Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Read online

  ‘So, Maurice did put on his play, the one from the college erotica library, but not in the college gardens.’

  ‘You could say that. Someone else started it, someone else from Brentwood. Quite a school. Didn’t I always say so? But he died, threw himself from the Amsterdam Hilton, or so they said. Maurice took it on, made it more fun.’

  ‘But why you? Wasn’t it rather unpleasant?’

  ‘Only sometimes. It was more show than anything else. Not much happened, at least not where I could see. The tent within a tent within a tent was always a bit impractical. It looked good. It was a job. I got paid. And I got to spend time with Maurice.’

  The Calthorpe was by now almost full. There was an intensifying whiff of gas and a louder bubbling of Welsh vowels. V continued for some while to speak to me as though she were still the older girl, still embarrassed to be seen with a young boy outside a cinema.

  At lunchtime there was a message and a map from Mahmoud, showing the coast road to the east. At 4 p.m. he was waiting, as promised, where the Montaza beach meets the road, by the pink-and-white holiday resort whose last regular occupant was Egypt’s last ruling king. It was safer at the edge of town, he said, which was not the reason he had given when he had first mentioned my coming here. He had insisted then that no one writing about Cleopatra should come to Alexandria without visiting these fantasy turrets.

  King Farouk had lost his throne in 1952: ‘when you were only one years old’, said Mahmoud.

  The king, he said, was ‘not a bad man’. He had shown ‘youthful promise’, even if his biographies show him only as a harmless collector of red cars and razor blades. He had been harassed by foreign powers and ungrateful Egyptians like old Mr Zaghloul.

  Yes, his life had ended in ignominy and exile, famed for his pornography collection and dying, eventually, from one too many Lobster Thermidors. But he was ‘not to be derided for that’. In fact, said Mahmoud, ‘his memory was increasingly revered’.

  We could not go inside the Montaza Palace. Only the President, the fourth in line of the non-royal pharaohs of Egypt, was allowed to use it and he never did. But we could admire the generous use of the letter F in the decoration, a recognition of the immortality of not merely the king himself but of his sisters, Fawzia, Faiza, Faika and Fathia – and of his children, Ferial, Fawzia, Fadia and Fuad.

  Mahmoud’s tone was rather different from before, mildly mocking, not quite as deferential to the ‘good men’ who had always ruled his country. ‘F for Fascist too,’ he added. Farouk liked Hitler because Egypt’s British ‘protectors’ behaved as the Roman protectors once had done – and the Germans had done less harm here than the French. But that was less an issue now. It had faded from memory along with the king’s collection of sexually explicit snuff boxes and green alabaster baths.

  Poor Farouk had hormonal problems. He was seen almost as a ‘good man’ again now, much better than the man who was ordering new cameras and microphones into Saad Zaghloul Square. The police were searching for terrorists but listening to everyone. They said that Jihadists were Egypt’s enemy, when almost everyone was Mubarak’s enemy. They planted bombs to make the British and Americans afraid of the Jihadists and supportive of the regime.

  This was a surprise. So Mahmoud, too, was suggesting that the New Year bomb was Mubarak’s very own work, a sharp change of view from the quiet apologist who had adopted me only two weeks ago at the Metropole Hotel. On January 1st both Socratis and Mahmoud had seemed to be on the same side – with different degrees of enthusiasm. Then Socratis had given his carpet lecture, his story of how Cleopatra ruled, how she was propped up by a foreign power and hated by almost everyone. The ancient Alexandrians had a name for that sort of message, an ekphrasis, a picture described with a purpose. And now Mahmoud, rather more directly, was back in line with his friend, a very different line from the one before.

  Why then, I asked, had we come to a presidential palace, even one not used by the president? Was this really his ‘safer place’? What was going on?

  This place was controlled by ‘the old security’, he said, the part that barely functioned. There were 250 acres here and as many different kinds of palm tree. He smiled, as though newly unburdened. And anyway, was this not the closest to the queen of the Cleopatra Ball that I was ever going to get?

  Perhaps it was. If I wanted to conjure scenes of Antony, god of intoxication, Cleopatra, the ruthless and insatiable, Dellius, procurer of boys and girls, and Plancus, master of all ceremonies, this would be the place. We could forget the Metropole ballroom.

