Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (22 page)

The summer atmosphere was torpid. Not even the imminent arrival of Mr Brown seemed quite as surprising or urgent as it had
before. When Lew asked to see me, I was quite unreasonably surprised. Had I thought any more, he asked, about the things-to-see-around-the-office
instructions? What could we say about the statues that stood between Big Oil House and the Thames? Would one of them make
a little feature for the
News
or
Times
? I was ready for this. I had taken a look while on a walk to the other side of the river, home of Big Oil’s bigger international
brother, the place of fabled free office lunches and Olympian facilities for swimmers.

The Victoria Embankment Gardens were full of bronze figures, mostly social reformers and fortunate soldiers, all well past
their date for inspiring anyone. Also suitably nearby was a war memorial given by the people of Belgium in thanks for their
liberation by Britain in the First World War, a curved white stone wall encompassing three figures in a blob of bronze. But
our Dutch friends were, it seemed, unpredictable on the subject of Belgians, Germans too, especially recent Germans – indeed
on all modern history, since a good oil company had so often to be a good friend to all sides.

My suggestion instead was that we cross the Embankment and describe Cleopatra’s Needle, the thin granite column, watched by
two bronze sphinxes, where the pleasure boats picked up tourists for river trips. This was something, possibly the only useful
thing, that I already knew about. Its pink sides and pigeon-spattered tip could be seen from any window on the Thames side
of our building. If there were to be a direct line drawn between us and our international centre, Cleopatra’s Needle was the
pencil that would draw it. Any office messenger on his way to the pedestrian bridge might briefly stop and ask himself where
it came from, why it was there and what the signs on the side (notably better preserved than those of the Belgian War Memorial)
might possibly mean.

And he might also ask ‘Who the fuck was Cleopatra?’, said Lew, interested enough to push his pencil jar away but worried perhaps
that his feature story could become a tutorial in hieroglyphics. ‘Yes, we can explain that too,’ I replied, ‘though I should
say now that Cleopatra probably didn’t do much more with her needle than move it from one part of Egypt to another. She may
not have even done that. It was already more than a thousand years old when she was born. We gave it her name because she
was the most famous Egyptian we knew when it arrived. We hadn’t discovered Tutankhamun in 1877.’ I was stumbling. Lew looked
up as though he was just about to call a halt. A blue pencil, spun between forefinger and table-top, was rolling towards him.
He wrote down the date on his pad. One form of
impatience turned instantly into another. Pulling his shoulders back, he said: ‘So it’s been here a hundred years, it’s a
centenary, let’s do it.’

I was not quite quick enough to grasp the point. This stimulated a diatribe on how an anniversary was the perfect approach
to any story like this one. Not to see that immediately was a failure. Then quickly we were back to Cleopatra. This was going
to be a test. He had to go to a meeting across the river and while he was away I was going to write down a list of points
about her that would interest Big Oil readers. ‘Put the most important first. Then build out from there. Remember what I said
before. A news story is like a pyramid, the main point at the top, then gradually expanding and falling away until the bottom
points only survive if there is nothing else to print. Yes, a pyramid, rather appropriate for this story, don’t you think?’

He rummaged in his centre desk drawer for his swimming trunks. Did Cleopatra build her own pyramid? He mused with a smile
as though it would simply be nice to know. Anything to do with oil? He asked this second question with more seriousness. His
first trunks, blue, damp and smelling of dust and ammonia, were found, sniffed and discarded into his holdall to take home.
He took a second red and dry pair from his briefcase, wrapped them inside a yellow towel from another drawer, wrapped the
whole seaside roll in a bag marked ‘Documents’ and said we would talk further when he was back.

I have spent a whole day at this cafe table by the courthouse, the first day of seeing neither Socratis nor Mahmoud. Perhaps
their lives have returned to normality and they are working. Mahmoud has a job in an office that is part of the court system,
not here in the old city centre where the prison vans ply back and forth, but somewhere
out to the east nearer the empty palace of King Farouk. Socratis said he was going west to collect up his cars before the
police did – and to make sure that his mother was getting the due attention of her son.

Soon it was lunchtime, a hallowed hour in Big Oil world. How to leave the office was a recognised business skill, requiring
the skills of a silent waiter sliding a kipper onto a breakfast plate. If the fewest questions were to be asked, a conjuror’s
arts could be useful too. On the desk of the fifth member of our little team, Miss P, secretary, assistant, knower of all
things, ‘lifer’, as those near retirement called themselves, was a list of where everyone was and how long they might be.
RT and RJ were seeing the printers and had a meeting at 2.30. Miss Q was with her mother and had a dental appointment at 3.00.
There was a question mark beside both of these entries.

Beside the name Peter was a blank space followed by the words ‘dry cleaning in wardrobe’. This meant that in our largest grey
steel cabinet was my grey suit from Walters of the Turl, purchased in Oxford for interviews four years before and perfect
now for Big Oil; also a pink button-collared shirt, one of three bought from a sale in Jermyn Street for my first job, advertising
trainee and strategist for Curly Wurly chocolate bars, enthusiastic participant in meetings where the names of chocolate boxes
were dreamed and tested. A narrow horizontally striped tie in petrol shades was also from Jermyn Street, bought singly, very
sensibly too, despite the advice from my ad-man adviser that clothes should always be bought in volume to show consistent
style.

RJ’s desk was the only one by the window. Such pale light as came through the grimy gauze and glass was reserved exclusively
for our
resident artist. The note about how to behave when Mr Brown arrived was the most visible part of a small wedge of paper keeping
apart the frame and sill and allowing a very slight breeze to rustle the motoring pages of
Exchange and Mart
. It was impossible to look out and see Cleopatra’s Needle. But I knew it was standing outside with a pigeon on its tip. There
was always a pigeon on the tip of what had to be the oldest work of art in London. Part of Lew’s advice during the blue-pencil
session had been to note carefully the first thing thought or said about a story, the first words about it delivered at the
time. Often this first thing was the story itself, the peak of the pyramid. So often in his news-editing days he had heard
the real story from a reporter’s lips and then found it nowhere mentioned in the copy. That was a lesson worth learning. Back
at my own desk, this was the first of my points, not necessarily yet in the right order, but a start.

