The Senecans

by Peter Stothard

  ‘Those history books were not, however, what brought Seneca and me to our first time together. I was too young for them in 1962. It was Mr V, leaning over the table on which he never ate, who explained to me why the tutor of Nero’s childhood, the writer of his speeches, the calmer of his whims, the profiteer from his policies, was at this moment at the most perilous point of his life, standing (as in my memory he still stands) beside a balsa couch, his heavy-lidded eyes dipped down, waiting for a signal from the reclining young tyrant that he might speak. That was when I first heard Seneca’s name, not a very flamboyant name, not a Spartacus or a Cleopatra, a name that nonetheless, like those others, stayed.’

  Miss R turns and traces a circle with her hand.

  ‘Seneca and Nero are together and alone, unusual positions for an emperor and a victim. Nero is not on a throne and that too is a concession to his former teacher who, when permitted, can look directly at the thick neck, thin lips and light grey eyes of the man to whom he once taught the arts of persuasion.’

  ‘What exactly is going on?’, she asks.

  ‘In 62 AD or 1962?’

  ‘Both’, she barks.

  ‘In 62 AD. Seneca has for thirteen years been the closest man at Nero’s side. It is eight years since, as a boy of seventeen, Seneca’s pupil succeeded to the throne of Rome.’

  ‘During this time there have been ominous changes. Seneca’s job as tutor came from Nero’s mother, Agrippina, whom Nero has just murdered. Seneca’s power has been assisted by a head of the palace guard who has just died from an infection in his throat.’

  ‘In his eighth year of absolute power Nero wants to be an artist more than a statesman – and the presence of a political adviser who writes plays and philosophy is an irritant, a reminder of a rival. The Emperor, his hair yellowing, his legs thinning, has come to prefer more ruthless flatterers. Seneca wants permission to retire. He has no family in Rome except his wife. There was a son but he has long ago died.’

  ‘Seneca wants escape, nothing more than escape. Will Nero let him go? Will he thank him? Will he have him killed? Will he watch him be killed? Those questions invite the damp and the cold even though the afternoon is hot.’

  ‘So what was the point in 1962?’

  ‘That retiring from a political court is as hard as arriving in it. That was the first political lesson I ever heard. V’s father whispered it into my eleven-year-old ear that day behind the net curtains of his bungalow by the sea, twisting his knife towards a fleshy lump of wood. Neither Hitler nor Stalin liked men to retire of their own free will. No more did Claudius or Nero.’

  ‘This Mr V became my teacher as well as seaside puppet-master. The balsa Seneca thanks the balsa Nero for the opportunities that have made him rich and offers to return that wealth (or most of it) to the place from which it came. He recalls his humble origins in Cordoba, in distant Spain and pleads to be able himself to return to where he began. This is the right time, he says. To do and acquire more would offend the laws of due proportion.’

  ‘Nero listens. He screws his eyes. He gives the look of an old friend and the answer of an executioner. His face is hard to read, just as Seneca taught him to make it. He turns his old tutor’s arguments back on him, just as he once learnt to do, just as his mother once wanted him to learn to do.’

  ‘Nero does not need to prove a case only to take his tutor’s case apart. He speaks of his own youth and Seneca’s useful age, his continuing desire to be warned when he is on slippery paths, the inevitable incomprehension that will surely occur if Seneca suddenly disappears. The careless or unkind might even allege that Nero has frightened him away – and that might be a damaging charge to the Emperor, surely an outcome that Seneca does not wish.’

  ‘The conversation ends. The skin from Seneca’s cheeks collapses over his ears. The lines across his chin are like the thin spokes of a wheel. The face, like the man, is lessened by the loss of imperial light. Nero can return to writing, to his new wife of whom his mother disapproved while she was alive, and to dressing men and women in pitch-dipped gowns and burning them in his gardens. Seneca can bathe and change his own sweated clothes. His career does not abruptly end. For a short time it is allowed to fade away.’

