Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Read online

  In his infinite leisure hours he studied the many curious ways that waves behave in the air above the sea. That was how he spent most of the rest of his life, in the south of England instead of the north because that was where the radars were made, quietly reasoning through his problems on his high chair in the Marconi Laboratory and in an armchair at home, spreading files marked Secret like a fisherman’s nets.

  Life on our estate was based on a bracing sense of equality and a grateful appreciation of peace. Although most of our fathers felt they had a part in this great military project of the future, rarely can so massive a martial endeavour, the creation of air defences along the length of Britain’s eastern coast, have been conducted in so calm a spirit. My mild mother competed gently for influence against other mothers – in studied unconcern for what the Marconi estate was for. The fighting war was absolutely over. The Marconi tower was a lightening conductor as well as a controller of missiles. The new business was civil, work that would keep us safe and increase our prosperity as the politicians promised. And because everyone was in it, everyone was in it together.

  That was the determined message of Miss Leake (her name seemed perilously amusing from the first time I heard it), our headmistress at Rothmans School, whose doctrine of excellence-and-equality, delivered in her severest voice, was adapted only slowly to the advancing evidence of differences around her. My younger sister and I were peculiarly different. Jill was sharper, wilder, a primal force. I was quiet and accepting.

  There were girls with superior proficiency at maths to any boy. There were boys who could barely count but who designed the most beautiful fighter planes to crash the female enemy down to earth, exchanging sketches that would today attract close attention from the police. For our first two years our teachers reassured us repeatedly that we were all much the same. But eventually, inexorably and certainly by the time that we had reached the age of nine, those of us who multiplied well were divided from those who did not.

  Streaming was the name for the separation. Maths was just the start. Those, like Maurice and I, who could not sing were called ‘groaners’ and kept outside the classroom door during music lessons. That was when I first properly noted his pale face and wit. Those who preferred Aeneas to algebra were allowed to write fiction for our homework, as long as it was science fiction.

  Miss Leake was the high mistress of these rules. We rarely saw her and wondered sometimes how she could exert such power when the polished brass nameplate on her door was her only regular presence. My father came to see her only once. He was not at all worried about my being a ‘groaner’ (he listened to little music himself bar the songs of the American mathematician, Tom Lehrer) but he was faintly sad about my absent number skills.

  Jill would sometimes join Max and the gramophone in singing Lehrer’s version of ‘We’ll All Go Together When We Go’, ‘The Periodic Table’ and ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’. I could not and did not sing. My mother could sing well but did not. None of that mattered. Numbers on the Marconi estate were the key to advancement. Euclid, the Alexandrian ‘Father of Geometry’, was the best and only Greek. Physics was the first step to a working future, a future in paid employment in a world which itself worked well.

  Many Rothmans pupils with no aptitude at all for figures – who could draw a dive-bomber but never do equations – were pummelled onto numerical paths. Jill resisted. To my mother’s frustration she was a brilliant resistor, an early lesson to me of female will. But how possibly, asked our neighbour on the other side of the clay mountain, could anyone pull themselves up by any other route than mathematics? My father agreed, but he did not force me and he could not force my sister. He did not argue the superiority of science or anything much else, except bidding conventions in hearts and spades and the best way to see threats low in the sky.

  My mother had bigger worries than innumeracy. She had heard from rival mothers that I had damp eyes when stories were read in class, not necessarily even the saddest stories. I was much too open to the world around me, absorbent almost: she put this failing in different words at different times. Professor Rame and his Egyptian queen were among many bad influences. It was better that I spent more time outside. In the real world everything would always be fine.

  My mother was a shy connoisseur of small improvements and distinctions. She was born in the city of Nottingham, not ‘the sticks’, the phrase with which she dismissed Bert Stothard’s fields and stone-crusher factories. When she met my father after the war, she had been a secretary at John Player’s, a clean job in tobacco, and she had her eyes on a place in a silk shop or Raleigh Bicycles. She was always alert to social distinction. Were the engineers’ families of Rothmans Avenue, Dorset Avenue and Noakes Avenue truly quite the same? Did the more brilliant scientists live in Rothmans, the more managerial in Dorset, the more clerical in Noakes? Were they richer in Rothmans and rather poorer in Noakes? Who took a daily newspaper? Who took the Daily Telegraph?

