‘David asked if Alastair wasn’t “just a bit over-excited”, making a slow note on a pad with a gold pencil and, as almost always, trying to give a fellow courtier the benefit of any doubt.
I replied that he was calm as milk. On this Cool Britannia night, when the Blairs had asked every fashionable guitarist and fashion icon over for a thank you drink in their new home, it was the Prime Minister who was over-excited. All that Campbell was doing was dealing a little light abuse to an editor who had used the words “obscene” and “photo-opportunity” too closely together.’
‘David now looked disbelieving: “You didn’t say that?” No, it was a learned friend who was standing beside me. He was saying that only Lord Byron could have described properly such a crazy scene.’
‘Lord Byron? What did bloody Byron have to do with it? David disliked what he knew of the author of Don Juan’.
‘What scene? Who was there? Who was talking to whom? Was Gordon Brown there? The questions came tumbling from his tongue. I don’t recall any slurring then but David was never a good interrogator. He was fascinated by tags and other tradecraft. He admired the rougher ends of the security services. He would not have been much use to them.’
‘He made me impatient too. I was the journalist. He said he had news for me. He was supposed to be my source. I was not supposed to be his source and yet, at certain moments, that was exactly what he wanted me to be, an exchanger of gifts and services in the oldest way honoured by time. I suddenly could not even remember if Gordon Brown had been there. I was not going to go back to find out.’
‘As my learned fellow guest predicted, the Cool Britannia celebration was an eloquent mixture of sycophancy, sleaze and celebs. There was indeed a Byronic cast of every “Jack Jargon”, “Miss Bombazeen” and “Dick Dubious”. Where were Byron’s “sophists, bards, statesmen, all unquiet things”? In short supply. At the mention of statesmen David looked at me fiercely. He liked to appear as a man of literature but he needed to choose territory that he had traversed before.’
‘Byron was not his territory. He had not prepared for Byron. He had not asked a friendly tutor. Nor did poetry interest his clients. The volume of the car radio rose as though to mask my coming (and much hoped for) indiscretions from anyone listening in.’
‘Sad to say, I repeated, there were not many statesmen in the room at all, unless we counted the oil paintings (Addington and Peel, meet Mr Adman and Miss Pullstringer). From wall to wall there were challengers only to be Byron’s “young bard, Rockrhyme, who had newly come out and glimmered as a six week’s star”.’
‘There were also contenders for other parts, “Lord Pyrrho too, the great freethinker; and Sir John Pottledeep, the mighty drinker’. Drinks for lesser guests were less lavishly supplied.’
‘David sighed. Did you speak to Blair himself? What did he say? He spoke about the party, I replied. No, not the Labour Party. “These people who are big in the rock world, they really understand what’s going on in this country”: that was the first thing that the new Prime Minister said to me. “Take Mick Hucknall of Simply Red, he has an amazingly sharp mind. And Mick Jagger. I went to talk to him the other night about Brown Sugar and there he was, asking me about Monetary Union”.’
‘“Blair wasn’t talking to Noel Gallagher about Monetary Union?”, David asked with as blank a face as he could make. Oh no, I said. Blair said only that “he’s very switched on to everything, if you know what I mean”.’
‘David closed his notebook and turned down the radio. I quickly told him the rest of what I could remember, how, once the Prime Minister had left the Oasis star, no one else wanted to take up the celebrity challenge. The more house-trained half of Oasis was on his own, abandoned to look at the carpet and the curtains. “My mum is going to ask me what it’s like inside”, he growled as a group of political reporters passed by, “and it’ll be terrible if I don’t know the answers”.’
‘This neglect seemed odd. Noel Gallagher was charming, much less liable to cunt a man than was Alastair Campbell. New Labour theorists admired him. He wore the Union Jack on stage, reclaiming a symbol that in the Thatcher era had been hijacked by the fringes of the Right, some of them David’s friends, all of them unhealthily attached to the Red, White and Blue. Blair’s men wanted the flag back.’
