Counting the Stars

by Helen Dunmore

  bastard Piso and bastard Memmius

  who dirty the faces of Romulus and Remus.

  ‘Yes, “bastards” is the word for them,’ says Veranius with deep feeling, while the others bang their cups on the table. ‘I was terrified of dying out there. There’s only one inscription that could have gone on my tombstone: Here lies Veranius, fucked to death by Piso.’

  There’s a sudden silence as each of them remembers the tomb in Bithynia. Fabullus clears his throat.

  ‘He doesn’t mean to be such a crass fucking fool as he is. Take him away, someone, and put his head in the fountain.’

  Catullus puts his arm around Fabullus’ shoulders. He feels raised up, glittering with wine and love for his friends. They are his. They have never betrayed him. They’ve come back older, harder, deeply tanned by wind and sun.

  ‘Let’s fill our cups,’ he says. ‘Let’s drink to being fucked over.’

  ‘You can’t have done as badly as us,’ says Veranius. ‘I heard you had a boat built to bring you back from Bithynia. Very classy.’

  ‘There’s plenty of wood for boat-building out there.’

  ‘I also heard she’s a bit of a racer,’ Veranius persists. ‘Lucky devil.’

  ‘Her racing days are over. She’s in dry dock in Sirmio now. The most she’ll ever do is take old ladies out for a turn on the lake.’

  ‘Old ladies?’

  ‘Yes, old ladies. Why does everything comes back to sex with you, Veranius?’

  ‘Because I don’t get enough. Even cross-eyed mountain girls wouldn’t look at me –’

  ‘We’re forgetting our toast,’ says Fabullus. ‘Gentlemen, I give you: being fucked over!’

  ‘And fucking,’ says Camerius after the toast, draining his cup. Camerius has a new girl, who is – as usual – amazing-looking, incredibly witty, plays the lyre like a professional (which would be even more of an asset if Camerius weren’t tone-deaf), and as for tits, you’ve never seen anything so perfect, round and rosy as pomegranates, just peeping through the sheer silk tops she wears – And crazy about Camerius –

  – Her tits are crazy about you?

  – I’d give a lot to find a girl with discriminating tits like that.

  – Does she send them off questing on their own, Camerius, until they find someone to discriminate in favour of?

  Camerius wasn’t even going to listen. They weren’t capable of appreciating a pure, refined, unworldly girl, the kind of girl you dream about –

  – Before you ask her for a fuck.

  – You bastards, you’ve got minds like the Cloaca Maxima. You think every girl’s a clapped-out scrubber just because they’re the only ones who’ll take you on. A girl like Mucia’s beyond your understanding –

  – Mucia! Not the Mucia? Not All-comers Mucia?

  – D’you reckon Camerius will be taking her home to his mother?

  – Listen, Camerius, she plays the lyre like a professional because she is a professional.

  Camerius protests, angry, but laughing too. He’s always falling madly in love, spending everything he’s got on the girl, and then when money and girl are both gone he writes up a storm of desperately ornate verse before recovering enough to start all over again. ‘I’ve met the most incredible girl, wait until you see her…’

  Catullus loves them, loves them all. They’re his. Fabullus, Veranius, Camerius. Beacons of friendship in a dirty world. He tries to tell them how much he loves them, but they’re making bets on how long this new girl will last with Camerius.

  The mood leaves him. All at once his friends’ faces seem far away and inexplicably bright. How do they find so much to laugh about? His own mouth is stretched tight with trying to smile. Clodia once said he made her laugh, he made every evening wonderful. He can’t do that any more.

  ‘Are you all right?’ It’s Fabullus, leaning across the couch. ‘Here, have another drink.’

  He has another drink, and then another, and the evening goes on. At some point he recites a poem written to Clodia. When he’s in the middle of it, new lines come to him. They are so good that he knows he’ll remember them, and then Veranius says something about Cynthia and his attention snaps back to the table.

  ‘How’s Cynthia doing? I used to think about her a lot in Macedonia. I might go over there tomorrow – have you seen her?’

  ‘You won’t find her,’ says Catullus, ‘she’s left Rome.’

  ‘Left Rome? But she can’t do that. What for?’

