Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  * * *

  Carole’s Egyptian childhood, from which she was so traumatically torn, was something she often dreamt about, occasionally talking about it in her sleep in French.

  Waking, you said you saw your house,

  the Nile snaking into mist,

  Mohammed the one-eyed cook.

  Somehow, you said there were children,

  Running…

  From time to time, we would contemplate visiting Egypt, but it was many years before Carole felt ready to face the emotional impact she feared a return would have. But eventually, when our daughters were in their final year of university, we made that pilgrimage together, though instead of flying directly to Cairo we decided to take a more gradual approach, flying first to Israel and then travelling from the southern port of Eilat to Egypt by coach, which one could do in those calmer days before the Arab Spring. Very early one morning, before the sun and heat rose, we set off, hardly believing the breathtaking journey across the Sinai Peninsula, past the Suez Canal, past the burnt-out tanks that remain a poignant reminder of the bitter battles that have been fought there over the years, finally reaching Cairo in the late afternoon. It was a journey full of wonder and expectancy. What did I expect?

  … Crocodiles leaping from the Nile?

  The enigmatic Sphinx resolving its own riddles?

  Cleopatra plying her seductive trade in the market square?

  No, there were more earthly wonders… Carole walking me along the Nile to her parents’ flat, past her school – how well she remembered the way – and on to the famous Gezira Sporting Club, where her cricket-mad father hit a vaunted century, where she learned to swim… and, later, the Pyramids, where her English husband got the hump from a camel falling to its knees, making her laugh… Then the historic ice cream parlour, Groppi; the cinema where she saw Gone with the Wind; the mummies in the museums… Could this be real? If anyone was dreaming now, it was me.

  All this is recalled in detail in a poem I wrote years later, but what isn’t is the trip we made to Alexandria, where Carole’s grandmother had lived. Carole had been born there and spent her early years in that flat before her parents moved to Cairo, and she would return to stay with her grandmother often, enjoying the sea and the beach. Those memories were especially poignant, and she was naturally eager to see the flat again if at all possible, so a few days after we’d arrived in Egypt, keyed up and a little nervous, we boarded the train for Alexandria at Cairo’s run-down station. The 120-mile journey seemed to take an eternity, and since there was only one train a day it was packed, Arab music blazing from the loudspeakers above our heads all the way. Opposite, my eyes were drawn to a handsome young man in a long, white silk cloak, who looked like a character out of the Arabian Nights. Who was he, I wondered.

  At last we emerged into the city that was for me Lawrence Durrell, and for Carole the scene of a treasured, almost mythical childhood. There was a queue of horse-drawn cabs, and we took one along the seafront towards the famous lighthouse, when Carole suddenly asked the driver to stop, for she had recognised the area and realised her grandmother’s flat was down a nearby side street. She made straight for it, and I followed quietly as she approached the entrance. An old doorkeeper was half asleep on the floor near the lift, and as he rose Carole tried to explain what we wanted but he was understandably suspicious and, shaking a stick, ushered us away from the lift into the street. Suddenly, as if by magic, a middle-aged lady, alerted no doubt by the raised voices, appeared on the balcony of a first-floor flat and called down to the man in Arabic, asking who we were, what we wanted, and then repeating the same questions to us in French.

  As Carole began to answer, the lady signalled us to come up, and we entered her small apartment. Carole began again to explain, mentioning her family name, whereupon the woman, overcome by emotion, exclaimed, ‘Carole!’ and flung her arms around her. ‘I knew your lovely grandmother,’ she said, ‘She would come down every afternoon to play bridge with my mother, and you too would come racing down the steps to our flat… and I knew your mother and father and uncles, the whole family.’ It was overwhelming. Carole was in tears; we all were. ‘Come, let us try to visit that flat,’ the lady decided, and up we went in the shaky lift – or was it we who were shaking?