‘Someone eventually brought over the young-looking, blondish but not very Oasis-like chief executive of Barclays Bank, who was being wooed to help Gordon Brown remodel the social security system. “I’m with the Nat West”, said Gallagher rather more brightly, “but, hey Meg”, he turned to his wife, “you’re with Barclays or is that your mum?” Before we could find the answer, or watch a rocker’s introduction to a closely hovering Bishop of London, Campbell came by and whisked off his trophy for a Downing Street tour.’
‘Even in those early New Labour days the non-celebrity discussion was about how Gordon Brown of Number Eleven would get along with the Blairites of Number Ten who already saw him as an invasive disease. The two top men in New Labour were already like student flatmates who had planned to go on sharing accommodation while working in London but were minute-by-minute having second thoughts.
‘That was what David wanted to know about most. Did Campbell seem frightened of Brown? Was everyone frightened of Campbell? Did the Downing Street tour include what had been the bedroom of John Major? Were there jokes about chewed pillows? Were the curtains still purple?’
‘I had seen the bedroom. I did not remember any jokes. Everything seemed quite imperial, I said, uncertain about what the precise colour had been, a bit like the columns of The Old Rose. David looked pleased. He liked things imperial. He just needed to be inside the court if he could.’
I said I had spoken to my sometime friend, the Labour lobbyist Jenny Jeger, the J in the GJW partnership, a reminder of my first years as a newspaper reporter. We had not spoken for a decade at least. What had happened to G, the Scottish Liberal? He was fine: his wife, she thought, preferred his gillie, some kind of aquatic gamekeeper, “very D. H. Lawrence”. And to W, the Heathman Tory? He was fine too, still collecting art and lost causes.’
I did not ask J how she was herself. She was too obviously not well, half the weight of when we first spoke of party finance scandals in 1981. I was just about to take her aside, past a gaggle of Brownites, when we were interrupted by two gangster-like men who said they were shoe-designers.’
‘We looked down at their shoes, each in an identical pair, black, boat-like with raised seams that reminded me of the limits of what was allowed at school. “Not ours”, they said in unison, as though the question needed no posing; “Gucci”. Jenny, weakened by cancer though she was, had a stick and pushed off rapidly, with more speed than I could match, into a throng of Pet Shop Boys, TV chefs and an especially thick crowd around the man who plays the Blackadder fool at the Tudor court.
David was not interested in Jenny Jeger, nor in her aunt, the sometime Labour MP for Camden. J did not have long to live and was already part of that most distant recent past. David’s boredom reminded him that he had left his tweed cap in The Red Lion and he ordered the car back to where we had begun. The cap was inside on a ledge, set up like a dinner plate, with a knife and fork on either side, by a drinker making a joke.’
David Hart
Miss R asks if she can take a break. She does not normally ask. We walk together around the rest of the disintegrating office. She seems as though she wants to speak. Instead she sweats. She visits the bathroom. When she returns she is less comfortable still. I wait, take a deep breath, and wait again. She waves me to go on. I am not sure what to say.
30.8.14
Almost everyone around me, it seems, has reached some sort of end. We are over sixty, those of us who started work when Old Labour was dying, who survived (and even prospered) with Mrs Thatcher and who welcomed (briefly) Tony Blair as the next generation’s choice. We have been lucky in life, many of us very lucky.
Mr V, who must be in his late eighties now
, repeats that theme often in his notes. He has never known anyone more fortunate than the boy whom he introduced to the retirement of Seneca. He often asks about Margaret – also if ‘Josephine is still in her cage’, reminding me in bold italics that I once wrote an article about a parrot that was ‘the oldest bird in the zoo’. It was one of my ‘better pieces’. He has an inexhaustible interest in old parrots.
