Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Page 23

  After the death of Caesar’s fake son, Caesar’s real son, Caesarion, her own son, will be undisputed heir to the world, truly the King of Kings. Obelisks from all over Egypt are being gathered to make the gates of his temple, with places of honour too for Alexander the Sun, the boy whom his father Antony has just crowned King of the Persians, and his twin sister, Cleopatra the Moon, who, for the present, is Queen only of Libya.

  Those were the best of coronation days, occasions for triumphal parties that pleasured even the most jaded tastes. Everywhere she goes in Greece, there are banquets and dances in her honour. In Rome, she hears, Octavian is mocking the ‘Donations of Alexandria’ as illegal gifts of Roman property to foreign bastards. Plancus, it is said, describes every detail of their dances in the Greek islands, an outrage, he claims, when the world is on the brink of war.

  Ridiculous. And Plancus knows it. What seems an oriental orgy to the hypocrites of Rome is mere religious homage for her Hellenic hosts. Let her critics mock Cleopatra’s piety if they will. Let Octavian’s admiral, Agrippa, do his utmost to persuade the uncertain and disloyal. Let him try to secure the open ports of Greece, threatening, bribing and persuading. Every traitor has his reason. Meanwhile in Athens she has set up her court beside the Acropolis. She has revisited the temples that she last saw with her father when she was a child.

  17.1.11

  Rue Nebi Danial

  Six hours ago I was imagining Cleopatra, a task I have intended many times. Two hours ago I saw her room, an experience not intended at all. It was precisely 4.00 a.m. when I awoke as though somewhere else. Those numbers alone, on the red lights on the clock in Room 114, proved that I was awake, still inside that hotel room, on the bed between the close yellow walls with their Venice prints. I was not in an office of grey and black although I could clearly see that office and move myself around it.

  Every few seconds, between dark desk and shelves, I stopped to check that the clock light was still on, that I was still in the Hotel Metropole where I knew I was attempting to sleep. But beyond the red numbers I saw only shadows in which the queen had been sitting, the high sides of her chair, a foot-stool, a black vase of white flowers, the travelling equipment of a Cleopatra on the move, the place where bribes were exchanged for pledges and promises for gold.

  I could see her pen, the sloping letters she had written, the instructions that even without her name were unambiguous because she alone could give such commands. Everything of hers was without colour, built from towers of smoke but no less solid for that. The desk crushed the carpet. A pile of papyri was poised to fall. There were no figures in either of the two realms here, no one else with me in the yellow hotel room, no one serving, filing, writing and certainly not presiding over the grey office. There was nothing fearful or fantastic about it. I merely watched for a while until there was nothing new to watch.

  Afterwards it somehow seemed wrong to try to sleep. Dreams disappear. I want to hold the scene. So I am the first customer in the first cafe past the dead fountain, the nearest one that is open for trade before dawn. The coffee is in a copper-bottomed glass. The pastry is reassuringly hard. Across the road there are puppies in glass tanks awaiting the trade of the day, snoozing on shredded newsprint. There is no dog shit to disturb potential buyers, not a damp shred of yesterday’s news stories of Copts and Muslims and national unity.

  How do the pet salesmen do that? Is there some pen in the back of their truck where dogs go to do what real dogs do? These are not false dogs. They shuffle their shoulders and lick their tails and exercise their eyes when they see they have a watcher. We breed dogs not only for the finest range of long hair and short, long ears and short, but for eyes that look more like we look, so that they look as though they are looking at us.

  These dogs need badly to look their best if they are ever to get out of these fish tanks into the dirty realism of a human home. These are not real dogs until someone imagines them as their friend. Cleopatra had a dog as a god and the Romans despised her for that.

  I do not feel well. I am not seeing well. I am not writing much. Maybe I should have gone to Athens after all. But Mahmoud did not ask me in order to make Cleopatra happen more quickly. He wanted to get me away. I wish I knew why. It is still a relief still to be here.

  It would be a further relief to continue walking south on this street towards the lake, to the point where the Mareotis meets the waters of the sands. There are thousands of birds to see. But walking further is no good. While Julius Caesar could dictate and walk at the same time, that is one of the very many lessons that he did not pass on.

