'How's your little sister?' Apollonius enquired after a time.
'Maia? Not so little. She worked for a tailor, then she married a slovenly horse vet. No discernment. He works for the Greens, trying to keep their knock-kneed nags from dropping dead on the track. He has a nasty cough himself-probably from pinching the horses' liniment.' Apollonius looked puzzled. He was not in the same world as me. 'Her husband drinks.'
'Oh.' He looked embarrassed. 'Very bright, Maia.'
'True.' Though not in her choice of husband.
'Don't let me bore you,' the schoolmaster said courteously. I cursed him in silence; it meant I would have to carry on with the chat.
'I'll tell Maia I saw you. She has four children of her own now. Nice little things. She's bringing them up properly.'
'Maia would. A good pupil; a good worker; now a good mother too.'
'She had a good education,' I forced out. Apollonius smiled as if he were thinking, Always gracious with the rhetoric! On an impulse I added, 'Did you teach my brother and the other girls? My eldest sister, Victorina, died recently.'
Apollonius knew he should be saying he was sorry but lost himself answering the first question. 'Some I might have done, from time to time…'
I helped him out: 'The elder ones had a problem getting any schooling. Times were difficult.'
'But you and Maia were always signed on every term!' he cried, almost reprovingly. He was bound to remember; we were probably the only regular attenders on the whole Aventine.
'Our fees were paid,' I acknowledged.
Apollonius nodded fiercely. 'By the old Melitan gentleman,' he insisted on reminding me.
'That's right. He thought he was going to be allowed to adopt us. He paid up every quarter in the hope he was improving two shiny-faced heirs.'
'Did he adopt you?'
'No. My father would not hear of it.'
This set me off reminiscing. For someone who so clearly had little interest in children once he had produced them, my father could be a ferociously jealous man. If we misbehaved he would happily threaten to sell us as gladiators, yet he took pride in rejecting the Melitan's pleading overtures. I could still hear him boasting that free-born plebeians got their children as a trial for themselves, and did not breed for others' convenience.
The rows over sending Maia and me to school occurred not long before Pa lost his temper and left us. We felt it was our fault. We had the blame hanging over us; it made us a target for bullying from the rest.
After that fatal day when Papa left for an auction as usual but forgot his way home, Mother still strung the Melitan along-until even he finally twigged that no adoption would occur. He fell sick with disappointment, and died. With hindsight, it was rather sad.
'Do I sense, Marcus Didius, that all was not well?'
'Right. The Melitan caused some trouble.'
'Really? I always thought you and Maia came from such a happy family!' That just shows, teachers know nothing.
I cradled my winecup, caught up again in the anxieties the Melitan had imposed upon our house: Pa raging against him and all moneylenders (the Melitan's occupation), while Ma hissed back that she had to have the lodger's rent. Later Pa took to suggesting that the reason the old man was so keen on acquiring rights in Maia and myself was that we were his by-blows anyway. He used to roar this out in front of the Melitan as a hollow joke. (One glance at us disproved it; Maia and I had the full Didius physiognomy.) The Melitan was trapped in a stupid situation. Since he was so desperate for children, sometimes he even persuaded himself we were his.
Impossible of course. Ma, looking on like thunder, left us in no doubt.
I hated the Melitan. I convinced myself that had it not been for the anger he caused in my father, my Great-Uncle Scaro would have adopted me instead. Knowing about the quarrels that had already occurred, Scaro was far too polite to suggest it.
I wanted to be adopted. That is, if I was never claimed by my real parents. For of course I knew, as children do, that under no circumstances did I belong to the poor souls who were bringing me up temporarily at their house; someday my palace awaited me. My mother was one of the Vestal Virgins and my father was a mysterious and princely stranger who could materialise in moonbeams. I had been found on a river-bank by an honest old goatherd; my rescue from the toil and turmoil surrounding me had been foretold in a sibylline prophecy…
'You were always the dreamy one,' my old schoolmaster informed me. 'But I thought that there was hope for you…' I had forgotten he could be satirical.
