Time to Depart (4 page)

VII

Helena Justina had not heard me come home. She was tying in strands of my climbing rose, a thing of long spindly growth that struggled for water and nourishment on the narrow balcony outside my sixth-floor apartment. For a moment I was able to watch her while she remained quite unaware of me.

Helena was tall, straight-backed, dark-haired, and serious. She was five days from her twenty-fifth birthday. The first time I ran across her, married life in the utmost luxury but with an insensitive young senator had left her bitter and withdrawn. She had just divorced him, and made it plain that anyone else who got in her way could expect to be kicked out of it. Don't ask how I got around the problem - but writing my memoirs promised some fun.

Astonishingly, two years of surviving scandal and squalor with me had softened the hard shell. Maybe it was being loved. Now, as she paused rather dreamily to suck at a thorn in her finger, there was a stillness about her. She looked far away, yet unconscious of her own thoughts.

I had neither moved nor made a sound, but she turned quickly. 'Marcus!'

We embraced. I buried my face in her soft neck, groaning with gratitude for the way her strong, sweet face had lit with pleasure when she realised I was there.

All the same it worried me. I would have to hang a bell inside our entrance door, so nobody else could creep up on her like this. Where we lived was a lawless tenement.

Maybe I needed to find a better place for us.

Helena seemed tired. We were both still drained of energy after travelling home from the East. Coming in and crossing the outer room, I had seen evidence that she must have spent my absence at Ostia unpacking and tidying. My mother or one of my sisters might have dropped in to help, but they fussed around and were likely to have been seen off politely with cinnamon tea and a few tales about our journey. Helena never fussed. She liked to set things just so - and then forget about them.

I pulled her to the rickety wooden bench, which felt even worse than I remembered. Bending down with a curse, I fiddled about with a piece of broken roof tile - which probably meant we had anew leak somewhere - and managed to level up the bench's feet. Then at last we sat quietly together, gazing out across the river.

'Now there's a view!'

She smiled. 'You love coming home, Marcus.'

'Coming home to you is the best part.'

As usual Helena ignored my suggestive gleam - though as usual I could tell she welcomed it. 'Did everything go all right at Ostia?'

'More or less. We got back to Rome about an hour ago. Pa finally managed to show an interest. Once I'd done the hard work he turned up and took charge at the Emporium.' Luckily my father actually lived on the riverbank, below the Aventine cliff and only a step from the wharves. 'He's got the glass, so make sure he pays you an agency fee.'

Helena seemed to smile at my advice. 'Did Petronius do what he wanted? And are you now going to tell me what the fuss was about?'

'He was sending a condemned man into exile.'

'A real villain?' she asked, lifting her bold eyebrows as she caught my surly tone.

'The worst.' Petronius Longus would be horrified at the way I shared such information; I knew he never told his wife anything about his work. Helena and I had always discussed things; for me, the big rissole was unfinished business so long as I was waiting to confide in Helena. 'Balbinus Pius. We saw him on to his ship, and one of Petro's men has gone along undercover to see he doesn't hop ashore prematurely. By the way, I asked Petro and Silvia to dinner once we're straight again. Everything in order here?' I didn't bother looking back at the bare room behind me: a small table, three stools, shelves with a few crocks, pots and beakers, a next-to-useless cooking bench.

'Oh yes.'

For the past few months my sister Maia would have valiantly toiled up the six flights from time to time, making sure for us that no one broke in and that Smaractus, my pig of a landlord, had not tried his usual trick of squeezing extra cash from subtenants if he thought I was not here. Maia had also kept the balcony garden watered and had pinched back the herbs, though she drew the line at controlling the rose. She reckoned I had only planted it to get cheap flowers for seducing girls. All my sisters were naturally unfair.

I took charge of Helena's finger, removing the thorn with adept pressure from one thumbnail. My right hand was habitually caressing the two-month-old scar on her forearm where she had been stung by a scorpion in the Syrian desert.