  So I have stopped at this new cafe near the bus station, where swarms of men are now beginning to arrive for work in the city trades. Dawn has quickly come. There are steel tables beside a yellow kerb, a solidity shaken only from time to time by yellow taxis taking the shortest distance to their destination. These little encounters of car and concrete must happen every hour of every day and night. Twice already there has been a scrape, not quite a crash, and a layer of sunny paint has moved from stone to metal or metal to stone.

  Maurice was only an occasional visitor to the pubs around The Times. For months I would never see him at all. I want now to describe my old friend as he was at this time; but, of all his times, this is the faintest in my mind. He wore pink shirts with grey ties. His shoes were soft and shiny. That much I do recall. There must be more than that.

  His schoolboy face survived intact above his collar, a little redder but the same face. I think so. Or perhaps I am just superimposing an older, stronger memory upon a newer, weaker one. It seems unjust to be describing him at all when he is not here to describe me. He would have taken that badly. He always gave as good as he got – and usually found in my sprawling suits and ill-cut curls some cause for cool critique.

  He was a success in his own world. Twelve years after Oxford he was prospering in the promotion of pet food and perfume, the bright ad-lands of million-pound accounts and hundred-pound lunches into which he had briefly, and unsuccessfully, introduced me back in 1973. The Gray’s Inn Road had journalists – but nothing much else to recommend it to him.

  So I was surprised when he called and said we should meet at 7 p.m. in the Blue Lion. He had a business interest, he warned me. He remembered that my responsibilities at The Times now included some supervision of the diary column. Yes, I wrote worthy leading articles too – about politicians and policies. But a diary of gossip, he said, could do more harm than any diatribe about the court of Margaret Thatcher.

  A few months ago the Times Diarist had run a comic campaign against one of his clients, the manufacturer of a male cologne called Drakkar Noir. It had been wholly trivial, funny sometimes he conceded, but not amusing to his client. This Drakkar Noir might indeed be ‘pongy’ and ‘cheeselike’, best used for confusing police dogs and poisoning house plants. But he had heard that the diarist was planning a return to his theme. Might I bring the man to meet him? Without being hugely optimistic, I said I would.

  While we waited, Maurice consumed several large gins and a generous ladling of other newspaper gossip. Was The Times really going to have a Bicentenary Rout? Could I get him an invitation? Yes, I said. And yes, I would try. Our fellow Trinity man, Duke Hussey, was leading the case for a lavish event that would be remembered for decades to come. Charles Douglas-Home, the Editor and my boss, was taking a more stringent view.

  It was not clear who would prevail. Duke had powerful support. CDH, as the Editor was always known, was younger but a nephew of both a former British prime minister and the playwright of The Chiltern Hundreds, the satire that V had so enjoyed at Brentwood. He had art and politics in his blood. Both men had their backers and critics in the Blue Lion and the Calthorpe.

  Throughout 1985, as CDH saw it, The Times was already due to play host to the Queen, the Queen Mother and the Queen’s sister on separate royal bicentenary occasions. Each event came with its own laboriously negotiated rules about whom the visitors should meet, what
should be said to them and how many ice-cubes were needed for a gin-and-Dubonnet refresher. CDH thought this to be quite sufficient. His ambitions for the year were the collapse of the Soviet Union, the defeat of its British ally, the National Union of Mineworkers, the stiffening of Margaret Thatcher and an end to wasteful spending of all kinds.

  Duke took a less Old Roman view of life. He argued that the Rout would be more public than the royal lunches, an opportunity for us to greet the Prince of Wales and the grandest of his future subjects at Hampton Court Palace, to impress advertisers and to remind them all with fireworks and acrobats of the glories of the Georgian age in which The Times had been born. A strict though substantial budget was agreed. The Bollinger Company promised generosity in the pricing of Times champagne: a thousand bottles were to be free. A royal ‘fixer’ was hired at an equally generous rate.