  Miss R walks to the window and takes a deep breath as though it were open, as though she were about to speak herself. Is she surprised? What was she expecting? This is not a story I have ever told before.

  ‘Was seeing Seneca like that a shock?’

  ‘Not entirely. On the way to Walton V indicated in her own indirect way that all might not be quite as I expected. On that grey 60s Sunday, while we waited for the green-and-yellow bus, she warned me both of her father’s ways with Roman history and his record of rages. But I did not understand what she meant. In 1962 I was eleven years old and my knowledge of Rome and rage were equally small.’

  ‘That was when Mr V had only recently left the semi-detached house, almost identical to the one attached to my own father’s work, on the Essex clay of the Rothmans Marconi estate. V’s parents were deemed “separated”, a rare, cold word in that place and time. V was a year older than me but many years wiser. When she told me to tread carefully with her dad it did not seem important. I listened. I loved to hear her speak. But I lacked experience as well as knowledge of what she was saying.’

  “‘Sheltered’ is how my childhood would now be termed. Anger was as alien as extravagance. My primary school teachers would bluster from time to time but not at me, and not at V either when she was in the same class at the same school the year before. My own father, Max, a recent escaper to Essex from the Nottinghamshire coal-lands, was the mildest of men, even milder than the gentlest teachers in our gentle Rothmans estate where men designed military machinery.’

  ‘V’s father was a laboratory technician. He made hard steel models of military radars during the day and soft wooden models of almost anything else by night, nights that for the past few months he had been spending some thirty miles away by the sea, in the town that Daniel Defoe called Walton Under the Nase, a more accurate name, I have always thought, for a place permanently tumbling into the sea. Mrs V (as I always knew her) had ejected him from the family home. I did not know how or why.’

  ‘It was rare for V to agree to see me on a Sunday but, when her job was to visit her estranged father, she found me useful. My reward was to spend bumpy hours looking at her legs in her weekend-shorter skirt. The price was to be in Walton at 1 o’clock on that October day, sitting at the high end of a steeply sloping sofa, waiting too long for lunch, admiring wooden walls and pillars in the window of a bungalow glowering at the sea.’

  ‘I was nervous because, as on the two previous days I visited Mr V, I was not supposed to be there. My mother, the prouder of my parents, an escaper from the city of Nottingham itself rather than its surrounding “sticks”, disapproved of the laboratory technician and his daughter. Our Rothmans estate was home to engineers and mathematicians from all over the country, each of them chosen for their part in making radars for the postwar safety of the West. With no common roots, ours was a world of hastily defined social distinctions – and for us in the lower middle of the range of classes, those who were a fraction lower down were deemed much the most dangerous.’

  ‘All the children of the military engineers learnt their letters and numbers, mostly numbers, in the same classrooms of Rothmans school, a single-storey block of bricks. But outside school I was supposed to face slightly up the social ladder rather than slightly down. Laboratory technicians like Mr V were a little lesser than electrical engineers like Max Stothard and it was better, my mother said, that I stayed away from where they lived, either as man and wife together or, yet worse, apart.’

  ‘The Seneca scene occurred on the third visit by V and me to Walton. We were late. The back seat of the bus had spent more than an hour on the roadside, the peculiar indicator then to other buses that it was over-heated, under-dieseled or in some other sort of distress. When we finally reached the righ
t street, V asked if I minded going on alone while she found a shop and bought some sort of peace offering on behalf of her mother.’

  ‘I walked up the crazy-paved path through a lawn of artificial grass, the door opened, and Mr V smiled at me like a white mouse and pulled me in. He said nothing. He shuffled me beyond his hall of small wooden model toys, past the cloakroom in which he had built a precisely scaled model of our estate (I could see my house and its own plastic grass: I could see the house that once had been his), and into the front room where there was just one large model – of Roman pillars, pilasters, porticoes, peristyles and ponds. Behind thick curtains, a double row of net that gave a dirty, salt-stained light, modesty even by the standards of Essex in 1962, was a peculiar imagining of an imperial past.’

