‘What made you so sure what he was saying?’ She picks up a book from one of her new stacks on the floor. It is the two-tone brown copy of Kingsley Amis’s, The Old Devils, the winner of the 1986 Booker Prize, signed inside as a gift from the author ‘chez Woodrow’. Miss R might be beginning her own novel collection now.
‘I knew Woodrow well enough to recognise what was important, I say. He was not a man of mysterious depth. There were difficult times between us but not in our understanding of each other. Woodrow still affected to be a kind of father figure, helping me through treacherous shoals. He thought I was sometimes naive just as I thought him shameless almost all of the time.’
13.8.14
‘The next Senecan to give me his “wisdom, dear boy” was Ronnie, still the Prime Minister’s speechwriter despite pining quietly for the previous Prime Minister. We were in the very back of The Old Rose. If he had something especially awkward to say he would always move furthest from the rumbling Highway. That was where we liked to sit, even without a Latin lesson, whenever I could not come to the West End.’
‘Ronnie was pleased about the economic consequences of Black Wednesday, surely a White Wednesday, he said, for all Senecans. The further we stood from European money the better he liked it – as, of course, did She.’
‘He used the word “She” with delight. Ronnie and I were still feeling our way in the new era. We were re-establishing our relationship in a system intended to be so different from what came before, kinder, gentler, warmer. Although Ronnie was a man divided now in loyalties he was on this subject happy to be back with me saying what his mistress wanted him to say.’
‘He could not so easily speak for John Major, his master. To me Ronnie was still the willowy T, leaning forward like any actor playing a plotter’s part, describing the blackness inside the bubble of power as the British currency fell out of the ERM, the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System, its acronym then as famous as NATO or a GCSE.’
Miss R picks up one of her novels, a hint perhaps that I am heading in the wrong direction. She does not want a story about economic management but she need not worry. I am not going to tell one.
‘Ronnie was not an economist. None of us was. Woodrow could call odds; he held a profitable political sinecure as Chairman of the Tote. David was a property investor; he knew when to call markets. Frank and I were almost blind to numbers. Words were all we had.’
‘Ronnie, in fact, was almost Roman in his disregard for economics. Like Seneca, he spoke only of the moral aspects of money. He was a playwright who wrote economic speeches when someone else had provided the charts.’
‘The only time he ever talked of even meeting an economist was when recounting how John Maynard Keynes, wartime bursar of King’s College, Cambridge, persuaded him to stick to his part in the University Greek play of 1940. Ronnie liked to talk about Keynes but he never told Margaret about him. The man who believed in borrowing money to spend it was always best left unmentioned.’
‘At the back of The Old Rose the other chairs were empty. Ronnie still spoke in his lowest voice, as though learning lines. He was an instinctive, visual raconteur, a writer and a vivid source for other writers.’
‘He was not the least surprised at what I had learnt. He recounted the Black Wednesday scenes, the fall of numbingly large numbers, the helplessness as billions of pounds disappeared. He described a centre where there was no Thatcher, no economic policy, no European policy and where, for a critical time in the middle of the day, there was no Prime Minister of any kind.’
‘I listened. The line of his thought was, as often, telescoped into an impromptu play. The enforced absence of Mrs Thatcher was his prologue. Act One showed the frailty of her successor and the falling faith in the policy of imprisoning the pound in a European cell. The new element was Act Two, the twist in the story in which John Major, at a time when Whitehall needed some sort of certainty (any sort), was communing with his bedroom pillows instead of his computer screens. Without Woodrow’s corroboration it would have been hard to believe as anything other than a play.’
Miss R still looks unconvinced.
‘If Ronnie were alive in this office now, he would tell you himself about this story which, as days went on, went out to other journalists too. He quickly ceased to be shy about it. Others who claimed to know talked to others who found it useful to believe. Soon there was only one story that anyone, anywhere, with any knowledge at all, was talking about.’