  Duke promised precise attention to every problem. Would Elton John be a suitable entertainer? The Lord Chamberlain thought not. Would the guitar maestro, Julian Bream, go down better? Perhaps a little too quietly. Why did a juggler cost £200 for a night and a jester only £150? Should we have more jesters or risk an ‘illusionist act with audience participation’ (£350)? Was it possible to have Beefeaters instead of St John’s Ambulance staff? The fixer was doubtful whether their skills were quite the same but Scots Guards, she knew, could be had for £25 a night.

  Protracted negotiations ensured that everyone knew that smoking ‘was permitted but not encouraged’ and, more importantly, which flower vases in the Palace were suitable for water and which ones, given the exigencies of their inner glaze, would have to be filled with roses only at the very last minute. Perhaps we could also have a ‘lady with a dove’. These were all details in which Duke, the Alexandrian of The Times, excelled.

  Just as Maurice was newly anxious about his perfume, I was newly anxious about my responsibilities at The Times. I was somewhat surprised to be in charge of the leader writers. But these were strange days. I was a new arrival when novelty was suddenly a good thing. The newspaper was continually rolling from one crisis to the next. CDH was impatient of frivolity in part because he was dying of cancer, though few yet knew it.

  Here in Egypt now, I am wondering whether this period almost thirty years ago is part of my ‘last nights of Cleopatra’ or not. Most of it is not; most of the serious troubles of that time are not. But some of it, for various and not always very connected reasons, earns its place. If that distorts the picture of a newspaper, an era and its people, so be it.

  My main job was to be a writer of leading articles. This leader-writing is a peculiar kind of journalism. Its practitioners represent the editor and not themselves. They represent the views of the institution too, these deemed to be the same as those of the editor but not always at this time without a fight.

  Great passion was spent on what should be the opinion of The Times. Occasionally there was a kind of holy warfare. The overt aim of leaders is to make things happen. On The Times in 1985 the leader writers were still called Cardinals, with a certain self-conscious irony, but with seriousness too. These were the anonymous men, almost wholly men, who advised the nation on its own good.

  Acutely conscious of their place in history, they knew that the most famous leaders of their past were those that had called successfully for action. Demands for immediate resignation were best. Charles Douglas-Home’s removal of a Foreign Secretary before the Falklands War in 1982 was still noted as a triumph even by those who hated him. But there was a creeping anxiety in our office that the best was behind us, that the importance of leaders was a conceit, or largely a conceit. It was an appearance of power that had too often been exaggerated and had to be very carefully maintained if any power at all were to remain.

  There was division over how best to exercise this care. The Cardinals’ most favoured tactic was to find out that a government policy was already agreed, or almost agreed, before demanding it themselves. The most artful leader writer liked to catch a moment just before something happened, to describe the javelin as it was poised to be thrown, and then to claim credit for its arc and its arrival at its target.

  But The Times could not always be so well informed. So most leader writers preferred instead to argue both sides of a case, to make much use of ‘on the one hand’ or ‘on the other’, a habit made easier by the high proportion of leader writers who had read Greek at school and knew the power of ‘men’ and ‘de’ in constructing a fine sentence. This style disguised doubt beneath the appearance of rigour. It was also becoming a joke.

  CDH, especially in his final days, was opposed to both kinds of caution. He was a stubborn individualist. He had old clothes and hard principles. He was monarchic in his instincts and a serious student of how monarchy worked. He hated communism and smoking, despised ‘men’ and ‘de’ and every other conventional wisdom. He did not mind being rebuffed. He wanted to write what, in his view, was right. The Observer newspaper, he often said, had lived successfully for almost three decades on its unsuccessful opposition to Eden’s Suez war.

  CDH knew about Egypt. He knew about the Ptolemies. We occasionally talked about Cleopatra. But his sole interest in ancient Alexandria was the way in which it was ruled. For its poetry, medicine, art or philosophy he cared nothing at all.

  On our Drakkar Noir night, I left Maurice briefly in the Blue Lion and went back across the road to check that all was well in the office. I pushed against the Editor’s door. There was no reply except for mutterings, murmurs and the sound of cloth crunching across carpet.

