Cleopatra's Sister Read online

  Rhamades and Berenice headed hotfoot for the Callimbian border and thence for Marsopolis, where Rhamades had friends and where he planned to marry Berenice and set up in style as the consort of royalty and a man of substance. But Berenice had other ideas. Callimbia was ruled at the time by Hippostrates, a connection of the Ptolemies, a man pushing sixty and childless. Berenice set about ingratiating herself with the king, whose young wife died soon after from eating poisoned sweetmeats of mysterious provenance. Berenice made the consolation of Hippostrates her especial concern, and in due course they were married. Rhamades disappeared from the story, Hippostrates expired at the ripe old age (by the standards of the day) of sixty-two, and Berenice became Queen of Callimbia.

  For the next few years she and her sister Cleopatra glared at each other across the desert. Caesar came, and went. Berenice undoubtedly heard every detail of her sister’s gaudy and eventful career, and would have been duly affected. Cleopatra was not only younger, but (according to Berenice’s acolytes) less beautiful, less intelligent and less entertaining. But she had all the luck. Such Romans as dropped in at Marsopolis were not of the Caesar class. Berenice observed, took note, and bided her time. And it was not such a bad time, either: a capital city which rivalled Alexandria in civilized appeal, a subservient and industrious population, a compliant entourage, wealth, health and lovers.

  And then Antony hove upon the scene. By now Berenice’s watchful interest must indeed have been intense. Quite apart from the question of sibling rivalry, there was the matter of international peace and security, with warring Roman contingents rampaging around the Mediterranean, rattling swords at one another and appropriating territory whenever it seemed expedient. Berenice must have feared for the sovereignty of Callimbia. Hitherto, evidently, she had steered a diplomatic course of non-involvement, but now things were getting hot. Antony was busy giving Cleopatra chunks of Asia Minor for birthday presents, while Octavius Caesar and his friends were not known for their sensitive recognition of national boundaries. Berenice looked on, wondering how best to keep her head above water.

  Antony and Cleopatra confronted Octavius’s fleet at the battle of Actium, and lost disastrously. Cleopatra retreated upcountry to rally the troops and consider the next move, but Antony, emotional and impulsive, and plunged into a fit of depression and shame, rushed off along the coast with a couple of friends, Aristocrates and Lucilius. Their ship was caught in a storm, blown hither and thither, and eventually forced into the harbour of Marsopolis, where news of the arrival of these unexpected visitors was brought immediately to Berenice.

  What an opportunity! Play her cards right and she could filch Antony from right under her sister’s nose. He was disillusioned, depressed and notoriously unstable. Berenice got to work.

  It is at this point that Plutarch’s sparse comments endorse the alternative account of events, and furnish the first official historical reference to Berenice’s existence. It is probable that Plutarch travelled to Callimbia, and indeed the sudden onset of descriptive enthusiasm in his otherwise mundane narrative suggests precisely that.

  Mark Antony, with his companions, was forced to take shelter from the storms in the harbour at Marsopolis, the principal city of Callimbia, where he was received by the queen of that country: Berenice, the sister of Cleopatra. Berenice entertained Antony lavishly, and urged him to stay at her court until he was fully recovered from the stresses and disappointments of the recent campaign. And indeed Antony was of a mind to do so, for the city was very agreeable, with many gracious buildings, avenues of flowering trees, an abundance of food and wine, and a climate made pleasant by the prevailing cool breezes from the sea. However, Aristocrates was opposed to this and persuaded Antony to set sail and to rejoin Cleopatra at Alexandria.

