Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (30 page)

She smiled like a cat. This was the woman who saw history as a single flat plate, a non-stop now, within which the big players
lived simultaneously and for ever. This was the woman who wished that Jesus had never come to Alexandria, who thought, her
son had said, that Cleopatra was still available for dinners. This was the witness to the aftermath of the New Year bombing,
the mother whose grief had caused her son such concern and her son’s friend such suspicion.

She did not seem in any way abnormal today, no madder than any woman would seem while singing an unknown aria into an empty
archaeological site. She looked like a gracious, wealthy Egyptian with dark-set eyes, greeting one of her son’s friends who
had travelled from afar. She stopped for breath. Socratis, much the more deranged of the two men, introduced us with a whisper.
I began to commiserate with her about the carnage in the church but Mahmoud broke in to say that this was unimportant now.

They knew that I had questions, he added. I was not sure what to say. It seemed an age since we had first failed to meet.
She began quietly to speak in English. She hardly seemed a possessor of exotic beliefs. Had I not recognised her songs from
Handel? Surely Handel had been from England? Did I not know his
Giulio Caesare
? That was the very best of parts for a Cleopatra.

She trilled again into the outer theatre, triggering a long, metallic echo, like that of a bullet against a pack of distant
tanks. But even this Cleopatra, she said, stopping suddenly in her song, was not as good as the one she had once played here
long ago, forty years ago. She whispered the words as though her character were still breathing, a baby asleep, not yet to
be woken. Cleopatra would always be in Alexandria, she said, when she was needed the most.

Mahmoud and Socratis lowered their eyes. The whispering singer took no notice of them, looking only outwards and over the
Odeon seats towards the marble heads from the sea. This time she did not sing. She spoke softly in Arabic in rhythmic, rasping
beats. And then she recited in a language that was probably still Arabic but in syllables which were sour as though mingled
with smoke. For the next five minutes the words grew wilder and the skin lightened under her eyes. It was as if she were younger
and slighter, manically remembering.

When she stopped, she sat down on the blue silk cloth. That was a wonderful speech, she said, ‘a Cleopatra with a happy ending’.
She had played this part in this very theatre soon after it was found by the Poles. It was easy to play here then. This was
the play that proved the ‘unconquerable power of Egypt’. Cleopatra was dead. That had been her death scene. In truth, the
Romans were the ones defeated. It was easy, she said, to believe that then.

Socratis began to speak. He looked as though he were about to shout, smoothing his hair in futile gestures. His mother motioned
him to be quiet. She had been five years old, she said, when Egypt had had its last true victory over its enemies, when Nasser
had taken back the Suez Canal, when Britain and France were humiliated by those they had occupied so long. It was the first
event she could remember. Did I too remember it? How old had I been? Five too, I told her. After the triumph there had been
constant celebrations. Under Nasser and Sadat there had always been celebrations.

Had I been to Alexandria’s opera house? It had soft leather doors in purple and bronze; and there was an altar on the ceiling
to all the great composers. She had never sung her Cleopatra there. She would have loved to do that. She was a singer but
not a good enough singer. She would have loved to play her stage part there too. But she had only ever played it here. Soon
Cleopatra would be at the opera house again. The Queen had never disappointed.

Then slowly, as though instructed by some ghostly director, she rose from her silk-draped wall and walked out into the ancient
rooms behind the stage. These were the caves of arches where she and her friends had kept their costumes, she said. Was there
to be an encore? There was not. She walked out onto the flat sand with her son, past the smooth heads of the gods, past Mahmoud,
pausing only to collect the plastic-wrapped chauffeur.

Socratis looked at me. I had seen enough and should make of it what I could. Within minutes the attendant had returned to
enforce
the house rules of the Birds. Two French women were standing idly with Tutankhamun postcards in their hands.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina

I want to find the play I have just heard. Neither Mahmoud nor Socratis knows its name. To them it is just ‘the Cleopatra
play’. I ask at the desk if anyone can help. After a few hours a small pile of books arrives.

