Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (10 page)

V occasionally came to Brentwood on a Saturday afternoon. This was permitted on designated dates. I have notes of a few of
them still in my 1967 diary. Each time she seemed surprised that I was still alive. Was I keeping an eye on other old Rothmans
friends? How was that witty boy with thick round glasses, Maurice, the one whose insults made her laugh?

She routinely listed names and, when I could not give a positive reply, pursed her lips as though to say that they had surely
disappeared into hell. Her girlfriends knew of boys who had gone there (there was a resounding stress on the word ‘gone’)
who spent their nights in boxes, boys who had to clean lavatories with toothbrushes and play all the roles of girls since
there were no girls there.

Those were boarders, I said, members of a wholly different world from that of the boys bussed in only for the days. Well,
Maurice is a boarder, she said. How was he? I was not always sure. I was surprised that she cared. V was an older girl from
Noakes Avenue. We were younger boys, Maurice from the big houses in the fields and I from the middle ground. We had been in
the same junior school. That was all.

She was impressed, however, by Brentwood’s Bean Library. This was the one reason, she thought, why a sixteen-year-old boy
might reasonably spend three hours each day on a trunk road instead of going to the best school nearby like everyone else.
We met there from time to time, normally on the occasion of a football match when sisterly support was approved.

The Bean, she said, was like a perfumery that she had once visited with her mother in London. It smelt of spice and leather
and beneath a polished-wood barrel roof stood rectangular tables and open shelves through which we could see who was selecting
books on the other side. It was this arrangement of shining surfaces that explains my peculiar picture of her in the rough-book,
a drawing of black feet on tiptoes, a space and then a pale knee below a dark hem, another space and then a belt of black
leather, more books and then a necklace with a single stone.

The Bean Library was home to a society where we discussed the 1964 general election and the appearance in Brentwood of Mr
W’s lost Tory saviour, Quintin Hogg himself, ringing his hand-bell to warn us that if we elected Mr Wilson we would soon all
be wringing our hands. When voting time came, Brentwood heeded this warning and returned a Conservative to Westminster as
was its wont. But the country at large did not. Sir Alec returned to his Scottish coalmines and grouse moors and the only
Douglas-Home of which anyone in the Bean Library needed to take note was his brother William whose comedy,
The Chiltern Hundreds
, about a butler who campaigns to be a Tory MP when his master has defected to Labour, had been selected as our school play.
V preferred the election result to the play. I did not care much for either.

One night I brought home one of Mr W’s red Latin Loeb editions to set alongside my grandfather’s
Aeneid
, books 7–12. My father commented that one advantage of the classics was how little of it had survived. He meant that there
was so little of the ancient world to study, compared, for example, with the infinite possibilities of his shooting range
over the sea and skies. Just one look at the Bean Library Loeb shelf showed how wrong that was. The classical landscape was
vast. There were Latin texts in red and Greek in green,
hundreds and hundreds of books. There was poetry, history and drama but also the
Elements
of Euclid, Ptolemy I’s prized mathematician, my father’s only good Greek.

Sometimes in the Latin books there were short passages, sometimes long passages, suddenly rendered into Greek. To read the
forbidden parts of Latin poems it was essential to know Greek. To read about sodomy or cock-sucking or how Greek queens excited
themselves with geese, a boy needed to know Greek well, or to know another boy who knew Greek well. Even among these school
books there was an intimidating infinity of Greek and Latin as boundless as the deserts and fields of Egypt and Essex.

The Bean Library was where the rough-book was written, where Cleopatra the Second began. Without it there would not be an
eighth attempt now in the theatre of Septimius Severus under the flat gaze of unfinished gods.

The tourist site is almost empty now. It is close to closing time in the rain. There are only two places in which to stay
dry, a postcard hut by the entrance selling Tutankhamuns and, a hundred yards to the east, a glass-covered Roman house called
the Villa of the Birds.

The choice of postcards is peculiar. All of them celebrate a child pharaoh from the desert south who never came to the Mediterranean,
whose name not even Cleopatra knew, the heir to a father who preached the heresy that there was only one god and whose memory
had already, in the first century
BC
, been expunged from history for more than a thousand years. There is nothing Alexandrian about Tutankhamun.

The second shelter is for vivid mosaics of peacocks, ducks and doves made by Alexandrians for Romans, portraits in coloured
stone of birds that still fly and swim here. There are no postcards of the birds. The archaeological authorities – and their
political masters – do not like their Greek and Roman past. They much prefer to be the heirs to pharaohs.

Now that the clouds have cleared, it is an hour till closing time on Sharia Yousef, the time that Socratis promised that Mahmoud
would come, the time to discuss plans for tomorrow. The picnickers have gone. The shadows from the grey-green columns are
sweeping like second hands across the sunset face of the stage.

What most amazed V was the competition at Brentwood to know things, the ancient and the modern, or to know some of them, or
to seem to know some of them. There were weekly ‘form-orders’ for every form, league tables of individual performance in every
task on every day. Competition was considered character-forming, competition in Latin and Greek especially so. There were
rankings for rugby and cricket and running, but also for the collection of cold-weather data and the sale of tickets for raffles
and
The Chiltern Hundreds
. There
were contests in writing accounts of the death of kings for
Greenwood
, the school magazine. My
Cleopatra
was unplaced but my
Mary Queen of Scots
was a winner, the first words of mine ever put on view beyond the box room overlooking the Essex clay.

