Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (27 page)

Place Saad Zaghloul

I have slept for most of today in Room 114. Mahmoud was right. I do need to see the world of 32
BC
as Cleopatra saw it. I do want to think what she was thinking. It takes concentration and quiet to come close to another’s
mind. There is never complete quiet in the Place Saad Zaghloul but tonight I do not need to sleep.

So, yes, I will try to see Cleopatra in Athens, the city where once upon a time (precise dates do not help) she came down
Singrou Street (let me choose that street, any street) looking for men and money. This was a route that has always been there,
the way to and from the sea, the straight line to the open port. I have often stayed there. It is one of the most easily imagined
lines in the city, easy to imagine Cleopatra surveying her prospects there.

Nine years have passed since Tarsus, the seduction of Antony on her barge (not so hard) and their political alliance (always
a little harder). Much is well. At home her throne is secure. There have been no more pretenders. Antony has given her Cyprus,
Armenia, Parthia, Syria, Cilicia and Libya. Her children have new crowns. The Egyptian crowds had new achievements to cheer.
Antony is a popular ally. The Alexandrians like his boyish fondness for fishing trips, fancy food, masqued balls and pranks.
Her lover wears the two theatrical masks of the Greeks, the Comic in Alexandria and the Tragic in Rome. Long may that continue.

Her sister, Arsinoe, is long dead, almost forgotten now. Antony ordered her to be strangled. After Tarsus it was almost the
first order that he gave. In Ephesus no one seemed to have missed Arsinoe. Or no one said so while Cleopatra and Antony could
hear. They were both royally welcomed in that great Greek city of Amazon heroines carved in stone, of lion-hunting children,
of massive eyeless masks above the theatrical arches.

In Italy there have been a few troubles. Antony’s official Roman wife – ‘the cunt’ as the soldiers jovially used to call her
– waged her own war on Octavian, courageous in its way but irritating rather than even wounding him. And then this would-be
Amazon died, mourned by her soldiers but leaving an empty place at Rome, an opportunity for Antony to marry Octavian’s sister.
This was a common enough form of peace-pact, a very temporary pact in this case. Antony did not want Octavia for any other
reason. To Cleopatra the marriage was inconvenient, socially awkward among Athenians who for some reason rather liked Octavia,
even upsetting on some nights, but not important.

Only the Queen of Egypt has Antony’s twins, Sun and Moon, new arrivals soon after Tarsus, child monarchs now in their own
right. They are both her retort to Rome and her recompense for entering the Roman world. Antony was generous to Octavia (he
is a practical man) but he left her as soon as leaving her was necessary. He came home to Alexandria and married Cleopatra
under Egyptian rites, the only rites that mattered.

Celebrations after that were incessant – also essential. The people needed a distraction. Further east Antony was neither
so decisive nor successful. His war against the Persians failed badly. Great propaganda skills were needed to ensure that
his failure was not total. He was
defeated by heat, cold and traitors. But, according to Roman oracles, only a king could ever defeat the Persians. Antony might
yet be a king in Rome as Julius Caesar might have been. There would be time for many foreign victories once Octavian was dead.
Meanwhile there were enough prisoners of war for the theatre directors of Alexandria to confect a magnificent triumph.

Plancus is no longer her friend. Antony’s sometime second-in-command is not even her ally. He has defected to the other side.
She should not be upset. He could not change his character, only his mind. His faithlessness proved as fixed as the stars.
Plancus is in Rome as Octavian’s man now, spreading malice about the madness of Alexandria to anyone who cares to hear. The
drunken parties that he so enjoyed are suddenly the poison that he had to drink, the debauches he was forced to endure.

Plancus left her because he thought that the young Octavian, backed by impressionable allies, would defeat Antony, backed
by Cleopatra and the treasure of Egypt. Worse, Plancus thought that Cleopatra’s backing was not an advantage for Antony at
all, that instead she was a personal distraction, a barbarian temptress, a prime target for Roman propagandists. The war that
Octavian has just declared is against Egypt, against Cleopatra, not against Antony, his fellow citizen, former brother-in-law
and friend. Officially, she is the sole enemy now.