  This leaves out a great deal. Either Plutarch didn’t know any more, or he preferred to be economical with the truth. What really happened was that Berenice threw the biggest party Marsopolis had ever seen. We can assume that she had heard a thing or two about her sister’s various thrashes, over the years – the illuminations, the perfumes wafted from censers, the boys dressed as Cupid, that barge. The flutes, the pipes and lutes; the roasted boars. The nights of dalliance. Berenice flung herself into the process of upstaging and outdoing. The ensuing jamboree lasted for three weeks, it is said. There were torchlit processions, phalanxes of dancing girls, cauldrons of roasted doves, vats of Callimbia’s choicest wines, honey-baked gazelle, phoenix steeped in herbs, masques and acrobatic displays and a continuous serenade by hand-picked eunuchs. Berenice herself made her entrance in a chariot of onyx and malachite, drawn by leopards. She gave Antony a trireme crewed by Nubian slaves, plus an ivory chest stuffed with precious stones, a cloak of the finest Callimbian linen embroidered with pearls, and finally a bed made of cedar of Lebanon inlaid with gold. No doubt Antony took the hint. What is certain is that he entered into the celebrations with enthusiasm. He stayed on, and on. His companions became concerned. Antony was well known for susceptibility and lack of judgement. Octavius Caesar was stamping around Macedonia, waiting to pounce; Cleopatra would be getting restive, to say the least of it. The companions urged a return to Egypt; Antony waved them away and helped himself to another roasted dove. And finally they took matters into their own hands, slipped a hefty knock-out potion into Antony’s wine, loaded him into the trireme and hurried him back to Alexandria to make his peace with Cleopatra and get on with the business of bickering over control of the Roman Empire.

  Nothing more is heard of Berenice. From Plutarch or from anyone else. She vanishes, to be transformed into a myth, a legend, a voluptuous marble statue in the central square of late twentieth-century Marsopolis and a provocative suggestion of alternative history. If Antony’s companions had not been so forthright. If he had been alone. If Berenice had not given him that trireme. Ah, if …

  5

  Howard

  During his twenties, Howard became aware of the curious divide between the life that he lived and the forms of life that he studied. His working days were spent scrutinizing fossil fragments, staring into a microscope, and pondering the construction and performance of extinct species. He worried about digestive systems, reproductive apparatus and modes of locomotion. These mysterious and elusive creatures were both deeply individual and at the same time parts of an intricate network of interdependence. They ate, and were eaten. There were both prey and predators. He sought to identify points of evolutionary success, or of failure. His own professional success depended upon the painstaking or inspired interpretation of a function or a relationship, thus giving a further artificial but ironic twist to the system of mutual obligation.

  But if he looked with equal detachment at his own struggle for survival, he saw something entirely different. Or rather, since the detachment was impossible, experienced something entirely different. What you had here was a battleground of emotion, personality and intellectual ability. Physical attributes hardly came into it at all, except in a minor way, of course – those regarded as good-looking have a superficial asset, while it is clearly not an advantage to be malformed or grossly tall, short, fat or thin. But on the whole success lies elsewhere, for Homo sapiens. It is only in more esoteric occupations – prizefighting, javelin-throwing, nightclub bouncing – that sheer physical strength or dexterity wins out. Howard had the opportunity to observe this truth at first hand when he was appointed to his first academic post, as an assistant lecturer at Tavistock College. The institution was in the grip of a peculiarly ferocious outbreak of inter-departmental warfare, centred around a power struggle between rival professors. The power struggle had little to do with the disputed matters of course structures and the allocation of teaching resources and everything to do with the conflicting personalities and irreconcilable ambitions of the two men concerned, a burly choleric geologist from Yorkshire and the head of Howard’s own department, a bantam-weight Welshman. Confrontations between the two men were a process of relentless emotional manipulation, with Idr
is Jones seeking to provoke his opponent into a fatally compromising loss of temper and thus of negotiating status, while the geologist concentrated on a campaign of innuendo and imputations of malpractice. If there were a biological analogy, it would be of a fight between members of different species, each equipped with its own means of attack and defence – teeth versus claws, speed against camouflage. But in this case the strengths and weaknesses were aspects of character and qualities of intellect. One man was almost twice the size of the other. Howard, observing their engagements in the Senior Common Room or around a committee table, saw the whole thing as a triumph of mind over matter.