  There was a brief scuffle when two young English women, trying optimistically to soak up some pale sun, sought a piece of sand for their towels that two Egyptian businessmen, with black suits and sandwiches, thought was rightfully theirs. An argument between the almost naked and the over-dressed will normally favour the latter; and so it did. But after this there was almost no movement, no distraction at all.

  Mahmoud said he had to go back to work but would meet me at 7 p.m. at the Palestine Hotel, the king’s former guest house. Meanwhile I could select a writing place beside a bank of reeds, an indigenous variety among a wide choice of more exotic shrubs.

  This is a place and a chance to think ahead. The rest of this book is going to star the Queen of England as well as Egypt, a hero of Anzio, a cancer-stricken editor, a Hollywood actor, strange men on stilts, Margaret Thatcher at the height of her powers in the Miners’ Strike (even though I never wrote that first biography), a lost escapologist (£350 for the evening), a thousand bottles of free Bollinger champagne and a Dutch master’s painting. There will definitely now be a bigger part for Lucius Munatius Plancus. V has made sure of that.

  So who was Plancus? Aside from the good stories, where does he fit in? Like most of the Romans whose names we put in history books, he was a soldier, a diplomat and a politician. There was nothing unusual in his lines of work. He was an aristocrat, but from one of the newer families, the kind then most likely to see their future with Julius Caesar. Like Antony, but lower down the ranks, he helped the conquest of Gaul. He earned a reputation for hunting druids. He might have been with Caesar for the invasion of Britain. He knew Hirtius. He disappears from the record at the time of Pharsalus and the Alexandrine War but was probably there at both. His is the second name mentioned in Caesar’s African War, the bloody mopping-up of Pompey’s defiant supporters. He might himself have been one of its Continuators.

  In V’s view the middle-aged character of Plancus was as necessary in 1987 as the teenage years of Cleopatra had been twenty years before. She saw him as a forgotten character, and no less important for that. He was a trimmer, a chancer, a boaster, a Roman who played for almost every side in Rome’s long civil wars and whose sole thought, at all times, was of who would win, how would their battles be won, when should he join the winner and how he could help himself from the victor’s spoils.

  In V’s view, he needed rescuing. He was important. He was relevant. He was missing in too many versions of the story. He was the man most like the men she saw about her. This unreliable ally of Mark Antony was the consul who dressed in weeds and wode and slithered among mermaids at the Queen’s command. He was the judge who decided whether Cleopatra’s priceless pearl in acid wine should win the wager. The shaking of this cocktail was the act, in some ways the single most essential act of Alexandrian extravagance, science, theatre and technical invention. Plancus was the ringmaster, the producer. He had gained only small credit from historians for stopping the show before the second earring too was reduced to sour wine and scum.

  The English women on the Palestine beach have given up their struggle with the men in black suits. They have dressed and joined their sometime disputants at the bar. Closer encounters seem almost certain. The larger of the two men is dancing and one of the women is trying to pull him back down to the table. I may be able to follow their progress more closely when Mahmoud comes back for dinner.

  A few weeks after our encounter outside th
e Pakenham Arms Duke Hussey asked me for a drink – out of Trinity Oxford solidarity, I assumed, rather than for any other reason. What other reason could there be? I was nervous. Might it be some kind of interview? Surely not. Duke was the boss of bosses. I was the newest recruit. Duke was ‘management’, a word used derisively in the Blue Lion and Calthorpe. Management did not talk to journalists any more than trade unionists talked to journalists. No one talked to anyone – except in formal talks – or talks about talks.

  We met at Brooks’s Club in St James, an unlikely pair, he acknowledging fellow members, staff and even the portraits on the walls, I looking downwards onto a grime-ground carpet. We both had a dry sherry, the first sherry I had drunk since the days of Maurice’s decanter. I ordered what he ordered. It seemed the safest course.

  He began by being complimentary about articles I had written for The Sunday Times. Before we had been forced to stop work I had been ‘coming along well’. He thought that I was picking up the style. But he said the words in such a way as to suggest that the newspaper’s style was not his own, nor one of which he much approved.