  At the very edges of the bus routes that served the school were money-men and accountants, some of whom farmed chickens (for their eggs or maybe their tax efficiencies), whose sons and daughters we could visit at birthday parties. Did these ‘Millionaires’ Row’ houses really have four bedrooms? With attention we could find out. Whose kitchen had less Fablon and more Formica? Should Marley floor tiles be polished? Did parquet flooring have always to be made of wood and was it harmed by sledging across it on cushions? My father played Tom Lehrer’s mutually assured destruction song ‘We’ll All Go Together When We Go’ when guests came for a drink. But was this acceptable or not? Why was Jill not playing with Sophie? Why was Peter not out with Maurice, the bank manager’s son? Why was he always stuck in that box room? And where exactly did everyone go on holiday?

  Summer was the great unequaliser. On the North Sea coast, only thirty-or-so miles away, the skies were known equally to all masters of air defence and to their sons who watched wheeling gulls and weightless terns above cold brown waves. But the beaches beneath were crisply divided. Clacton, Walton and Frinton were significantly different. We always went to Walton-on-the-Naze, the middling one of the three, which had the widest concrete esplanades where children could ride bikes. Clacton-on-Sea had slot machines and candyfloss booths where ‘other people’ could waste their money. Frinton-on-Sea had no candyfloss, no caravans (we always stayed in a caravan), no fish-and-chip shops, not even a pub, just jubilee gardens and what was known, only by warnings not to walk on it, as ‘greensward’.

  Maurice’s family went to Frinton. Did Rothmans Avenue families prefer Frinton too? By the time of my eleventh birthday in 1962, it sometimes seemed that they did. Our Marconi estate was small, confined and had only one entrance to the world. Once inside it we could always roller-skate through the class lines. On the coast, it was an impossible walk, and even an awkward drive, between three neighbouring towns that seemed built deliberately to show how apart from one another we could be.

  My father was a typical Marconi engineer of his time in every respect except one: he rejected the right to insist that there was only one right path. That was his grace and glory. He never stopped me preferring stories about science to the understanding of what science actually did. He did not invade the box room. If lumps of clay looked to me like anything other than lumps of clay, that was not a problem for him. He did not much like the Coleridge and the Tennyson being on hand. But he did not take them away.

  He read the fiction that I wrote about my manufactured hero, Professor Rame. He even praised it. There was ‘no future in it’ but he was never much concerned about the future. I wish I could say that he had first introduced me to Cleopatra. But there was only a short consultation a few years later (he consulted me, which is why I remember it) about whether ancient names would be suitable for Marconi weapon systems. Would Caesar or Cicero be better than Blue Streak or Blue Steel for the weapons guided by our great metal tower, the one that protected the estate from electric storms and the British state from communi
sm? How about Cleopatra? Absolutely not, he said. A missile could not be named after a woman, even a queen.

  Alexandria became much later a favourite city. But the only place here that he ever mentioned was one called Settee Street. Maybe it is here still. He knew that Cleopatra’s capital, stretched out between a lake and the shore, had once had a great lighthouse, a radar mast in reverse, a tower aiming to be seen rather than to see, an exchange of particles and waves, the line on which my father made his world.

  Once the Cold War was over he had to switch his interests to foreign and smaller customers. Once the Russian warships had left Egypt’s biggest harbour, there were opportunities here both for arms-dealers selling modern radar dishes and for archaeologists uncovering ancient lighthouse parts. Alexandria hosted a navy which needed help against its enemies and that was the kind of place my father sought for the rest of his life.

  In 1960 he much approved of the schoolteacher who told us vicious war stories from ancient myth to illustrate the virtues of modern deterrence. After I brought to class his family Aeneid he was pleased to learn that he owned the final half, the books of marching through Italy, not of loss and doomed love. My father liked to see people as electro-machinery, as fundamentally capable of simple, selfless working. His own mind was closed to the communications of religion or art. He had a peculiar intolerance of violins and the soprano voice. He most of all loved jet-streams in the skies over air shows.