The topmost shabby volume is entitled
Théatre de Notre Temps
. It contains a surprise, or a possible joke, or a bizarre coincidence, certainly a shock. If Mahmoud and Socratis have organised
this they are smarter than I see them.

Neatly marked with a library card is
Mort ou Amour
, an Egyptian dialogue, a French translation, in which an historian in an Alexandrian hotel room is struggling to write a
book about Cleopatra. The dramatic hero does most of the things that I have done here since I arrived, ruefully recalling
past efforts, weighing fact against fiction, realism against romance, ‘la politique ou le coeur’ as motivation for peace and
war. He complains that ‘le nom de Cleopatra m’a suivi toute ma vie’. He admits that the name has often haunted him more than
the Queen herself. He remembers hangovers and nights of ‘insomnies’.

Troubled by past and future cancers, he talks for three acts about his life to a visiting friend called Cleopatra. This woman
knows the story only from the film that she last saw as a sixteen-year-old. The two argue about the Elizabeth Taylor version
– ‘une femme splendide’ – and what should and should not have been in it. She smokes; he drinks. There are more sleepless
nights. He argues that ancient and
modern history are the same, that his two Cleopatras are the same. The historian is not quite deranged but neither is he quite
himself.

This is almost a threat – or a fortunate escape. If I had known earlier of Tawfik al-Hakim’s
Mort ou Amour
I could hardly have written this year what I already have. But I do not want to read any more of it. I have already read
more than is good for me. It is not a joke. It is a coincidence. But sometimes the two can seem the same.

Mort ou Amour
is also not what I have been looking for. This oddity from the catalogue cannot be the iconic hit that Socratis’s mother
performed, the one whose ‘happy ending’ I have just watched from the Roman villa. The only good omen from Tawfik al-Hakim
is that at the beginning of Act Three his historian has completed 200 pages, his muse is encouraging – ‘Deux cent pages en
un mois? Pas mal’ – and the end is in sight.

The second work in the library pile is
The Downfall of Cleopatra
by Ahmed Shawqi, a book from a rather more distinguished figure, a politician as well as a writer, an ally of Mr Zaghloul
against British rule in Egypt. Shawqi wrote it in 1927, the same year in which he was hailed as the Prince of Poets, a laureate
of Arab aspiration. The text is in English although the translation here is no triumph of rhyme: ‘the great are concerned
in many ways/about how they are destined to end their days’.

As in
Mort ou Amour
there is little action. But this earlier play is written in salon verse not bedroom prose. It is set in 31
BC
instead of the present and has a high patriotic tone. The louche Alexandrias of Plutarch, Shakespeare and the Victorian erotic
are all equally far away.

The first scene begins in the private royal part of the Library where gloomy young scholars listen to cheers in the street
outside for the victory at Actium. The celebrants cry that Alexandria’s monarch, like its lighthouse, is queen of the seas.
But this, the scholars know, is a trick. The fleet has returned by night so that its broken masts and sails can be repaired
by morning. The mob is like a parrot; its mind is in its ears. Their heroes are traitors, whose crown is a wine goblet and
whose throne is a bed of lust.

Shawqi’s Cleopatra blames others for spreading the falsehoods and false hopes. She must accept that Actium had not been a
victory. But neither had it been a defeat. It was an opportunity to let the two Roman sides destroy themselves, leaving Egypt
to become the big victor in the end. Shawqi’s Antony is a useless sot while this Cleopatra is a cunning Egyptian liberator,
a national unifier who ruthlessly betrays her lover in the better interests of her country.

After lengthy acts of partying and prophecy, the Queen recognises that she herself is doomed. Death by snakebite must ensue.
But in the long run she knows that Rome is the more doomed. She has no interest in an afterlife with Antony. She cares only
for the future of Egypt. Its enslavers will be enslaved. The invader has opened for itself a
grave. One bad rhyme after another: better in Arabic perhaps. After the uprisings of the 1920s it was a national call to arms.