Yet is it not a gain for her to be without Plancus? For a decade he read almost every letter that Antony ever sent. He was
closer to both of them than any man. Better by far the enemy without than the enemy within. Plancus always wanted to be better
than he was. There were so many men like that. In leaving her he was at least, for the first time in his life, a leader not
a follower. He jumped without being
pushed. The Roman who slithered among the mermaids of her court, who played judge when she melted pearls into wine, changed
sides without even waiting to join a crowd. At last he was what he wanted to be.

How many others might follow? How many towns and cities too? It is hard to say. Cleopatra knows her Romans better than she
knows her realms. The boundaries of the Ptolemies encompass places where no Ptolemy has ever been. There is that pretty, pear-shaped
port on the western end of Crete, closest to Italy, whose people used to send her ancestors bulls made of clay, their horns
gilded as though by apprentice butchers or master-makers of toys.

Every year the Kydonians sacrifice these replicas of the real animals that the grander gods of Egypt demand. In Kydonia there
are deep tombs where mourners stare year after year at the sealed dead of their kings, where magicians are wreathed in golden
snakes, where women twist their hair with dazzling blue stones and combs from the bones of river monsters, ornaments as old
as the oldest Egyptians, or so the magicians say.

Kydonia is not quite her domain. She is realist enough to know when she can freely enter a town and when she cannot, even
a town that she has never seen. Have the Kydonians of Crete truly turned their back on their Ptolemaic past? Have they really
chosen Octavian as their Roman ruler? It is hard to know. Cretans are easily overexcited. From the bottom of their cups stare
big eyes warning the drinker not to take too much. Like some at her own banquets, sometimes even the perfect Antony himself,
they do not take proper heed.

And anyway, all Cretans are liars. So one of their philosophers once said, presumably excluding himself since otherwise there
would be all sorts of logical problems, the kind with which librarians tired her
mind. Is there any sure answer to anything? Maybe merely most Cretans are liars. Plancus too is a liar. Both Plancus and the
Kydonians will pay appropriately when the coming war is over.

Canidius is still her ally, a privileged Egyptian landowner now, the type of man on whom a monarch can rely. When Antony’s
officers were arguing about tactics, Canidius said that Plancus was wrong about her impact on the war. To Canidius she was
not just a financial necessity; she was a political necessity too. The coming war would be fought in Greece. The Romans regularly
fought their civil wars in Greece. Antony’s Greek legions and eastern allies cared more that she, Cleopatra, someone like
them, should win, much more than that one member of Julius Caesar’s party should triumph over another. That was surely true.

Canidius is a wise man. She readily signed her
ginestho
on the document that promised him an eternity of profits from wine and grain. Tax-exemptions are so much more effective than
cash bribes. This one sealed both his own support for her and his heirs’ support for her successors. No Roman likes paying
tax. They are not used to it. This will be one of many such signatures in preparation for the conflict that will determine
so much.

Canidius commands the army with which she and Antony are going to conquer Octavian. Egypt’s is the finest fleet. Octavian,
for all his posturing diplomacy, is weak, inexperienced, often sick, seasick always it is said. The war has begun. A battle
is coming. After her victory the bribes that she is paying now will be money well spent. Octavian will be as dead as Pompey.
Octavia? She will soon be fortunate if divorce is her only fate. Plancus? He will either be dead or suddenly remembering with
pride all his services for Antony and Cleopatra.

After the death of Caesar’s fake son, Caesar’s real son, Caesarion,
her own son, will be undisputed heir to the world, truly the King of Kings. Obelisks from all over Egypt are being gathered
to make the gates of his temple, with places of honour too for Alexander the Sun, the boy whom his father Antony has just
crowned King of the Persians, and his twin sister, Cleopatra the Moon, who, for the present, is Queen only of Libya.

Those were the best of coronation days, occasions for triumphal parties that pleasured even the most jaded tastes. Everywhere
she goes in Greece, there are banquets and dances in her honour. In Rome, she hears, Octavian is mocking the ‘Donations of
Alexandria’ as illegal gifts of Roman property to foreign bastards. Plancus, it is said, describes every detail of their dances
in the Greek islands, an outrage, he claims, when the world is on the brink of war.

