Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (26 page)

A schoolboy’s idea of Anzio was a place of warmth, wine and art, the sculptures that Plancus and his kind had stolen, bought
and sold, the grapes they had grown and the sun that had shone on them while they did so. The Anzio beaches in 1944 were a
classical landscape of a different, darker kind.

Duke clenched his fist over the table as he recalled the scene. He was now a wholly different man from the one who had arrived
at Brooks’s, cold as he recalled the sodden sands, the rain like corrugated-iron sheets, the clinging mud like the mess on
an abattoir floor. This was classical only as an amphitheatre for gladiators is classical, sand where there was nowhere to
hide, overlooked by high boxes, booths, protected places with perfect lines of sight.

When it came to his own part, Duke paused. He arrived after the first wave of the assault, among the reinforcements required
to fill the gaps left by the dead. He did not want to talk about what happened next. In his memoir,
Chance Governs All
, published much later, he described his encounter on a bramble-covered hillside with ‘the worst shot’ in the German army,
the machine-gunner who at a range of three yards took his leg when by any likelihood of reason he should have taken his life.

It was a matter of chance. Chance governed everything, he said. Confidence and luck were the keys to any life.

We returned to talking about Trinity. This was easier, though increasingly disjointed. He told me what I had never known,
that James Holladay, the heavy-bodied hero of the King’s Arms, had been a gunner in the D-Day landings, going over on a Gooseberry.
A Gooseberry? Yes, part of a Mulberry, one of the artificial harbours. Did I not know about them?

Incidentally, did I ever go to the Calthorpe Arms? He preferred it to the Pakenham. I said I was surprised he knew either.
He said he knew the Calthorpes quite well. The one who gave his name to the pub was our naval commander in the Mediterranean
in the First World War. Arthur Calthorpe accepted the Turkish surrender.
Gradu diverso via una
. That was his motto.

In his London club, forty years on from the event that had redirected his life, Duke seemed surprised to be taking an hour
or two away from his industrial wars, musing about ships and scholarship and about Plancus, the man in the Gaeta tomb. Was
he an evil traitor and a trimmer, a betrayer of his brother, a stealer of his brother’s house, an unreliable ally, debauchee
and drunk? Or was he just what so many of us would have been, if we were lucky, a man of all wars who waits to see who is
going to win and enjoys himself as best he can while waiting?

Duke did not encourage long answers – or any answer that strayed too far from his centre of concern. He did not seek the bigger
picture. He did not care about Cleopatra or Antony. He was a minimalist, happy to define his knowledge in his own way, a lover
of order, an artist of organisation, an Alexandrian in many ways. When he argued for Plancus, he did so doggedly, as though
the Roman were a wartime companion fallen upon hard times. On a troop ship from one theatre of foggy fighting to another,
Plancus had been a
relaxation of a kind. The tomb itself, he said, had suffered from both allied and German bullets but it was well restored
now. There was a prison nearby where for a long time they kept some of the nastier operatives of the SS.

These days of returning to childhood passions and student studies have been peculiar in many ways. I am both a better and
worse classicist than I once was. Like so many others who have learnt Latin and Greek, I read as a child what I barely understood
and have understood as an adult what I barely now can read. I had only a few answers for Duke back then. I have a few more
now.

Lucius Munatius Plancus was, as James Holladay said and V could see, one of those men who live and strive just below the surface
of politics. Although he does not appear in Shakespeare’s plays or on screen alongside Elizabeth Taylor, he is a serious figure
in Rome’s history books. For example, while Antony was at Tarsus waiting for Cleopatra’s barges, Plancus was in Italy arranging
the land that Antony had promised to his veterans. This was much the more difficult of the two challenges. Not everyone can
be part of the love story. Some do not even like the love story. Duke certainly did not.

In the summer of 41
BC
there was a brief, brutal war between Antony and Octavian, Caesar’s two heirs still nominally in alliance. No commander knew
what to do, whether and where to win or how much to win by. Plancus played a typical part, as victor in an unintended battle,
advancing, retreating, halting, waiting and then retreating again – before Octavian took decisive action and the most devastating
revenge on those nearest to him at the time.

A full civil war was looming – with one side backed by the wealth of Egypt. Timing was critical for both sides. Antony had
a chance to
deploy his bigger navy against Octavian but, with Plancus as his counsellor, chose instead uneasy peace. Both men had a mass
of unfinished business. Antony promoted Plancus to command the rear of his coming eastern campaign against the Persians.

In Italy the civil war was by propaganda. Octavian branded Antony as the plaything of a royal whore, a debauchee and a drunk.
Antony claimed Julius Caesar’s military mantle and argued that there was honour in being a drunk. Octavian’s brutality began
to outweigh the popularity of his land grants. Antony’s eastern ambitions fell close to collapse. Both sides struggled to
match words with reality.

Occasionally there was better news for Antony from the East. After one small success, Antony began some boundary reorganisation
of the empire in favour of Egypt, moving new peoples and countries under Alexandrian control. When I told the Big Oil men
about Cleopatra’s modest bitumen business on the fringes of Arabia, that was one of her gains at this time, territory given
to her as a down payment in anticipation of much bigger things to come.

Antony soon found that he had no choice but to fight Octavian directly for the right to rule Rome. The great Antonians, Plancus
and Canidius to the fore, headed fast for Alexandria where Cleopatra generously rewarded her Roman allies. The Ptolemies had
always known the power of bribes. Some of Antony’s officers hated everything about her but her money. Some were not bribed
enough – or smelt arrogance and the possibility of defeat. But most could be paid and swayed – by cash and by parties, routs
and revels.

