Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Read online

  A wild wife bringing blackness to eyes.

  This way, that way, this way, that way, in and out, in and out, needles and beaks: the fate that faced the oldest Cleopatra in Cleopatra’s library.

  4.1.11

  Rue Nebi Danial

  This is becoming a book about me. That is not what I intended. Perhaps I can steer it elsewhere, noting that there are many ways to write a memoir, some we choose, some we are expected to choose, and others that follow their own path.

  If I were able I would choose to write about the people who have meant the most to me over my sixty years, so very few people. If I were to meet expectations I might write about Margaret Thatcher, who made the politics of my own time dramatic for a while, or about her successors who never did so quite as much; or about The Times and the TLS which I have edited for so long.

  But I have written too many words about those politicians and in those papers. Most have sunk deservedly deep beneath the library sea. A memoir must be more than a regimented repetition. I could write a memoir of the year 2000, my memorable millennium, when the doctors said that I was about to die. I could describe the peculiar pancreatic cancer that could not, they said, be cut away or cured. I could describe the cut that eventually came, the banned drugs that saved me and the sights that they brought up from my mind. But I have already written much of that and locked most of it away.

  There are so many threads in our lives that can be tugged. We are like old bags for wine or shopping. Draw a different string and the bag will take a different shape. I am in Cleopatra’s city and this is Cleopatra’s thread, a story of failure for the most part (mine not hers) but no less a memoir for that. It already connects more than I expected it would. I cannot see the final shape but I am confident that it is there to be seen.

  Back in Socratis’s cafe in the early morning, the one he called ‘my cafe’, I have not yet seen him in his proprietor’s place. Beside the dead fountain there are the usual tiny tables, yellow teas and the views over a sea creature with an electric flex in her mouth. Low in the sky the sun is in eclipse.

  Outside in the road this is a morning for the men in grey. There are vans with covered windows, military men, men with guns and men with merely shrugs. The coffee-drinkers watch the soldiers as though they are nothing to do with them in any way. Their studied inattention is as notable as if they were screaming out in protest.

  No one glances at the sky where, for the past ninety minutes, a large bite of the early sun has been gradually obscured by the passing moon, a partial eclipse, now at its fullest extent. Horses, waiting for tourist hire, have stamped their hooves as though there was something untoward in the air. Grey-backed crows, accustomed to use these early hours for gutter-feeding, have found the skies a temporarily safer home. But no coffee-drinker has even looked or paused as the sun has become moon-shaped and the tracing paper sky above the tenements and palm trees is drawn, redrawn and drawn again in hazy shades of brown.

  I should not be shocked. These are people of reason. It is fine for me, a visitor, to fix my mind in the age of the first horoscopes. That is what a tourist likes to do. Perhaps their anxieties are as hidden as is half of the sun. Or maybe they genuinely do not care. The Egyptians who lived before the Greeks came did not worry about eclipses. Their priests were men of science who arrived early at the knowledge that these bites out of the sun could be predicted. Far from proving man’s subservience to the heavens, they showed his power over it. As for arbitrary arrests, those too were as common as light.

  If Socratis were here I would tell him that Plutarch, one of the liveliest sources for the life of Cleopatra, came to Alexandria once (yes, unlike Jesus, he probably did come) and gave the best description of an eclipse in all ancient literature. Why does that matter? Any accuracy about events that we can still see ourselves is a useful test of writers from the past. I will need Plutarch if I am going to say very much that is colourful and characterful about Cleopatra. If I can trust him about the sun, I may trust him about a queen.

  Socratis is supposed to be here soon. When he arrives, I will also ask him what today’s eclipse means to him and to his mother. Anything? Encouragement? Encouragement too, I will say, for Cleopatra’s story, even though I am still only skirting its contours.

  Why did I begin my rough-book version? A grateful sixty-year-old will often credit good teachers. But in the frozen flatlands of Essex almost half a century ago, in the hardest British winter for four hundred years, it was a bad teacher who had the best claim, a Mr G, a peculiar man even among a staff of some very peculiar men.