  A decade after we left Dorset Avenue, for a bigger house with an orchard and a cellar, the whole estate began a slide into another age. Miss Leake retired. The Marconi families moved away. It was no longer a place where every house shared the same business. There were no longer newts, nor anything but grass, in what was once the mysterious ‘bomb-hole’. The great clay statues were cleared from the gardens, leaving only a few lumps behind.

  Bibliotheca Alexandrina

  An hour ago Mahmoud sent a message to the Sea Fountain cafe (‘Dead Fountain’ would be more accurate) telling me to meet him here at the Alexandria library, ‘anywhere close to the catalogues’. His neatly written message, in an envelope from the Metropole, was delivered by a driver in a stiff plastic suit. It contained a map and directions and an apology from Socratis who needed ‘to visit his mother’. Surprisingly obedient (I am not quite sure why) I gathered my papers, paid my bill, stretched my legs and left. The cable in the mouth of the Dead Fountain’s sphinx gave a swaying farewell.

  I went back down Nebi Danial and along Al Horreya, this time trying to imagine how it might have looked in Cleopatra’s time, with Corinthian columns instead of French china shops. I took a left turn at the Roman fort and floral clock, the old city gateway, and walked on to the new Alexandrian library, invisible until it is reached, a shallow bowl of glass by the sea.

  Waste paper was swirling in the wind. The hot-chocolate cafes were empty. An armed guard of anxious young soldiers waited and watched as though for a visit from unusually senior officers. The only welcome came from headscarfed school students scampering through the sculpture park between a green stone tornado, a green crescent moon and a grey head of the great Alexander.

  There was no mention in Mahmoud’s note of any specific time to meet. But a change of seat was anyway overdue. The peacock pattern of the cafe furniture is still imprinted on my flesh. This new chair is a luxurious contrast, designed for keyboard-tappers in the new glory of the very newest Alexandria, a library built at Greek billionaires’ expense to remind Egyptians and their visitors that Greeks made this city, and that there is more to history here than pyramids and Pharaohs.

  The shelves are designed to evoke Cleopatra’s family library, the most ambitious book collection ever attempted. Today, whether because of terrorist bombing or excessive security, it is almost empty, evoking only to the very few. What do I do while waiting for the promised arrival of my guides? First I ask myself to forgive my own vanity. Secondly, I seek my own name in the catalogues and ask – only idly – what, if anything, of me has survived this far?

  After Professor Rame’s adventures there was no further fiction. So I have no need to look among the novels. In my life as a newspaper editor and reporter I must have written millions of words of journalism. Most of them were anonymous ‘leading articles’ on now forgotten issues of lost days. But there might perhaps be traces here of my foreign correspondent’s life.

  In the print catalogue there is a French translation of my first book, Thirty Days, a daily diary which covered my time spent with Tony Blair and George W. Bush during the Iraq War in 2003. This Trente Jours will possibly impress Mahmoud. But to use the ‘electronic archive of the world’s press’ demands more technical skill than I can muster. The screen shakes and so do I.

  Is it worthwhile ordering any other books? Two desks away there is a huge pile of Latin classics awaiting an absent reader’s attention, each one tagged with its own ticket. The Aeneid is in a single dark-blue volume. Its requester may not come. If he or she does arrive, I can politely return it or wait to see if its absence is noticed. To begin at Book Seven with Caieta has always been a good introduction, however little I understood of it fifty years ago. I can go there again.

  The Aeneid was the epic that Rome’s first emperor, Octavian who called himself Augustus, hoped would expunge the memory of Cleopatra, a figure whom he made a symbol of everything he was against. The Egyptian queen was, in this version, a seductress, an oriental, a capricious autocrat who melted pearls in wine. Her conqueror intended Virgil’s poem as a victory speech, proof that Alexandria had been defeated and true Roman virtues made triumphant.