Shawqi’s play had many revivals in the 1960s and was a popular staple for concert performances in Alexandria and Cairo. After
the military disasters and deceptions for Egypt that followed, it seems, quite reasonably, to have fallen out of favour. Perhaps
Socratis’s mother was merely reviving her own youth. Perhaps she saw some imminent chance of a new revival.

I was not going to find out more. Some parts of a story can be neatly tied. Others cannot. Ahmed Shawqi himself, after writing
six plays on historical themes and a comedy set in a harem, died in 1932, a respected rebel comrade of the even more celebrated
Mr Zaghloul, whose high statue tonight is guarded closely.

Place Saad Zaghloul

So what did happen to Cleopatra in the end? Maurice was asking the question. It was June 2010 and we were back in the Blue
Lion, the first time we had been there together for twenty-five years, the first since the night of Drakkar Noir and Andrew
Faulds MP. The place had changed according to the pattern of the intervening time, more salad-eaters, fewer beer-drinkers,
more pistachios, fewer peanuts, lagers from implausible Dutch towns, light and heavy wines in small and large glasses.

It seemed easy and natural to be back. We were continuing to slip in and out of each other’s lives as we had for all of our
lives, noting the progress of his marriage (initially good, latterly poor), his boyfriends (the best of them away east of
Suez), his sons (one of them at Trinity), the peculiarities of different cancers, the curability of some, the inexorability
of others, including the one that was beginning to bring Maurice’s life to an end.

When we were last on the Gray’s Inn Road the Editor of
The Times
was dying of cancer. Maurice reminded me (as though I needed reminding) that ten years ago, when I was editing
The Times
myself, and in my eighth year of the job, I too was told that a rapid cancer death lay ahead for me. What kind of cancer
had I had? It was pancreatic, like Maurice’s, but a different pancreatic, the neuro-endocrine variety, sometimes the kinder
sort. He knew that. He just wanted me
to say it again. But if the topic is the wrong kind of cancer, it is hard to sustain an honest optimistic conversation for
long. Maurice had given up alcohol. And he did not speak of that for long either.

Within minutes we were back in the past, I recalling the sherry decanters of Oxford and he the Red Tents, the higher life,
the champagne and pills that produced better sex with mermaids. The tents had been his finest creation. Okay, yes, it had
been a development of others’ efforts. But the gauze, the gods, the questions in Greek, those were wholly his own. Dear Frog,
the flying suicide, would never have had the inspiration. The sea-creatures in the inner sancta had almost always been men
(no, always, all of them). Did I know that until the late Middle ages the ‘mermaids’ of art and poetry had been mermen to
a man?

He smiled. I wanted to press him more but did not. I avoided V’s employment as a statue. I recalled instead his Nubian teacher
in the red dress. We looked, too, at his later life. Maurice used his money now to help anonymous addicts in need. He had
long ago given up advertising and finance.

His eyes were still bright. His hair and skin were not. What was this peculiar organ called the pancreas? It was a tiny fish-tailed
thing, ‘an inner mermaid’, he mocked. Why in different ways had it bitten us both? Had we shared something nasty in the Essex
water, some rays from the Moscow-watching radars of the Rothmans estate, or a blight in the Oxford sherry? It was hard to
be light, although Maurice liked, when he could, to make light of everything.

So what did happen to Cleopatra in the end? He asked the question again. I was feeling defensive. It was absurd that I had
never finished my book. I began a defence of how Big Oil, Mrs Thatcher, the 1986 print revolution for the press, the editing
of
The Times
and
The Times
Literary Supplement
(now, oddly, back in the same office opposite the Blue Lion where
The Times
had once been), and other books about Tony Blair and Spartacus, had all found a higher priority.