'I'll be in trouble over your war wound.' Both my own mother and Helena's noble parent would blame me for taking her to such a dangerous province and bringing her back scarred for life... . And there might be another new situation that would set both our mothers on the alert. Newly home after a whole summer abroad, I did not want to start broaching issues. But I took a slow breath and braced myself. 'Maybe there's worse than that in store for me.'

Helena showed no reaction: so much for being mysterious. 'I think there's something we need to talk about.'

She heard the message in my tone that time. She looked at me askance. 'What's wrong, Marcus?'

Before I was ready I heard myself saying: 'I'm beginning to suspect I'm going to be a father.'

I fixed my gaze on the laniculan Mount and waited for her to accept or reject the news.

Helena was silent for a moment, then asked quietly, 'Why do you say that? There was a very slight rasp in her voice.

'Observation.' I tried to sound nonchalant. 'Matching evidence with probability is my job, after all.'

Well, I'm sure you're the one who knows!' Helena spoke like an angry householder whose chief steward had just accused a favourite slave of raiding the wine cellar. 'How do you reckon it happened?'

'The usual way!' Now I sounded tetchy. We had only ourselves to blame. It was a classic failure of contraception - not the alum in wax letting anyone down, but two people failing to bother to use it.

'Oh,' she said.

'Oh, indeed! I'm referring to a certain occasion in Palmyra -'

'I remember the date and time.'

As I feared, she was sounding far from overjoyed. I decided that pity consoling hand on the scorpion scar might be unwelcome; I drew back and folded my arms. Once again I gazed out beyond the Tiber to the Laniculan Hill, where I sometimes dreamed of owning a villa if Destiny ever forgot that I was the one she liked tormenting with hammerblows My chance of ever becoming a householder in a quiet and spacious home was in fact ludicrously slim.

'I know you have your position in society to think about,' I told Helena, more stiffly than I had intended. 'Your family's reputation, and of course your own.' Unhelpfully, she made no comment. It tipped me into flippancy: I'm not asking you to stand by me.'

'I will, of course!' Helena insisted, rather bitterly.

'Better not commit yourself,' I warned. 'When you've had time to think, you may not be too happy about this.'

We were not married. She was two ranks above me. We never would be married unless I could persuade the Emperor to promote me to the middle rank - which had been refused once already. One of the Caesars had turned down my request, even though I had earned quite a few favours from the Palace and my father had lent me the qualifying cash. Humbling myself to take the loan from Pa had been hard; I reckoned the Palace owed me more than favours now.

But the Palace was irrelevant. I was in a fix. Plebeians were not supposed to sleep with senators' female relations. I was not a slave, or I would have been dead meat long ago. There was no husband to be affronted, but Helena's father was entitled to view our crime in the same light as adultety. Unless I was much mistaken about the ancient traditions of our very traditional city, that gave him the right to execute me personally. Luckily Camillus Verus was a calm man.

'So how do you feel, Marcus?'

Fortunately my life as an informer had trained me to avoid saying what I felt when it could only lead to trouble.

Helena filled in the gap for herself wryly, addressing the. sky: 'Marcus is a man. He wants an heir, but he doesn't want a scandal.'

'Close!' I said it with a smile as if both of us were joking. She knew I was dodging the issue. Applying a serious expression, I altered my story: 'It's not me who has to go through with the pregnancy and the dangers of birth.' Not to mention enduring the extreme public interest. 'What I think takes second place.'

'Ho! That will be a novelty. It may not happen,' Helena suggested.

'Looks definite to me.' Helena had been pregnant with a child of mine before, miscarrying before she had even told me. When I found out, I had vowed never to be left out again. Believe me, keeping track had not been easy. Helena was the kind of girl who lost her temper if she felt she was being watched. 'Well, time will show if I'm right.'

'And there's plenty of time,' she murmured. I sat there wondering: time for what?

The child would be illegitimate, of course. It would take its mother's rank - utterly worthless without a father's pedigree to quote as well. Freed slaves stood a better chance.

We could cope with that, if it ever came to it. What was likely to break us, one way or another, would happen to us before the poor scrap was even born.