  My second school, in a low, redbrick town called Brentwood, was founded as a sixteenth-century penance. In the reign of Bloody Mary (as we new Elizabethans were taught to call her) Sir Anthony Browne, a local worthy, had ordered a Protestant boy burnt at the stake. Our founder never thought the boy would choose to die, an Antigone of his time, when he had the chance to recant and live. But like many worthies he was wrong. Sir Anthony Browne became repentant. When the regime changed, there was added need for repentance – and thus for building a school that survived cautiously behind an old red wall (the name of our school song), a mysterious Latin motto (Incipe: Begin) and a foundation myth of a child charred for love of the gospels. Brentwood’s national renown was for football. Its Latin and Greek were prized too.

  At Rothmans Miss Leake held Brentwood in especially high esteem. Maurice’s parents were very anxious that their son should be a Brentwoodian, mine only slightly less so. It was the place to which the wealthiest of the area were destined to go and to which the poorest, thanks to the youthful science of social engineering, could sometimes go too. It offered equality in its own way.

  Miss Leake would never have met the robotic, rubber-hosepipe-wielding Mr G. She believed that her scholarship boys would be taught by the earnest, slender, slightly socialist young men who visited her from time to time, asking if she had anyone who might excel at soccer or Cicero. This was an honest mistake. Behind Brentwood’s Martyr’s Memorial many eccentric instructors lay hidden, including Mr G, an ex-soldier of cement-mixer voice and stature, a survivor of a war which had been unkinder, it seemed, than the one experienced by my father and his floating radar-engineers.

  Mr G had not fully survived. Explosions still plagued his mind. The clattering of desk tops could drive him maddened from any classroom. Often the noise of classes with Mr G could be heard for hundreds of yards around, the crash of wood on metal interrupted by yelps from boys whose entertainment had been temporarily spoiled by the lash of his rubber hose.

  This damaged pedagogue preferred to read than to teach us. This was his privilege since his function was not to take responsibility for any particular subject. Instead, he filled the gaps left when regular teachers were away. If he could be cajoled into telling stories of the Himalayas (which he pronounced with a long second syllable as though gargling sand) or his war among the Pyramids, that was fine with us.

  Thus on a January morning in 1963 (the rough-book has the month but not the day) Mr G began to read to us from a battered library book. There had been the usual riot as he arrived. At least two unfortunates were still imprisoned under the master’s desk, crushed and bent together in the common manner of the time. And, at some point not long afterwards, I must have copied out some of the words. Presumably Mr G left his text behind as he escaped.

  All this I discerned at a glance. Then I looked upon the face, the flawless Grecian features, the rounded chin, the full, rich lips, the chiselled nostrils, and the ears fashioned like delicate shells.

  I imagine that the lesson began smoothly enough. On this occasion he had an exotic story to tell. Maybe we were quiet for a while.

  I saw the forehead, the crisped, dark hair falling in heavy waves that sparkled in the sun, the arched eyebrows, and the long bent lashes. There burnt the wonderful eyes that seemed to sleep and brood on secret things as night broods upon the desert, and yet as the night to shift, change, and be illumined by gleams of sudden
splendour.

  The words ‘forehead’ and ‘splendour’ would have been rolled out like fresh asphalt, the ‘bent’ and ‘yet’ clipped like gravel. That was how he always spoke. There was probably some modest clattering of desks already. But some of us were listening.

  It was not in these charms alone that the might of Cleopatra’s beauty lay. It was rather in a glory and radiance cast through the fleshly covering from the fierce soul within. For she was a Thing of Flame.

  A THING OF FLAME. This phrase appealed so much that I wrote it in capitals, twice.

  Even when she brooded, the fire of her quick heart shone through her. But when she woke, and the lightning leapt suddenly from her eyes, and the passion-laden music of her speech chimed upon her lips, who can tell how Cleopatra seemed?