  She knocked several times on the apartment door, and after a few minutes a youngish Arab woman, dressed in a dark red robe, answered, naturally wary. Eventually reassured, she let us in, and Carole walked round and round in a daze, her eyes full of tears, remembering which room had once been hers, and which bedrooms had belonged to her grandmother, her parents, and her uncle Emile, who had also lived there; recognising the sitting room, recalling the furniture as it had been all those years before, the kitchen where she helped her grandmother bake. Looking out of the window at the back, she saw the wild garden where dozens of cats would seek sanctuary. Nothing seemed to have changed, yet everything had.

  Thanking the Arab lady for her graciousness, we returned to the first-floor flat, where, over tea, more memories were exchanged before we took the slow train back to Cairo. We still talk of going back with our daughters, and indeed with our grandchildren, though given the eruptions in the Arab world we may never be able to do that. But one dream came true, and perhaps one day another will too, and there will be peace. Inshallah.

  * * *

  It was while he and his wife Val were staying with us in France that Jeffrey Pike and I began having a conversation about the business, and he set out to convince us (as if we needed convincing) that the way we were financing it was high-risk, and that we needed to find someone to share that risk. A forthright, highly successful businessman, Jeffrey promised to make it his mission to help us. It was not as though we hadn’t had approaches and discussions in the past – we had, with several companies, most seriously with the Spear’s games group. The latter had come about via Gyles Brandreth, who was involved with the company through his Scrabble prowess, that game being one of their main products. His idea was to row his own company in, too, as well as André Deutsch, which had been acquired by Tom Rosenthal and was struggling. In the end, nothing came of it.

  Another unexpected – and dangerously flattering – approach came, improbable as it may sound, as I was driving Lady Falkender (formerly Marcia Williams) to watch the tennis at Wimbledon. I have mentioned earlier how Harry Secombe and I had bumped into Harold Wilson and Marcia, his political secretary, at the BBC. It so happened that Marcia was a friend of the photographer Gemma Levine and her then husband, and I’d met her again at one of their family occasions, not long after Harold Wilson had resigned suddenly and mysteriously, sending shock waves through the political world. That meeting had led to our signing up a top-secret book with Marcia, to be called The Resignation, on which her collaborator was journalist Peter Dacre (father of the current editor of the Daily Mail). It was to be a roman-à-clef, a thrilling ‘factional’ account of what had caused Wilson to resign, a story laced with blackmail, break-ins, espionage, sex and skulduggery in high places. Was the Prime Minister in the story Wilson? Did what she described really happen? That was the game she wanted to play and those were the questions she wanted readers to ask. There was, underneath it all, a layer of truth and authenticity, for if anyone knew the reasons for Wilson’s resignation, it was Marcia.

  Thus it was that, knowing my passion for tennis, she invited me to Wimbledon, where she was a guest of the Mail. But perhaps there were other reasons too, for when we were nearly there she turned to me and said, ‘George [Weidenfeld] would like you on board and has asked me to speak to you. Would you be interested?’ Gratifying though this was, since I admired Weidenfeld greatly, I shied away, realising that those waters were far too deep for me. He was a wonderful publisher and certainly did not need me, nor our company. We drove on without referring to the subject again, enjoyed the Mail’s hospitality tent, and watched the tennis. I remember I wore a badge I’d picked up somewhere which proclaimed ‘In tennis, love means nothing’. Strangely en
ough, I had an approach from George Weidenfeld several years later through another source, but I didn’t pursue that either.

  Marcia Falkender was a highly controversial figure at that time, partly because of the influence she was deemed to have had over the Prime Minister, partly because of his resignation honours list, which she was rumoured to have drafted for him on lavender-coloured paper – the notorious ‘lavender list’ – something that sounds to me very much like a Max Clifford invention and which she has always vigorously denied. I liked and admired her. A remarkable woman with a rapier wit and pen, Marcia also has a strong sense of humour and fun which her rivals (and some of those who worked with her) gave her little credit for. However, she didn’t suffer fools gladly, and that was clearly part of the problem. She might have been a successful barrister, or even a politician, but perhaps she was too honest for that.

