Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Read online

  Or perhaps he is not frightened of the horses but of something else. ‘Careful, careful,’ Mahmoud whispered to both of us with warmth and a threat: ‘Zaghloul, Nasser, Mubarak, all of them good men.’ Socratis, unmoved and mud-eyed, suggested that we all meet later in a place he called ‘my cafe’. First he had to make some hospital visits.

  I too need to pause. Before I begin this last Cleopatra, the one that this time I will finish, I want to describe myself a little, to try to see myself as I see Socratis or Mahmoud or as I see the past, revealing first what is easiest to reveal.

  So what do I see?

  First: a sixty-year-old man, settling into his room, as tall as a wardrobe, as broad as a pillow, hair the colour of a greying sheet, stubble like a scratchy blanket and a long horizontal scar across his stomach like the crack in the door.

  What else?

  In order to write I have my back to the sea. The view of the steely Mediterranean is desirable but distracting. This is a cramped and crowded room – with a high ceiling, generous wall space but little accommodation for another chair. I have not yet rearranged the furniture. I am standing upright, scribbling in a notebook with a pen pressed against the door as though it were a desk.

  A closer observer – if suitable surveillance were installed – would see me writing quickly, almost as though I were talking. Just occasionally my jaw moves in emphasis or amplification, a movement made clearer on unshaven cheeks.

  I have no need to look respectable. Twenty-four hours ago I left London unexpectedly, and no one I know will see me here. I could have fixed to see writers or politicians or critics, the contributors to the newspaper that I edit. I might have brought crisp, clean clothes, linen suits and a laptop computer. Instead, I am wearing frayed jeans, scuffed suede shoes and am pushing out words on a notepad against a thin panel of wood.

  This is not how it was supposed to be. For the last weeks of my fifty-ninth year, I had a suitcase packed for a different trip, to the winter sunshine five thousand miles to the south. But Christmas was frozen. The London airports were iced for many days; and when the ice melted there were too many travellers for South Africa and not enough planes. Egypt was an easier ticket to buy – from Hampstead to Cairo, to the fluorescent checkpoints of the desert and the Metropole Hotel, to a tiny, tall room with a balcony overlooking the sea.

  Rue Nebi Danial

  Socratis gave me instructions about where I should be going next. The walk was short. The directions were simple: right on Al Horreya, left on Nebi Danial, past the bookshops and piles of trousers where the two streets meet, the Piccadilly Circus of Alexandria, as the guidebook says; past the lives of Fidel Castro and Richard Burton, catalogues from JCPenney and the Modern Dining Centre, past dozens of purple overalls, an advertisement for a discussion about Jean-Paul Sartre in 2002, a brown-and-white radio mast in Eiffel pattern and a tightly shuttered home for French missionaries.

  I was told to sit in the cafe by the fountain, the ‘Sea Fountain’ I think he called it. Just before Nebi Danial ends in a bus station there is a low, iron fence around a sloping, green-marble slab broken by grass. Above a watery-coloured rock sits a concrete swirl of foam speckled by golden mosaics and on the foam, riding erect, or as erect as anything could ride on so toppling a tower, is a winged woman with claws, part angel, part sphinx, pushing out a conch shell from which water, powered by a hanging electric flex, may once have flowed. A Sea Fountain? Yes, this must be the place that he meant.

  That was about an hour ago. How long do my new friends expect me to wait? And what do I know about them to make me wait? The answer is still almost nothing except that they share an interest in one of the very few tourists in town. This interest may be official or entrepreneurial. It is hard to say. What they cannot know about me is that waiting with paper and pen at a table is what I am here to do. I am writing about Cleopatra for the last time.

  If, as Socratis suggests, this needs to be a day of caution lest al-Qaeda has begun an Egyptian campaign, there is no harm for me in that. A break may be useful. To write beside a busy street, with the constant hope of interruption, is the best way for me to write, sometimes the only way. If there are to be no tourist destinations today, there is time for a reminder of my very first attempt on Cleopatra, for going back fifty years to Professor Rame and the Egyptian Queen, to a place in every way different from this L-shaped room of languid waiters and tiny tables that Socratis called ‘my cafe’.