Everyone had a position in an order and, while in theory this could change with every test and examination, in practice it
was noticeable how little it changed. The top seemed always to be on top. The best footballers were the best cricketers too
– and the best runners once full athletics training was under way. When the lowest were raised to the highest, and the highest
returned to the bottom of the pile, as happened once a year in the dining rooms on ‘Saturnalia day’, the result was felt more
deeply than any act of religion. The sight of the headmaster carrying warm carrots and the second-formers being served by
the sixth was our most self-conscious borrowing from ancient Rome. Borrowing seems too weak a word for what it was like for
the orders to be briefly subverted, the lowest divisions elevated to the school heights.

Division was the daily business of life. There were boundaries between the aesthetes and the Combined Cadet Force, between
the boys who mocked Mr G for mispronouncing Himalayas and those who feared his hosepipe, between those who fenced for England
and those who fenced pornography, between those to whom the headmaster might read Achilles Tatius and those to whom he never
would. And there was always our classical divide between the Greeks and the Germans.

When Mr W shouted ‘Get out, you Huns’ at the half of a class who had chosen to study German rather than Greek, it was just
an ordinary day. He used this command before every lesson, sitting up on his stool behind his high desk and waving a white-chalked
duster at the retreating modern linguists as though it were a talisman against their
evil spirits. The regularity of the words brought equally regular results. When the master had spoken from his perch, it was
as though a new queen bee had come of age within a swarm. The thirty-strong third-form class divided into two equal clouds.
The Huns clattered and clanged over their bags and books to reach safety. The Hellenes, as we remainders were known, poked
them on their way with pencils and rulers.

The noise of wood and flesh and metal was immense. There was more clanging than would be heard today because polio was still
a potent scourge and iron leg-callipers an all too audible reminder of it. The mere clattering was the sound of boy-meets-desk
at all ages and times. The peace, when the clouds had parted, was W-heaven. Once the Huns had given up their ground, we could
shuffle to the front of the room, fill up the empty spaces and open our slim, brown-cloth-backed copies of Euripides’
Rhesus
, a Trojan War play about spies and horse-thieves which may not have been by Euripides at all.

This was an introduction to scepticism as well as to tragedy. The high-spending librarians of the Ptolemies attracted fakes
as well as treasures. Our
Rhesus
was of dubious authenticity, we were told. But, for reasons that were never clear, availability in school stocks, perversity
in the character of Mr W, simplicity in much of its language, we seemed always to be reading it. The drama was set at night
outside Troy. A matching murky blackness filled our minds but at least we effete scholastics were safe for a while from the
Huns.

Mr W had no genuine prejudice against those who chose German. He did have an ill-concealed contempt for the Combined Cadet
Force, whose business was rerunning the last war and in whose ranks every pupil, even his own, had to march on Thursday afternoons.
But a jocular anti-German approach was fine.

No one wanted trouble. Dividing one group from another was not designed to hurt. It was as natural as breathing. Then, one
afternoon in the summer of 1968, the classics library, which was kept in the form room of the classical upper sixth, was ransacked
by persons unknown. This, we soon learnt, was a much more serious offence to school rules than surreptitious snogging or serial
buggery. It was a public crime. It was a mystery. While V and I ate ice creams at Chelmsford bus station the next day she
wanted to know what I had seen, who had seen it first and who was under suspicion.

On no account, I told her, were we allowed to clear the evidence. I described to her the confetti of grey on the green floor,
the occasional piece of cardboard colour, the muddy purples and blues used for binding dictionaries. I slightly exaggerated
what I had seen and when I had seen it. She nodded sagely, as though humouring a child.

So who had done the deed? Who would write Homo on a book of Homer, Virgin on a book of Virgil, mix up pages, tear maps and
lexica? Who, without even noticing, would have torn the rough-book with most of my Cleopatra notes? A disaffected airforce
platoon of the CCF? A band of chemically enhanced physicists? Germans? The fencing team? She shrugged and broke the empty
end of her cone into the waste bin. In V’s view, almost anyone could have had a reason. She was surprised such assaults were
not a daily occurrence like all the other assaults that her friends still reported to her.

For a week there was nothing more to report. But then a book was burned, only one book, but burning, it seemed, was more serious
still. The target was a copy of
The Greek Anthology
, a collection of short poems, many from Alexandria, written over a period of a thousand years, mostly unappreciated except
by zealots and at that time, in a school classroom, never opened at all. It had not even burnt well.
The culprits had used pages from tattered rough-books (one of them mine) to fuel an inadequate fire.

Mr W had the job of investigation. I could not tell him anything. No one could. Or, anyway, no one did. I had expected to
be sadder at the almost total loss of Cleopatra the Second. Once I would have cared much more but, in truth, I had left it
behind. Since no one apart from V knew how far it had advanced, I did not even report the damage.

Maurice suspected the boy he called Frog, a suitable candidate I agreed. Frog was not a pleasant creature. He was short, squat,
obsessive, a day-boy who lived like a boarder, an undesirable hybrid. He was clever but not predictable. He fitted in nowhere.
He was always keen to continue his tedious stories after catcalls and abuse, even after chalk had been pushed down his throat.
He understood certain jokes perfectly and others not at all. He knew about Nazi medical experiments and once gave a lecture
to the classical society, in excessive detail, on how gladiators used to slit each other’s arteries. Perhaps this Frog had
been both the ransacker and the burner. He seemed a very likely culprit.

In V’s view to investigate the crime at all was a silliness that proved how isolated and self-obsessed we were. This was 1968,
the year of revolutions from Paris to San Francisco and even changes to modest forms of socialism in Britain. Whoever was
protesting, in the rooms between the Memorial Hall and the headmaster’s garden, was not, she thought, protesting anywhere
near enough.