  I spent a number of evenings with Marcia and Peter Dacre trying to get the book right. Her method was to reel out scenes to him, which she could do without hesitation, and Peter would then transpose them and work them into the story, but she was never satisfied with the result and would rewrite furiously. They were, I felt, on different wavelengths, and the book was never finished. I have a draft manuscript a foot high in our garage, but Peter is gone and Marcia an invalid these days, so there, I imagine, it will remain, the blockbuster that never was, parked behind our car.

  Still, we had fun. Marcia and her jovial sister Peggy liked to have small, merry parties in their flat, and Carole and I were often invited. Many of the guests were regulars, loyal friends from over the years, and Mary Wilson was usually among them. Marcia shared a birthday with Harold Wilson, and on one memorable occasion George Weidenfeld (who’d been ennobled by Wilson) gave a joint lunch party for them in his sumptuous Cheyne Walk residence to which Marcia had invited us. As we were led into the formally laid-out dining room, she indicated a tall, elegant lady and whispered to me, ‘That’s the woman,’ and I recalled how in one scene in her book, set in Russia, her fictional Prime Minister had a dalliance with a certain female. Fact or fiction, I wondered?

  I’d been to the Weidenfeld residence once before on a less formal occasion, when the American poet Robert Lowell was in London and George had held a party for him to which a number of poets had been invited. Lowell had collapsed on his host’s bed at the end of the evening and Dannie Abse, reluctantly donning his doctor’s coat, had checked him over, noticing as he did so that on the bedside table there was a photograph of Harold Wilson. I’m not sure what Dannie read into that but he mentioned it several times afterwards. Later, Dannie invited Lowell and his wife, Caroline Blackwood, to his home, where some of the guests seemed to sit at the feet of the famous white-haired poet as he pontificated like some self-appointed prophet about the poor state of British poetry. When, not one to be cowed, even by someone who was a guest in his house, Dannie drew Lowell’s attention to a particular poem by Ted Hughes that he admired, the American dismissed it quite sharply, clearly not used to being challenged.

  The last time I saw Marcia was a few years ago when she invited me to lunch at the House of Lords. Having suffered a stroke, she was now in a motorised wheelchair, though her mind was still as agile as the wheelchair she drove. Arriving late, she raced along the corridors at an alarming speed towards the dining room while I tried to keep up and their lordships scattered in all directions before her charge.

  * * *

  Jeffrey Pike was persisting with his valiant mission to help bail us out and we had meetings with several publishers, one of whom was Colin Webb, whose Pavilion Books, originally backed by Michael Parkinson and Tim Rice, seemed a good match for us. Though I liked and admired the go-ahead Colin, who’d been my successor at the Woburn Press, and despite the goodwill involved, in the end it just didn’t stack up (Pavilion eventually being acquired by Chrysalis, and Colin leaving to start Palazzo, which specialises in high-quality illustrated books and where he is the publisher). During the fairly protracted negotiations with Pavilion, I recall that Colin and I used to phone each other covertly using the pseudonyms ‘Eccles’ and ‘Neddie’, both of us being Goon Show fans. Nothing that light-hearted occurred in our subsequent discussions with Batsford, a venerable firm that had recently been acquired by an American, Gerry Mizrahi, who courted us ardently, eventually coming up with an offer Anthony Harkavy wouldn’t allow me to consider, having had previous dealings with him. Jeffrey concurred. He had been somewhat aggressive with Mizrahi when we first met and had stormed out of his office when Mizrahi was late for a meeting with us.

  Then Jeffrey told us that John Needleman, one of the partners in the firm of accountants he used, had bought a publishing company and left the firm. Coincidentally, Needleman had been in my office only the week before: what he’d bought was not in fact a publishing house but a book remainder business, Ramboro, with which we had occasional dealings, and he had come with his very experienced buyer, Tim Finch, looking to buy some of our overstocks. I appreciated Jeffrey’s suggestion, but an association with a remainder company was not exactly what we were after.

