I don’t fully understand her. ‘What picture?’
She does not want to answer and looks as though she would prefer to take back what she has said.
I still feel mildly confused. I should be sharper to talk about Woodrow, the man who will be at the heart of one of the strangest Senecan stories. Miss R almost relaxes as I begin with what was once well known but is not known so widely now.
‘Lord Wyatt of Weeford, as Mrs Thatcher later entitled him to be known, was a man of frail appearance, strong opinion, moderate skill in many things and magnificence at flattering the powerful. In 1984, when I met him first, he was already a veteran moth at the flame of British power, a famous host who poured out fine wines and fierce words, most of them in the cause of his friends. I saw him then as a populist snob, a proud man who prided himself on knowing the People’s opinion. He considered me to be a non-populist snob, much the worse kind.’
‘But you worked together for years’, says Miss R, for the first time seemingly surprised by my answer.
‘Yes, we needed to work together’, I tell her. ‘That did not mean that either of us wanted to.’
‘Yes, he worked for The Times and he had his weekly column in the News of the World. But he exercised his zealotry in the cause of characters who ranged rather narrowly, I thought, from Margaret Thatcher to the Queen Mother.’
‘Although he brought fun into a room, he brought trouble too. He was loyal, which was a virtue of a kind, except when he sat at night with a dictating machine in his hand. Many were the friends who thought him loyal until they read his diaries after his death. He was generous with his gifts, particularly to anyone who could help him in return or with whom he had shared his childhood. His “Voice of Reason” was a title held with a wide smile without irony.’
Miss R circles her hand towards her body, her way of saying that I should start further back.
‘So, yes, when he first invited me to lunch it was to abuse me as “a naive intellectual” and to use me in some way if he could. That is what he told me later. He wanted to talk about short stories and plays, his own in particular, the virtues of Robert Graves’s I Claudius and the possibility of his writing a novel himself, maybe on a Roman theme.
‘Did he mention any other Senecans?’
‘He told me that David Hart was a maniac, a security risk, more libertine than libertarian but somehow influential on Margaret. When he spoke about Ronnie, he used the term “hired hand” – even though Ronnie was never hired, never paid anything for his speeches, and Woodrow himself was always desperate to be paid. We drank wine of which he was volubly proud. His diary recorded the name.’
‘And about Frank Johnson?’
‘Woodrow thought that all wit was dangerous around Margaret Thatcher, but that Frank’s wit, being the subtlest, was some of the safest. She did not always understand it.’
Miss R looks unimpressed. Is that all?
‘I could tell you much more about Woodrow Wyatt’, I say, ‘but not from the first time we met. The first time we talked (I was alert now to all her distinctions of seeing, talking, sharing food) was on the Belgrano day when he delivered the identical ‘scholarship’ message to me that David and Ronnie did.’
‘You should have mentioned that before’, she complains, more like an interrogator than a historian.
‘I don’t think so. Woodrow was less directly concerned with me that day than were the other three. He aimed always at the highest point in any social or editorial pyramid – and that was not me on that day, nor on many others either.’
‘There were many later lunches, like the one at which he used Kingsley Amis to stop me trying to reduce his contributions to The Times; or the many times when he abused me for reporting the “madness” of John Major on Black Wednesday; and when he invaded my office with Frank Johnson on the way to a News of the World party and put his finger through an oil painting.’
I expect Miss R to ask for more about that Black Wednesday, September 16th, 1992. It was a well-known date once, when suddenly an economic policy collapsed, when speculators spread the political reputation of a Prime Minister across their trading room floors. It is one of her subjects, possibly her main subject. Instead she stares through the glass walls of the TLS, imagining some impossible past in which oil paint might have surrounded us instead.
‘Was Woodrow Wyatt, the News of the World’s Voice of Reason and dinner host to a Queen and Prime Ministers, a regular wrecker of art?’