  But immediately I am bidden to stop. A librarian appears as though to take back the book for its rightful borrower. There is a thudding behind her. Mahmoud and Socratis are finally here, waiting impatiently by the catalogues, not allowed further entry because it is too close to closing time. They are gesturing at me to come out. I point to my watch. I will be with them in a few minutes. There are limits to being led by unknown guides.

  So, to take a breath and end where I began, with Book Seven of the poem: Aeneas and his followers have newly arrived in Italy after their troubled odyssey from Troy. With good reason the sailors are anxious about their futures, reluctant to let go of their past. Some of them have already set fire to their ships in order that they might stop somewhere, anywhere.

  Dido of Carthage, Cleopatran temptress and corrupter, has burnt herself to death. Aeneas has also buried his father and now, as he bids farewell to Caieta, wonders whether his nurse will ever be remembered by anyone else. He doubts whether there is truly any glory in having a name attached to a tomb; but he labels her bones nonetheless.

  Tu quoque litoribus nostris, Aeneia nutrix,

  You too to our shores, Caieta, nurse of Aeneas,

  aeternam moriens famam, Caieta, dedisti;

  have given eternal fame by your death,

  et nunc servat honos sedem tuus, ossaque nomen

  and now your honour marks this place,

  your name these bones

  Hesperia in magna, si qua est ea gloria, signat.

  in great Hesperia, if that is any glory.

  That has to be the last line. Socratis is scowling. The driver, his suit a sickly mix of yolk and mud, looks as though he will break the windows. Yes, there was some glory for Caieta. She is still remembered two thousand years on, especially by readers who begin the Aeneid in the wrong place. Biographers want the dead but they have only the living. We must work with the tools that we have.

  2.1.11

  Hotel Metropole, Place Saad Zaghloul

  It is now four in the morning by the clock in Room 114, ten hours since Mahmoud and Socratis arrived together at the library. I have had more than enough time to establish how little I know of them.

  Mahmoud was bright-eyed like a boy on his first day at work. He brought with him a pack of Cleopatra cigarettes, a Cleopatra Ceramica catalogue of modern bathroom furniture and a DVD of last season’s Ramadan TV series starring an Egyptia
n queen who looked a little like my ancient Miss Leake. He quickly noted the existence of Trente Jours and said with a studied sincerity that, if he were ever to write a book himself, he would undoubtedly make a journey to this most famous of libraries so that he could read it here.

  At the same time Socratis merely smirked. His face, like a mask of mud, cracked in only the finest lines. Either he doubted that Mahmoud would ever write a book or he despised my motives in reading my own. This older, calmer man was careful not to betray himself too much. He kicked one workman’s boot against the other and tugged at the belt of his soft wool trousers.

  But there was also a third man, a squat and square-faced driver who had no such qualms, a laugh like an idling diesel engine and a confident look – as though he knew he represented the true views of both his bosses. Mahmoud was displeased by this mockery. He became almost embarrassed. His cheeks glowed to match his brown polished shoes. He scowled. Excessive laughter was improper behaviour, he seemed to suggest, unacceptable rudeness, the response of a yes-man who said ‘yes’ far too loudly. The driver took no notice. He pushed out his stomach against his soil-stained plastic jacket. When he could inflate no more, he exhaled with a grumbling sigh.

  It was as hard as before to gauge exactly what was going on or even who was in charge. Socratis commanded the chauffeur. But maybe both of them were there to look after Mahmoud. Does some part of Egypt’s tourism department employ drivers who dress like their car seats? The guidebooks, which say a good deal about the badges on state uniforms, have no guidance on that.

  Eventually Mahmoud tapped his Cleopatra cigarettes against his Cleopatra Jacuzzi pictures. He looked sleek and serious again. Socratis froze his fissured cheeks into a frown, forcing his man in the upholstery suit to apologise. ‘The wretch’, he said, expressed ‘the sincerest sadness.’ He did, indeed, look chastened – as though the worst possible thing had happened to him, as if he had lost his car, as if his parking assistant (an ubiquitous breed in Alexandria) had driven his Mercedes out across the Corniche, down into the harbour and out among the drowned ruins of Cleopatra’s palace.