  He was twenty-six at the time, and it was his first experience of the brutalities of human intercourse. He had led a somewhat sheltered life. As an only child he had been spared – or deprived of – sibling warfare. His childhood had been spent in a decorous suburban area north of London. The school to which he had won a scholarship was similarly exempt from the more extreme savageries of street life and playground. There was little bullying, and the violent aspects of adolescent exuberance were rigorously quenched by the staff. Intelligence and application were neither despised nor penalized, and it didn’t matter that much if you were not good at games. Howard was perfectly happy at school, which he was later to realize was a privilege, but perhaps also a drawback in that he was distinctly untrained for a life of competition and contention. By the time he reached university he was so immersed in his particular interests that he ignored most of the extra-curricular student activities, and led his own contented and preoccupied life on the edge of things, occasionally plunging into some smoky gathering over coffee mugs or bottles of rot-gut wine when he felt in need of conversation or sexual stimulus. He was liked, but seen as somewhat aloof. Girls found him faintly intriguing because of his detachment; from time to time one of them would make a dead set at him, and Howard would respond with polite enthusiasm, which usually fizzled out after a few weeks. He enjoyed sex, and became increasingly disturbed by the fact that his emotions were not much engaged. He would be attracted to a girl, want to go to bed with her, do so – provided she was of the same mind – and then fairly soon he would come to realize that he felt nothing much for her at all. And, since it seemed to him distinctly shabby to go on indulging yourself sexually with someone to whom you were pretty well indifferent, he would back out of the relationship, gingerly and with compunction. The campus psychiatrist was on call round the clock, alert for every manifestation of emotional unease or disturbance. Many of Howard’s acquaintances spent some of each term officially excused from classes on account of psychological distress; it seemed positively abnormal to profess constant robust mental health. But Howard felt unable to take his particular trouble along for an airing. You could not sit there and say to the man, ‘Please, I don’t seem able to fall in love.’ It would be less embarrassing to be able to claim impotence, or sexual deviance of some kind.

  And in any case he was increasingly absorbed in work. He had known for a long time that he wanted to be a palaeontologist. Towards the end of his period at university he became clear as to what kind of a palaeontologist he wanted to be. He found the focus of his interest reaching further and further back in time, and homing in upon smaller and smaller creatures. The more spectacular areas of the discipline were not for him, he realized, turning his back on the Jurassic, on dinosaurs, on early mammals. He was drawn to the beginnings, to that ultimate antiquity, in which anything is possible, where everything is decided, whence, against all the odds, we derive. The first time he looked through a microscope at one of those bizarre, unlikely and immaculate animals of the Cambrian Burgess Shale, he knew that he was hooked. Enslaved, committed. He had fallen – not in love but into fascination. It was as though he stared not just down a tube but through dimensions of time and space – as though his eye reached through more than 500 million years and became intimate with the exotic universe of those delicate creatures which floated brilliantly into vision, unreachable, inconceivable and precise. He became detached, intense, dispassionate, his entire being subsumed into his own eye as he gazed down into that light-drenched other world, at the sparkling surface of the rock on which there sprang into sudden relief the symmetries of miraculous creatures, delicate scribbles on the grey desert – the ridges of a body like dredged silver sand, or the smear of graphite that was the shining whisper of a vanished creature. Using a camera lucida, he would watch the image of his own pencil, straying over the craggy surface of the rock, across shelves and valleys, a ghostly intrusive presence defining now the outline of the animal, lifting it from its silent floodlit world on to a sheet of paper, and he understood that he would spend his life in the service of Opabinia, Wiwaxia, Hallucigenia and the rest of them. Here was an array of creatures most of which were unrelated to any species in existence now, all of which had vanished. Here were animals like hairbrushes, or like lotus flowers, with nozzles, struts and frills, occasionally reminiscent of existing fauna, but always eerily different, as though you looked at the fantastic parade of an alternative world. And that, of course, was exactly what they were: the doomed originators of a host of alternative worlds, the elegant biological suggestions which might have led to a contemporary scene populated by the unthinkable descendants of hairbrushes and lotus flowers, if the contingent events of evolution had proceeded differently. The strange conjunction of likelihood and contingency which is the root of life, in every sense. The accident of reality, and of human existence. Howard, improbable heir of the most insignificant of the Burgess Shale animals, the modest slug-like creature, Pikaia, which is ancestral to vertebrates, stared at these quivering images, thought of the implications, and knew what he wanted to do.