‘No’, I say. From a sharp angle I can see her own face in the glass, querulous and broken into parts by the remains of transparent tape which, till yesterday, supported a calendar.
‘Woodrow was a connoisseur. He knew about paintings, particularly those by his ancestors. That was the day when he tried to show off his knowledge of the dull brown portrait of an artist at his easel that hung behind my office door. It was a ‘novelty item’, he said, that had entered the Times art collection only because its subject, a pseudonymous Jacob Omnium, who also used the name Belgravian Mother, was a once renowned writer of Letters to the Editor.’
‘“The small black dog playing around its master’s shoes”, he added proudly, “was from the brush of the lion-maker of Trafalgar Square, Sir Edwin Landseer”. Woodrow was still explaining this to Frank, as though to a moderately damaged child, when he touched the creature’s tail and a large patch of brown paint and varnish fell into his hand.’
Miss R smiles into the smeared mirror.
‘Frank Johnson was a wary friend to Woodrow as was I. On that picture-punching afternoon Frank stood beside us like a don about to enter a brothel, sardonic, contained, certain that he should not be on his way to the News of the World party but looking forward to “the copy” for his diary he might get from the night.’
‘As the tail pieces fell to the carpet he bounced up as though he were about to dance and smiled at me as though he had planned the embarrassment himself. Frank was impressed neither by Woodrow’s art conservation nor his art history, not at all when he noticed the little plaque at the bottom of the six foot picture that clearly identified Landseer’s sausage dog.’
‘As the tour continued, Frank smiled kindly only on the faces of Henri Blowitz and William Howard Russell, reporter heroes of the second half of the nineteenth century, the first fortunate enough to have been painted by the fashionable Frenchman, famous portrayer of Hamlet and Queen Victoria, Benjamin Constant, the second by a hack who made a decent job only of the Crimean tent.’
‘Both men pointed to the only female figure on the walls – and in the whole Times collection – a woman who had married a former proprietor, lived with him for a year and then died. Beside her was a peculiarly beautiful lily, with, in this case, no indication that the flower had come from a superior artistic hand. Frank smiled again. Woodrow scowled.’
Miss R is making me nostalgic, normally what she wants to avoid. Or maybe it is the looming sense here of departure and destruction.
‘These paintings were what everyone expected at The Times when I was there – antique, imposing. My walls themselves, however, were not at all what visitors to the newspaper imagined. They were low and windowless, their proportions liable to oppress even a captain of submarines and to delight only an interrogator of evil intent.’
‘When the journalists of The Times arrived at Wapping in 1986 our place of work was that long tube of brick that you can still see, corrugated-iron roofed, beside the main plant. At the far end, where the cartoonists sat to catch the light, there is the wide door for Charles Douglas-Home’s wheelchair, the door that he did not live long enough to need.’
‘In the then new red brick offices there was room only for machines, managers and the journalists of the News of the World and the Sun. So our home became this so-called Wapping Rum Store, built, it was said, by prisoners of Napoleon’s wars in grey and yellow brick and apparently set to survive now again, as expensive shops for the expensive flats when the latest Wapping revolution is complete.’
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br /> Beneath the mezzanine
‘No new window in this brick was then allowed. Before we moved to the London docks in 1986, few had even known of the Rum Store – and none had cared. But architectural conservationists became rapidly romantic. Some of those who sympathised with the print union protesters found it easier perhaps (and more soothing for their guilt) to put up small obstacles to our business than large ones.’
‘Perhaps the “rare French brickmanship” around us was indeed a masterpiece. Whatever the reason, all queries about whether a hole might be punched in our office walls for natural light, or for any reason other than a wheelchair, were met with shrugs. It was as though I had walked the two hundred yards up river to the Tower of London and asked for a white plastic conservatory on William the Conqueror’s White Tower.’
Miss R has had enough. This mention of King William is too much. She is getting anxious about her ‘chronology’. I have come to recognise when this happens. She fears a return to Thomas More. She wipes her face, complains about the dust in the air and studies her notebooks, the electronic pad first, then her SENECA.