  His cafe? I doubt it. He also says that the Cecil is his hotel. He may not even come. He is right, however, that a grey-haired Englishman with a few old papers, a pad of new paper and an Arabic guide to classical sites seems unlikely to be disturbed as long as from time to time he buys a Lipton’s tea, the pale yellow brand name that must have been on these unwashed walls for fifty years at least.

  CLEOPATRA THE FIRST

  Once upon a time there was a Professor James Rame, an ageless, characterless male who knew Cleopatra personally. He loved her. He loved her because she was beautiful, bold and smelt like my mother. This professional alien, space traveller and hero of a long-lost adventure at the courts of Alexandria, was my first and only fictional creation. I was ten years old.

  Professor Rame and the Egyptian Queen, a fantasy of golden hair and blue skies (or so I like to think), was written in what my parents used to call a ‘box room’, almost square and about the size of this cafe alcove. A near-perfect cube, it contained a high wooden desk and it doubled as a home for water tanks and staircase support. Just as in Room 114 at the Metropole, it was easiest to write there while standing.

  The rest of the little red-brick house was filled with radio noises, Mrs Dale’s Diary and the permanent hum of a Hoover. But in the windowless box room there was silence. The bare plastered walls, pink as a story-book pig, were protection against invasions from beyond.

  Outside in the garden there were other walls, solid mounds of what my father called Essex clay. To him it was dead, inert, inevitable wasted earth abandoned by builders in a hurry. To a child it was like living flesh or warm plasticine that I could punch, climb, cut, try to mould, try not to offend. Half a century ago, behind the back doors of semi-detached houses on the Marconi works estate, a mile from Chelmsford, were hundreds of slimy-sided cubes of this clay, newly cut by machines, soft but indestructible, leaden red by day and looming brown by night, garden obstacles that at a child’s bedtime might become an Egyptian temple or an ancient Roman face or a Russian.

  My first Cleopatra was a phantom, a dream in the dark. When she joined Professor Rame’s Egyptian adventure she became a bit more than a mud-red face, more than a mouth, a nose and a neck. She had a name. She did things, felt things and made things happen. I am sure she did. But I cannot remember any of them or anything of how I imagined her.

  I can guess that Professor Rame’s hostess had some of the finer female characteristics, those that went with perfume and jewellery, not with oven-cleansers or Kilner Jars, with my mother’s ambitions not her insecurities, with my sister’s bright blond hair not her noisier toddler habits. But I can only guess. I would give much now for a few sentences of how Cleopatra and the professor first met, that first clash of other worlds. But the name is all there is. Sometimes one just has to accept the absence of memory as better than the pretence of it.

  There is nothing so very wrong in remembering only a name. Much of what we know of antiquity are names, the names of lost people, plays, histories, the names of learned treatises, works on medicine, on how to prevent slaves escaping and how to apply make-up. My own Cleopatra (as I saw her then), the seventh woman of her name to rule in Egypt after its submission to the Greek generals of Alexander the Great, wrote a treatise about make-up. Or maybe she had her name attached to someone else’s lipstick tips: librarians and booksellers even then believed that a work was more likely to be read under the name of a celebrity. If history had happened differently, mascara might have been all we knew about her. Instead, she became the lover of two great Roman gener
als and, as some came to say, changed the history of the western world. On Cleopatra’s name there is space enough to pile a mountain.

  Professor Rame’s own name was different. It was invented as a disguise, a suggestion of what I was supposed to become. My professor wore an adult form of school uniform, National Health pink-rimmed glasses and was a master of engineering science. He had to be. He could hardly be a professor of anything else if he were to travel in space and time.

  Imagination of the ancient world was a luxury in 1959. Engineering was the necessity, in our case radar engineering. For my father and the men who lived around us, seeing the invisible was a profoundly practical matter. Max Stothard was a designer of military machines that made us safe.