  By now the clattering would have been brutal. I do not record it. But it was always brutal, bringing with it either retreat or retribution.

  In her met all the splendours that have been given to woman for her glory, and all the genius which man has won from heaven. And with them dwelt every evil of that greater sort, which, fearing nothing, and making a mock of laws, has taken empires for its place of play. In her breast they gathered together, fashioning that Cleopatra whom no man may draw, and yet whom no man, having seen, can ever forget.

  Regular punishment came from the master’s rubber hose, a vicious beast. It was perhaps as an additional penance that these rough-book words were written, though that would have been unusual. Without modern internet searches I would have never discovered their origin in Cleopatra, a tomb-raiding adventure from 1889, by the novelist Rider Haggard, best known for his character, She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  They fashioned her grand as the Spirit of Storm, lovely as Lightning, cruel as Pestilence, yet with a heart; and what she did is known.

  There ended the lesson. Last year Maurice told me that he too still remembered it well. He was the smaller of the two prisoners bent in the hollow where the master’s desk had been forced against the classroom wall. The larger boy had spent the period with a broken nib in hand, tattooing A THING OF high on Maurice’s thigh.

  Cleopatra the Second, like much else at that ice-bound time, made slow progress. This eighth Cleopatra, resumed now in sunshine that is merely cold, has rather more on which to build its story. There is not only my greater age and knowledge (of some things at least) but other fresh encouragements, not in new readings of Cleopatra fictions but in new possibilities of fact.

  Since 1963 much new has been learnt about Alexandria. Great piles of papyrus have appeared from rubbish tips and coffins. New ways of unrolling and deciphering papyrus have emerged, rediscoveries of marbles and bronzes from shipwrecks and sand, new advances most of all in ways of thinking about this Greek city in Egypt, this ever fragile city of thought built on the coast of colossally pyramid-filled plains.

  There are thousands of ways to put together the pieces, now the most numerous from any time or place in the ancient world. This is not a jigsaw. There is no picture to be completed. The slivers of the newly found can merely force us to look again at the old. But that in itself is a new power.

  I must be confident. Alexander and Cleopatra are two of the figures that float through that history, linked by lesser men, famed in their deaths but never themselves quite dead. The city’s spirit has evaporated but it can better now be collected. Alexandria has become a million virtual things blown away to everywhere, hard to catch and keep but peculiarly modern for just that reason. In all the ways that she can be remembered and has been, Cleopatra has become that spirit.

  Back in Brentwood, back in 1963, my rough-book continued with details of obelisks, the gold-and-bronze-tipped granite needles that for thousands of years captured for Egyptians the power of their sun. At dawn the first beams brought old friends up from the underworld; at dusk the reddened rays took them back. The obelisk caught the points of change, the rising and the going down, a function forgotten when imitators travelled further north. All over the Essex that I knew there were sunless obelisks squeezed between shops and offices, stones that satisfactorily commemorated wars without ever casting even a shadow.

  Faraway antiquity was grounded in what was near. On the next three crumbling pages came a detailed description of buildings in an Alexandrian landscape, one which might have come from classical texts or guidebooks but much more likely grew from sights closer to home, infinite flat space interrupted by monuments and threats, long avenues, endless fields punctuated by wooden posts and running tracks, Brentwood’s own sad obelisks, panelled halls built to remember both world wars, narrow corridors of crumbling brick and rotting clothes, temporary stages and a temple.

  After that came a giant V sign, not an expression of abuse but the rough shape of Africa. Attached to the north-eastern coastline is a smaller V, representing the shape of the Nile as it spreads out from Cairo, west to Alexandria, east to Suez. A third V stands as code for the only girl’s name in the book.

  V, like Maurice, was there from the very beginning of this story, one of the few primary-school friends who remained a friend as we moved on. She was one of those clever girls whom the less clever boys most resented, one of those against whom the sons of missile designers designed missiles of wishful thinking. She was difficult, abrasive, often mocking, sexy, I suppose in retrospect, although I did not much suppose so then. Like Maurice, she was influential only from time to time. But hers were important times.