  ‘Where has she gone?’ asks Fabullus.

  ‘She came into a small inheritance, and so she’s gone down to the country, to be near where her boy is.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think she’ll get much business in the country,’ says Camerius.

  ‘The inheritance gives her enough to live on.’

  ‘Where the hell did an inheritance like that come from? A grateful client? I can’t believe Cynthia still had any contact with her family,’ says Veranius, clearly annoyed that Cynthia is not going to be there, the same as ever.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ says Catullus, becoming aware that Fabullus is watching him.

  ‘Cynthia gone… Why do things have to change? Why can’t they stay the same?’ demands Veranius.

  ‘You’re right,’ says Fabullus. ‘Only we should change while everything else stands firm around us. No doubt we’ll find they’ve had the nerve to build a few new apartment blocks while we’ve been away, and change the Consuls. But let’s not talk politics, it’s too depressing. It seems as if we’ve come back to a madhouse. Well, if you ever hear from Cynthia, my brother, then greet her from me.’

  He’s forgotten that Fabullus sometimes used to call him that. ‘My brother.’ No, not really forgotten. It comes as a shock, that’s all, and then the words fall into place, hurting, but sounding sweet.

  Twenty-three

  He gives his name to the slave doorman. The man just stands there, doing nothing.

  ‘Gaius Valerius Catullus, to see the mistress of the house,’ he repeats sharply.

  ‘I heard you the first time,’ says the doorman.

  Catullus’ anger fights his disbelief that any slave should dare to speak like this. Since he came back from Bithynia he’s heard nothing but rumours about what’s going on in Clodia’s house on the Palatine.

  – A household turned arse over tip, where slave is master and mistress is slave.

  – Or slave on top of mistress, even, you might say.

  Lies, smears and slanders – but what do they add up to? Nothing, he tells himself on good days. Rufus’ trial looks as if it will go ahead, because it’s gone too far to stop. There are too many allegations and too many witnesses. He believes that Fabullus is right, and political machinations are at the back of the whole thing. Clodia has got dragged into it – probably because of her brother – but the essential Clodia, his girl: she remains apart.

  On bad days, he believes the smears. She’s a whore who is incapable of love or even the pretence of faithfulness. From birth she’s been as hard as bronze: brazen. She couldn’t keep away from Rufus. She had to have him, and then she hated him. The slaves know it, as they know everything. The mistress does what she wants. She doesn’t care for the laws of the gods or of man, so why should they?

  Don’t think of all that now. Take one bastard at a time. He doesn’t know this doorman. Rumour says that there are a lot of strange faces in Clodia’s house these days, but this is the first time he’s been here since his return from Bithynia. He wrote to her as soon as he arrived in Rome, and she wrote back to explain that it was difficult just now, her time wasn’t her own. People were watching every move she made; she couldn’t risk scandal.

  Couldn’t risk scandal! That’s my girl, he thought. He wanted to write back and ask who her time belonged to if it wasn’t her own. Whose is it, then? Perhaps you’d like to tell me? But he sent no more letters. Why ask questions, when you know you won’t like the answers? Besides, even to think of what she might answer makes him feel exhausted, an
gry and ashamed. She has poisoned his mind. His suspicions are as detailed as those pornographic frescoes that old men keep curtained in their private rooms. Even though he hates himself for it, he can’t resist looking at the pictures. He tosses himself off, thinking of Clodia splayed under another man.

  ‘Running all the estates is a nightmare. It’s like governing a province,’ Clodia used to say after Metellus Celer’s death. ‘If it weren’t for my brother’s help, I’d never be able to manage.’

  But Clodia has at least kept a façade of respect and order until now. This new cock-of-the-walk doorman is the symptom of a disease that’s entering a more dangerous stage. Clodia isn’t even bothering to keep up appearances any more.

  ‘Who the hell do you think you are talking to?’ demands Catullus, wishing for once that he’d brought his own retinue of slaves with him. No doubt this fellow is new, and thinks that because a visitor is unattended, he has no status and can be disrespected. He’ll learn.

  ‘Gaius Valerius Catullus,’ singsongs the slave mockingly, ‘but all the same my lady’s not at home.’

