Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Page 16

  And from the ‘Versailles window’ on the stairs a many-coloured light would shine, not just on the guests climbing the red-carpeted staircase but, by means of wheels and mirrors, on those dancing in the ballroom too. Normally it was a tawdry dining-room where a waiter conducted a laptop computer, sometimes singing, mostly pretending to sing, while a few Americans argued about the price of water. It need not be like that. It had once been a ballroom.

  The red-panelled walls and gilded frames of flowers need not be as they were now. They could be something else. The flowers on the red carpet could be something else. In the side room, the green one with the frieze of river vegetation and cabbage, there could be the bar. This was not an ideal green. It was not even an Islamic green like that of the posters of the President’s sphinx-like son. Nor was it the shiny green of olive leaves. It was a fainting green, a green to swoon and be revived to. But if we used pink lights the cabbages could become roses, said Mahmoud: ‘the scent of roses has always stopped drinkers getting drunk’.

  If this was a rebuke, Socratis did not hear it. Both men continued. There would be rooms within rooms, a maze, magnificent marquees. There would be water in all the fountains, even in the Dead Sea fountain by the cafe. All the hotel furniture would have to be cleared – out into the road if there was no rain or back to Settee Street where it all came from fifty years ago.

  The singer with his musical laptop would have to get back to waiting on tables. There would be mezzos and sopranos, Socratis boasted, pushing out his chest. Maybe his mother would sing – or maybe better not. There was nothing wrong with the fake singer. If a man could not be a fake singer in Alexandria where else could he ply his trade?

  All the guests would have disguises, goddesses and housemaids, mermaids, mermen and other monsters. Who would be Cleopatra? Everyone could be Cleopatra. At her own parties long ago she had sometimes dressed herself as a street-girl or a flower-seller, Egyptian Isis or Greek Athene. Her generals had been giant sea creatures. Even a consul of Rome, a governor of Gaul, had been a merman, slithering across the floor between the tables. The mermaids could be anyone or anyone’s. Who could be Cleopatra? Who knew who was Cleopatra? Anyone. No one.

  The ball-planners left two hours ago. The square is unusually empty. The miserable view from the balcony is of almost no one near the Zaghloul monument. Police with guns patrol every entrance. A few pink food wrappers have blown around its mock-pharaonic panels, wind-blown paper patches, the only colour in the place. Inside this room where visitors are urged to feel the joy of the queen and her Antonio the yellow wallpaper is pale in the evening sun. Only the tiny pictures of Venice are reminders of how Europeans once wanted to see Alexandria, a city of romantic waters, royal barges and secret sexual excess.

  Socratis wants to change much more in Egypt than the decor of a hotel. He does not like to be cautious. It offends his masculinity and his Coptic pride. Mahmoud is happier with his bureaucrat’s role. But at heart they are not, I think, so different. If the bombing of the church is the beginning of the end for President Mubarak and his son, they will both be pleased. Whatever their jobs or employers now, Socratis will be pleased first. Mahmoud will quickly place whoever or whatever comes next in his pantheon of Egyptian ‘good men’.

  On my bed the scraps of past Cleopatras seem increasingly aggressive in their claims for attention. Top of the pile now is the reminder of the night when Maurice first revealed his own passion for party-planning.

  It was well after midnight in a low-ceilinged Trinity attic, by an open window with almost the same view down the lawn as from the grander rooms which Maurice and I had shared the year before. The only sound was the whish and whirr of a suitcase-sized tape recorder whose music-to-write-by had ceased many minutes before. My oldest friend, not now a very regular visitor, stamped a slippered foot against the rhythmic flapping of tape-end against spool. He was excited. He had a speech. He wanted me to listen.

  There was a red tent within a red tent within a red tent. That was what Frog said. The walls behind were grey-green and damp but in front of the canvas slit that led to the sanctuaries were dry roses. Inside the first encircling corridor the floor was warm leather. Through a second slit into a second circle there was a different carpet, silk or satin, light enough to show the outlines of the limbs that lay bodiless beneath.

