and drawings owned by the Big Oil Company and somehow now misplaced. We were not authorities at all. If there were any difficulty
of any kind we were to direct Mr Brown to someone who had been appropriately briefed.

There was only modest debate among us all about what this might mean. Our desks were scattered. The raising of voices was
discouraged. To be standing suggested one was not working. So that too was discouraged. These were ancient days before computers
and there were no electronic means of ruminating upon which artwork might have gone astray, whether there had ever been any
art in any room where we had ever been, and when Mr Brown would come. A brief meeting around a drawing board produced the
consensus that the chaos in the mysterious upper levels of management was no greater than usual. Then we all went back to
our places.

The board belonged to RJ, the designer of
Big Oil Times
, a magazine for employees made in the then fashionable manner of the
Sunday Times Magazine
. RJ’s desk was the centre of my working world. He was a leather-vested, thin-lipped man in his early thirties whose over-the-collar
black hair was shiny at his forehead and dull at the back, like the metalwork of a not-quite-new machine. His pride was in
the ownership of a red Ferrari which no one had ever seen and was always a few parts and ‘a few grand’ short of what he needed
to put it on the road. For regular use – although he came to work from Deptford by train – he had a white Lamborghini.

The Editor of
Big Oil Times
was RT. RJ helped RT to make the ordinary look exciting. While
The Sunday Times
in those days would show the inner tubing of a Big-Oil-powered aero engine only when its
failure had spread a hundred bodies over the Atlantic Ocean,
Big Oil Times
would show the same engine when it was working as it was supposed to do, powering the economy, empowering civilisation, making
every employee proud to come to work, even those in Big Oil House whose closest experience of engineering was a well-turned
paperclip.

RT needed RJ because RJ knew about airbrushes and other modern means to make a printed page appear aluminium. RJ needed RT
because no one else would pay him handsomely enough to satisfy the Ferrari repair-man. Together they satisfied the Big Oil
management view that, in the best spirit of John Betjeman, John Piper and other calendar-artists commissioned by Big Oil in
the past, it was worth spending substantial sums on making customers and employees feel the soothing power of paint. It was
only unfortunate that some of these past masterpieces, their prime purpose of distinguishing July from August long ago fulfilled,
had gone missing and that this Mr Brown had to be given the job of finding them.

RT himself, a square-faced, blue-blazered man from Clacton-on-Sea, had no interest in oil or engines or any kind of machinery.
His passion was for fiction with original unclipped dust jackets. He had a shiny briefcase divided into two internal compartments,
each tightly sealed against the other, one filled in the morning with egg sandwiches and apples so that he did not need to
waste his lunchtimes sitting down for lunch, the other filled in the afternoon from his midday book trafficking through Covent
Garden to the Charing Cross Road.

A modest antiquarianism did not make RT an unsuitable man for Employee Communications, the department in which we all, in
different ways, were paid to work.
Big Oil Times
was created to encourage
outside interests amongst employees, some sense of what lay beyond, but not too far beyond, their daily workplace. RT knew
a good deal about Guides and Calendars, the Art Deco architecture of Big Oil House itself, its clock with the coffin-shaped
hour hand and the cricket-bat minute hand, one of the biggest in London, known to older wits as Big Benzine. He knew why the
colour yellow was used for safety helmets.

He did not know much about how a refinery worked but that hardly mattered. Most office workers, the readers at whom his magazine
was aimed, had no knowledge of refineries either. RT’s job was to employ writers who could explain catalytic cracking and
associated mysteries, to choose photographers and artists who could remove the grime and make the crackers glow, and then,
much his most important responsibility, to make sure that anyone in the company with a right to complain about his magazine
had the chance to complain and correct the pages before they went to press. In Big Oil UK this was a large number of people.

RT always preferred the articles about the bees and water voles, some of the many creatures whose lives, we wrote, were studied
and enhanced wherever oil was discovered, sold or used. In 1977 there was the added excitement of North Sea exploration, offering
him the chance to show not only floating rigs and storage buoys the size of Nelson’s Column but monstrous fish from depths
that fishermen had never reached before. The illustrations of these were, in RT’s view, the equal of any lost thing that Mr
Brown might be seeking.

These men had the job of introducing me to bureaucratic life. Both James Holladay and Mr W had stressed the role of the office-worker
in understanding Alexandria. This was the year in which Cleopatra the Sixth lived only between nine and five. The story
quietly recommenced – beyond the perfumed barges on the River Cydnus – in between reporting on inter-refinery football matches
and the social responsibility demanded of pipeline-layers. It was always better to be seen doing something than nothing.