Cleopatra and Antony were lovers, sexual partners, partners in politics. No one can know which partnership was the most important.
Some have been honest enough not to ask or answer that question. At massive coronation ceremonies, they promoted their children,
and the
boy they called Caesar’s child too. Lands and titles flowed to Ptolemy Caesarion, and to their young twins, Alexander the
Sun and Cleopatra the Moon. These were rewards which, like the bitumen business, would be followed after victory by much more.

Both sides were readying rapidly. Octavian’s admiral, Agrippa, captured bases along the western coast of Greece. The sea belonged
to Octavian. Suddenly, characteristically and critically, Plancus changed sides and divorced himself from Antony. He sensed
that he was on the wrong side.

Canidius Crassus had his
ginestho
, his promise of eternal financial security from the Ptolemies. Confident in Antony’s army too, he stayed loyal. Antony and
Cleopatra began a tour of Greece and Asia to raise further funds and forces. More would be needed than even the wealth of
Egypt could supply.

Over the twelve months of our occasional conversations in 1979 Duke lost his battle. He wanted the right to run the printing
plants on behalf of the owners, to use modern computers instead of machinery of the medieval guilds, to decide who worked
and what they were paid, to ensure that the papers were printed each night without stoppages, strikes and sudden demands for
more pay. The unions were determined not to lose what they saw as ancestral rights to their own money and mercenary power.

The conflict seems like ancient history now – with causes barely recognisable to journalists today, whose worries are elsewhere.
At the time it was like an ancient siege, a contest over which side could best endure the hardships of not working. Both sides
bluffed and counterbluffed. Both sides threatened and blustered. But the unions in the end could endure the longer. All newspaper
owners had bribed
their printers for decades – and had no strength to manage without them.

There was the business question of whether any
Times
or
Sunday Times
readers would be left if the fight lasted too long. But there was a battle of political will too. The owners were the ones
who lost heart. We returned to work in conditions hardly different from those we had left. We were still using typewriters
rather than computers although, for me, any keyboard was a technological advance.

The Cleopatra project progressed well during the war but failed with the demands of a phoney peace. I moved with Harold Evans,
from
The Sunday Times
to
The Times
. The present became more consuming than the past. Margaret Thatcher squeezed out Cleopatra, as Lew had hoped she would.
The Times
itself was turbulent. Duke’s hopes and the unions’ fears were merely postponed. Coming very soon was the last year in which
newspapers would be made with molten lead on museum-grade machinery. Rising soon, on the other side of the City, past Tower
Bridge towards what were still then the old Docklands, a new print works was being built, one which would be revolutionary
until the next revolution – that of Web and wireless – overtook us in turn.

In the Calthorpe, the Blue Lion, the Pakenham and the Apple Tree no one knew how soon the change would come. But beside the
Thames, barely more than a mile away, it was already beginning to happen. Every news editor, sub-editor and reporter already
had a desk planned for him or for her, in ‘work-stations’ linked by computers, in an office that no one had seen and most
did not know even existed.

Duke was by then not controlling the company any longer. As soon as his campaign had failed, his authority became more honorary
than
real. Among his gentler responsibilities was a party to boost morale, a bicentenary ball for
The Times
, a celebration which he called a Rout, a name from the Georgian royal court that seemed to him to strike the right tone.
Not everyone agreed with him – either about the name or about whether we should have a ball of any name or kind.

‘A Rout’, said the Literary Editor to the Labour Editor, reading from a dictionary: ‘a large evening party or fashionable
gathering much in vogue in the eighteenth century; a company of rioters; an assembly of persons leading to an unlawful act;
a disorderly retreat of defeated troops.’ There was consensus in favour of the fourth definition, or possibly the third.

This was a year when no one could manage anyone except by force, when printers, miners and politicians combined to cry havoc,
when there were Irish assassinations, a freezing winter when sterling stood at all-time lows as though in sympathy with the
thermometer. And this was the year when Duke brought in acrobats, tumblers, royal processions, fancy dress, commemorative
champagne, escapologists of every variety, all for the great Rout of Hampton Court, all in the great Alexandrian tradition
of partying problems away.

Mahmoud came back an hour later than he had promised. He sat down with his back to the sea insisting that I should enjoy what
remained of the view. He seemed in good spirits. He was going away for a few days, to Athens, the only city to which Alexandria
was connected by direct flights. Did I want to go with him? Had Cleopatra ever visited Athens? Would it be pleasant to continue
the story somewhere else?

Yes, I said. Cleopatra had visited Athens. She was a minor goddess there. He smiled. The Ptolemies had their own temple in
Athena’s
city. Four hundred years after its prime it was still wealthy, still looking to become powerful again. As the last battle
loomed of Rome’s civil wars, the Athenians, like everyone else, were keen to identify the winner. I could hear myself sounding
like a bore and he looked suddenly very bored.

But, no. I did not want to leave Alexandria. I had promised myself that I would not leave till my book was finished or, at
least, certain to be finished. I knew Athens well and I could readily imagine Cleopatra there if that was what I wanted to
do. I was not sure that it was.

He began objecting. Surely it would be easier to write in Athens about Cleopatra in Athens? Was not that just what I liked
to do? He frowned. He looked down to where I had been sitting in the gardens. A wind was rippling though King Farouk’s collection
of trees. By the shore there were reeds swaying and there was a line of men in brown suits, standing straight and gently swaying
too.

Mahmoud turned sullen. He pressed me again. He looked out at the men in brown. I asked what he was anxious about. Nothing
at all, he snapped. Oddly shocked, I thought, that I would not join him on his Athenian trip, he ordered little and ate less.

After half an hour a car arrived, with two men inside, one in the front passenger seat the other in the back. The first left
the car and stood with his face towards the palace gardens, waiting for Mahmoud to join him, to take the spare place in the
back and be driven away.