Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (25 page)

Mahmoud’s tone was rather different from before, mildly mocking, not quite as deferential to the ‘good men’ who had always
ruled his country. ‘F for Fascist too,’ he added. Farouk liked Hitler because Egypt’s British ‘protectors’ behaved as the
Roman protectors once had done – and the Germans had done less harm here than the French. But that was less an issue now.
It had faded from memory along with the king’s collection of sexually explicit snuff boxes and green alabaster baths.

Poor Farouk had hormonal problems. He was seen almost as a ‘good man’ again now, much better than the man who was ordering
new cameras and microphones into Saad Zaghloul Square. The police were searching for terrorists but listening to everyone.
They said that Jihadists were Egypt’s enemy, when almost everyone was Mubarak’s enemy. They planted bombs to make the British
and Americans afraid of the Jihadists and supportive of the regime.

This was a surprise. So Mahmoud, too, was suggesting that the New Year bomb was Mubarak’s very own work, a sharp change of
view from the quiet apologist who had adopted me only two weeks ago at the Metropole Hotel. On January 1st both Socratis and
Mahmoud had seemed to be on the same side – with different degrees of enthusiasm.
Then Socratis had given his carpet lecture, his story of how Cleopatra ruled, how she was propped up by a foreign power and
hated by almost everyone. The ancient Alexandrians had a name for that sort of message, an
ekphrasis
, a picture described with a purpose. And now Mahmoud, rather more directly, was back in line with his friend, a very different
line from the one before.

Why then, I asked, had we come to a presidential palace, even one not used by the president? Was this really his ‘safer place’?
What was going on?

This place was controlled by ‘the old security’, he said, the part that barely functioned. There were 250 acres here and as
many different kinds of palm tree. He smiled, as though newly unburdened. And anyway, was this not the closest to the queen
of the Cleopatra Ball that I was ever going to get?

Perhaps it was. If I wanted to conjure scenes of Antony, god of intoxication, Cleopatra, the ruthless and insatiable, Dellius,
procurer of boys and girls, and Plancus, master of all ceremonies, this would be the place. We could forget the Metropole
ballroom.

There was a brief scuffle when two young English women, trying optimistically to soak up some pale sun, sought a piece of
sand for their towels that two Egyptian businessmen, with black suits and sandwiches, thought was rightfully theirs. An argument
between the almost naked and the over-dressed will normally favour the latter; and so it did. But after this there was almost
no movement, no distraction at all.

Mahmoud said he had to go back to work but would meet me at 7 p.m. at the Palestine Hotel, the king’s former guest house.
Meanwhile I could select a writing place beside a bank of reeds, an indigenous variety among a wide choice of more exotic
shrubs.

This is a place and a chance to think ahead. The rest of this book is going to star the Queen of England as well as Egypt,
a hero of Anzio, a cancer-stricken editor, a Hollywood actor, strange men on stilts, Margaret Thatcher at the height of her
powers in the Miners’ Strike (even though I never wrote that first biography), a lost escapologist (£350 for the evening),
a thousand bottles of free Bollinger champagne and a Dutch master’s painting. There will definitely now be a bigger part for
Lucius Munatius Plancus. V has made sure of that.

So who was Plancus? Aside from the good stories, where does he fit in? Like most of the Romans whose names we put in history
books, he was a soldier, a diplomat and a politician. There was nothing unusual in his lines of work. He was an aristocrat,
but from one of the newer families, the kind then most likely to see their future with Julius Caesar. Like Antony, but lower
down the ranks, he helped the conquest of Gaul. He earned a reputation for hunting druids. He might have been with Caesar
for the invasion of Britain. He knew Hirtius. He disappears
from the record at the time of Pharsalus and the Alexandrine War but was probably there at both. His is the second name mentioned
in Caesar’s
African War
, the bloody mopping-up of Pompey’s defiant supporters. He might himself have been one of its Continuators.