'I don't want to lose you,' I stated abruptly.

'You won't.'

'Look, I think it's fair to ask what you want to do.'

Helena was frowning. 'Marcus, why can't you be like other men, who don't want to face up to things?' Maybe she was joking, but she sounded serious. I recognised her expression; she was not prepared to think about this. She was not intending to talk.

'Let me say what I have to.' I tried playing the man of the house, knowing this normally only got me laughed at. 'I know you. You'll wait until I leave for the Forum, then you'll worry in private. If you choose a course of action, you'll try to do everything alone. I'll have to come chasing after you, like a farm boy left behind at market when the cart sets off for home.'

'You'll soon catch up,' she answered with a faint smile. 'I know you too.'

I was remembering the little I knew about what she had gone through, on her own, that other time. It was best not to think about it.

Legally, every day I kept her I was robbing her noble father. Once the results of our fling became apparent, Helena would be strongly encouraged to regularise her life. The obvious solution for her family would be a quick arranged marriage to some senator who was either too stupid to notice this, or plain long-suffering. 'Helena, I just want you to promise that if there are decisions to be made, you will let me share in making them.'

Suddenly she laughed, a tense and breathy explosion of dry mirth. 'I think we took our decisions in Palmyra, Marcus Didius!'

The formality cut like a boning knife. Then, just when I thought I really had lost her, she seized me in a hug. 'I love you very much,' she exclaimed - and unexpectedly kissed me.

It was no answer.

On the other hand, when a senator's daughter tells a plebeian that she loves him, the man is entitled to feel a certain low pride. After that it is all too easy to be seduced by the offer of coming indoors for dinner. And there are domestic routines of an even more wicked nature that can be made to follow dinner with a senator's daughter, if you can manage to lure one of these exotic and glorious creatures away from her noble father's house.

VIII

Allowing a woman to sidetrack me was routine. Come the morning I was still resolute. Plenty of ineffectual clerks had hired me to chase after heartless females who were giving them the silly story; I was used to being offered sensual bribes to make me forget a mission.

Of course I never accepted the bribes. And of course Helena Justina, that upright, ethical character, would never tty to influence me by shameless means. She went to bed with me that night for the same reason she had always done so: because she wanted to. And the next day, I carried on directly facing up to the situation because that was what I wanted.

Helena carried on dodging. I had made absolutely no progress in finding out how she felt. That was fore. Her motives defied prediction. That was why I was in love with her; I was tired of predictable women. I could be persistent. Maybe that was why she was in love with me.

Assuming she really was. A shiver as I remembered our lovemaking last night convinced me - at which point I stopped worrying.

I washed my face, rinsed my teeth, and bit my way into a hard bread roll. Yesterday's; we lived too far from the street to buy fresh loaves for breakfast. I gulped down some of the warm drink I was preparing for Helena. While she sleepily drank hers in bed, I put on a tunic that had spiced itself up with a gay shower of moth holes and renewed acquaintance with a wrinkled old belt that looked as if it had been tanned from the ox Romulus had used to measure Rome. I dragged a comb into my curls, hit a tangle, and decided to keep the relaxed coiffure that matched my casual clothes. I cleaned my boots and sharpened my knife. I counted my small change - a swift task - then transferred the purse to today's belt.

I kissed Helena, following up with a bit of fumbling under the bedsheet. She accepted the playfulness, laughing at me. 'Oh go and flaunt your Eastern tan where the men show off. . .' Today she would readily surrender me to the Forum, the baths, even the imperial offices. She knew that when I had had my fill of the city I would come home to her.

After a short tussle with the outer door, which had taken to sticking, I limped downstairs. I had hurt my toe kicking the doorframe and was cursing gently: home again. Everything as I remembered it.

