Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Read Free Page A

as anything could ride on so
     toppling a tower, is a winged woman with claws, part angel, part sphinx, pushing out a conch shell from which water, powered
     by a hanging electric flex, may once have flowed. A Sea Fountain? Yes, this must be the place that he meant.
    That was about an hour ago. How long do my new friends expect me to wait? And what do I know about them to make me wait? The
     answer is still almost nothing except that they share an interest in one of the very few tourists in town. This interest may
     be official or entrepreneurial. It is hard to say. What they cannot know about me is that waiting with paper and pen at a
     table is what I am here to do. I am writing about Cleopatra for the last time.
    If, as Socratis suggests, this needs to be a day of caution lest al-Qaeda has begun an Egyptian campaign, there is no harm
     for me in that. A break may be useful. To write beside a busy street, with the constant hope of interruption, is the best
     way for me to write, sometimes the only way. If there are to be no tourist destinations today, there is time for a reminder
     of my very first attempt on Cleopatra, for going back fifty years to
Professor Rame and the Egyptian Queen
, to a place in every way different from this L-shaped room of languid waiters and tiny tables that Socratis called ‘my cafe’.
    His cafe? I doubt it. He also says that the Cecil is his hotel. He may not even come. He is right, however, that a grey-haired
     Englishmanwith a few old papers, a pad of new paper and an Arabic guide to classical sites seems unlikely to be disturbed as long as
     from time to time he buys a Lipton’s tea, the pale yellow brand name that must have been on these unwashed walls for fifty
     years at least.
    CLEOPATRA THE FIRST
    Once upon a time there was a Professor James Rame, an ageless, characterless male who knew Cleopatra personally. He loved
     her. He loved her because she was beautiful, bold and smelt like my mother. This professional alien, space traveller and hero
     of a long-lost adventure at the courts of Alexandria, was my first and only fictional creation. I was ten years old.
    Professor Rame and the Egyptian Queen
, a fantasy of golden hair and blue skies (or so I like to think), was written in what my parents used to call a ‘box room’,
     almost square and about the size of this cafe alcove. A near-perfect cube, it contained a high wooden desk and it doubled
     as a home for water tanks and staircase support. Just as in Room 114 at the Metropole, it was easiest to write there while
     standing.
    The rest of the little red-brick house was filled with radio noises,
Mrs Dale’s Diary
and the permanent hum of a Hoover. But in the windowless box room there was silence. The bare plastered walls, pink as a
     story-book pig, were protection against invasions from beyond.
    Outside in the garden there were other walls, solid mounds of what my father called Essex clay. To him it was dead, inert,
     inevitable wasted earth abandoned by builders in a hurry. To a child it was like living flesh or warm plasticine that I could
     punch, climb, cut, try to mould, try not to offend. Half a century ago, behind the back doors ofsemi-detached houses on the Marconi works estate, a mile from Chelmsford, were hundreds of slimy-sided cubes of this clay,
     newly cut by machines, soft but indestructible, leaden red by day and looming brown by night, garden obstacles that at a child’s
     bedtime might become an Egyptian temple or an ancient Roman face or a Russian.
    My first Cleopatra was a phantom, a dream in the dark. When she joined Professor Rame’s Egyptian adventure she became a bit
     more than a mud-red face, more than a mouth, a nose and a neck. She had a name. She did things, felt things and made things
     happen. I am sure she did. But I cannot remember any of them or anything of how I imagined her.
    I can guess that Professor Rame’s hostess had some of the finer female characteristics, those that went with perfume