  Maurice paused as though this were a very suitable place to pause, not because he was nervous or had lost his place. He did not want to continue until he had assessed my response.

  These limbs were lower legs, both right legs, the soles of their covered feet fixed upwards, the faint shape of the sweating toes visible beneath the cloth. The higher parts of the thighs were out of sight inside the final red tent on the floor of the innermost chamber. There was no opening by which to pass through and see why two women, probably women, were lying face down in the hidden heart of this strange construction; or why one of each of their legs was stretched outside into the corridor as though for some reason surplus to requirements.

  The only instruction was on a pink card secured by a jewelled brooch, carrying words in Greek, ‘veiled in the obscurity of a learned language’ as Edward Gibbon once noted on a similar occasion: ‘Menete! Nereidais Kleopatras Palaistra’ (‘Wait Here To Wrestle with Cleopatra’s Mermaids’).

  I said nothing. Maurice took a drink and a rasping breath and went on. I turned a page and continued to take notes. He seemed pleased. Maurice had met Frog. That was the start. Maurice had met Frog in the King’s Arms, and Frog had taken Maurice to the Red Tents, at an address he had been given before finally he had left the protective embrace of Brentwood School. Frog was a late arrival in Oxford but he already knew a city that neither of us yet knew.

  Maurice admitted to me that he had not seen everything for himself. He had not been allowed inside the innermost tent in the grounds of the great house. But Frog had been in. There were both men and women playing the parts of mermaids there, each with one leg pinned outside under the red silk drapes and another dressed in green gauze as though it were a tail.

  There was the scent of dried roses. There was a secret code. Each sea creature asked its visitor whether Alexander the Great was still alive. The right answer was ‘yes, he is alive and in power over the world’. Gibbon’s injunction to use ‘the obscurity of a learned language’ was in his account of the Roman empress Theodora, whose sexual pleasure was to place corn grains among her pubic hair for gentle consumption by geese. The historian deemed this more decorously described in Greek. The creators of the Red Tents agreed.

  How strange that Maurice had discovered all this with a boy whom he had so recently seen as so lacking in the lightest touch of grace, who had had the nickname and the sexual appeal of a small frog, a spotted frog, not even a frog naturally spotted in a National Geographic way but spotted as a laboratory frog might become through fright.

  Frog, it seemed, was rather different now. He had never been a quitter, said Maurice, with a suddenly more admiring view of the boy he had once so despised. He had also, it seemed, acquired or reacquired friends who would have fitted into the most febrile Roman imaginings of life in Cleopatra’s court, into an ancient exotica which the words of my failing biography had not approached, not closely, not at all.

  Frog had ‘gold on his tongue’. Maurice paused again, this time for nothing other than a dreamy dramatic effect. He was lightly drunk but less so than on many a quieter sherried night.

  What did he mean? I had no idea. In Brentwood days Frog had often looked shifty to me, a bit oily, as though he had sluiced his lips in a tin of peaches. Had he now moved up in life? Did Frog wear jewellery in his mouth?

  The Greek Egyptians, I ventured, used to put gold in the mouths of their dead so that they might charm the inhabitants of the next world. The password to the Red Tents, ‘Yes, he is alive and in power’, came from the legend of Alexander the Great’s sister, Thessalonike, who swam the seas looking for sailors to trick into the wrong answer. Maurice did not even pret
end interest in this.

  The flow of news babbled on. Frog had found himself a base as bar manager in his college, a useful post, Maurice mused. Our former unloved school creature had also, Maurice added softly, delivered a full confession for the great Brentwood book-burning of 1968. He claimed ‘diminished responsibility’. The new Frog was really very amusing.

  At this point we fell silent. Maurice cleared his nose and throat into a pale-blue cotton handkerchief, one of the dozens that his mother sent him. He had nothing more to do or say. There was no more about Frog’s Oxford that night. He left the room like a cat.

