Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (24 page)

These ‘space barons’ were the men of power. In 1979 newspapers were small in pages and large in staff. Most of what was written
never appeared in print. For a century
Times
correspondents had grown used to writing despatches read by no one other than the editor and his so-called ‘leader writers’.
That was one reason that the paper’s opinion was so respected: it was based on original research, facts that the readers never
knew.

In the expansive sixties more stories had appeared each day, some even with the byline of the writer attached. But even in
1979, if any story were published at the length it had been written, it was a miracle, and almost certainly a mistake. ‘Space’
was the prime asset of the paper. The ‘space barons’ were the men who dispensed it, who decided what was published and what
was not. On
The Sunday Times
, with only one publication a week and dozens of teams and hundreds of individuals wanting to fill it, the barons were like
kings. The Blue Lion had been their court.

Lew also wanted to visit the Pakenham Arms, a place on a corner of two empty streets at the back of the offices. The Pakenham
was an ‘anywhere pub’ that might have been in Brentwood or Chelmsford, a place of satisfyingly small distinction. He had been
told that this was where ‘the Business News boys’ met most nights, the reporters whom he might sometimes need (or pretend
to need) for his own Big Oil work. This was partly true. I was a Business News reporter myself. My new colleagues did meet
there some nights, but not, I said, most nights.

Unpredictability was a useful tool. Business writers then were not as open to businessmen as they later became. They were
often hard
for businessmen even to find. The best qualification to be a business writer was to hate business. Theatre critics loved actors;
the Labour staff loved trades unions; cricket writers batted and bowled every Sunday. The correspondents in Washington and
Cairo and everywhere else were men who loved their temporary homes. But business writers deeply distrusted businessmen, and
much preferred talking to each other. When they wrote biographies, they were like the historians of ancient Greece and Rome;
they wrote in bold colours, for purposes of occasional praise and frequent damnation, about people who would never meet them
and whom they never met.

By the time we left the Pakenham that evening it was almost nine o’clock. A large black car stopped beside us and a large
limping man stepped onto the pavement. This was a rare sighting of the boss of bosses at Times Newspapers, a man whose destination
was the office back entrance and who could not at that time have safely had a drink in any of the bars where Lew and I had
been. Marmaduke Hussey, or Duke as he was known, was the man charged with modernising the machinery, making the unions as
museum-worthy as the presses. He had much on his mind. His campaign was not going well. He was not producing any newspapers
at all. Each week their readers were fleeing to rival titles still in print.

He noticed me only because, unusually, I was wearing a blue Trinity tie embroidered with the black griffins of the college
crest. He was wearing the same. He asked my name and I introduced him to Lew who knew much more than I did about the Chairman,
an industrial hero of the Thatcher age, and was delighted to meet him in person.

V signalled her imminent arrival at
The Sunday Times
, just as she had done at Oxford, with short, mocking, mildly abusive messages, each signed with her initial. The notes did
not arrive with quite the regularity of the Trinity post. On one visit I found three. Our post came in sacks that stayed unopened
for weeks. Our strike-struck offices were on a form of bureaucratic life support. We were alive but not functioning, anaesthetised,
ready to be brought round at a moment’s notice, a moment that was perpetually postponed. No one knew whether the unions or
the management would be the first to crack.

Every few weeks we came to Gray’s Inn Road to hear the news of the dispute. We held trade union chapel meetings and news conferences
on ‘long-term projects’. Lew was surprised that I had joined the journalists’ union but as a newcomer, and a latecomer to
newspapers too, it had seemed a good idea. There was no other way to hear of management tactics or the printers’ response.
Lew thought that ‘Duke’, whose hand he had proudly shaken, would defeat the printers, become a Thatcherland hero and need
never again skulk into his office by the Pakenham Arms’ back door. V, as was clear from her notes, hoped for a very different
outcome.

My old friend scrawled that journalists were ‘scabs’ who should ‘back your brothers’. My old boss thought that every trade
unionist
was a threat to the national order. My own view was somewhere in between. The dispute was yet another chance to continue with
Cleopatra while, for the first time, being able to claim that that I was being paid to do so.

Most journalists took other jobs – and thus were being paid twice. At every meeting we listened to fraternal delegates from
faraway places and prided ourselves that, without our appropriately paid inactivity, there would be no newspapers to reopen
when the dispute was over, whichever side claimed the victory.

None of V’s notes prepared me for the shock of first seeing her in the newsroom, swinging her legs on a grey metal desk during
an explanation to us of what expenses could and should be claimed for work which, while not producing stories for next week’s
paper, was necessary for maintaining contacts, conducting long-term investigations and generally ensuring our permanent readiness
to return to life.

I recognised her immediately. I did not expect her to be there, not in person, but she was dressed more or less as she always
had been, in black, in a short skirt and shaggy sweater (my mother, and probably hers too, would have called it ‘old dishcloth’)
but hardly different at all from my rough-book drawing of a dozen years before. The only addition was a badge in support of
NATSOPA clerical, one of the many warring union branches.

She looked superior and smug. She refused to meet my eye. My only aim was to work my way to the side of the room and get her
out as fast as possible.

Out on the broad grey pavement she laughed and pointed across the road. I wondered which of the pubs was the least unsuitable
to take her. The Blue Lion was too public in every way. The Apple Tree was always packed with printers. Journalists there
were generally
discouraged. The Pakenham maybe? She would have felt at home among the anti-capitalist reporters of our Business News. But
I was not sure I wanted my prickly new colleagues to meet my prickly old friend.

It had to be the Calthorpe. A few minutes later V became the first woman that I had ever seen there amid the medicinal gas,
the sea-coloured tiles, the club-wielding bodyguards and the Welsh. I bought us two beers in bottles, the safest choice. After
some brief words about teachers’ union solidarity committees, threats to craft skills from foreign capitalists and other cries
from the chapels, we continued almost as we had done in 1971, as though we were continuing the same conversation, first reprising
the main points lest there was something we had forgotten.