In V’s view the middle-aged character of Plancus was as necessary in 1987 as the teenage years of Cleopatra had been twenty
years before. She saw him as a forgotten character, and no less important for that. He was a trimmer, a chancer, a boaster,
a Roman who played for almost every side in Rome’s long civil wars and whose sole thought, at all times, was of who would
win, how would their battles be won, when should he join the winner and how he could help himself from the victor’s spoils.

In V’s view, he needed rescuing. He was important. He was relevant. He was missing in too many versions of the story. He was
the man most like the men she saw about her. This unreliable ally of Mark Antony was the consul who dressed in weeds and wode
and slithered among mermaids at the Queen’s command. He was the judge who decided whether Cleopatra’s priceless pearl in acid
wine should win the wager. The shaking of this cocktail was the act, in some ways the single most essential act of Alexandrian
extravagance, science, theatre and technical invention. Plancus was the ringmaster, the producer. He had gained only small
credit from historians for stopping the show before the second earring too was reduced to sour wine and scum.

The English women on the Palestine beach have given up their struggle with the men in black suits. They have dressed and joined
their sometime disputants at the bar. Closer encounters seem almost certain. The larger of the two men is dancing and one
of the
women is trying to pull him back down to the table. I may be able to follow their progress more closely when Mahmoud comes
back for dinner.

A few weeks after our encounter outside the Pakenham Arms Duke Hussey asked me for a drink – out of Trinity Oxford solidarity,
I assumed, rather than for any other reason. What other reason could there be? I was nervous. Might it be some kind of interview?
Surely not. Duke was the boss of bosses. I was the newest recruit. Duke was ‘management’, a word used derisively in the Blue
Lion and Calthorpe. Management did not talk to journalists any more than trade unionists talked to journalists. No one talked
to anyone – except in formal talks – or talks about talks.

We met at Brooks’s Club in St James, an unlikely pair, he acknowledging fellow members, staff and even the portraits on the
walls, I looking downwards onto a grime-ground carpet. We both had a dry sherry, the first sherry I had drunk since the days
of Maurice’s decanter. I ordered what he ordered. It seemed the safest course.

He began by being complimentary about articles I had written for
The Sunday Times
. Before we had been forced to stop work I had been ‘coming along well’. He thought that I was picking up the style. But he
said the words in such a way as to suggest that the newspaper’s style was not his own, nor one of which he much approved.

I had already made my first mistake – in telling the Business News men of the Pakenham Arms that I was having the lunch at
all. So I would have to bring back some news, some gossip or insight. What was I supposed to say? Duke seemed to be one of
those men who could say nothing for hours on end, mixing pleasantries with mouthfuls of plaice and peas.

Duke was a military hero. That much Lew had told me. The industrial campaign to defeat the trades unions of Gray’s Inn Road
was nothing much, it seemed, in comparison to what this modest, bluff, flat-faced man had known in his youth. He was confident
of victory. We had only to be patient.

We talked easily enough, about Trinity, James Holladay, the King’s Arms, the gardens. He asked about my hobbies as though
he were interviewing me for a senior position in domestic service. I mentioned Cleopatra, but carefully. From his flickering
eyes came the message that an ambitious reporter, a Trinity man too, should have more immediate matters on his mind.

Duke knew, however, about one character in the Cleopatra story, the same one, strangely, that V had identified. Duke and V
had nothing else in common. It would have been hard to imagine her in Brooks’s. He was her enemy, her class enemy, in the
seventies the most potent kind. But they both knew bits of what little there is to be known about Lucius Munatius Plancus.

That was mere coincidence then, a discovery made over two dishes of sponge pudding and custard. But it is also the only reason
that I am writing about Plancus now, with my back against the soft bark of a tree once owned by King Farouk. The consul with
the mermaid’s tail, as Duke explained, was a Roman of more than mere historical interest, not just a part of Cleopatra’s life
but part of his own. He spoke for what seemed an hour or more. I had not yet learnt that the coffee stage of a club-land lunch
might last twice as long as the soup, fish and cake.