  ‘V and her father were alike in many ways, both blond and pale-clothed, pale-faced too, puffy around the arms, like the cream chewy toffees that the travelling sweetshop brought us, like the balsa itself which in this house, unpainted and unvarnished, filled every visible space. He was a blotting-paper man, she a sheet of chalk, a neatly matching pair except that, after half an hour, still only one of them was there. V had not returned. There was only one of the V family visible on that May afternoon, in cream slacks, short-sleeved cricket sweater and an almost colourless aertex shirt.’

  ‘I waited for him to speak. On the first of my previous visits he had asked me about my senior school plans, just as a kindly neighbour should do, querying what subjects I was most looking forward to. Latin, French, Physics? Not Physics. On the second occasion he asked why I thought that the Rothmans estate had been designed in the way so clearly shown in his model. Why were there larger detached houses by the school and smaller ones, joined to one another in twos, threes and fours further away? Ours were both part of the middle but not in the same part of the middle.’

  ‘What was meant by middle class? Did I see myself on the Right or on the Left? At some time soon I might have to choose. On the first visit we ate egg sandwiches on the sofa of his kitchen, its walls as luridly coloured in red and yellow as his front room was white. There was a green parrot in a gilt cage. I told him that I was looking forward to Latin because a teacher had already introduced me to it and because my grandfather had left me a Latin book.’

  ‘The second time, while V was slowly making tea, he told me that the estate was a sign of order, a structure of people as well as bricks. Order was a necessity. His voice was barely audible and I did not then understand even what little I could hear. I was dutifully waiting only for the explosion that V said would one time surely come. When we left for the bus stop an hour later, I was still waiting. As we left I suggested to V that she had exaggerated her father’s rages, a jibe that cost me excommunication for the whole, long journey home.’

  ‘Only on the third visit did I hear the wooden Seneca plead for his life.’

  19.5.14

  Miss R left hurriedly last time. She had to take a call. Her visit today seems similarly to be interrupted. She arrives noisily and adds a suitcase to the patterns on the floor. This time she prefers not to sit. She arches her back against the wall, a position permanently poised for a strike.

  I am ‘not being helpful enough’. Her mother is buzzing her phone. Her mother is a nuisance. I am a nuisance too. She wants to get back to her assignment. She has a new list of questions.

  I look at her as though to protest. But I have begun this. I will go on with it. I am a bit surprised at my own patience but these are strange days, useless for any work of my own, not till I get to Cordoba.

  I could have answered many more of the questions if David Hart had not developed Primary Lateral Sclerosis, his rare form of Motor Neurone Disease, and ended his life, unable to speak or walk or make any more than the most limited use of his voluntary muscles.

  David was one of those who knew about ‘the letter’, the three sheets of paper on Mrs Thatcher’s table, the one directly outside the door to her Downing Street flat, where her closest confidantes could leave the most private things. He knew about ‘the interview’, too, or rather the side of it that I at The Times did not know.

  ‘Tell me about this letter – and about “the interview”, the interview “given by the Rt Hon Margaret Thatcher FRS MP to The Times on Monday 24 March 1986”. She speaks in quotation marks, reading from her list.

  I cannot tell her much. David claimed to know everything about both. I can tell her merely that ‘the letter’ was important for the brutality of the attack on its beleaguered recipient and her deep hurt in response. There was hurt from ‘the interview’ too.

  Miss R is right to be interested. Personal harm is at the heart of politics. So very few people ever knew about her hurts. David knew because Ronnie Millar told him. But I never got to ask Ronnie enough about it before he died, or to ask David before he became weak and voiceless, typing a little but mostly only medical queries, asking how Stephen Hawking’s condition was so slightly and significantly different from his own, googling with a single finger joint, sucking Chateau Lafite, his favourite, through a straw. Nothing can bring back answers to questions never posed.

