Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (19 page)

I said nothing. Maurice took a drink and a rasping breath and went on. I turned a page and continued to take notes. He seemed
pleased.
Maurice had met Frog. That was the start. Maurice had met Frog in the King’s Arms, and Frog had taken Maurice to the Red Tents,
at an address he had been given before finally he had left the protective embrace of Brentwood School. Frog was a late arrival
in Oxford but he already knew a city that neither of us yet knew.

Maurice admitted to me that he had not seen everything for himself. He had not been allowed inside the innermost tent in the
grounds of the great house. But Frog had been in. There were both men and women playing the parts of mermaids there, each
with one leg pinned outside under the red silk drapes and another dressed in green gauze as though it were a tail.

There was the scent of dried roses. There was a secret code. Each sea creature asked its visitor whether Alexander the Great
was still alive. The right answer was ‘yes, he is alive and in power over the world’. Gibbon’s injunction to use ‘the obscurity
of a learned language’ was in his account of the Roman empress Theodora, whose sexual pleasure was to place corn grains among
her pubic hair for gentle consumption by geese. The historian deemed this more decorously described in Greek. The creators
of the Red Tents agreed.

How strange that Maurice had discovered all this with a boy whom he had so recently seen as so lacking in the lightest touch
of grace, who had had the nickname and the sexual appeal of a small frog, a spotted frog, not even a frog naturally spotted
in a
National Geographic
way but spotted as a laboratory frog might become through fright.

Frog, it seemed, was rather different now. He had never been a quitter, said Maurice, with a suddenly more admiring view of
the boy he had once so despised. He had also, it seemed, acquired or reacquired friends who would have fitted into the most
febrile Roman
imaginings of life in Cleopatra’s court, into an ancient exotica which the words of my failing biography had not approached,
not closely, not at all.

Frog had ‘gold on his tongue’. Maurice paused again, this time for nothing other than a dreamy dramatic effect. He was lightly
drunk but less so than on many a quieter sherried night.

What did he mean? I had no idea. In Brentwood days Frog had often looked shifty to me, a bit oily, as though he had sluiced
his lips in a tin of peaches. Had he now moved up in life? Did Frog wear jewellery in his mouth?

The Greek Egyptians, I ventured, used to put gold in the mouths of their dead so that they might charm the inhabitants of
the next world. The password to the Red Tents, ‘Yes, he is alive and in power’, came from the legend of Alexander the Great’s
sister, Thessalonike, who swam the seas looking for sailors to trick into the wrong answer. Maurice did not even pretend interest
in this.

The flow of news babbled on. Frog had found himself a base as bar manager in his college, a useful post, Maurice mused. Our
former unloved school creature had also, Maurice added softly, delivered a full confession for the great Brentwood book-burning
of 1968. He claimed ‘diminished responsibility’. The new Frog was really very amusing.

At this point we fell silent. Maurice cleared his nose and throat into a pale-blue cotton handkerchief, one of the dozens
that his mother sent him. He had nothing more to do or say. There was no more about Frog’s Oxford that night. He left the
room like a cat.

After a few minutes he was briefly visible again through the window, out on the long path through the college lawn towards
the gate with empty plinths awaiting the Stuart Restoration, then clearer
against the night lights through the gaps in the lime trees (long awaiting their own different restoration) before vanishing,
flouncing, towards his own room beside the Library – where the late studiers were smoking their cigars.

Place Saad Zaghloul

Maurice began to go often to the Red Tents. I was not sure quite how often. In that second Trinity year I knew less and less
of what he was doing. Our paths remained parallel but less close. There was no more sherry. He admitted that the tented mermaids
were more often men. The bodies under the red cloth were not the same men all the time. Indeed the right to be pinned down
on the satin floor was highly prized; a senior merman could choose his time for the most active hours of the night.

What sort of action? He was never very precise. Sometimes there were girls, he said, as though to reassure me. The only requirement
was that all should appear to have a tail instead of legs, an illusion most easily achieved by the spare limb being pinned
outside the canvas walls. Frog had once seen a boy with a polio-shrunken leg of the kind we knew so well from school. But
this had not been as much of a success as the organisers had hoped. Maurice’s homosexuality then still seemed theoretical,
experimental, like cannabis, cocaine, cross-dressing and the Marowitzing of Shakespeare. It was secret. But everything was
more secret then.

He spoke sometimes vividly, or vividly as it seemed to me, of doors beyond doors beyond doors, dark rooms behind the light,
lines of basins with alphas and epsilons in lipstick on the mirrors, nobody about, then suddenly a crowd, planks to trip over,
drains to piss down,
coloured clothes in cardboard boxes, white colonial wear, sailor suits, cheese-paper blouses on meat-rails, feathers, wax
fruit, dried flowers in profusion and curly heads against a drinking fountain.

For the first time the telephone rings in Room 114. There is a silence that ends with the news that Mr Socratis has his car
waiting downstairs. I triple-lock the door, pass the red panels, the green cabbages and the Versailles window, and leave through
the security shield. Socratis is tapping his foot on the pavement. Mahmoud is in the back seat behind the driver. He is pleased
because the police have found another of the conspirators. There is a new video on YouTube of a man with blacked eyes, bloodied
mouth and no sign of life.