No, he said. What had happened to the real Cleopatra? That was what he suddenly wanted to know. It was as though we were back
in our shared set of rooms, dressed from Marks & Spencer and Chelmsford Market, planning to plagiarise Charles Marowitz to
the sound of a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

After Antony’s death Octavian wanted Cleopatra stripped immediately of her treasure. It was too easy to destroy an army’s
wages by fire. Metals might be melted into different shapes and saved; but ivory, pearls and precious stones would be dust.
Cleopatra could not be allowed to immolate herself like an oriental martyr. Paying the victorious soldiers was the victor’s
immediate priority. Nothing mattered more than that.

Octavian sent Rome’s most glamorous poet and soldier, Cornelius Gallus, to be his envoy. Gallus was that most Alexandrian
of Romans, literary innovator, glorious elitist, lover of Antony’s own favourite actress in Rome and commander now of Antony’s
four African legions. While Gallus distracted the Queen with art and gossip, a junior officer was tasked with climbing up
to the back window of her mausoleum, to burst in from behind and take her captive.

The manoeuvre succeeded perfectly. After that there was only the lesser, but still significant, question of Cleopatra’s personal
fate. Octavian allowed her request to leave and prepare Antony’s body for burial. She beat herself almost to death, feverish,
refusing food, but relieved to learn that her Caesarion was still free and on his way east
and south. Most of Cleopatra’s remaining interest was in the fate of her children.

Maurice nodded, pouring a little water on the wound on his wrist through which the chemotherapy came.

Octavian then came to see Cleopatra himself. He found her either as a feverish captive or an unbowed queen, depending on which
of the main ancient versions we prefer.

As always when there was doubt in the air, Maurice began to look combative. Perhaps I would like to make up my mind, he suggested
sourly, turning over a dirty ashtray.

The dignified and unbowed was the better of the two pictures, the one from Plutarch’s
Life of Mark Antony
, the main source for Shakespeare, the one that Shawqi hoped to contradict. One of Plutarch’s best sources was Cleopatra’s
doctor. At times Plutarch, masterly observer of eclipses, writes like a doctor himself.

Octavian was uncertain what end for Cleopatra would suit him best. He wanted the option of taking her to Rome in his triumph.
But there was the memory of her sister, Arsinoe, in Caesar’s parade. The Romans had wept for little Arsinoe. It was impossible
to be certain of how a queen might be seen by the people.

Cleopatra herself had clearer requests. She wanted the best life for Ptolemy Caesarion, for Alexander the Sun and Cleopatra
the Moon. She wanted guarantees for them and the option of suicide for herself, but on her own terms, when and how she wanted
to make it happen.

While both sides weighed their choices Cleopatra made a last visit to Antony’s tomb. Afterwards she sat on a straw bed and
tried to
persuade Octavian that she had acted against him only from fear of Antony. Octavian did not believe her. She replied with
prayers and fists and arguments over the inventory of personal trinkets missing from her treasure trove.

Four months later, when the summer was over, Maurice and I were back in the same Blue Lion seats. He had some points that
he hoped I might say at his funeral. But the listing of his achievements in advertising, finance and charities did not detain
him beyond the first glass of Evian.

We sat after that as though with those blue plastic boxes of Agfa colour slides, the ones that were fashionable for our parents
in our schooldays. In the 1950s most photographs were of happy scenes, or scenes made happy, scenes that the photographer
wanted to remember. So too were these colour-slide memories, memories of mud and rugby, sports days and concerts even though
neither of us had succeeded with ball or recorder except in our own minds. We remembered how both of us had been ‘groaners’
at Rothmans Primary, and we remembered the Brentwood book-burning.

Did I remember Miss Leake and the children’s parties at his house in front of the chicken farm? Yes, I remembered most of
all the parquet floor and the find-your-partner games and the time Maurice almost smashed the china cabinet. How did I know
that I was not imagining the parquet floor – or that he was not imagining the cabinet? We did not absolutely know. But there
were magic cushions and wooden lakes. I was sure about that.