Josephine was, in fact, not a parrot. She was an Indian hornbill, more than fifty years in captivity, whom I used to visit for encouragement (mine) from time to time. She died in 1998 which was when I wrote about her life, the only obituary of a bird ever to appear in The Times. Mr V’s multiple congratulations on my gracious treatment of Josephine came with the implicit criticism that for Margaret I could have done better.
V herself only rarely contacts me – and solely to direct criticism at my work, my way of life, and, yes, at least once, my luck. I have tried to reply more often to Mr V but his daughter just comes and goes, mostly goes. When I saw her last she said she had an ex-husband and an adult daughter of her own, very like her but not to look at. She gave little other idea of how lucky she had been herself.
31.8.14
How did Seneca die? Miss R asks her question like an interrogator who is certain she is going to be lied to.
Cordoba is close ahead. I try to look as harshly back.
The death of Seneca is not something I can lie about. The story is too famous for its truth to be easily changed. His suicide by suffocation may not be as well known in 2014 AD as it was in 114 AD or 1014 or 1614 or at the beginning of the First World War. But it is still the best known incident in his life. That is what he would have wanted, what every Stoic wanted.
‘The call to kill himself was inevitable from the moment he failed to persuade Nero to let him retire. An emperor might demand suicide at any time, deeming it a favour to his friend that he not be strangled by a gaoler’s noose, or racked to paraplegia.’
‘Imagining all the many ways of death was for a Stoic a way of making none of them matter and banishing the fear of death that was so destructive to life. This was not the sole key to happiness, as some of Seneca’s teachers had taught him in his youth. But it was significant for virtue.’
‘The purpose of life for a good man was that he should work for the common good, focus on what is present, what is possible; he should grab life but not be surprised when life eludes him; he should always be prepared to leave life.’
‘There is no mention in that on my SENECA notebook’. Miss R flicks through her now full book of notes to check that she is not mistaken.
‘No, death is not what the self-help industry of today finds helpful.’
‘So why did he die?’
‘He was caught in a plot to assassinate Nero and replace him with a man called Lucius Calpurnius Piso. Few today remember Piso’s name. It hardly matters now. It hardly mattered then, the name of a vain senator who sang popular songs and was hardly better than a mad emperor who performed his own poetry. Every Julio-Claudian was threatened by one or other old buffer called Piso.’
‘It was a very poor plot. Piso delayed too long. The assassin’s knife did eventually come for Nero, but too late, too predictably, and it was easily brushed aside. Piso delayed because he preferred to be an emperor than a murderer – and thought that he could not be both.’
‘The plot was betrayed by its own frailest plotters. Seneca’s friend, Epicharis, a woman who was only a minor conspirator, survived the rack, said nothing and hanged herself, an example to the men in that slippery court, wrote Tacitus, and Seneca would have agreed. His nephew Lucan the poet betrayed everyone. Who ever knew whom his brother, Novatus, betrayed? Novatus helped to save St Paul from the Jews but he could not save himself, or anyone else, from Nero.’
‘When the time came for the assassination, hardly anyone even noticed. The Emperor was screwing his little eyes to watch the games in the Circus at the time. He barely blinked. The news became known only when the revenge began, widening circles in a pool of blood which ended only when there was no one left to kill.’
‘Seneca was at the very edges of this pool. That was enough. Some of his friends believed that Seneca would have made a better ruler of the Roman world than Piso or any other replacement. He did not disagree with them. That in itself was more than enough to have him dead.’
‘When Seneca first tried to retire from court, the scene that Mr V showed me in the Walton balsa house, Nero preferred to keep his former tutor close. But that was then. Seneca was undeniably a candidate for the throne. Even the guard who brought him his suicide sentence thought so. So the former tutor could hardly blame the former pupil for ordering his death.’
‘Seneca’s wife was condemned too. She was inevitably a suspect. In the terror of this time a person’s innocence was the least of defences. Seneca’s difficulty was the simple difficulty of dying, his fleshless wrists from which no blood flowed, his scrawny ankles, his stomach that could not absorb the hemlock of Socrates, the death that his reputation demanded – and would eventually bring him to their shared portrait bust.’