Socratis is not so pleased. A different security force, one of many serving the President’s purposes, is clearing the streets
of derelict cars, reluctantly for the most part because an ill-paid policeman can make good money hiring out back-seats to
prostitutes and addicts. The cars are now judged terrorist havens.

Socratis has several threatened vehicles, not only on the Moon side of Alexandria but in Cairo by the airport. Their night-time
users would be needed for the Cleopatra ball. He hoped that the clean-up campaign, like past efforts of its kind, would falter
on economic grounds before it reached his retired Toyotas. Meanwhile he wanted me to accompany him back to the library. There
seemed no good reason not to agree.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina

Maurice called the place of the Red Tents ‘
my
Mermaid Club’. The phrase was a form of protest since there was another Mermaid Club in
Oxford that he would like to have joined. The invitation to me to join this older Mermaid Club came from Geoff the Editor
who described it, in the fake antiquarian way then fashionable, as ‘a brotherhood committed to Restoration Comedy and the
restorative powers of claret’. We had a venerable membership book with violet signatures, menus and arguments about the appropriateness
of plays. Each meeting began with lines of John Keats on the subject of the Mermaid Tavern, a city hostelry that had once
been the haunt of Milton and Ben Jonson, maybe Shakespeare too:

How the meetings ended I can no better recall here in Alexandria forty years on than I could in Oxford on the following morning.
We were a self-perpetuating cabal of authorities on the first halves of Restoration comedies, from Sir Fopling Flutter to
Sir Courtly Nice, the obscure to the very obscure.

The membership included many of the kind of men not much seen in Essex, men whose names already stood for something in the
world outside, from castles to accountancy firms or for family connections of their own to poets dead and gone. For most of
us it was a club which provided a light experience of Oxford tradition and a heavy taste of hangovers.

What was the Latin for hangover? One of the thinner-faced, blonder-haired Mermaids gave me a little lecture on Mark Antony’s
notorious
crapulae
. He also knew much more than I did about
Cleopatra and the dead poets. He began each bottle with the opening lines of
Nunc est bibendum
, ‘Now is the time for drinking’, Horace’s Cleopatran ode. Sometimes he even recited in English to the end.

Occasionally Cleopatra’s name appeared in games when modern politicians had to be cast as characters in old plays. How Hamlet-like
was hesitant Edward Heath? Incidentally, why had he never married the beautiful Kay Raven whose picture was by his bedside,
it was said, and who occasionally came to Trinity to see her brother, the tutor who read aloud to us in verse?

How Cassiusesque were Harold Wilson and James Callaghan? Would Reginald Maudling, then considered one of the cleverest ministers
of his time, better suit the parts of the harmless drunkard Falstaff or the more dangerous drunkard Antony?

There were still the popular ‘names of’ clapping competitions.
There were games in which members had to find their pair, Robin and Marian, Cleopatra and Antony, barely an advance on the
Essex polished floors of 1956. And then there were always the lost Act Fives in which the stage directions ran into the dialogue
and the drink ran into the ceilings of the rooms below.

‘Do you still write about politics?

Socratis had been away only an hour but seemed now to know rather more about me – that before my authorship of
Trente Jours
I had been an editor of
The Times
, a political journalist in America as well as Britain, that I had survived a cancer that was supposed to kill me and had
written about it in another diary called
On the Spartacus Road
.

‘What is Tony Blair like?’

Socratis knew too that I had spent time with Tony Blair and George Bush during the Iraq War and had now subsided deeply, though
he did not know just how very gratefully, into Greek and Roman history and a nine-year editorship of
The Times Literary Supplement
. This knowledge was no more than he could have found in a few minutes at a computer but it was beyond the interest that he
had shown before.

‘No,’ I told him, ‘I no longer write about politics. Or, at least, only very rarely, and not about any of the countries on
my Roman map, not about Morocco, Tunis or Libya, not at all about Egypt.’

‘What do you understand of being an Alexandrian?’

I paused, wondering if he was asking about the first centuries
BC
and
AD
(answer: riotous but politically ineffective, disrespectful of authority but dictatorially governed, innovative, artful,
always out for a good time if one could be found) or about the city of today. He did not wait for either answer.

‘There is someone I want you to meet.’

This man, he said, would tell me everything about Alexandria. He would come to the library and find me there.

‘If you have to wait a little while, that will not matter, will it? You can always entertain yourself in a library.’

‘You could read your own book and practise your French,’ added Mahmoud who had been silent till then.

The driver began laughing until his employer poked him hard in his plastic-covered paunch, harder than would be necessary
for a driver more normally dressed.

I have now been in the library for almost another two hours. I am expert on how the window-cleaners conduct their spidery
dance on the roof above. The glass is tipped at an angle chosen to represent some ancient observation of the skies, not steep
enough to require the swinging harnesses worn by those who ply their trade on office blocks, too steep to move as easily as
on a roof that were flat.

