Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (23 page)

On the way out in the corridor I saw Miss R herself. Miss R was never normally seen out of her office. There were rumours
that she sometimes slept there. To my amazement she invited me in, almost pulled me in. She ignored the toppling ashtray.

My plan had been to ask whether there might be a better job for me somewhere, maybe in her own department. But before I could
speak she placed her square face within inches of mine, pushed two tweed-covered elbows towards me across her desk and asked
what I was doing in Big Oil at all. After a few minutes of feigned interest in North Sea oilfields, I told her about both
Cleopatra projects, the long-standing and the latest.

‘Then why are you wasting your time here?’ she replied, tapping hard on the table and turning the ash-mountain into a long
grey river. She reminded me of V. ‘The only thing worth anything here is what the engineers do and what I do. They get the
oil out of the ground. I make sure we pay as little tax as possible on it. The rest is rubbish. Get out while you can. Stick
to Cleopatra but get her right. Remember: raising money, spending money, taxing, avoiding being taxed: that is most of what
there is.’

What about Mr Brown and these lost pictures? ‘Please, please,’ she grimaced. ‘Don’t tempt me. There was once an Antony Brown
here, somewhere in security. Now it is just a house name. Antony Brown is whoever gets the pointless job. You can’t imagine
the nonsense that keeps men, mostly men, employed in a place like this. But then if you can imagine it you will never escape
it.’

In the library the following day there were only three readers at 9 a.m., a teenager with a
Morning Star
under his arm studying
The Guardian
on a wooden rack, a stooped woman whose size, shape and mackintosh colour matched precisely the revolving bookcase into which
she peered, and a man with a briefcase and a knife who was neatly transferring dust-wrappers and the occasional illustration
from public ownership to his own.

Half a shelf of Roman history survived here, like the obscurest part of a forgotten empire. Its books had not been knifed,
deprived of their jackets or touched much at all except to push them tight together to make more room for the twentieth century.
They always seemed to squeal with relief when taken down and spread upon a desk.

Lew wanted to know what Cleopatra ate. Chicken was the new dish of the time, more fashionable than pigeon, quail and ostrich.
She had caraway, flax, lettuce, sunflower and sesame seeds and the now-extinct silphium of Cyrene. There were olives, cabbage,
courgettes, raw onions; coriander, scattered in tombs, was popular for taking to the next life. Was this what he wanted to
know?

I had to imagine what the readers of
Big Oil Times
wanted. I would not be the first – or last – to write a book like that. A very short summary for Cleopatra the Sixth took
only an hour and a half. The thin man had not even opened his
Morning Star
yet. The woman and the revolving bookshelf were still entwined in indecision. The book thief had just begun to read
The Rachel Papers
, after removing its black-and-yellow wrapper, and had not reached much beyond the conflict between the young Martin Amis
and his shaving mirror. At this rate Cleopatra could care for three children by two world leaders, make a bad call in one
of the world’s most important battles and die in mysterious circumstances, possibly involving snakes, and all before Lew had
begun his daily assault on the Continent.

All that I have done in the unusual absence of both Socratis and Mahmoud is to remember events that I barely ever think about
at all, a patch of colourless Big Oil past that is a part of this Cleopatra story because it would be incomplete without it.
James Holladay
had said that bureaucrats and trimmers were the key to historical understanding. The people who made things happen might be
grey. The prisoners going in and out their buses today are particularly grey.

Hotel Metropole, Place Saad Zaghloul

In the early morning darkness, beside the check-in desk at the Metropole Hotel, no one is as calm as yesterday. A pale waiter
in a white robe delivers coffee as though it were the alcohol of his reluctant evening work, each cup like a liquid explosive
cursed personally by his imam. The guards are not only awake beside their electronic gate but alert. The woman who two weeks
ago greeted me reluctantly to the home of ‘Cleopatra and her Antonio’ is now not even pretending a welcome. There is a line
of supplicants in front of her desk. The stained light from the Versailles Garden staircase falls on foreigners seeking rooms.

From my armchair by the window, I can see both the empty sidestreet and the queue inside. There is the guide I last saw at
Pompey’s Pillar, the one who was lecturing about Tutankhamun. The same young women are behind her, maybe a table-tennis team,
and behind them a man, dressed for winter, with a Canadian passport in his hand.

Closest to me, in the space where guests sit to check their messages and their bills, and wait for taxis, is the picnicking
family from the Roman Theatre, the ones who had hoped for better weather but were making the best of the cold. Wherever all
these people have been staying before, this morning they want to move here.