‘It seemed that his wife would die more easily, more quickly. She would share his eternal glory. He was pleased. He was also wrong. He died thinking that he and his wife were dying together. Nero’s guards were watching them both as they slit their wrists and lay back for death to take them away. But his wife did not die. Nero changed his orders. He tempted Pompeia Paulina with life. The guards tied tourniquets. The Emperor’s reputation might be improved if he allowed a few more years to the loyal spouse of his tutor.’
‘Pompeia retires and becomes a celebrity widow. The historian, Tacitus, disapproved. Pompeia became for him a possessor of mere fame who might, like her husband, have had a greater glory. Tacitus was Seneca’s supporter. Like the writer for Foyles, he saw Seneca as a good man who tried to make the worst a little better. There was another more hostile historian, Cassius Dio, who took the modern view that a man’s death as a martyr cannot expunge a life of flattery and collaboration.’
‘It was three more years before a new plot succeeded where Piso’s (if you could really call it his) had failed. The Spanish legions led the revolt. Some of the revolution came from Cordoba. Nero died deploring the death of so great an artist as himself. In 69 AD there were four different emperors. Throughout the east Nero remained long a ghost in power over the superstitious, just as Ronnie so often reminded me. Was he really dead? Many were unsure.’
‘That is the story of how Seneca died.’
There is suddenly a coldness in this emptying office. Miss R’s gaze reminds me now of the day she first arrived. She has listened enough. But she is still waiting for the answer that she wants. She says her mother told her a different story.
‘How did you first see him die?’
I pause. She asks again. I remember how in interviews we used to seek the ‘killer question’. Miss R looks like a reporter who has found it.
‘Do you remember your very last visit to Walton-on-the-Naze?’
She twists her fingers. She arches her back against the empty bookcases. She does not say that I should show her a different kind of remembering but that is what she means. Five months ago it would have been hard to make the jump in time but now it is easier. Seneca and the Senecans are now almost as one, layer upon layers in these last dying Wapping days.
‘Yes’, I say.
I answer easily, much more easily than I would have expected. I know what she wants. I don’t know how she knows.
‘It was on the fourth visit that V and I made to her father. To each of these trips I always gave a number; and the number has stuck. Mr V looked even paler than he had been on visits one, two and three, barely separate from the balsa model landscape around him. In my peppered-grey eleven-year-old’s uniform (my story for my mother was that I had Sunday work at school) I felt almost flamboyant.’
‘V, as before, left me alone with her father almost as soon as we arrived. She had things t
o buy, food for our lunch, a gift from her mother. Mr V did not mind. He set off on a tour of balsa Rome in full tutorial flow: Seneca was a hero, a man who tried to order his world: ageing Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was a villain, a man of disintegration; the old Tory way was collapsing from within; socialism was coming like effluent on the tide; trade unions were worse than guitarists. Mr V shouted out the case for his balsa philosopher, that human excesses were the only enemy, virtue the only good, self-restraint the route to freedom, anger against the powerful a dangerous necessity.’
‘Of course, I knew nothing of any of this then. I recognised rage but not mania. I grasped none of Seneca’s influence on my balsa-carver. I learnt that only later from his letters, from that pile of them now tumbling onto this floor, from their favourite themes of how poverty is as potent as wealth, death as life, and that most of the things that men prize, freedom, food, property, sex and drink are secondary things.’
‘This favourite villa, he said, pointing with a knife at the edge of the pale table, was always kept in perfect order. It was where Seneca wanted to go when he knew that Nero was tired of his teacher, tired of philosophy, tired of being ordered, maybe worse than tired.’
‘And then Mr V recited the retirement scene, just as he had done before, just as if he were reading a playscript. Perhaps there was a chance that his hero might be safe. The crumpled Seneca was an owner of at least five villas, places where he might hide.’
The Senecans Page 23