  Nevertheless, prodded by Jeffrey, John and I met up several times and eventually he confided to me that he was in the process of selling his company to Chrysalis, who at that time were not only leaders in the music business but also owned radio and television outlets. John told me they were keen, through him, to expand into the publishing world and were interested in us. That was an altogether different proposition and seemed like a perfect marriage. After a long courtship and a protracted negotiation, during which Anthony Harkavy played his usual blinder, protecting our interests (particularly during the final long, tense meeting in the offices of Chrysalis’ solicitors, Harbottle & Lewis), a deal was finally signed. It was, in a way, one of the saddest days of my life, giving up our independence, but also an incredibly important one, for, as a result of our agreement, we were able to pay off the bank and remove all the guarantees (ours and that of Carole’s father, which was still in place). It was a massive relief.

  * * *

  John Needleman was in charge of the expanding Chrysalis publishing group, and working with him was relatively easy, since he seemed content to leave the actual publishing to me, which, after all, is what I was there for. Meanwhile, he concentrated on what he was expert at: buying companies, six of which he acquired in quick succession. Several of these were companies that had approached us over the years and which had now hit hard times. As part of the arrangement, we gave up our office in Clipstone Street and moved to north London, where Ramboro was based, and in due course those other companies joined us there. As a condition of the deal, we’d managed to keep nearly all our staff, but after a year or so, two key members (the ‘A team’, as I called them) left. Kate Mills, our brilliant editor, went to Book Club Associates, then to Orion as publishing director of fiction, and is now publishing director of Harper Collins’ HQ imprint, while the dynamic Charlotte Bush is now the high-flying director of publicity and media relations at Penguin Random House. Both stars.

  After three years, John Needleman left and was replaced by Marcus Leaver, with whom I was increasingly uncomfortable for several reasons, especially after he brought in an associate publisher for my imprint without discussing it with me. I played it cool, biding my time, and in due course Leaver left for America and the editor he’d brought in also departed. We were back to square one, except that Chrysalis decided that the illustrated imprints they had acquired through Needleman were swallowing money and they wanted to withdraw from the publishing business.

  Eventually, there was a management buyout and Anova was born, with Robin Wood and Polly Powell in charge, both experienced publishers. It was shortly after this that Laurence Orbach, with whom I was at school, suggested that I start my own imprint within his huge international publishing group, Quarto, which, in 2006, I did, having negotiated an exit deal with Anova (now called Pavilion) that gave me a continued interest in certain Robson Books titles. When we announced this move,
and the new imprint, JR Books, I had two interesting emails. One came from the editor Marcus Leaver had brought in, generously congratulating me and saying I’d seen off ‘a number of young guns, myself included’. The other was from Leaver saying, ‘You are one of a kind and someone should bottle your publishing instincts,’ and he went on to say that he’d ‘learned so much’ from me and was ‘pleased to call [me] a friend’. I quote that not through vanity, since I took it with a large pinch of bottled salt, but because of what I know preceded it.

  Laurence Orbach had bought Aurum Books, which was run by the experienced and extremely able Bill McCreadie, but apart from that Quarto was basically a high-quality packager running a totally international business. Our association lasted for five years, but as Quarto people who were not versed in general publishing started to try to impose themselves, it became impossible given the restraints – the more so once Bill McCreadie, who had become an ally, decided to leave Aurum. In some ways, I feel I let Laurence down, but we’d both acted in good faith and we parted as friends. I was saddened to read, a few years after we parted, that some of those same people who had been shackling me had ousted him as CEO of his own company, and how ironic it is that Leaver is now in charge of the whole caboodle, including Aurum. There, but for the grace of God…

  Dannie Abse was fond of quoting Louis Pasteur’s assertion that ‘chance favours the prepared mind’, and as things with Quarto were unravelling, it seemed to favour mine. I had known Iain Dale for many years, and indeed had published him at Robson Books, and we’d had several successful launches at his superb Politico’s bookstore. Very much at the centre of the political world, Iain had recently started Biteback, a mainly political publishing imprint backed by Lord Ashcroft. He told me he was looking to expand into a more general area alongside the political, perhaps to acquire another publisher, but as we talked it became clear he didn’t need to – I could start that imprint for him, and once the idea was floated, we were almost up and running. We just had to think of a name for the new imprint.