  The words ‘to you’ are so clearly intended to follow that they are almost audible.

  A pure, hot flame of rage lights, deep in Catullus. ‘You forget yourself,’ he says, ‘and Rome has her way of handling slaves who forget themselves. If you don’t want to find yourself hanging from two pieces of wood on the Esquiline Hill, you’ll speak to me with respect. Announce me to the mistress of the house immediately.’

  Calculation moves in the man’s eyes, and a shade of fear. ‘She’s not at home, she’s at her brother’s,’ says the slave.

  ‘ “She’s not at home, she’s at her brother’s”? Who do you think you are talking about?’

  ‘The mistress,’ says the slave, cowed and sullen.

  ‘That’s better.’ Anger is catching his breath, making it hard to speak. That Clodia allows herself to be spoken of like this, by her own slaves, enrages him. And she’s ‘at her brother’s’. Or perhaps somewhere else. They say she’s got someone new. Catullus doesn’t trust rumours about Clodia. He suspects that many of them start in her own house, and are intended to screen what she’s really doing.

  ‘She’s always there in the afternoons,’ goes on the doorman.

  Catullus does not want to hear any more from this man. A slave doorman is like part of the door itself: he sees everything and knows everything. His fists clench, as he thinks of how much this man must know about Clodia. She doesn’t even trouble to hide it. All the traffic of the house is exposed.

  ‘I could find out more for you, about where she’s gone,’ says the doorman.

  The slave wants a bribe. He could give him money, and he’d soon open his mouth. If you want to know the worst of Clodia, this is your chance.

  ‘Fetch Aemilia here,’ he says instead.

  ‘Aemilia?’ echoes the slave with an offensive show of astonishment. ‘You’re behind the times. There’s no Aemilia here no more.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If you mean the Aemilia that I know, she’s gone. Left our service, so to speak.’

  ‘You mean… she’s been freed?’

  It’s not credible that Aemilia would ever leave Clodia’s service willingly. She loves her too much.

  ‘Freed? That’s a good one. Sold is what she is. Sold in disgrace to whoever would take her, and lucky for her that she didn’t get worse. She won’t be giving orders where she’s gone.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  A doorman slave knows everything. But this one shrugs. ‘No idea. Your honour,’ he adds with a barely discernible hint of mockery.

  Catullus takes out his purse. ‘Here’s a sestertius that says you know.’

  The doorman bends forward, peering at the coin. ‘Sorry, sir, it’s speaking a bit quiet, I can’t make it out.’

  ‘Here’s another.’

  The doorman glances around, slips the coins into his tunic and says quickly, ‘Lollia’s place.’

  ‘Lollia’s place?’

  ‘You’ll find it easy enough, it’s a left turn off the Street of the Dye Makers, near the Twins’ flower market.’

  ‘You’re sure? I’ll have your hide in tatters if you’re lying.’

  ‘I heard them give the direction to the litter-bearers.’

  ‘Litter-bearers for a sold-off slave! Now I know you’re lying.’

  ‘She wasn’t looking too clever, if you get my meaning. The mistress wanted it that way, with the litter. Hidden, like.’

  He doesn’t want to know any more. It’s like worms writhing when a stone is lifted. But the doorman is well into his tale now.

  ‘She was lucky it wasn’t worse that happened to her, stupid bitch. She ought to of kept her mouth shut. You don’t talk about certain things that go on in this house, that’s rule number one, not if you know what’s good for your health.’

  He’ll go straight to this Lollia’s house – it’ll be a brothel, most likely – and get everything out of Aemilia. ‘Sold in disgrace’. But Aemilia loved Clodia like a dog. She would never betray her.

  (Didn’t Clodia once say that she thought maybe Aemilia was spying for the Metelli?)

  It’s not possible. Clodia is her own woman, independent. The Metelli can do nothing to her. They can’t even enter Clodia’s house without her permission.

  (But if some slave has opened his mouth about what happened before Metellus Celer died –)

  Aemilia would keep Clodia’s secrets, whatever they were. She would never betray her.

  He walks back down the hill and across the Forum in a black dream. Fool, Catullus. Isn’t it time you joined the real world? Anyone can betray anyone.