  In our house there was no time for the nonsense of any history older than the century. Ours were homes built in anxious haste, dug out of a butcher’s farmland below a giant steel aerial mast that had been erected against the Communists as soon as the Nazi threat was past. The mobilisation of men and material to watch for Cold War missiles was as urgent as in the hot wars – from Crete to Alamein – in which my father and his engineering friends had learnt their craft. In former fields, beside a town that already boasted the title ‘Birthplace of Radio’, we were the families whose fathers understood klystrons, tweeters and ‘travelling-way tubes’ for the long-distance radar that kept the enemy at bay.

  Every man on the estate knew either about the transmitters that saw things faraway in the dark or about the various electric valves that powered a radar’s eyes. They worked at benches, not at desks. There was a wartime spirit still. The interest was not the Korean War, the one that filled the headlines of the Daily Telegraph of 28 February 1951, the issue my mother kept in the sideboard because it marked the day of my birth. Still less did it stem from the Suez War, a nasty disturbance that might as well have happened in Cleopatra’s Egypt for all the concern it created for us. Our war was the war with Moscow.

  The Soviet threat was an evil. But, like everything in that hopeful time, it was also a good. As well as defending British prosperity against the great Red menace, we were supposed to share in it, creating a haven of high education, a science park, even an Essex garden community in which the clay cut to make the foundations of 51 Dorset Avenue might one day grow cabbages, fruit trees and flowers. By 1960 Mr Churchill’s England had become Mr Macmillan’s – with only the barest distraction from Mr Eden’s debacle in Colonel Nasser’s Egypt. Life was going to be fine.

  There were many advantages for us on these company streets. Almost every family had a TV set, assembled during our fathers’ lunch-breaks rather than bought in a shop. We had miniature radios when most of the country still kept the BBC in big wooden boxes: Professor Rame’s career began with the bedroom sound of science fiction, bluff Englishmen bringing their voices to Mars and the Moon.

  Books, by contrast, were rare. There were just five of them in 51 Dorset Avenue, the brightest coloured being a sky-blue edition of S.T. Coleridge, the title printed in such a way that for years I thought that the poet was a saint. Next to this sat a collected Tennyson, in a spongy leather cover. On the shelf below was a cricket scorebook in which someone had copied improving philosophical precepts; and beside that, The First Test Match, a slim, slate-green hardback. This was the one of them that looked read and reread.

  The fifth book is the only one that is with me in Alexandria fifty years on, my Nottinghamshire grandfather’s copy of the second half of Virgil’s Aeneid, Books 7–12, with the name B. Stothard, in a firm, faded script, inside the flyleaf. The first owner of this red Loeb edition, English and Latin on opposite pages, was a family mystery. My father refused ever to offer anything beyond a set of not quite consistent facts: that Bert Stothard had been a farmer who had lost a fortune thinking there was oil beneath his farm, that he had been a miner, a mining engineer, a Methodist preacher, a manager of the parts department at a maker of stone-crushing machines. Every description was of some other existence. In 1956 he died, leaving behind a secretive son and the second half of a Latin epic poem.

  In the two thousand years since the time of Cleopatra this Aeneid has been the most famed of all writings in Latin. It has been the book of empire-builders, the story of how a young Trojan prince escaped the fires of conquered Troy and sailed away to found the far greater city of Rome. Its first half tells how Aeneas put imperial duty before his love for a foreign queen (there is more than a touch of Cleopatra in Dido), and how he visited his dead father in the underworld to get divine instruction for the task ahead and endured various adventures of varyingly entertaining sorts. Its second half is more gruelling, for Aeneas, his men and for readers, a story of military struggle through Italy, the defeat of hostile tribes and some vengeful killings that even Virgil’s greatest admirers wished he had omitted.

  There must be many other two-volume sets of the poem where Part One is borrowed (and never returned) and Part Two is never borrowed at all. Those who begin with the seventh book of the Aeneid, the first book of the Aeneid in the library of Dorset Avenue, take an unusual route into the story. They know nothing of Troy or Dido, nothing of sex and cannibalism in caves. They begin with the military struggle, the shrugging-away of the Trojan past so that the Italian future can begin.