  After a few minutes he was briefly visible again through the window, out on the long path through the college lawn towards the gate with empty plinths awaiting the Stuart Restoration, then clearer against the night lights through the gaps in the lime trees (long awaiting their own different restoration) before vanishing, flouncing, towards his own room beside the Library – where the late studiers were smoking their cigars.

  12.1.11

  Place Saad Zaghloul

  Maurice began to go often to the Red Tents. I was not sure quite how often. In that second Trinity year I knew less and less of what he was doing. Our paths remained parallel but less close. There was no more sherry. He admitted that the tented mermaids were more often men. The bodies under the red cloth were not the same men all the time. Indeed the right to be pinned down on the satin floor was highly prized; a senior merman could choose his time for the most active hours of the night.

  What sort of action? He was never very precise. Sometimes there were girls, he said, as though to reassure me. The only requirement was that all should appear to have a tail instead of legs, an illusion most easily achieved by the spare limb being pinned outside the canvas walls. Frog had once seen a boy with a polio-shrunken leg of the kind we knew so well from school. But this had not been as much of a success as the organisers had hoped. Maurice’s homosexuality then still seemed theoretical, experimental, like cannabis, cocaine, cross-dressing and the Marowitzing of Shakespeare. It was secret. But everything was more secret then.

  He spoke sometimes vividly, or vividly as it seemed to me, of doors beyond doors beyond doors, dark rooms behind the light, lines of basins with alphas and epsilons in lipstick on the mirrors, nobody about, then suddenly a crowd, planks to trip over, drains to piss down, coloured clothes in cardboard boxes, white colonial wear, sailor suits, cheese-paper blouses on meat-rails, feathers, wax fruit, dried flowers in profusion and curly heads against a drinking fountain.

  For the first time the telephone rings in Room 114. There is a silence that ends with the news that Mr Socratis has his car waiting downstairs. I triple-lock the door, pass the red panels, the green cabbages and the Versailles window, and leave through the security shield. Socratis is tapping his foot on the pavement. Mahmoud is in the back seat behind the driver. He is pleased because the police have found another of the conspirators. There is a new video on YouTube of a man with blacked eyes, bloodied mouth and no sign of life.

  Socratis is not so pleased. A different security force, one of many serving the President’s purposes, is clearing the streets of derelict cars, reluctantly for the most part because an ill-paid policeman can make good money hiring out back-seats to prostitutes and addicts. The cars are now judged terrorist havens.

  Socratis has several threatened vehicles, not only on the Moon side of Alexandria but in Cairo by the airport. Their night-time users would be needed for the Cleopatra ball. He hoped that the clean-up campaign, like past efforts of its kind, would falter on economic grounds before it reached his retired Toyotas. Meanwhile he wanted me to accompany him back to the library. There seemed no good reason not to agree.

  Bibliotheca Alexandrina

  Maurice called the place of the Red Tents ‘my Mermaid Club’. The phrase was a form of protest since there was another Mermaid Club in Oxford that he would like to have joined. The invitation to me to join this older Mermaid Club came from Geoff the Editor who described it, in the fake antiquarian way then fashionable, as ‘a brotherhood committed to Restoration Comedy and the restorative powers of claret’. We had a venerable membership book with violet signatures, menus and arguments about the appropriateness of plays. Each meeting began with lines of John Keats on the subject of the Mermaid Tavern, a city hostelry that had once been the haunt of Milton and Ben Jonson, maybe Shakespeare too:

  Souls of Poets dead and gone,

  What Elysium have ye known,

  Happy field or mossy cavern,

  Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?

  How the meetings ended I can no better recall here in Alexandria forty years on than I could in Oxford on the following morning. We were a self-perpetuating cabal of authorities on the first halves of Restoration comedies, from Sir Fopling Flutter to Sir Courtly Nice, the obscure to the very obscure.

  The membership included many of the kind of men not much seen in Essex, men whose names already stood for something in the world outside, from castles to accountancy firms or for family connections of their own to poets dead and gone. For most of us it was a club which provided a light experience of Oxford tradition and a heavy taste of hangovers.