Everyone in Big Oil had an assistant. Many had an ‘opposite number’ too, sometimes a person whom they had never met, who did
a similar job, often the same job, in the other part of the company whose offices were in Holland. This was part of a political
accord in which neither the British nor the Dutch should dominate the other. It was a system whose balancing intricacies would
have fascinated the courtiers of any time and place, one which mere communications assistants like me (though not ourselves
possessing doppelgängers in The Hague) had also to understand. There was never just one executive with whom we could ‘clear’
copy or pictures for publication, whom we could ask whether the screw-top of a million-gallon oil barrel was an industrial
secret, an environmental hazard or a technical triumph to be paraded for employees. There were always at least two ‘clearers’,
normally many multiples of two, not always in the places where it seemed logical that they would be.

Miss Q was RT’s assistant, tall, tightly strung in the muscles around her eyes, elegantly tailored in red, as financially
extravagant as a Ferrari. She spent much of her mornings on telephoned arrangements for nights out with men who sounded much
older than her when she spoke to them and much, much older still when she spoke about them to her girlfriends the next day.
Some, we gathered, were powerful and famous, some not. She seemed masterful in balancing their interests against her own interests,
successfully for herself for the most part. She knew a great deal about the oil industry through her mother, who was close
to a senior man of Whitehall. She also knew
where one would most likely find a missing John Piper. Chelsea galleries were like childhood homes for her. But none of this
expertise seemed to serve her professionally as well as she hoped.

Big Oil information had to flow, like the oil itself, through the proper channels. RT had not appointed Miss Q himself and
they did not speak very much. It was RT who had told me about the ‘chain-smoking depressive’ of immense seniority whose office
at the end of the Public Affairs corridor was labelled Political Relations. This Miss R, it seemed, was the controller of
everything. But she would no more have consulted someone from our own office about petroleum revenues than keep her mouth
free of a Marlboro. The mysterious Mr Brown might possibly have more sense. But more likely he would not. Miss Q did not do
much at all. But then none of us did much at all. Doing much was not a virtue in our part of the oil industry. Those who did
too much faced all the usual dangers of the active, as well as some that were unique to this strange time and place.

RT’s boss – and mine – was a long-distance swimmer. Lew D had been a successful provincial journalist, tempted into Big Oil
first because his journalist wife, whose job was better than his, had wanted to work in London, secondly because he could
not get a job on Fleet Street himself, and thirdly because nowhere else could a man make the equivalent of a cross-Channel
swim each week in the office pool. He was a gentle superior who enjoyed gentle domination by women – by Miss R in the office
and by his wife at home. Each one trained him for the other. He looked like a kindly weasel, lean, sharp, short, quick-moving,
with darting eyes. He modelled himself on the then best-known editor in England, Harold Evans, whose ability to be everywhere
at once, in the newsroom, on the squash court, on war fronts and in swimming pools was already a thing of legend.

Lew supervised four publications, each with their own editor, for which he had the ‘higher responsibility like that of a regional
editor in chief’. Or that was how he put it when we first met. As well as
Big Oil Times
, there was
Big Oil UK News
, a tabloid for refinery workers and tanker drivers, and
Explore News
, a paper stapled like a school exercise book containing inspirational prose for our North Sea pioneers, only a few of whom
spoke English. Last and least there were the Newsletters, an occasional series aimed at communicating certain specific corporate
virtues, such as how carefully the company restored the countryside after it had built a liquefied natural gas pipeline.

Lew affected disdain for those who stood above him in the towering ladders of seniority. His own editors felt the same way
about him, not just the superior creators of
Big Oil Times
but the polyestered man who promoted Transport Cafe of the Year for
Big Oil News
and the Nordic-faced thriller-writer who printed safety warnings and helicopter timetables for riggers from Korea. If an
idea came from above, it had to be considered, managed, minuted with care but, ideally and if at all possible, not commissioned
for publication. Therefore suggesting a story to Lew D was something that only a newcomer would do, a 25-year-old graduate
with brief experience in chocolate advertising, some very nominal training in journalism at the BBC and an ambition to write
a book of ancient biography.

The most defined of my responsibilities was for the Newsletter series. But there was not, it seemed, a consistent need for
picture books of arable tranquillity over pipes of refrigerated high explosive. RT had tried me out on a trip to Heathrow
Airport to describe how smoothly Big Oil fuelled the planes; RJ had allowed me to write captions for a colour spread of Scottish
wasps; Miss Q had shown me how
to help her clear copy through some peculiarly impenetrable thicket of the company organogram. A few months after I arrived
some even more senior figures decided that we should aim to make the area around Big Oil House ‘come alive’ for our fellow
workers. This was the first time I had heard that phrase since Geoff the Editor introduced me to James Holladay.