  There is also a large W, marked out in blue. Mr W was a teacher, as unorthodox in his way as Mr G but more useful, the kind that Miss Leake expected from Brentwood School, tall, classical, scholarly, athletic, the son of a 1948 Olympian. He had a thin face filled with powerful stubble, a long blazer that on his junior pupils would have reached the floor, and a passion for libraries, the Greek and Latin languages, and fast running. He was a man of sibilantly hissed views – on classical and political controversies – all of them the more fiercely and freely expressed the further he could distance himself from authority.

  Mr W was the first to set out for me what soon became one of the strongest of the reasons for writing about Cleopatra: that the queen was important because Alexandria was important. She and her city have hung together for 2000 years. She is the face on ancient coins – and on film-posters, sanitary ware, cigarettes and T-shirts here too. If picturing Cleopatra was helpful for understanding Alexandria, that was fine with Mr W. He was the first man who told me anything about her that was more than a name, a clay sculpture, a space-traveller’s friend or a fictional fantasy.

  Mr W taught sprinting and the high jump as well as classics. On track and field I was the opposite of what an athletics trainer should want, running fastest and jumping highest at the beginning of the season when everyone else was awaking, then falling back through the ranks as other competitors improved. Training made me worse, certainly comparatively worse, but such was Mr W’s hostility to progressive ideas of all kinds that my lack of progress was almost a vindication, something attracting only a few hisses of disgust and occasional wry words of praise.

  The best-known W-hiss was rarely heard on the athletics field, being one of ritual abuse against those misguidedly studying German instead of Greek, especially when they failed to leave his classroom fast enough in what were known as ‘split-periods’. Greeks vs Germans constituted one of many much-loved lines of difference in a school that could turn any difference at all into sport, theatrical competition and other forms of barely repressed violence. In that respect it was not so unlike Alexandria, having few ideals beyond respect for power and the encouragement of only such creativity as was properly approved.

  Brentwood was about twenty miles of Essex road away from my Rothmans–Marconi estate. These were miles that I travelled in a bright green bus, in that first winter through the thickest snow, the iciest for centuries. The fish froze in the school ponds. Dead birds clogged the drains. The Sixth Form weather club, which had its own wood-slatted measuring cage by the cricket pavilion, rec
orded twenty degrees of frost. The kindlier teachers told us that it would not always be like this.

  The daily effort of arrival and return was deemed a privilege. The school offered free places to boys from many distant parts of the county whose minds might benefit from a classical education and whose tolerance for bus travel was high. It educated some proficient classicists (who could use their journeys to learn almost any quantity of grammar), as well as some even more proficient footballers and sons of footballers, all of us crammed into a string of brick buildings along enormous tracts of fields, ponds, white-marked pitches and unmarked wilderness.

  Cleopatra’s family, the Ptolemaic autocrats of Egypt, were in the 1960s only at the edge of classical studies. Lessons in Athenian democracy and Roman republicanism were the core. As Mr W explained in one of his bloody-minded moods, there was something strange in that priority. In the hanging-around times of spring athletics he argued that Alexandria was much more important as well as more useful than Athens, that the much-vaunted Athenian democrats of the fifth century had destroyed themselves by their ideals, that Alexander’s little-studied, non-democratic Greeks had been the successful exporters of reason and beauty around the world.

  Democracy was a word overused and little understood. Its syllables were Greek but that did not mean there had ever been a Greek democracy, not one that we would recognise as such today. Cicero’s Republican Romans, so beloved by the head of the classics department, had quickly been replaced by Rome’s emperors, the first of whom gained decisive victories, as well as much of their ideas, inspiration and money, here in Alexandria. Some of Mr W’s views, I later found, had been much more crisply expressed by Oscar Wilde. But the first exposure to an old thought is a wonderful thing.