6.6.14
Immediately below me I can see what will happen next. The last parts to be built are the first parts set to go, the glass tower of lifts and gardens and atria that grew from the western side only when it was safe for there to be glass on the plant at all. In 1986 there was only brick. Any panes then would have tempted bars and ball-bearings from those opposing Margaret Thatcher, market capitalism, Marxist groups deemed traitors to the Marxist cause, scab journalists, scab electricians, scabs of every kind who were doing ‘print-workers’ jobs’. In minutes it will be glassless again.
Yellow cranes carry crashing balls of steel. There are grey concrete ramps where escalators once gleamed. Blocks of ceiling-lights, anonymous parcels of weight and black tape, hang down from cables like bodies brought down from a mountain. Fountains of water play on the pillars, no longer to create the illusion of calm but to prevent fire.
Miss R has a map and photographs. She prods and asks, asks and prods.
‘High under the roof is the dining room where we once entertained visitors and did not dare to invite Margaret Thatcher in February 1986.’
‘Go on.’
‘There would have been a riot outside if we had tried. She might have been tempted to come through the gates. She would surely have been advised against doing so. Some of us liked our lunching box in the sky. We wanted it to be seen. We thought about its redecoration. We thought what we might serve for lunch. And then we played host to her in the Mikado room of the Savoy Hotel. ‘Three little girls from school are we, ending our career with a touch of glee’, sang Frank, who loved opera, even The Mikado, and, as a schoolboy extra, had shared a stage with Maria Callas.’
‘I was the one sent ahead to check the place cards. Thus Margaret and her civil servant, who liked to be punctual, and I, who had my job to do, were beaten to the room only by a man with a Hoover who worked on till he had cleaned every corner. She seemed younger than at the sycophants’ lunch, more crisp, less motherly, less and better perfumed. We mused on whether patients should pay for bed and board in NHS hospitals and if not why not. We remembered Anthony Berry and his dogs.’
‘She had seen an excellent idea for advancing wider share ownership in Good Housekeeping magazine, “such a good guide to our culture” she told us when the lunch finally began. David had wanted me to mention his name at some point so that I could report to him her response, a warm and favourable reaction, he hoped.
Somehow the opportunity never came. I blamed the man with the Hoover.’
Miss R points at the black hole that, till five minutes ago, was our office dining room.
‘Beside what is left of where we ate is the last girder of the corridor where Woodrow once pushed me against a wall. I was sure he was going to hit me. This was soon after the Good Housekeeping and Hoover lunch. He was enraged that a Times political writer, in a formally arranged interview for Good Friday, had asked the Prime Minister about her personal shares, her dealings in those shares and whether sharedealing was something that prime ministers should do. “This was a disgrace”, he screamed. “None of her responses should be printed. It was a breach of an agreement made at the lunch”.’
‘Not the lunch I attended’, I said.
‘“Then it had to be another lunch”, he snarled back.’
The setting for the whole scene has been struck by steel now. For the first time Miss R is watching with clear attention. ‘What was that share business all about?’
I too am rapt by the wrecking balls. ‘At the beginning of 1986 even her most loyal courtiers were beginning to be concerned at what was then called “sleaze”, not yet a cliché. David saw “spivs” everywhere. Business supplicants saw David Hart and no less firmly held their noses. Ronnie feared that a little PR man, the same little man who wanted to share his elocution classes, was entwining Westland, Mark Thatcher, a knighthood for a tobacco boss and a request to sponsor a motor racing team.’
‘But Woodrow was furious at the calumnies. Surely we had not asked Margaret about such nonsense? She was quite right to ask that, if she did not like the interview, we should not publish it.’
‘I told him that I didn’t understand. An interview was a theatre show for her. She had to be calm and she, if not he, surely would be.’