1) Oldest thing in London; carved from Aswan granite about 1500
BC
. Correction: oldest work of art in London outside a museum; oldest man-made object open to rain and pigeons every day. Not
a great fate for an obelisk sacred to the Sun god and designed to bring old friends back every day from the dead.

2) First erected near what is now Cairo in the reign of Thothmes III to celebrate his third celebration of the festival of
Set. Interesting? No.

3) Cleopatra did not build pyramids. This was one of the questions that Lew had asked. A lesson of the blue-pencil session
had been the need that a reporter should answer his editor’s questions. Ideally, he should give a positive reply. It was not
possible to pretend that Cleopatra had ever built a pyramid. Cleopatra cared more for theatre and politics. A good show was
cheaper than rocky reality – and better
for posterity too, since who remembers any Egyptian Pharaoh’s death better than hers? As for the main point: no pyramids.

4) The energy industries of ancient Egypt were the slave trade and what we know now as ‘alternatives’. The annual flooding
of the Nile was the greatest alternative energy source in history. Its source was a secret like the Philosopher’s Stone. It
too turned earth into gold. Cleopatra had less land and fewer slaves than the great Pharaohs of the past, including the one
who had her needle made. But she still had a unique source of water power (a fashionable ‘alternative energy’ subject for
Big Oil in the seventies and one on which a Newsletter was already planned) as well a level of slavery which only her most
ambitious competitors could match. As for oil, in her Arab territories a black ooze sometimes rose to the surface and could
be sold at a good price for making primitive forms of cement. We might say that she had a modest bitumen business.

Almost two hours had gone by. There was still a stuffy silence in all our offices and in the corridor outside. Not even Miss
P was back, which was odd since she had the most limited of excuses why she should not be at her desk. Twenty yards away Miss
R, oblivious of my failure to see her, was holding important conference calls about profits from the North Sea fields. I read
again my Cleopatra points and wondered which to choose next.

Where was Lew now? Probably on his hundredth Olympic length, recognisable only by grey curls and a clear plastic goggle strap
on the back of his neck, halfway to France in his mind and in a hot-metal print room in his dreams. No. Suddenly he was back,
without his document bag, without his jacket, with a memo in his hand, red-eyed and ready for a hard afternoon.

He wanted a meeting immediately. There was ‘a flap on’. ‘Is it to do
with Mr Brown?’ asked Miss P who had arrived like a rabbit in a half-successful conjuring trick, just a few seconds after
her boss and carrying two plastic bags. ‘Never mind that,’ said Lew. ‘Where is everyone?’ Miss P consulted her list and read
it aloud from printers to dentist, omitting any words like lunch or mother that might not be helpful. ‘Well, we’ll just have
to wait,’ he moaned. ‘You come on in now,’ he barked at me, ‘and at least we can get on with fucking Cleopatra.’

His office was much as it had been before, the scent of chlorine a little sharper, the limbs of its occupant less taut, almost
languid. ‘So what have we got?’ he said. ‘Anything yet for me to see?’ I had hoped that this conversation could have been
postponed, even forgotten. I pushed the pages of Cleopatra points across the cratered surface of the table, more to show effort
than usefulness. They were not even typed since Miss P had not been there to type them.

He read slowly and in starts, like a man reading a railway timetable. ‘A good start and some good appreciation of the problems’,
he finally announced. ‘So how does the story go?’

‘Do you mean our Big Oil story? I hadn’t quite got the angle on that.’

‘No, not yet,’ he replied. ‘I was thinking about this during my conference across the river, a lot of interminable nonsense
that you wouldn’t believe, and I was just wondering what went on at all those parties. You’ve seen the film, the one with
Elizabeth Taylor?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but do you really want to know?’

He leaned back, half-closing his eyes: ‘I’ll tell you when I’m bored, and when I am you can go back to the Alternative Energy
Newsletter.’

‘Right, this is the potted version,’ I began breezily.

‘Never patronise your readers,’ he snapped, subsiding further into
his deep executive chair as I meandered through marble colonnades, libraries and lighthouses. After the third course of wine,
women and jewellery, he seemed to be fading into sleep. I asked if that were enough for now. Lew hardly moved. ‘Enough for
ever?’ Then the mood changed. ‘We have to get you doing something. Get RJ to sort out some pictures. We’ll want Taylor, of
course. Were there other versions? And then, of course, there’s the bloody needle. He can get one of his extortionate photographers
to take that. It’s amazing how much they charge for taking pictures of something that doesn’t even move, that hasn’t moved
for a hundred years. What did Cleopatra eat? Did she watch her weight? Don’t forget the centenary angle. But we can come back
to that.’

He crossed the corridor to find Miss P still in solitary charge of five desks. ‘RJ and RT will like this idea, nothing to
do with oil, or not much, and great for photography.’ This was not the time to say – or even to think – that, however attractive
an idea this might be for
Big Oil Times
, it was not one which RT and RJ would like if it came from Lew D. If Lew were enthusiastic – and it seemed strangely as though
he was – it might be better if this initial keenness were first allowed to cool. Fortunately neither of them were yet back
in the office. Miss Q, according to a note on my desk, had called to say she would be away till late tomorrow morning. I left
the same message: I was going to be ‘in the library’. If Mr Brown had come then for his picture check, he would have been
guaranteed all the lack of disturbance that he was alleged to crave.