Ridiculous. And Plancus knows it. What seems an oriental orgy to the hypocrites of Rome is mere religious homage for her Hellenic
hosts. Let her critics mock Cleopatra’s piety if they will. Let Octavian’s admiral, Agrippa, do his utmost to persuade the
uncertain and disloyal. Let him try to secure the open ports of Greece, threatening, bribing and persuading. Every traitor
has his reason. Meanwhile in Athens she has set up her court beside the Acropolis. She has revisited the temples that she
last saw with her father when she was a child.

Rue Nebi Danial

Six hours ago I was imagining Cleopatra, a task I have intended many times. Two hours ago I saw her room, an experience not
intended at all. It was precisely 4.00 a.m. when I awoke as though somewhere else. Those numbers alone, on the red lights
on the clock in Room 114, proved that I was awake, still inside that hotel room, on the bed between the close yellow walls
with their Venice prints. I was not in an office of grey and black although I could clearly see that office and move myself
around it.

Every few seconds, between dark desk and shelves, I stopped to check that the clock light was still on, that I was still in
the Hotel Metropole where I knew I was attempting to sleep. But beyond the red numbers I saw only shadows in which the queen
had been sitting, the high sides of her chair, a foot-stool, a black vase of white flowers, the travelling equipment of a
Cleopatra on the move, the place where bribes were exchanged for pledges and promises for gold.

I could see her pen, the sloping letters she had written, the instructions that even without her name were unambiguous because
she alone could give such commands. Everything of hers was without colour, built from towers of smoke but no less solid for
that. The desk crushed the carpet. A pile of papyri was poised to fall. There were no figures in either of the two realms
here, no one else with me in the yellow hotel room, no one serving, filing, writing and certainly
not presiding over the grey office. There was nothing fearful or fantastic about it. I merely watched for a while until there
was nothing new to watch.

Afterwards it somehow seemed wrong to try to sleep. Dreams disappear. I want to hold the scene. So I am the first customer
in the first cafe past the dead fountain, the nearest one that is open for trade before dawn. The coffee is in a copper-bottomed
glass. The pastry is reassuringly hard. Across the road there are puppies in glass tanks awaiting the trade of the day, snoozing
on shredded newsprint. There is no dog shit to disturb potential buyers, not a damp shred of yesterday’s news stories of Copts
and Muslims and national unity.

How do the pet salesmen do that? Is there some pen in the back of their truck where dogs go to do what real dogs do? These
are not false dogs. They shuffle their shoulders and lick their tails and exercise their eyes when they see they have a watcher.
We breed dogs not only for the finest range of long hair and short, long ears and short, but for eyes that look more like
we look, so that they look as though they are looking at us.

These dogs need badly to look their best if they are ever to get out of these fish tanks into the dirty realism of a human
home. These are not real dogs until someone imagines them as their friend. Cleopatra had a dog as a god and the Romans despised
her for that.

I do not feel well. I am not seeing well. I am not writing much. Maybe I should have gone to Athens after all. But Mahmoud
did not ask me in order to make Cleopatra happen more quickly. He wanted to get me away. I wish I knew why. It is still a
relief still to be here.

It would be a further relief to continue walking south on this street towards the lake, to the point where the Mareotis meets
the waters of the sands. There are thousands of birds to see. But walking further is
no good. While Julius Caesar could dictate and walk at the same time, that is one of the very many lessons that he did not
pass on.

So I have stopped at this new cafe near the bus station, where swarms of men are now beginning to arrive for work in the city
trades. Dawn has quickly come. There are steel tables beside a yellow kerb, a solidity shaken only from time to time by yellow
taxis taking the shortest distance to their destination. These little encounters of car and concrete must happen every hour
of every day and night. Twice already there has been a scrape, not quite a crash, and a layer of sunny paint has moved from
stone to metal or metal to stone.

Maurice was only an occasional visitor to the pubs around
The Times
. For months I would never see him at all. I want now to describe my old friend as he was at this time; but, of all his times,
this is the faintest in my mind. He wore pink shirts with grey ties. His shoes were soft and shiny. That much I do recall.
There must be more than that.