'Still the same academic assessments: cruel, but fair!'
'You were good at geometry. You could have been a schoolteacher.'
'Who wants to starve?' I retorted angrily. 'I'm an informer. It makes me just as poor, though I'm still being set puzzles, in different ways.'
'Well that's pleasing to hear. You should do work that suits you.' Nothing disturbed Apollonius. He was a man you could not insult. 'What happened to your brother?' he mused.
'Festus was killed in the Judaean War. He died a national hero, if that impresses you.'
'Ah! I always supposed that one would come to no good…' That dry humour again! I was expecting a long stream of anecdotes, but he lost interest. 'And now I hear you're contemplating a family of your own?'
'Word flies round! I'm not even married yet.'
'I wish you good fortune.' Once again the force of other people's premature congratulations was pushing Helena and me into a contract we had hardly discussed. Guiltily, I recognised that I was now committed both in private and in public to a plan that she saw quite differently.
'It may not be that simple. She's a senator's daughter, for one thing.'
'I expect your charm will win her round.' Apollonius only understood the simplicity of shapes on a slate. Social subtlety eluded him. He had never grasped why my father, a Roman citizen, should be outraged by the thought of having two of his children taken over by an immigrant. And he could not see the immense pressures that now kept me and my lady apart. 'Ah well, when you do have your own little ones, you know where to send them to learn geometry!'
He made it sound easy. His assumptions were too tempting. I was letting myself be won over by the pleasure of meeting somebody who did not see my marriage to Helena as utterly disastrous.
'I'll remember!' I promised gently, making good my escape.
XXXIV
Back at the apartment I found Helena sniffing at tunics. They were ones we had worn for travelling, just fetched back from the laundry downstairs.
'Juno, I hate winter! Things you send to be washed come back worse. Don't wear those; they smell musty. They must have been left too long in a basket while damp. I'll take them to my parents' house and rinse them out again.'
'Oh, hang mine over a door to air for a bit. I don't care. Some of the places I've been in today were not fit for pristine whites.'
I kissed her, so she took the opportunity to sniff teasingly at me.
One way and another that kept us busy until dinner-time.
According to custom in our house, I cooked. We had half a chicken, which I sizzled in oil and wine, using a rattly iron skillet over a grill on the brick cooking bench. There were no herbs, because we had been away at the time when we should have been collecting them. Helena owned an expensive collection of spices, but those needed picking up from her parents' house. All in all, things at the apartment were even more disorganised than normal. We ate sitting on stools, holding our bowls on our knees, since I still had to obtain a new table. My boast to Junia had been true: we did possess an impressive dinner service in glossy red Samian pottery. For safety I had stored it at Mother's house.
Suddenly I felt overwhelmed by despair. It was thinking about the dinnerware that did it. Problems were building up all around me, and the prospect of having our only civilised possessions packed away, perhaps for ever, was just too much to bear.
Helena noticed how I was feeling. 'What's the matter, Marcus?'
'
Nothing.'
'There's something niggling you-apart from the murder.'
'Sometimes I think our whole life is buried in straw in an attic, awaiting a future we may never arrange.'
'Oh dear! It sounds as if I should fetch out your poetry tablet, so you can write a nice morbid elegy.' Helena took a mocking view of the melancholy stuff I had been trying to write for years; she preferred me to write satires for some reason.
'Listen, fruit, if I did manage to acquire four hundred thousand sesterces, and if the Emperor was willing to include my name on the middle-rank scroll, would you actually be prepared to marry me?'
'Find the four hundred thousand first!' was her automatic response.
'That's me answered then!' I muttered gloomily.
'Ah…' Helena put her empty bowl on the floor and knelt at the side of my stool. She wrapped her arms around me, spreading her warm red stole across my knees comfortingly. She smelled clean and sweet, faintly perfumed with rosemary, which she used to rinse her hair. 'Why are you feeling so insecure?' I made no reply. 'Do you want me to say that I love you?'
'I can listen to that.'