‘How are Maurice and Cleopatra?’

I had not seen Maurice for a while.

‘He is still advertising,’ I said.

‘Himself?’

‘No. Dog food. He met a very nice boy a few months ago at Crufts, while persuading the champion chihuahua’s owner that he
owed it all to the chunky goodness of Maurice’s client.’

She smiled but not for long.

‘And Cleopatra?’

‘Well, it’s not easy,’ I said, ‘what with all the uncertainty of the dispute.’ I had just written a peculiarly dull passage
about the Perusine War, a string of battles in which Antony and Octavian, still nominally allies, had fought through proxies
over the fate of unfortunate Italian towns. I was not feeling very confident.

As before, my floundering did not go unremarked.

‘I don’t think you are going to get Cleopatra round here.’ She
looked around the Calthorpe as it slowly filled with middle-aged anxiety.

‘What about the useless males Cleopatra had to deal with? Remind me again of those.’

‘Canidius, the general, the one you thought was stupid at the beginning of the film?’

‘I don’t think he would get you very far.’ In 1979 no one yet knew about Cleopatra’s handwritten assent to his tax-breaks
for wine, the exemption certificate that had lasted two thousand years in a coffin.

‘There is Hirtius. We talked about him once. Greedy, pompous, a writer.’

‘Better.’

‘Or Dellius, the pimp, Cleopatra’s escort to Tarsus. Also a writer.’

‘Too easy.’

‘Plancus. What about him?’

‘Try me.’

‘He changed sides. He was famous for changing sides. He was the closest man to Antony and then abandoned him. He thought Cleopatra
was a bad influence.’

‘Promising.’

‘A big man at Oxford once told me he was the most important of them all. He was not in the film, or in Shakespeare, but he
did at least two other things that once made him famous, well infamous really.’

‘You mean the pearls?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the slithering about in a mermaid costume?’

‘Yes. How do you know about that?’

She ignored the question.

‘You should write about what you know. You don’t know Cleopatra.’

‘I don’t know Plancus – except that he judged the contest between Antony and Cleopatra over who could put on the most expensive
dinner.’

‘Yes, and she dissolved a huge pearl earring in her wine to win the prize.’

‘Plancus did stop her dissolving her second earring too.’

‘Maybe.’ She nodded and pulled a piece of cardboard from her beer. We were undeniably raising the tone at the Calthorpe Arms.
‘There was also the time that he slopped around Cleopatra’s throne as a sea god with a mermaid’s tail, full blue body make-up
too. Unusual for a Roman Consul.’

‘Well, it was a probably a fancy-dress party. All Alexandrians liked dressing up. But anyway, why do you know so much about
Plancus?’

V paused. She knew she had a good line ahead. ‘Plancus was always in the Red Tents. He had an axe and a cane. He was the man
in charge.’

‘What Red Tents do you mean?’

‘Maurice’s Red Tents. Plancus was the MC, the ringmaster, the man who kept us in order.’

I tried to hide my surprise, unsuccessfully as ever. She paused.

‘Don’t worry. I wasn’t one of his mermaids under the carpet with their legs stuck out into the corridor. Those were nearly
always boys.’

‘I was one of the statues around the sides. We wore veils and not much else. Sometimes I was the one who played Alexander
the Great’s sister and asked for the password. And once I was Cleopatra when the usual one was away. Our Cleopatra was never
available to customers either. She liked to watch. She had finished her exams by then.’

‘So, Maurice did put on his play, the one from the college erotica library, but not in the college gardens.’

‘You could say that. Someone else started it, someone else from Brentwood. Quite a school. Didn’t I always say so? But he
died, threw himself from the Amsterdam Hilton, or so they said. Maurice took it on, made it more fun.’

‘But why you? Wasn’t it rather unpleasant?’

‘Only sometimes. It was more show than anything else. Not much happened, at least not where I could see. The tent within a
tent within a tent was always a bit impractical. It looked good. It was a job. I got paid. And I got to spend time with Maurice.’

The Calthorpe was by now almost full. There was an intensifying whiff of gas and a louder bubbling of Welsh vowels. V continued
for some while to speak to me as though she were still the older girl, still embarrassed to be seen with a young boy outside
a cinema.

At lunchtime there was a message and a map from Mahmoud, showing the coast road to the east. At 4 p.m. he was waiting, as
promised, where the Montaza beach meets the road, by the pink-and-white holiday resort whose last regular occupant was Egypt’s
last ruling king. It was safer at the edge of town, he said, which was not the reason he had given when he had first mentioned
my coming here. He had insisted then that no one writing about Cleopatra should come to Alexandria without visiting these
fantasy turrets.

King Farouk had lost his throne in 1952: ‘when you were only one years old’, said Mahmoud.

The king, he said, was ‘not a bad man’. He had shown ‘youthful promise’, even if his biographies show him only as a harmless
collector of red cars and razor blades. He had been harassed by foreign powers and ungrateful Egyptians like old Mr Zaghloul.

Yes, his life had ended in ignominy and exile, famed for his
pornography collection and dying, eventually, from one too many Lobster Thermidors. But he was ‘not to be derided for that’.
In fact, said Mahmoud, ‘his memory was increasingly revered’.

We could not go inside the Montaza Palace. Only the President, the fourth in line of the non-royal pharaohs of Egypt, was
allowed to use it and he never did. But we could admire the generous use of the letter F in the decoration, a recognition
of the immortality of not merely the king himself but of his sisters, Fawzia, Faiza, Faika and Fathia – and of his children,
Ferial, Fawzia, Fadia and Fuad.