There are many reasons for knowing about a character from the past. I already knew about Plancus because any biographer of
Cleopatra has
to know him: he was the man who organised her fancy-dress parties and the financing of Antony’s armies. James Holladay knew
even more about Plancus because it was his job to know more – and because he considered unreliable allies to be some of the
most consistently important chracters in history.

V had played alongside a Plancus in the Red Tents of Oxford, looking down at the mermaids and the wrestlers. Any admirer of
the poet Horace will know about Plancus, the recipient of a beautiful and mysterious poem beginning
Laudabunt alii, Others will praise
and followed by a list of seaside towns. But Duke knew about him because, in January 1944, he had passed by Plancus’s tomb.
It was like a giant pillbox, he said, like a great brick drum built by Hitler’s finest engineers. He had been on his way to
losing his leg at Anzio at the time.

The long last phase of the Second World War in Italy had given the young Marmaduke Hussey a fresh perspective on ancient history.
His fellow officers, he said, included much better scholars and teachers than he. Many knew of the Continuators. They had
read the second half of the
Aeneid
, the battle for Rome itself. Quarrelling commanders, disagreements about battle sites and cavalry tactics, and whether Rome
was even worth fighting for: all these questions filled the Latin pages of their schoolboy memories.

In 1944, Duke reminded me, the Allies were advancing painfully through Italy, arguing among themselves about the speed and
direction of the drive against the enemy. Neither the landscape nor the questions were so very different from how they had
been 2000 and 3000 years before. So many of his companions were steeped in the classics, the easiest way for them to talk
about the present was to place the roads, rivers and mountains in the past. Not much had changed. The British, American and
German armies were the latest
and bloodiest heirs to Aeneas and Antony fighting up and down the peninsula known as Italy.

Lucius Munatius Plancus’s 2000-year-old tomb, once topped by cypress trees, dominated the allied invasion routes of 1944 at
Gaeta by the Bay of Naples. So, when Duke’s transport ships passed by, several of his friends knew exactly what it was. They
talked of how it was the most spectacular spot, close to the place of Plancus’s birth. The old Roman had made his tomb, 500
feet above the sea, to mark the achievements by which he most wanted to be remembered: his good deeds, his consulships and
priesthoods, his triumphs over Swiss tribesmen and the foundation of Lyons. Had he perhaps persuaded Virgil to begin Book
Seven of his
Aeneid
there, with the burial of Caieta, the hero’s nurse, those lines about whether life was worth remembering, the first in Latin
that I ever read? Maybe he had.

What did I think? Were his friends right? I was able to add a few thoughts, the first of the lunch that Duke seemed to listen
to. In his old age, I suggested, Plancus was rightly worried that his bad deeds would outlast the good. More shocking to some
than the pearl dissolved in wine was his rumoured part in his brother’s murder and his exploitation of Antony’s money-making
raids on the aristocracy after the Ides of March. Plancus, it was said, had wanted his brother’s house at Tibur, the most
fashionable riverside suburb of Rome. Antony could ensure that this theft was legal. But it was still a stain on his character.

Plancus knew that he would be attacked after his death. He had enemies who were already writing the bad obituaries. ‘Only
ghosts fight with corpses,’ he jibed at them, ‘
cum mortuis non nisi larvas luctari
’. But Plancus was a vain man. He wanted the best possible credit for the best that he had done.

Duke nodded. By February 1944, he said, the British army had fought its way from Sicily and reached a line just south of Gaeta.
The Germans were as divided as the Allies about whether or where they should fight in Italy and they too had the tomb of Plancus
on their maps. Duke’s masters took a fateful decision (absolutely fateful for him) that rather than fight their way on land
past Gaeta they would sail past it, to Anzio, the beaches of ancient Antium.