Various visitors have come and waved a ticket in my face. None has been Socratis’s Alexandrian. Each time he or she has been
keen only to claim a pre-booked desk. Each time I have moved further down the steps, past the sculptures representing literature,
past the exhibitions of linotype machinery, past plaintive paintings on the theme of the Rosetta Stone (lost to the British
Museum) and the great lighthouse (lost to the sea).

So, before the age of institutionalised regret, what did it mean to be an Alexandrian? Confidence was important. So was making
the best of weakness, finding calm where one could and fun when one wanted it. Alexandrians captivated the Romans with techniques
of twisting, reshaping not merely possessing. This city conquered Rome long
before Rome conquered this city. Alexandrians might later be seen as dull and dry, products of court life without political
freedoms, not properly Greek. But they made magic for export.

The librarians here were both scholars and entertainers. There was Callimachus, who liked short poems, and Apollonius, who
liked long ones. Both squabbled their way to reputations. For centuries poems poured in and out of Alexandria, piling gaiety
upon the grim lessons of the past. Ink from everywhere came in on the tides past the Pharos. This was the import that the
Ptolemies most prized, red ink from the ochre of earth, black from the burning of insects and wood, waves of words on papyrus
rolls which artists could study and make different. The harbour waters were the way into an unprecedented place where the
curious and the state-sponsored could pick and prod for pleasure.

The study of these pickers and prodders was our Oxford study too. Our textbooks were guides to how the greatest poets in Latin
had continued and adopted what the Alexandrians had begun. We read closely in those Roman writers, Catullus, Virgil, Horace,
whose works have lasted through the centuries – and speculatively in those whose efforts, much lauded in their day, have been
lost.

Virgil had a friend called Cornelius Gallus, an Alexandrian in art who was born in the same year as Cleopatra. He also shared
a mistress with Mark Antony. He had many claims to be in Cleopatra the Fifth. But from all his once-famed poems we had just
one elegantly balanced pentameter line, rescued from an unreliable book of ‘rivers mentioned by Roman poets’, the kind of
list that cataloguers and games-players have always loved.

Its subject was the Hyspanis, known today as the Southern Bug, a river once deemed to separate Europe from Asia.
Uno tellures dividit
amne duas
: With one stream it divides two lands. There was the ‘one’ at the beginning, the ‘two’ at the end and the word for division
dividing the line: it seemed then a magical thing. In the seventies we were told that Gallus, if only we possessed more of
his work, would be the link between two ages of art, the learned entertainers and the deepest, most personally passionate
poets, between Alexandria and Rome. Hellenistic literature was the hinge on which literature hung. Our teachers always hoped
for more of it.

In Alexandria’s Greek anthologies there was never any direct challenge to the old masters, no equal to Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides or to the comedian who mocked them in
The Frogs
or to the Homeric poets from whom the idea of Greece began. There were instead the men who made Greece for Rome and for everywhere.
Alexander’s menacing mermaid sister was right: her brother was still alive and in power over the world.

Consider, as Mr W used to say, even one of Alexandria’s most mocked of scholars, Didymus Chalcenterus, Cleopatra’s librarian,
commentator on Homer, long seen as a figure of fun if seen at all, sometimes called Forget-me-book because he wrote more books
than even he could remember. This Didymus explained the choruses of Sophocles and uncertain attributions in Euripides. He
listed thousands of Greek words whose meanings, he argued, were not quite what they seemed.

Didymus made enjoyment happen. Short poems or long ones? Callimachus from Cyrene or Apollonius from Rhodes? Let the readers
choose what or whom they liked best. Green marble or red for a bathroom, white or brown for a dining table, polished wood
or plain for stairs? He wrote the handbooks and guidebooks. He was at the heart of the project for Alexandria to conquer Rome
and beyond.

This was important, the promotion of Greek not just its existence. No one in the past sixty years who has ever claimed to
be a classicist has escaped the jeering charge: why, with so much else from which to choose, do you want to do that? Completing
Cleopatra’s lives, in a way that not even I expected, close to where she once lived, is now my own small, best answer.

There is still no sign of Socratis’s friend at the library. There is a cold rain outside where the seekers of cigarettes and
fresh air meet. Each new arrival at the desks has a wetter coat and a better need for her headscarf. Mud streaks the carpets.

Among Cleopatra’s contemporaries was a man named Crinagoras. His name appears in several of the anthologies of tiny poems
that were first made here and are back now on Alexandria’s shelves. He came from Lesbos, the same island as the politician-poet
Alcaeus. But Crinagoras did not hymn the death of tyrants. He wrote poetry that pleased his present more than the distant
future. He had a ready line for the death of a slave boy, a slave girl or for a lover who bestowed the name ‘Love’s Island’
on the place where he died. When Crinagoras wrote of eagles it was not to praise their soaring flight like a tragedian but
to note how their wing feathers, when neatly cut and purpled with lacquer, made quill pens and toothpicks. He had the perfect
inscription for a caged parrot whose call echoed the name of Caesar to the woods and hills.