‘No one yet had published anything. I called David on the phone. He did not like to talk when his words were “insecure”. He wanted me to come to Claridge’s. I preferred that he came to The Old Rose which, after some argument, he did. I was meeting Frank there later.’
‘David, when he finally arrived, knew no more than I knew already. He was reluctant to believe that I was a conspirator or had made the whole story up. As a conspirator himself he did not want an amateur threatening his status. He agreed that there must be something in what I told him.’
‘He had become more distant in these different days, a different man from the boaster of the Falklands War, the Miners’ Strike and Wapping. I was now the Editor. His heydays were almost forgotten.’
‘Not so long ago David had been as aggressive to her “enemy within” as to her “enemy without”. He had led the aggressors. None of that was wanted now. Sex, ideology and agriculture were his lifelong hobbies but the second was out of fashion and the third was fun only when he had a new tractor. He was back to his position of acting out the Sixteen Pleasures in the Lanesborough Hotel.’
‘The new Prime Minister was not interested in his principles but would anyone else ever be? That was his anxiety.’
Miss R scribbles notes at any mention of principles just as she closes her book at the mention of positions. One by one she turns to face the office floor the photocopies of David’s Ariadnes and Messalinas, their arses above heads, hands gripping bedposts.
‘Mrs Thatcher was genuinely principled’, she adds with a voice raised as a question.
‘Yes, indeed. The longer she had held the principles the better she liked them. When she died last year claims were made that she was a magnet for intellectuals, Friedmanites, Hayekians and the like. Ronnie would have laughed at that. His own view was that she did most of her thinking very early. She liked the clash of ideas she had already considered. She liked intellectuals but liked them less than those who dressed her own views in intellectual language.’
‘David’s principles were of unfettered freedom, a creed that made a mere coal strike into a life-or-death conflict. Even his enemies, of whom there were many, conceded that, with his “soul politics”, his legal funds and his helicopter, he made this difference – and thus made a bit of history. He came to like Seneca because Seneca helped him both to think and to seem to be thinking.’
‘David and Ronnie agreed that John Major distrusted any thinking except in a tactical sense. The new Prime Minister could undoubtedly be devious. He had staged a brilliant withdrawal to his dentist when the challenge to Margaret’s leadership came and those loyal to her were asked to stand and be counted. David had admired that. Retreat was a necessary skill, a too characteristic one as now it seemed. David admired nothing else about the new Prime Minister.’
Miss R writes a large letter H on her pad.
‘After a short period focused on women and agricultural machinery, David’s first response to the new era was to renew his plot for a New Right party to supplant the Conservatives. He especially loved its symbol, the soaring bird, the flattened M which he said would be easy for graffiti artists to paint on walls. This time he saw the core of his new movement not in anti-union miners but in suburban mothers opposed to gay sex education. He had his “shock troops” among Conservative students. He wrote his name on the plans with a sharp-pointed dagger for a D. He had high hopes of support from Poland.’
‘But hardly had these birds and enthusiasms soared when they collapsed. He cit
ed “security reasons” and refused to mention his graffiti any more. He decided to retire to his combine harvesters, sitting out the downturn for “as long as it took”, like a canny property speculator, waiting for the moment when he might best influence the next succession.’
‘So, when we spoke about Black Wednesday, he was only a little bit curious about why so many dull and mostly unexcitable men should believe that the PM’s mind had broken down. He was out of circulation.’
‘And yet it was a strange story, he agreed, the requests for briefing that brought only silence, the revelation that in John Major’s office there was not even a functioning television aerial. He described the sudden sense throughout the arteries of Whitehall that the heart of power had ceased to beat.’
‘I listened to him as encouragement but his metaphor was by then not a new one. His fresh contribution was the thought that something should certainly be published. It was wrong, he said, that everyone inside knew what nobody outside did.’
‘I laughed quietly at that. David lived his whole life on information known only to the very few. When Frank arrived with his Seneca’s essays and a Latin grammar he laughed quietly too. We did not wish to draw attention to ourselves. The bar that was empty at 11.00 became quickly busier at 12.00.’