  He did much of the work for his doctoral thesis on the other side of the Atlantic, working on Burgess specimens in the Smithsonian and scrambling around the sacred fossil beds on the slopes of the Canadian Rockies. It was a period that seemed detached from the onward march of things, as though his life were temporarily in suspension, a combination of idyll and purgatory, when he knew that he was probably at his happiest but knew also that the whole thing had to come to an end, and possibly a bitter one. Would he get a job? Would he get a job in the sort of institution he sought, or would he be driven to accept some compromise position, or exiled to somewhere that took in everyone else’s rejects? He was far from being without self-esteem, and knew that his work was good and his potential excellent. He had not yet tried his hand at teaching, but thought he would probably get on all right. But he knew now that those who deserve do not always get, and that while the objectives of science may be pure and uncompromising, the process of appointment to an academic position is not. He finished the thesis while anxiously scanning the appropriate Appointments Vacant pages and writing letters to anyone he thought might be able to offer help or advice. When the Assistant Lectureship at Tavistock College came up, he applied at once, though without high hopes. A London job was highly desirable; everyone would be after it.

  On the morning of Howard’s interview the Professor of Geology, that short-tempered Yorkshireman, had a row with his wife. As a consequence of this he left home in a state of irritation and inattention, drove his car violently into the back of a lorry and ended up in the local Casualty Department. The interview took place without him, and thus without the support he had intended to give to the candidate who was a former student of his. Professor Idris Jones, the chairman of the Appointment Board, whose main interest in the matter was to oppose the selection of his enemy’s protégé, was thus able to engineer without much difficulty that Howard got the job. Howard, surprised at this evident favouritism from a man he did not know and who certainly knew little or nothing of him, was fervently grateful to Idris Jones until, months later, a colleague kindly enlightened him as to the correct interpretation of events. Howard was somewhat chagrined. It would have been nice to think that he was the obvious candidate, or that he had captivated those present with his ability and personality. But by then
what really mattered was that he had the job, he was embarked on the course that he had chosen, and he could support himself by doing the sort of work that he wanted to do, which seemed an extraordinary privilege.

  He found a garret, encouragingly called a studio penthouse, not far from the college, at an exorbitant rent. After a couple of years he exchanged this for a basement, the monthly mortgage payments on which devoured most of his salary. He would have been quite content to remain in the garret, but was goaded into the purchase by his father, who made it clear that without owner-occupancy and a mortgage he would remain locked into some kind of eternal feckless adolescence. Howard would not have cared particularly about this, but he did not like to distress his father, to whom it mattered, so he allowed himself to be propelled into the basement, and let his mother deck it out with curtains and cushions.

  The basement, disguised with the cheerful label of garden flat, was in a seedy street near King’s Cross down which Howard walked by accident. He had been looking for a place someone had told him about which sold cut-price typewriters, failed to find it, and landed up wandering past this terrace in the process of conversion from grubby boarding houses to cramped maisonettes, the corner of which sprouted the sign which misleadingly offered a charming 2-bed gdn flat. It was the point at which he was under intense pressure from his parents to do something about his living arrangements. He had promised to house-hunt. He hated house-hunting. He made a note of the agent’s phone number, saw the flat that evening, and moved in a couple of months later, thus committing himself to three years of litigation and a love affair.