She said it. I listened. She added some details, which cheered me up slightly. Helena Justina had a convincing grasp of rhetoric. 'So what's wrong, Marcus?'
'Maybe if we were married I would be sure you belonged to me.'
'I'm not a set of wine jugs!'
'No. I could scratch my name on a jug. And also,' I continued doggedly, 'you would then be certain that I belonged to you.'
'I know that,' she said, smiling rather. 'Here we are. We live together. You despise my rank and I deplore your past history, but we have foolishly chosen to share each other's company. What else is there, love?'
'You could leave me at any time.'
'Or you could leave me!'
I managed to grin at her. 'Maybe this is the problem, Helena. Maybe I am frightened that without a contract to honour I might storm off in a temper, then regret it all my life.'
'Contracts exist only to make arrangements for when you break them!' Every partnership needs someone sensible to keep its wheels in the right ruts. 'Besides,' Helena scoffed, 'when you do run off, I always come and fetch you back.'
That was true.
'Do you want to get drunk?'
'No.'
'Maybe,' she suggested, with a hint of asperity, 'what you do want is to sit in your shabby apartment, alone, scowling over the unfairness of life and watching a solitary beetle climb up the wall? Oh, I do understand. This is what an informer likes. To be lonely and bored while he thinks about his debts, and lack of clients, and the scores of scornful women who have trampled all over him. That makes him feel important. Your life is too soft, Marcus Didius! Here you are sharing a small but tasty dinner with your rude but affectionate sweetheart; it obviously spoils your act. Maybe I should go, my darling, so you can despair properly!'
I sighed. 'I just want four hundred thousand sesterces-which I know I cannot get!'
'Borrow it,' said Helena.
'Who from?'
'Someone else who has got it.' She thought I was too mean to pay the interest.
'We're in enough trouble. We don't need to expire under a burden of debt. That's the end of the subject.' I tightened my arm around her and stuck out my chin. 'Let's see if you're a woman of your word. You've been rude to me, princess-now how about being affectionate?'
Helena smiled. The smile itself made good her boast; the sense of well-being it brought to me was uncontrollable. She started tickling my neck, reducing me to helplessness. 'Don't issue a challenge like that, Marcus, unless you are sure you can take the consequences…'
'You're a terrible woman,' I groaned, bending my head as I feebly tried to avoid her teasing hand. 'You make me have hope. Hope is far too dangerous.'
'Danger is your natural element,' she replied.
There was a fold at the top of her gown which gaped slightly from her brooches; I made it wider and kissed the warm, delicate skin beneath. 'You're right; winter's dreary. When clothes come back from the laundry, people put on too many of them-' It did provide entertainment when I tried taking some of them off her again…
We went to bed. In winter, in Rome, with neither hot air in wall-flues nor slaves to replenish banks of braziers, there is nothing else to do. All my questions remained unanswered; but that was nothing new.
XXXV
Gaius Baebius had not exaggerated how many records of incoming ships we would have to scrutinise. I went out with him to Ostia. I was not intending to stay there, only to provide initial encouragement, but I was horrified by the mounds of scrolls that my brother-in-law's colleagues happily produced for us.
'Jupiter, they're staggering in like Atlas under the weight of the world! How many more?'
'A few.' That meant hundreds. Gaius Baebius hated to upset people.
'How many years do you keep the records for?'
'Oh we've got them all, ever since Augustus dreamed up the import duty.'
I tried to look reverent. 'Amazing!'
'Have you found out the name of the agent Festus used?'
'No I haven't!' I barked tetchily. (I had forgotten all about it.)
'I don't want to find myself having to read this mountain twice-'
'We'll have to ignore that aspect and do the best we can.'
We settled that I would run my thumb down looking at the ships' names, while Gaius Baebius slowly perused the columns of whoever had commissioned them. I had a nasty feeling this method of splitting the details was likely to lose something.
Luckily I had left instructions with Helena that I would return home for any emergency-and to define 'emergency' liberally. Only next morning word came that I had to go back to see Geminus.