‘Frank did not wish to be distracted from his declensions but he did have new details which he reluctantly disclosed – on condition that we then wasted no more time on gossip. The Prime Minister, he reminded us, was in temporary quarters in Admiralty House while Ten Downing Street was being “refurbished”. He said the word as though John Major were personally choosing the curtains in John Lewis.’
‘Communications had, indeed, been less than ideal. Requests for briefings came in and nothing went out. A wire coat-hanger from a secretary’s dry cleaning had been necessary as an aerial before the television would work, only and appropriately in black and white.
When the picture appeared it showed rates of interest rising, rearing and bucking like a viper in a charmer’s basket. Every lunge was ever more fatal. If the Prime Minister had taken to his bed and chewed a freshly laundered pillowcase, who, frankly, could blame him?’
‘And now please, he pleaded, could we go back to De Beneficiis, On Giving and Getting, the right way and the wrong way to repay favours and receive gifts.’
14.8.14
‘Next day two reporters at The Times began work. Would the story “stand up”, as we say? Yes, it “had legs”. Sources were sources. We rapidly had a story. I could have been more cautious. It is sometimes too easy to confirm a story that everyone thinks is true, that the Editor has good reason to think is true. Some who knew held back. Some who didn’t know didn’t care.’
Miss R is as enthused as though she were on the hunt herself, her back against the door.
‘Why was something so unlikely so believed?’
‘Because it did not seem unlikely. There was madness and poison everywhere. More important was the character of John Major himself, not the character that his friends saw, charming, open, attractive, especially to women, but the public man, the not-Thatcher, the not-bloody-minded man, the not invulnerable to hurt, the not anything much but not her. Into the vacuum of “nots”, on top of the ordinariness that separated him from his predecessor, flowed anything comic and mundane that could fill the gaps.’
‘That afternoon Woodrow called me at the office. He liked to talk to me more now that I was Editor. He could sense drama from afar. He knew that there was drama most days. That was what we both loved and it would be many years before I began to love it less.’
‘He asked if he would be seeing me that night “in the Locarno Room”. I had no idea what he was talking about. We were having one of our “slipper wheel” quarrels. He said that I needed him as a friend at court. I said that I did not. I did not want to be at his court. Did it even exist? One of us always put the phone down briskly on the other.’
‘I did not know what I was doing that night. A newspaper editor can always say that – even dishonestly. He can always stay in his office. Normally he is safer there.’
Miss R stirs, moves to the window and changes the subject as though she has noticed a gap in her notes.
‘Where exactly was your office then? She is confused by both the destruction and preservation before us, the yellow jackets in the smoke and the grey suits flitting in and out of the heritage brick.’
I point again along the wall where we first saw the Senecans run as letters, H for Hart, J for Johnson, up on to the roof, the part beneath that thin tower on top of the Rum Store, the one like a Soviet army cigarette, black-tipped, beige-bricked.
‘That was where I worked, under what was a chimney once. In the days before The Times came to Wapping it funnelled the furnace of some forgotten industrial malpractice. That was where I most felt the thrill of the job, the sense of the centre of a web, the place where I decided what to do and what others should do, instantly and without question, most of which I forget, some that I remember more clearly now.’
‘The carpet tiles smelt of sour wine. The floor was damp from leaks in the roof. The evaporation of my “new editor’s” celebratory Good Ordinary Claret took weeks. Woodrow disapproved of the choice of drink, (surely something better could have been found for such an occasion) but he had come to my windowless bunker party nonetheless. He was still anxious about his column. He could not afford to lose it.’
‘He had forgotten, he said, how disgusting our Rum Store was. Seneca’s Rome had sewers that were more suitable than this squat brick tube. It was just as the Queen Mother had described it to him. Did I remember how we had marked her official visit by taking her on a much too exhausting walk, how her Dubonnet had too much lemonade and how some mannerless creature had asked her over lunch whether she was keeping a diary?’