  The kind of history happening outside my window today is so much clearer. This is land beside the Thames outside the Roman city walls that I walk past every day, land for traders, sailors, stevedores, soldiers, criminals, their guards and the desperately poor. White flakes fall thickly now on the ground around the disused gates, exposing other pits of past construction. Barrows appear below car parks.

  Plastic sheets protect the walls that are to be kept, the old brick walls, fifty-three courses of grey and gold that were here before the newspapers came. Only the red brick plant itself is set for immediate collapse. That will soon be history in the more usual modern sense, neither the uncovering nor questioning of evidence but the newly obliterated ‘you’re so history’ kind.

  It is amazing for me to see this. Hardly anyone else at 3 Thomas More Square seems to find it so but hardly anyone else here now was in Wapping when it mattered. There are hundreds of newspaper-makers above and below me in this office tower and everyone wants as fast as possible to get away. The fall has begun. Even on ground so often refilled over two thousand years this is an event.

  20.5.14

  I am expecting more questions about Margaret and the letter but instead she wants to know yet more about the V family.

  ‘They were so different from my own’, I say.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘The difference was not in every way. My father and Mr V looked quite alike. Mr V was somehow whiter because he was blond but Max Stothard was pale too, sharply so, where his hair stood against his skin. Maybe all adults looked the same then.’

  ‘My father had escaped a secretive family of Nottinghamshire Methodists to take a degree in Physics. Mr V had taught himself. They did not like each other but that was not a serious thing. Any casual observer would have seen interlocking cogs in Britain’s military machine for making radars.’

  ‘The big difference between them was the place of argument in life. In 1962 the Vs introduced me not only to politics, which eventually brought me to Margaret Thatcher and my Senecans, but to books of all kinds. The box room at the top of their stairs, the room that in our house was reserved for me and our suitcases, was their one place without balsa.’

  ‘Instead, they kept there the condensed versions of every sort of book from Marx to Miss Marple, Gibbon to Gertrude Stein, Kingsley Amis and Kingsley Martin, crime novels, classics from French and Russian, “Readers Digests” mostly, “Campbell’s” as Mrs V called them, stories without the added water, just like the soup.’

  ‘These books made V something of a polymath as a young girl. She could sound as though she had read almost everything. It was always dangerous to have an argument with V about what happened in a novel. Since none of us had yet graduated to discussing whether books were any good, or how or why they were any good, V was our very own professor of Politics and English.’

  Miss R s
crambles for her notes.

  ‘V knew books that Mr V and his wife had already absorbed for the corroboration, or otherwise, of their political hopes, hers well to the left of his. Copies of Dickens and Woolf were not merely Campbelled and digested but gutted, chewed and spat back between their plastic covers. Sometimes there was evidence of fatherly pleasure, the Annals of Tacitus on paper so thin that his ticks for Seneca dented a dozen pages behind each one.’

  ‘Or there were crosses of dissatisfaction, pages brown-inked “progressive cant” or ripped away completely. Words from the past were as serious as any screams of the present.’

  ‘And your own family?’

  ‘Between the Stothards and the Vs was not the tiny gap in employment status that exercised my mother and father, my mother most of all, but the massive gulf between silence and the clashing of ideas. V’s was a family where books and politics were one, a conservative vs two socialists at a time when under the Conservative Party we were told we had surely never had it so good. In my own house there were only five books and never any talk of politics at all.’

  ‘But you kept in touch with Mr V?’

  ‘For thirty years after that long-ago time he sent postcards and letters written in pale brown ink, mainly in the 80s when he noticed some egregious failure of mine to support Mrs Thatcher’s position in an argument, afterwards when his target was some incompetent whom he thought I might influence, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (the Work always deleted) or the Governor of the Bank of England (on a bad day he deleted England).’

  ‘Ours was a one-sided correspondence.’