  I had already made my first mistake – in telling the Business News men of the Pakenham Arms that I was having the lunch at all. So I would have to bring back some news, some gossip or insight. What was I supposed to say? Duke seemed to be one of those men who could say nothing for hours on end, mixing pleasantries with mouthfuls of plaice and peas.

  Duke was a military hero. That much Lew had told me. The industrial campaign to defeat the trades unions of Gray’s Inn Road was nothing much, it seemed, in comparison to what this modest, bluff, flat-faced man had known in his youth. He was confident of victory. We had only to be patient.

  We talked easily enough, about Trinity, James Holladay, the King’s Arms, the gardens. He asked about my hobbies as though he were interviewing me for a senior position in domestic service. I mentioned Cleopatra, but carefully. From his flickering eyes came the message that an ambitious reporter, a Trinity man too, should have more immediate matters on his mind.

  Duke knew, however, about one character in the Cleopatra story, the same one, strangely, that V had identified. Duke and V had nothing else in common. It would have been hard to imagine her in Brooks’s. He was her enemy, her class enemy, in the seventies the most potent kind. But they both knew bits of what little there is to be known about Lucius Munatius Plancus.

  That was mere coincidence then, a discovery made over two dishes of sponge pudding and custard. But it is also the only reason that I am writing about Plancus now, with my back against the soft bark of a tree once owned by King Farouk. The consul with the mermaid’s tail, as Duke explained, was a Roman of more than mere historical interest, not just a part of Cleopatra’s life but part of his own. He spoke for what seemed an hour or more. I had not yet learnt that the coffee stage of a club-land lunch might last twice as long as the soup, fish and cake.

  There are many reasons for knowing about a character from the past. I already knew about Plancus because any biographer of Cleopatra has to know him: he was the man who organised her fancy-dress parties and the financing of Antony’s armies. James Holladay knew even more about Plancus because it was his job to know more – and because he considered unreliable allies to be some of the most consistently important chracters in history.

  V had played alongside a Plancus in the Red Tents of Oxford, looking down at the mermaids and the wrestlers. Any admirer of the poet Horace will know about Plancus, the recipient of a beautiful and mysterious poem beginning Laudabunt alii, Others will praise and followed by a list of seaside towns. But Duke knew about him because, in January 1944, he had passed by Plancus’s tomb. It was like a giant pillbox, he said, like a great brick drum built by Hitler’s finest engineers. He had been on his way to losing his leg at Anzio at the time.

  The long last phase of the Second World War in Italy had given the young Marmaduke Hussey a fresh perspective on ancient history. His fellow officers, he said, included much better scholars and teachers than he. Many knew of the Continuators. They had read the second half of the Aeneid, the battle for Rome itself. Quarrelling commanders, disagreements about battle sites and cavalry tactics, and whether Rome was even worth fighting for: all these questions filled the Latin pages of their schoolboy memories.

  In 1944, Duke reminded me, the Allies were advancing painfully through Italy, arguing among themselves about the speed and direction of the drive against the enemy. Neither the landscape nor the questions were so very different from how they had been 2000 and 3000 years before. So many of his companions were steeped in the classics, the easiest way for them to talk about the present was to place the roads, rivers and mountains in the past. Not much had changed. The British, American and German armies were the latest and bloodiest heirs to Aeneas and Antony fighting up and down the peninsula known as Italy.

  Lucius Munatius Plancus’s 2000-year-old tomb, once topped by cypress trees, dominated the allied invasion routes of 1944 at Gaeta by the Bay of Naples. So, when Duke’s transport ships passed by, several of his friends knew exactly what it was. They talked of how it was the most spectacular spot, close to the place of Plancus’s birth. The old Roman had made his tomb, 500 feet above the sea, to mark the achievements by which he most wanted to be remembered: his good deeds, his consulships and priesthoods, his triumphs over Swiss tribesmen and the foundation of Lyons. Had he perhaps persuaded Virgil to begin Book Seven of his Aeneid there, with the burial of Caieta, the hero’s nurse, those lines about whether life was worth remembering, the first in Latin that I ever read? Maybe he had.