  There is also, at the very start of Book Seven, the question of ending, of memorial, of what part of us is remembered and how and whether any memorial is worthwhile. In the first sentence of Latin I ever saw, Aeneas has just buried the woman who nursed him as a child in Troy. Her name is Caieta. His father is dead; his lover, Dido, is dead. His mother, the goddess Venus, while as alive as she ever was, has shown divine inattention to childcare. So Caieta is an important part of the hero’s past and one of his last connections to it. He buries her on a coastal hill near Naples and builds a monument. Tu quoque litoribus nostris, Aeneia nutrix: You too to our shores, nurse of Aeneas.

  Caieta may seem an odd character to appear at the beginning of a book about Cleopatra. She is almost unknown. Most students have read the Aeneid without registering her at all. Her name begins with C and ends in A but that is not the reason she will play her part in this story. She will be there because she was the first Latin name I knew when it began. This final version of my Cleopatra, whatever it becomes, will be most of all a book of chances.

  Professor Rame’s adventure, my own first Cleopatra, owed a little to Bert Stothard’s Aeneid, but more as an opening to an ancient world than a guide to what was in it, more as an object than a text. I could not make sense of Latin yet. My professor owed much more to radio and its infant child, TV. Electronics were about to banish the printing press even then. On our estate of clay we were proudly in the forefront of that change. Our tiny transistor radios may have lacked the smartest cases; our televisions had often no cabinets at all, their twinkling glass valves strung out along the picture rails and around the back of settees. But we were surrounded by science. When we wanted a better picture, the contrast of our blacks and whites was improved from the first principles of the cathode ray. To make the most of the Coronation, the Billy Cotton Band Show or even Mrs Dale’s Diary, a massed expertise could be deployed, from as far afield as Noakes Avenue, the outer limit where Marconi-land ended and Essex farming returned.

  The houses were so alike, and the food in their cupboards so absolutely alike, that it hardly mattered where on the estate we fed our pet pond creatures or ate our tea. Most boys and girls had the same-shaped box room for their den, the same cube within a cube. A sawn-off end of a radar tube was so perfect for newt-keeping that every boy who braved the ‘bomb-hole’ pond in the ‘rec’ had one of his own. Break the glass screen and there was always a replacement the next night. We all had field glasses, relics of our fathers’ wars or second-hand from the army surplus stores; we knew the names of every swooping, hovering or merely hopping bird. All groceries came from the same dirty-green, single-decker coach of ‘Mr Rogers’, a silent ex-soldier who piled his fruit and vegetables on either side of the a
isle where the seats had been and twice a week toured the avenues from Dorset to Noakes to sell cereals, sugar, flour and everything that the gardens might one day produce but did not yet.

  Ours was a community of algebra and graph-paper. Mathematics was the language of choice. Contract bridge was the nightly recreation. Prizes for success in this sport of the mind fell tumbling from our sideboard doors whenever they were opened too roughly, uniformed knaves on ashtrays, unsmiling queens on decanters, aces on miniatures of port and brandy whose liquids had long dried away but whose evidence for victorious rubbers remained. My curly-haired, smiling father had a brain for numbers that his fellow engineers described as Rolls-Royce. Notoriously, he did not like to test it beyond a purr. In particular – and this was unusual in a place of intense educational self-help – he did not care to inculcate maths into his son. This was a task that he had recognised early as wholly without reward. Max Stothard would occasionally attack the mountain of clay in his garden but never knock his head against a brick wall. He much preferred to be relaxed.

  Like most of our neighbours, he had learned about radar by chance, in his case after lying about his age, volunteering for the navy and spending most of the war becalmed off West Africa. He had wanted to fight but did not. On a ship called HMS Aberdeen, he had stayed three thousand miles from the desert-rat fights of Libya and Egypt. He sent home red-leather-bound knives to his mates back in the Nottinghamshire mining lands. He sent postcards of Dakar’s six-domed cathedral to his strictly Methodist mother. But he never fired a hostile shot except at a basking shark.