His schoolboy face survived intact above his collar, a little redder but the same face. I think so. Or perhaps I am just superimposing
an older, stronger memory upon a newer, weaker one. It seems unjust to be describing him at all when he is not here to describe
me. He would have taken that badly. He always gave as good as he got – and usually found in my sprawling suits and ill-cut
curls some cause for cool critique.

He was a success in his own world. Twelve years after Oxford he was prospering in the promotion of pet food and perfume, the
bright ad-lands of million-pound accounts and hundred-pound lunches into which he had briefly, and unsuccessfully, introduced
me back in 1973. The Gray’s Inn Road had journalists – but nothing much else to recommend it to him.

So I was surprised when he called and said we should meet at 7 p.m. in the Blue Lion. He had a business interest, he warned
me. He remembered that my responsibilities at
The Times
now included some supervision of the diary column. Yes, I wrote worthy leading articles too – about politicians and policies.
But a diary of gossip, he said, could do more harm than any diatribe about the court of Margaret Thatcher.

A few months ago the
Times
Diarist had run a comic campaign against one of his clients, the manufacturer of a male cologne called Drakkar Noir. It had
been wholly trivial, funny sometimes he conceded, but not amusing to his client. This Drakkar Noir might indeed be ‘pongy’
and ‘cheeselike’, best used for confusing police dogs and poisoning house plants. But he had heard that the diarist was planning
a return to his theme. Might I bring the man to meet him? Without being hugely optimistic, I said I would.

While we waited, Maurice consumed several large gins and a generous ladling of other newspaper gossip. Was
The Times
really going to have a Bicentenary Rout? Could I get him an invitation? Yes, I said. And yes, I would try. Our fellow Trinity
man, Duke Hussey, was leading the case for a lavish event that would be remembered for decades to come. Charles Douglas-Home,
the Editor and my boss, was taking a more stringent view.

It was not clear who would prevail. Duke had powerful support. CDH, as the Editor was always known, was younger but a nephew
of both a former British prime minister and the playwright of
The Chiltern Hundreds
, the satire that V had so enjoyed at Brentwood. He had art and politics in his blood. Both men had their backers and critics
in the Blue Lion and the Calthorpe.

Throughout 1985, as CDH saw it,
The Times
was already due to
play host to the Queen, the Queen Mother and the Queen’s sister on separate royal bicentenary occasions. Each event came with
its own laboriously negotiated rules about whom the visitors should meet, what should be said to them and how many ice-cubes
were needed for a gin-and-Dubonnet refresher. CDH thought this to be quite sufficient. His ambitions for the year were the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the defeat of its British ally, the National Union of Mineworkers, the stiffening of Margaret
Thatcher and an end to wasteful spending of all kinds.

Duke took a less Old Roman view of life. He argued that the Rout would be more public than the royal lunches, an opportunity
for us to greet the Prince of Wales and the grandest of his future subjects at Hampton Court Palace, to impress advertisers
and to remind them all with fireworks and acrobats of the glories of the Georgian age in which
The Times
had been born. A strict though substantial budget was agreed. The Bollinger Company promised generosity in the pricing of
Times
champagne: a thousand bottles were to be free. A royal ‘fixer’ was hired at an equally generous rate.

Duke promised precise attention to every problem. Would Elton John be a suitable entertainer? The Lord Chamberlain thought
not. Would the guitar maestro, Julian Bream, go down better? Perhaps a little too quietly. Why did a juggler cost £200 for
a night and a jester only £150? Should we have more jesters or risk an ‘illusionist act with audience participation’ (£350)?
Was it possible to have Beefeaters instead of St John’s Ambulance staff? The fixer was doubtful whether their skills were
quite the same but Scots Guards, she knew, could be had for £25 a night.

Protracted negotiations ensured that everyone knew that smoking ‘was permitted but not encouraged’ and, more importantly,
which flower vases in the Palace were suitable for water and which ones,
given the exigencies of their inner glaze, would have to be filled with roses only at the very last minute. Perhaps we could
also have a ‘lady with a dove’. These were all details in which Duke, the Alexandrian of
The Times
, excelled.