  What did I think? Were his friends right? I was able to add a few thoughts, the first of the lunch that Duke seemed to listen to. In his old age, I suggested, Plancus was rightly worried that his bad deeds would outlast the good. More shocking to some than the pearl dissolved in wine was his rumoured part in his brother’s murder and his exploitation of Antony’s money-making raids on the aristocracy after the Ides of March. Plancus, it was said, had wanted his brother’s house at Tibur, the most fashionable riverside suburb of Rome. Antony could ensure that this theft was legal. But it was still a stain on his character.

  Plancus knew that he would be attacked after his death. He had enemies who were already writing the bad obituaries. ‘Only ghosts fight with corpses,’ he jibed at them, ‘cum mortuis non nisi larvas luctari’. But Plancus was a vain man. He wanted the best possible credit for the best that he had done.

  Duke nodded. By February 1944, he said, the British army had fought its way from Sicily and reached a line just south of Gaeta. The Germans were as divided as the Allies about whether or where they should fight in Italy and they too had the tomb of Plancus on their maps. Duke’s masters took a fateful decision (absolutely fateful for him) that rather than fight their way on land past Gaeta they would sail past it, to Anzio, the beaches of ancient Antium.

  A schoolboy’s idea of Anzio was a place of warmth, wine and art, the sculptures that Plancus and his kind had stolen, bought and sold, the grapes they had grown and the sun that had shone on them while they did so. The Anzio beaches in 1944 were a classical landscape of a different, darker kind.

  Duke clenched his fist over the table as he recalled the scene. He was now a wholly different man from the one who had arrived at Brooks’s, cold as he recalled the sodden sands, the rain like corrugated-iron sheets, the clinging mud like the mess on an abattoir floor. This was classical only as an amphitheatre for gladiators is classical, sand where there was nowhere to hide, overlooked by high boxes, booths, protected places with perfect lines of sight.

  When it came to his own part, Duke paused. He arrived after the first wave of the assault, among the reinforcements required to fill the gaps left by the dead. He did not want to talk about what happened next. In his memoir, Chance Governs All, published much later, he described his encounter on a bramble-covered hillside with ‘the worst shot’ in the German army, the machine-gunner who at a range of three yards took his leg when
by any likelihood of reason he should have taken his life.

  It was a matter of chance. Chance governed everything, he said. Confidence and luck were the keys to any life.

  We returned to talking about Trinity. This was easier, though increasingly disjointed. He told me what I had never known, that James Holladay, the heavy-bodied hero of the King’s Arms, had been a gunner in the D-Day landings, going over on a Gooseberry. A Gooseberry? Yes, part of a Mulberry, one of the artificial harbours. Did I not know about them?

  Incidentally, did I ever go to the Calthorpe Arms? He preferred it to the Pakenham. I said I was surprised he knew either. He said he knew the Calthorpes quite well. The one who gave his name to the pub was our naval commander in the Mediterranean in the First World War. Arthur Calthorpe accepted the Turkish surrender. Gradu diverso via una. That was his motto.

  In his London club, forty years on from the event that had redirected his life, Duke seemed surprised to be taking an hour or two away from his industrial wars, musing about ships and scholarship and about Plancus, the man in the Gaeta tomb. Was he an evil traitor and a trimmer, a betrayer of his brother, a stealer of his brother’s house, an unreliable ally, debauchee and drunk? Or was he just what so many of us would have been, if we were lucky, a man of all wars who waits to see who is going to win and enjoys himself as best he can while waiting?

  Duke did not encourage long answers – or any answer that strayed too far from his centre of concern. He did not seek the bigger picture. He did not care about Cleopatra or Antony. He was a minimalist, happy to define his knowledge in his own way, a lover of order, an artist of organisation, an Alexandrian in many ways. When he argued for Plancus, he did so doggedly, as though the Roman were a wartime companion fallen upon hard times. On a troop ship from one theatre of foggy fighting to another, Plancus had been a relaxation of a kind. The tomb itself, he said, had suffered from both allied and German bullets but it was well restored now. There was a prison nearby where for a long time they kept some of the nastier operatives of the SS.