Journalists learn a sense of when there is news. ‘Has something happened?’ I ask the guide. ‘Not here’, she snaps as though
I were
about to molest one of her team or seize one of her rooms. The Canadian stamps his feet. The picnickers punch their phones.

I wish that they were not here. I have worked long and hard in these quiet armchairs, longer and harder than at any time I
can recall, perhaps since my attempts to restore some academic reputation for myself in Oxford forty years ago. Honour Moderations
was the name of the exam. This too is like an examination. I have no books, only a few scraps of paper in Room 114 upstairs,
final revision notes as it were. It is remarkable what remains catalogued under Cleopatra in my mind when I have forgotten
so much else.

CLEOPATRA THE SEVENTH

A year after leaving Lew D in Big Oil House, after he had wished me good luck and made a joke about ‘fucking Cleopatra’, I
was with him again. We were on a tour of pubs that he had especially requested. I was showing him the places that had ‘once
been favoured’ by my fellow journalists at
The Times
and
The Sunday Times
. Lew wanted to see where his hero Harold Evans worked. He wanted to drink in the Blue Lion, the Calthorpe Arms, the Pakenham
Arms and the Apple Tree.

We were in bars likely to be favoured no more. For only three of the past nine months had any copies of
The Times
newspapers been published. In one of the angriest industrial disputes even of those disputatious days, all of us were ‘shut
down’ or ‘locked out’ (the language depending on one’s political position towards the unions, the management and the government)
and it was far from clear to the journalists that we would ever again open up or be allowed back in.

I was now the newest recruit to the Business News section of
The
Sunday Times
. Lew was touchingly pleased to see me out of Big Oil and into journalism, the opposite direction to the route he had taken
himself. But he was sad to find that I was so soon describing the legendary haunts of his newspaper heroes as though I were
a tour guide here in Alexandria, offering disappointment, decline and neglect.

He was wearing a leather jacket that I had never seen before. Maybe it was what he had worn for work at the
Daily Mirror
. But he had the same gaze, the same reddened eyes and watery smile that got him each day from one meeting to another and
from Dover to distant yachts at lunchtime. We had barely sat down in the Calthorpe Arms, a quiet hovel where even in better
times it was possible often to find a table and read or write, before he declared himself equally determined that I should
give up Cleopatra.

That was the main message he had come to bring me. I had a proper job now, he said. I had been lucky enough to leave Big Oil.
I had been even luckier to get a job on
The Sunday Times
. I was a newspaper man. If I had to write about someone else’s life, surely I should at least take on Margaret Thatcher instead.
I tried gently to change the subject. I would be wrong to make quick decisions. Surely he understood that. No, he did not.

I said I had just returned from Syria on a Lufthansa flight for journalists. Any free trip that kept us out of trouble was
an approved assignment when there was no real work. I had visited Palmyra, an ancient site that Lew had reluctantly visited
in his youth. We had talked about it before in Big Oil House, the ruined palaces of Queen Zenobia who, two centuries after
Cleopatra’s death, had idolised her memory, dined on her dinner plates and even briefly conquered Alexandria. This time Lew
remembered only how ill he had been in Palmyra.

He took a sip of Calthorpe ale. Margaret Thatcher was what he
most wanted to talk about. She was new. She was a big story, whether or not she crashed and burned or came out on top. I had
already met her. He was respectfully impressed by that. Yes, there were journalists who thought and hoped she would be here
today and gone tomorrow. That was all the more opportunity for a young man with a future in newspapers. And yes, there would
always be newspapers. The shutdown would be short. We journalists were still being paid.

Was he suggesting, I asked, that Mrs Thatcher was somehow like Cleopatra? Was she somehow a modern substitute? No, the beauty
of her was that she was not. She was nothing like her. Why did she have to be like anyone that was old and gone? I needed
to ‘get real’. That was the beauty of journalism. Its characters had to be real. He did not mean the people writing the stories:
some of them were fantastical and always had been. He meant those they were writing about. If I did not understand that, I
would never succeed.

My Big Oil writing tutor was rambling a little and suddenly he seemed about to fade. For someone who talked much about drink
he did not drink well. His
Big Oil Times
staff had often joked about that. Then just as suddenly, with a fresh burst of nostalgic enthusiasm, he abandoned his lecture
on newspaper skills and asked, as though he were a tourist, where all the ‘back-stabbers’ now came, reeling off the names
of pubs around Fleet Street where it seemed that many backs had been stabbed, the King & Keys and Coach & Horses, places where
I had never been.

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.