‘Yes, I did remember and how we had planned to brighten the brick and concrete with roses but had balked at the cost. I confessed that I had been the host without manners on the matter of the diary. He knew that already.’
‘We had reached a new uneasiness. Six years after the lunch with Kingsley Amis, despite the “slipper wheel” and what he saw as my dangerous naivety, I was more in control than before. Margaret Thatcher’s court was gone. All courtiers were out of fashion. Woodrow was still a Times columnist but, in the new era, there were even more of my colleagues who thought that he should not be.’
‘But at 7.00 pm, just as he had known and said that I would, I arrived at the Foreign Office and climbed the wide marble stairs to the Locarno Room. I felt tired. A man I barely knew asked if I was well. I sipped a drink and wished I had not. There were already dozens of thick necks in this grandest suite of Her Majesty’s grandest department. I tried to look closely without looking at anyone in particular.’
‘I knew why I had come but, even before I had taken ten steps, I knew I should have stayed beneath my chimney. Another unknown man asked after my health, politely but firmly. He looked to me like one of the men in The Undertaking, that Greenwich play on my first Thatcher night, a pinstriped fraud on a stage with the fantasising dead.’
‘I wondered if I should leave. The neck of the man asking me questions was built of triple-layered folds from one flat ear to another, a pitted nose, heavy-lidded eyes propped beneath a bright broad forehead where wrinkles ran like waste pipes. His colleagues looked much the same and it was as hard at first to see between the pillars of neck as to tell their double-breasted owners apart. At least I was suitably suited myself.’
‘The quieter places were beside the walls, an alternating pattern of panels in blue and gold. I could already see Woodrow who had chosen blue as his backdrop. His thin white hair, streaked carefully over his shining skull, absorbed the same jewel-like blue. These rooms, the invitation told us, were newly restored to their grandeur of the 1930s.’
‘A junior foreign minister was showing off the work. When Woodrow had asked me whether I would be “at the Locarno Room for the Lennox-Boyds” he made
it sound as though it were a dinner. I had said not. But there was something in the Editor’s office diary about the Foreign Office and this was it, fortunately as it turned out because by then there was something important that I needed to tell him.’
‘Woodrow was buried in the party’s first half hour by the bulk of other people. I watched him. I met an American friend whom I genuinely wanted to see. I began to feel better and a bit guilty. To compare the Locarno Room to a mortuary of the surreal was an exaggeration. I had to beware exaggeration.’
‘Where I stood was more like a gallery of plaster casts, thick white shapes, eighteenth-century copies of Roman heads, Renaissance copies of Greek originals, solid ghosts, ghostly nonetheless, politicians and bureaucrats with that peculiar spirit quality that comes when avoidance of trouble is the highest art.’
‘Seneca would have fitted in easily among the Locarno crowd, the Seneca of his best surviving portrait, a double bust from two centuries after his death in which he shares a block of marble and, by not very subtle implication, a mind and brain, with the face of Socrates. Woodrow was blending in with natural ease, his forehead just a little shallower than Seneca’s, his chin sharper, his eyes set in false mockery.’
‘My columnist’s bowties were hardly classical. Nor was the unlit cigar by his belt which he wore as though it were a pistol or a whip. But he and Seneca shared much of the same space, merely a trapdoor of time between them. There was so much else that these two shared (or so it seemed as I watched and waited, waved to men I knew and drank warming white wine), a relentless insecurity, a raw nerve in every jowled crevice, a resolute desire for principle as well as power, pleasure and its resistance.’
‘This was not intended to be a Senecan night. Woodrow had anyway proved himself the least attentive, the least inventive, of the group. I had one specific piece of business, to tell Woodrow about the article that had come from his unknowing phone call, now already on The Times presses for the following day, a short but striking story of John Major’s melancholic state of mind, maddened, said some, miserable, said all, and what that meant for what happened when his power was collapsing all around him.’
The Senecans Page 19