'Sorry. This is a fiendish nuisance, Gaius, but I must go. Otherwise I'll be breaking the conditions of my bail-'
'That's fine, you go.'
'Will you be all right carrying on for a while?'
'Oh yes.'
I knew Gaius Baebius had decided that I was flicking through the documents too casually. He was glad to see me depart, so he could plod on at his own dire pace. I left him playing the big man among his gruesome customs cronies while I fled back to Rome.
The request to visit Geminus was genuine. 'I would not send a false message when you were working!' cried Helena, shocked.
'No, my love… So what's the urgency?'
'Geminus is afraid the people who disrupted that auction are planning to strike again.'
'Don't say he's changed his mind and wants my help?'
'Just try not to get hurt!' muttered Helena, hugging me anxiously.
As soon as I reached the Saepta, I had the impression the other auctioneers were greeting my appearance with knowing looks. There was a disturbing atmosphere. People were gossiping in small groups; they fell silent as I passed.
The rumpus had happened, this time right in the warehouse. Overnight intruders had vandalised the stock. Gornia, the chief porter, found time to tell me how he had discovered the damage that morning. Most of it had already been cleared up, but I could see enough smashed couches and cabinets to guess the losses were serious. Potsherds filled several buckets on the pavement, and glass fragments were rattling under someone's broom. Bronzes stood covered in graffiti. Inside the wide doorway, what had been a garden statue of Priapus had now, as they say in the catalogues, lost its attribute.
'Where's himself?'
'In there. He should rest. Do something with him, will you?'
'Is it possible?'
I squeezed between a pile of benches and an upturned bed, stepped over some bead-rimmed copper pans, knocked my ear on a stuffed boar's head, ducked under stools hung lopsidedly from a rafter, and cursed my way to the next division in the indoor space. Pa was on his knees, meticulously collecting up pieces of ivory. His face was grey, though he applied the usual bluster once I coughed and he noticed me. He tried to stand up. Pain stopped him. I grabbed him with one arm and he
lped him ease his stocky frame upright.
'What's this?'
'Kicked in the ribs…'
I found two feet of free wall he could lean on and propped him there. 'Does that mean you were here when it happened?'
'Sleeping upstairs.'
'Helena said you were expecting a racket. I could have been here with you, if you had warned me earlier.'
'You have your own troubles.'
'Believe me, you're one of them!'
'What are you so angry for?'
As usual with my relatives, I had no idea.
I checked him over for ruptures and fractures. He was still too shaken to stop me, though he did protest. There was one monstrous bruise on his upper arm, a few cuts on his head, and those tender ribs. He would live, but he had taken all he could. He was too stiff to make it to the office upstairs, so we stayed there.
I had been in the store enough times before to realise that despite the clutter there was more empty space than usual. 'I see a lot of gaps, Pa. Does that mean you had the stuff smashed to ruins last night, or are you generally losing custom nowadays?'
'Both. Word gets around if you're having liveliness.'
'So there is something wrong?'
He gave me a look. 'I've called for you, haven't I?'
'Oh yes. Times must be bad! And I thought you just wanted to check that I hadn't jumped bail.'
'No chance of that,' my father grinned. 'You're the cocky sort who is bound to think he can clear himself of the charge.'
'As it's murder, I'd better.'
'And as it's my money bailing you, you'd better not skip!'
'I'll repay the damned money!' We were hard at it quarrelling again. 'I never asked you to interfere! If I'm desperate Ma will always assist with a judicial bribe-'
'I bet that stings!'
'Yes, it hurts,' I admitted. Then I threw back my head in disgust. 'Dear gods, how do I get in these messes?'
'Pure talent!' Pa assured me. He too breathed heavily and calmed down. 'So when will you be solving the murder?' I merely grimaced. He changed the subject: 'Helena sent word she had to bring you back from Ostia. Did you scavenge a bite on the journey, or can you finish off my lunch for me? I couldn't face it after the punch-up, but I don't want her-at-home to start…'
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