  She couldn’t keep away from Rufus, and Rufus, his own good friend Rufus, lover of poetry and listener to drunken late-night confidences – Rufus didn’t make the slightest effort to keep away from Clodia, once he’d spotted she was interested in him. He wouldn’t even admit that he was betraying his friendship with Catullus.

  – All this business with Clodia has got nothing to do with our friendship, or the way I feel about you. Can’t we be civilized about this? It’s just a fling for both of us, not the end of the world.

  Business with Clodia… Both of us… You bastard, you knew how those words would eat away at me. You want to make my love the same as yours – just a fling, although I found a lot of fancy words for it. As for friendship, you were never my friend, I know that now. You don’t know what the word means. You stole my girl and then came to me and talked about poetry.

  You knew my thoughts, Rufus. You chose to rip me apart, and then you pretended that it meant nothing. We were both men of the world, weren’t we? – and ‘our Clodia’ – yes, our Clodia, Rufus! – we shared her, didn’t we? – Our Clodia was a woman of the world and couldn’t be expected to stick to the standards of the middle-class housewife.

  You were always a liar, Rufus. You loved her because I loved her. You wanted her because I wanted her. It was my poetry that made you love her, if I can use the word ‘love’ for what you said you felt. She was precious to me, a jewel. Your eyes caught the gleam of it and you knew you had to have it. You were so greedy, weren’t you? You saw something you’d never had, you envied a love which you’d never experienced. Maybe you thought you could have it too. Maybe you thought it would be fun to smash it.

  And now your affair is over. You hate each other. It’s degenerated into claim and counter-claim, and it’s going to end up in the law courts. Every kind of vile accusation that you could throw at each other, you’ve thrown. That’s all it added up to, and it didn’t take long.

  You haven’t even got the wit to keep away from me. You smiled at me across the Forum this morning. You still think you can rummage in the shreds of my heart, and call it friendship.

  Let me tell you what you know about friendship. You know about clambering over people, using them as stepping-stones to what you want. A friend like you is the worst sort of enemy. You crept close to me, you were
so sympathetic, you wormed your way into my secrets. You learned all my weak points.

  Did you love it, Rufus? Did you hug your intentions to yourself while I blurted out my soul in my poems? How you must have smiled to yourself. You were so handsome, so urbane, such a man of the world: but I know you. I know that really you’re a greedy little boy cramming your mouth with cakes that you can’t even swallow because your belly is already full. You wait until no one’s looking and then you spit them out in the street.

  And now you’re tired of my girl. You’ve eaten her and you don’t want her any more, is that it? Maybe all the accusations are true. You thought she’d treated you badly and you were entitled to revenge. That’s the way a man of your kind always thinks. Perhaps you really did plan your revenge, so that you’d be back where you’ve always got to be: on top. You know as little about love as you know about friendship.

  And don’t come to me, Rufus, if golden-tongued Cicero can’t get you off the charge. (Although I am sure that he will: what’s a man like Cicero for, if not to turn black into white?) If you were starving in the street, I would take pleasure in seeing you die with a piece of bread held just out of your reach. I’d twitch it, to make you jump.

  Lollia folds her arms, and looks him up and down.

  ‘I think you’ve come to the wrong place,’ she says.

  He’s not surprised. The frontage is narrow and dirty. Lollia’s hair is brightly hennaed, but she’s dirty too. It’s a place for poor men who can scrape up a few coppers for their end-of-the-week fuck, and don’t mind waiting while the girl wipes herself off from the man before them.

  Catullus has picked up a trainee gladiator on the way, as bodyguard. He didn’t want to bring any of his own slaves. The gladiator stands behind him, huge and impassive.

  ‘I’m looking for someone,’ says Catullus. ‘A woman called Aemilia. I was told she’s here.’

  Lollia’s face darkens. ‘We’ve got no one of that name here.’

  ‘I think you have. I think she’s a former slave to the Metelli.’

  ‘You’d better come in,’ she says, glancing up and down the street. ‘He can wait here, just inside the door. That’ll put the fear of the gods into the punters.’ She laughs. ‘Only joking. There’s not much business this time of the day.’