If Maurice were still in touch with V, perhaps he could ask her whether we were right? He was not in touch, he said firmly.
It had been years since her last attack on us for betraying political beliefs
that neither of us thought we had ever possessed. There had been no more complaints that I was failing to make a difference,
failing to make things happen, always preferring to name things than change them. Once this had been a refrain, Maurice said.
Now it had long ago stopped. And anyway, V had not been at his fifth birthday party.

Did I remember his performance from the Trinity bell tower? He reminded me eloquently of this lest I had forgotten, adding
details, like the names of the loudly listed underground stations that I had indeed forgotten. His voice was fixed back in
the past. Even the ravages on his skin could not destroy the images of how he had been long ago, slightly reddened cheeks,
slightly slackened vowels, a glass in his hand so differently filled.

We talked of how acts of memory are useful for the dying. There were Greek and Roman philosophers who warned against the fear
of death and taught the power of shared recollections to keep fear at bay. In that lost pub of
The Times
we pictured the winter of 1963, our shiverings as useless wing three-quarters on a rugby ground that was the coldest since
the restoration of Charles II. We watched again Maurice’s Duncan in the Brentwood School
Macbeth
. He thought that the doomed Scottish king lacked any good lines and wanted most to have been Banquo.

Then how did she die? Maurice’s question was suddenly almost urgent. Beneath the tight skin of his jaw, tiny muscles were
still moving after his words had ceased. He was like a singer listening to one of his own records, knowing what he had heard
before, what he wanted to hear.

Painlessly.

Painlessly is good, he replied.

Cleopatra discovered that Octavian was about to send her to Rome by ship. She had little remaining time to decide.

So how does she die?

By the quietest poison, I said. Ignore the stories of asps or cobras or any other kind of snakes hiding in fig baskets. With
the knowledge from human experiments that the Ptolemies possessed, no queen would leave her suicide to the whim of a reptile.
Cleopatra was an aficionado of painlessness and pain. She had seen the agony caused by the snakes of Egypt, signed many a
ginestho
for the experiments and executions that proved why no one would want to die that way if other ways were available.

Painless is good, Maurice repeated and ordered coffee. It was good that she had deceived her tormentor and died as she intended
to die. That seemed much the best version of events.

We moved away again to the times we had spent by the cold North Sea watching birds on the waves, the wheeling, wailing and
gangling that were the same when we were five and fifteen as when we were fifty-five. We recalled grey gulls massing on the
beaches as the mud dried. He seemed suddenly tired. It was hard to hold these thoughts. He pouted – as he had used to do when
his cheeks were fatter. It was still a very recognisable pout.

We spoke of E.M. Forster. Maurice particularly liked the scandalous late novel that bore his name. The author of
Maurice
had shown little interest in his Alexandrian books,
Pharos and Pharillon
, after he had written them. But he had given his only speech about Cleopatra’s city in the east-coast town of Aldeburgh,
where for a while Maurice had owned a house.

I brought with me a copy of this speech. The novelist had drawn desperate comparisons between Aldeburgh and Alexandria, between
different scapes of sea and sky, nuanced brown and unbelievable blue. He had tried hard but had found nothing in common to
mark the two places ‘beyond the first two letters of their name and the occasional visitations of fish’.

Maurice smiled and recalled the Aldeburgh seals that looked so human when they stared. Were seals man’s first inspiration
for mermaids? He wanted to know how what we imagined intersected with our memories. He already knew how cancer can trigger
the imagination, the desire to be somewhere else being so strong as the disease takes its grip.

And James Holladay? Was it true that he had died of a heart attack in a plane flying over the Bermuda Triangle, a most unlikely
end for a man who must so much more likely have collapsed in the back bar of the King’s Arms? Yes, it was true. He died twenty-two
years ago, New Year’s Day 1989, and was buried under a marble slab in a forest of mahogany and coconut.

The coffee arrived, and then a cab, and the evening was over. Maurice died a month later. A part of me departed too.