  In a low light from the empty desk, CDH was on the floor with a young woman beside him, her body supported on one elbow and her arm flung lightly against his face. ‘It’s the Alexander Technique,’ he said with a gritted smile as I backed into the outer (not far enough outer) office and the corridor beyond. The Alexander Technique? What was that?

  Was this some joke at my expense? Was the Alexander Technique some sort of therapeutic massage? It seemed unlikely that in the wranglings between him and his staff about politics, between him and Duke about acrobats and dove-ladies, there would have been much space for Peter Stothard’s feelings for Alexandria. I went back to my office. There was no real urgency to see the Editor that night. The next phase of his battles against the leader writers – over Arthur Scargill and the miners’ strike, the Socialist Workers’ threat, the Church of England, the Middle East and almost everything else bar the England cricket captaincy – could wait, and did wait, for another day.

  I left to meet Maurice – and found him offering free Drakkar Noir samples to some youthful Welsh choristers. He was playful, happy, as happy as I had seen him in years. He had met his product’s tormentor already, he said. He did not think there would be any further problems. The smell of journalism was disgusting (how dare we cast aspersions on any perfume?) but he appreciated the chance to check that I was still alive, that I was prospering in office life, and that the irrelevancies of Cleopatra were being supplanted by worthier ends.

  We talked and drank for more than an hour, telling each other, as ever, what each thought the other should know. He loved the problems of the Rout. He was a natural impresario. He thought that £25 a night for a Scots Guardsman was particularly cheap. He hoped that the £200-a-night jugglers would at least be young. Then suddenly there was a crash of bodies through the door. No one looked up. A heavily bearded man, who spoke as though he was heavily entitled to be heard, began instantly abusing the Editor of The Times. His companions nodded. No one else took any notice.

  Maurice stopped his pricing of the Rout and began playfully spraying from his little black bottle. Drinkers began moving away – both from the newcomers and from us. The combination of beer, sweat and Drakkar created an air like that of a small car in which teenagers have failed to enjoy sex. Maurice pointed. For the first time in years he made the shape of a big beard around his face. He made the same shape of a big beard around my face. Did I not know who the agitator was?

  Did I no
t recognise him? Was I an expert on Cleopatra or not? Did I not remember our ill-fated, sherry-fuelled attempt at drama? This, he said floridly, was Canidius in Elizabeth Taylor’s movie. Did I not recall the dumb messenger’s sign? Did I not recognise the same man now?

  I was still not sure. Maurice was absolutely sure. This was Canidius, the general who would get his ginestho, aka Andrew Faulds, actor, MP, Palestinian activist, hounder of Mrs Thatcher over the sinking of the Argentinian ship Belgrano, here in the Blue Lion with a noisy delegation. He had either just seen CDH – or was just about to see him. He was agitated, angry, leaning forward in a notably more confident way than when he had been booming bad news to Rex Harrison’s Caesar. He was complaining most of all about the disgusting smell in the bar.

  This same Andrew Faulds, Maurice hissed, had also been the radio voice of Jet Morgan, the Englishman in space to whom we listened on our home-made transistors when we were six. This man, this voice, was almost a family member. Perhaps we should introduce ourselves. I disagreed. In one weird way, from Cleopatra the First to Cleopatra the Eighth, the Member of Parliament for Warley East was the single thread that held the story together. In other ways, he was no part of it at all.

  We moved to the back of the bar. Had I heard from V, Maurice asked, switching from Canidius to Rothmans, Brentwood and the cinema story we had talked about as we planned our Cuppers theatrical coup. No, I said. Then be grateful, he continued, waving a letter he had received from her about us both, attacking me for being part of the media-capitalist conspiracy and him for merely being a capitalist.

  I felt guilty. I had never mentioned to him V’s arrival on Gray’s Inn Road during the shutdown nor the revelations about her role as a statue in his Red Tents. I could have discovered if she was telling the truth. I was not as frank with Maurice as I should have been. There was so much in our lives that was now not shared with the other. Instead I let him gently pass on her taunts. According to V, he said, I had had ‘ideals once’.