Just as Maurice was newly anxious about his perfume, I was newly anxious about my responsibilities at
The Times
. I was somewhat surprised to be in charge of the leader writers. But these were strange days. I was a new arrival when novelty
was suddenly a good thing. The newspaper was continually rolling from one crisis to the next. CDH was impatient of frivolity
in part because he was dying of cancer, though few yet knew it.

Here in Egypt now, I am wondering whether this period almost thirty years ago is part of my ‘last nights of Cleopatra’ or
not. Most of it is not; most of the serious troubles of that time are not. But some of it, for various and not always very
connected reasons, earns its place. If that distorts the picture of a newspaper, an era and its people, so be it.

My main job was to be a writer of leading articles. This leader-writing is a peculiar kind of journalism. Its practitioners
represent the editor and not themselves. They represent the views of the institution too, these deemed to be the same as those
of the editor but not always at this time without a fight.

Great passion was spent on what should be the opinion of
The Times
. Occasionally there was a kind of holy warfare. The overt aim of leaders is to make things happen. On
The Times
in 1985 the leader writers were still called Cardinals, with a certain self-conscious irony, but with seriousness too. These
were the anonymous men, almost wholly men, who advised the nation on its own good.

Acutely conscious of their place in history, they knew that the most famous leaders of their past were those that had called
successfully for action. Demands for immediate resignation were best. Charles Douglas-Home’s removal of a Foreign Secretary
before the Falklands War in 1982 was still noted as a triumph even by those who hated him. But there was a creeping anxiety
in our office that the best was behind us, that the importance of leaders was a conceit, or largely a conceit. It was an appearance
of power that had too often been exaggerated and had to be very carefully maintained if any power at all were to remain.

There was division over how best to exercise this care. The Cardinals’ most favoured tactic was to find out that a government
policy was already agreed, or almost agreed, before demanding it themselves. The most artful leader writer liked to catch
a moment just before something happened, to describe the javelin as it was poised to be thrown, and then to claim credit for
its arc and its arrival at its target.

But
The Times
could not always be so well informed. So most leader writers preferred instead to argue both sides of a case, to make much
use of ‘on the one hand’ or ‘on the other’, a habit made easier by the high proportion of leader writers who had read Greek
at school and knew the power of ‘
men
’ and ‘
de
’ in constructing a fine sentence. This style disguised doubt beneath the appearance of rigour. It was also becoming a joke.

CDH, especially in his final days, was opposed to both kinds of caution. He was a stubborn individualist. He had old clothes
and hard principles. He was monarchic in his instincts and a serious student of how monarchy worked. He hated communism and
smoking, despised ‘
men
’ and ‘
de
’ and every other conventional wisdom. He did not mind
being rebuffed. He wanted to write what, in his view, was right.
The Observer
newspaper, he often said, had lived successfully for almost three decades on its unsuccessful opposition to Eden’s Suez war.

CDH knew about Egypt. He knew about the Ptolemies. We occasionally talked about Cleopatra. But his sole interest in ancient
Alexandria was the way in which it was ruled. For its poetry, medicine, art or philosophy he cared nothing at all.

On our Drakkar Noir night, I left Maurice briefly in the Blue Lion and went back across the road to check that all was well
in the office. I pushed against the Editor’s door. There was no reply except for mutterings, murmurs and the sound of cloth
crunching across carpet.

In a low light from the empty desk, CDH was on the floor with a young woman beside him, her body supported on one elbow and
her arm flung lightly against his face. ‘It’s the Alexander Technique,’ he said with a gritted smile as I backed into the
outer (not far enough outer) office and the corridor beyond. The Alexander Technique? What was that?

Was this some joke at my expense? Was the Alexander Technique some sort of therapeutic massage? It seemed unlikely that in
the wranglings between him and his staff about politics, between him and Duke about acrobats and dove-ladies, there would
have been much space for Peter Stothard’s feelings for Alexandria. I went back to my office. There was no real urgency to
see the Editor that night. The next phase of his battles against the leader writers – over Arthur Scargill and the miners’
strike, the Socialist Workers’ threat, the Church of England, the Middle East and almost everything else bar the England cricket
captaincy – could wait, and did wait, for another day.