‘Woodrow retorted that she had “quite enough real enemies” without my becoming one, “friends of yours”, he sneered, John Mortimer and Antonia Fraser who were modelling their plots against her on the plots against Hitler. She needed protection. Our interview was intended to be about “popular capitalism”, the “way ahead”, “trade union intimidation at Wapping”, “the ‘next big challenges”, more specifically, if that was strictly necessary, about the future of British car production, the question of whether patriotic customers might buy more Land Rovers if the Land Rover company remained in British ownership.’
‘This last unlikely theme, I guessed, was one proposed to her by Woodrow himself. He did not hit me but he did hold my jacket and push my shoulders hard against the plaster. The government has not “lost its strength”, he said. It is not “accident-prone”. Margaret will “without equivocation lead the Conservative Party into the next election”.’
‘That wall cannot have felt the like until the iron ball that has just now crashed it into sky. I told David what had happened, hoping for some sympathy. He said that Woodrow was absolutely right; that The Times was “out of control”; that the Editor and I were not sufficiently loyal to Margaret; that Frank was furious with me; that, if we were not more careful, it would be time for the “Colonel and the Wild Beast” to take over. When David was angry he often spoke in code. He never seemed to mind when this stopped him being understood.’
Miss R has been listening with an ever more puzzled look. ‘I thought that you did support Margaret Thatcher in those days?’
‘ Yes and no. The Times was in a difficult position. Whatever the Editor, Charles Wilson, and I, his deputy, thought of her and her policies, at least half of our readers hated both. Unhappy readers were always liable to defect to other newspapers that made them happier. Defecting readers meant lost money. Too much lost money might mean lost editors.’
‘Where did we stand? We drew a triangle with a long horizontal base to mean support, a shorter upright to show attack and an acute line between them. We stood on that “acute”.’
Miss R gives a sly look of understanding. She taps her SENECA notebook. She wants me back with Lord Wyatt.
‘Any attack on Thatcher at all’, I tell her, ‘made Woodrow angry. Fortunately for both of us, he could never remain angry for long.’
‘When he invited me for lunch at his house the second time, a few months later, he had more important anxieties than the Prime Minister’s Australian mining portfolio, and why it had taken six years of power to put it out of her personal control, or about promises to ennoble sponsors of racing teams. He again feared
that I would try to remove him from The Times.’
‘Woodrow was right about that. I still did not like his unswerving support for his dinner party guests. I still did not appreciate his weekly claim to Reason. He thought that if I ever had a chance I would probably “kill” his contributions (killing being the verb of choice for removing unwanted articles from newspapers). He was right about that too. Those were impeccable reasons for a lunch.’
‘That was the day he invited Kingsley Amis too, one of Woodrow’s many friends who had made the meandering journey from left to right over their years. When I arrived Amis was already there, seething quietly in a tweed jacket beside a table on which his Booker Prize-winner, The Old Devils, sat. Woodrow told him that this study of sexual rivalry among Welsh pensioners was a masterpiece. Woodrow was ever adept at praising those who did not need more praise. He thought I needed extra lessons in that art.’
‘Our main topic was to be money. Amis was to be his support. Woodrow was never as wealthy as he liked to seem. Difficult marital unions as well as the industrial sort had seen to that. His difficulties were real and freely confessed, albeit of the kind, he said, that could not possibly last. Unlike David, Woodrow was without codes. He was direct. Few ever misunderstood him.’
‘Woodrow was confident, enthrallingly so as it seemed to me in our good times. He had been briefly rich in the past. He had owned his own small newspaper which he would have liked to be a large one. He once wrote a short story about a get-rich-quick scheme and published it himself as if to make the fiction true.’
‘He always liked to live as though he were inevitably (and soon) about to be wealthy again, about gently to rejoin his school friends, racing friends and royal friends in worry-free consumption – in his own case in the cause of the public good. As for the present, the money from his column in The Times mattered to him a good deal. He was keen that I properly understood this tiresome but temporary problem.’
The Senecans Page 9