  What was the Latin for hangover? One of the thinner-faced, blonder-haired Mermaids gave me a little lecture on Mark Antony’s notorious crapulae. He also knew much more than I did about Cleopatra and the dead poets. He began each bottle with the opening lines of Nunc est bibendum, ‘Now is the time for drinking’, Horace’s Cleopatran ode. Sometimes he even recited in English to the end.

  Now we can have a drink. And a dance. And dress the room for the divinest party.

  While that queen and her drunken crew were still at loose, the time was not quite right.

  Sozzled with hope she was. They all were. Their fleet on fire soon sobered them up.

  Caesar was on to her like a hawk at a pigeon, a hunter at a hare. Next stop the chains of Rome except

  That she was never going to die like that, nor slink out quietly and hide herself away.

  Staring straight at her ruined palaces she took her last drink, the venom of the snakes,

  ‘Free, the mistress of herself, winning a triumph of her own.’

  Occasionally Cleopatra’s name appeared in games when modern politicians had to be cast as characters in old plays. How Hamlet-like was hesitant Edward Heath? Incidentally, why had he never married the beautiful Kay Raven whose picture was by his bedside, it was said, and who occasionally came to Trinity to see her brother, the tutor who read aloud to us in verse?

  How Cassiusesque were Harold Wilson and James Callaghan? Would Reginald Maudling, then considered one of the cleverest ministers of his time, better suit the parts of the harmless drunkard Falstaff or the more dangerous drunkard Antony?

  There were still the popular ‘names of’ clapping competitions. There were games in which members had to find their pair, Robin and Marian, Cleopatra and Antony, barely an advance on the Essex polished floors of 1956. And then there were always the lost Act Fives in which the stage directions ran into the dialogue and the drink ran into the ceilings of the rooms below.

  ‘Do you still write about politics?

  Socratis had been away only an hour but seemed now to know rather more about me – that before my authorship of Trente Jours I had been an editor of The Times, a political journalist in America as well as Britain, that I had survived a cancer that was supposed to kill me and had written about it in another diary called On the Spartacus Road.

  ‘What is Tony Blair like?’

  Socratis knew too that I had spent time with Tony Blair and George Bush during the Iraq War and had now subsided deeply, though he did not know just how very gratefully, into Greek and Roman history and a nine-year editorship of The Times Literary Supplement. This knowledge was no more than he could have found in a few minutes at a computer but it was beyond the interest that he had shown before.

  ‘No,’ I told him, ‘I no longer write about politics. Or, at least, only
very rarely, and not about any of the countries on my Roman map, not about Morocco, Tunis or Libya, not at all about Egypt.’

  ‘What do you understand of being an Alexandrian?’

  I paused, wondering if he was asking about the first centuries BC and AD (answer: riotous but politically ineffective, disrespectful of authority but dictatorially governed, innovative, artful, always out for a good time if one could be found) or about the city of today. He did not wait for either answer.

  ‘There is someone I want you to meet.’

  This man, he said, would tell me everything about Alexandria. He would come to the library and find me there.

  ‘If you have to wait a little while, that will not matter, will it? You can always entertain yourself in a library.’

  ‘You could read your own book and practise your French,’ added Mahmoud who had been silent till then.

  The driver began laughing until his employer poked him hard in his plastic-covered paunch, harder than would be necessary for a driver more normally dressed.

  I have now been in the library for almost another two hours. I am expert on how the window-cleaners conduct their spidery dance on the roof above. The glass is tipped at an angle chosen to represent some ancient observation of the skies, not steep enough to require the swinging harnesses worn by those who ply their trade on office blocks, too steep to move as easily as on a roof that were flat.

  Various visitors have come and waved a ticket in my face. None has been Socratis’s Alexandrian. Each time he or she has been keen only to claim a pre-booked desk. Each time I have moved further down the steps, past the sculptures representing literature, past the exhibitions of linotype machinery, past plaintive paintings on the theme of the Rosetta Stone (lost to the British Museum) and the great lighthouse (lost to the sea).