I was absorbing the familiar experience of the ramshackle apartment block: for five floors angry voices reached me from behind curtains and half-doors. Two apartments per storey; two or three rooms per apartment; two and a half families per dwelling and as many as five or six people to a room. Sometimes there were fewer occupants, but they ran a business, like the mirror-polisher and the tailor. Sometimes one room contained an old lady who had been the original tenant, now almost forgotten amidst the rumbustious invaders to whom Smaractus had sublet patts of her home 'to help her with the rent'. He was a professional landlord. Nothing he did was to help anybody but himself.

I noticed a few more graffiti gladiators chalked on the poorly rendered walls. There was a smell like wet dog mingling with yesterday's steamed cabbage. Stepping down around one dark corner I had a narrow escape when I nearly trod on some child's lost pottery horse-on-wheels, which would have skated my foot from under me and probably left me with- broken back. I put the horse on a ledge, alongside a broken rattle and one tiny sandal that had been there when I left for Syria.

The stairs ended outside in a dim nook under two columns that had once made a portico. The rest of this row of columns had long ago fallen down and vanished; it was best not to think about what was happening to the parts of the building they had been meant to support. Now most of the frontage was open, allowing free encroachment ftom Lenia's laundry. She had the whole ground floor, which according to her included what passed for a pavement and half the dusty road in Fountain Court. Just now her staff were doing the main morning wash, so warm, humid air hit me as I reached the street. Several rows of soaking togas and tunics hung nicely at face height, ready to slap at anyone who tried to leave the building on lawful business.

I went inside to be neighbourly. The sweet smell of urine, which was used for bleaching togas, met me like an old acquaintance I was trying to avoid. I had not seen Lenia yet, so when someone else shrieked my name she thrust herself out from the steamy hubbub like some disreputable sand beetle heaving its way above ground. She had armfuls of crumpled garments crushed against her flopping bosom, her chin balanced on top of the smelly pile. Her hair was still an unconvincing red; after the sophisticated henna treatments of the East, it looked hideously brash. The damp air had stuck her long tunic to parts of her body, producing an effect that did little for a man of the world like me.

She staggered towards me with an affectionate cry of, 'Look! Something nasty's blown in with the road dust!'

'Aphrodite rising from the washtub, sneezing at the wood ash!'

'Falco, you rat's bum.'

'What's new, Lenia?' I answered breezily.

'Trade's bad and the weather's a menace.'

'That's hardly new. Have I missed the wedding?'

'Don't make me angry!' She was betrothed to Smaractus, a business arrangement. (Each craved the other's business.) Lenia's contempt for my landlord exceeded even mine, though she had a religious respect for his money. I knew she had carried out a meticulous audit before deciding Smaractus was the man of her dreams. Lenia's dreams were practical. She really intended to go through with it apparently, for after the conventional cursing she added, 'The wedding's on the 'Calends of November. You're invited so long as you promise to cause .a fight with the nut boys and to throw up on his mother.' I've seen some sordid things, but the idea of my landlord having a mother set me back somewhat. Lenia saw my look and laughed harshly. 'We're going to be desperate for entertainment at this party. The arrangements are driving me mad, Falco. I don't suppose you would read the omens for us?'

'Surely you need a priest?'

Lenia shrieked with outrage. 'I wouldn't trust one of those sleazy buggers! Don't forget I've washed their underwear. I'm in enough trouble without having my omens mucked up. You're a citizen. You can do it if you're prepared to be a par.

'A man's duty is to honour the gods for his own household,' I intoned, suddenly becoming a master of informed piety. 

'You're scared of the job.'

'I'm just trying to get out of it.'

'Well, you live in the same building.'

'No one ever told me it meant peering into a sheep's liver for the damned landlord! That's not in my lease.'

'Do it for me, Falco!'

'I'm not some cranky Etruscan weather forecaster.' I was losing ground. Lenia, who was a superstitious article, looked genuinely anxious; my old friendship with her was about to take its toll. 'Oh I'll think about it . I told you from the start, woman, you're making a big mistake.'

'I told you to mind your own,' quipped Lenia, in her brutal, rasping voice. 'I heard you were back from your travels - though this is the first time you've bothered to call on me!'

'Having a live-in.' I managed to beat her to a leering grin.

'Scandalous bastard! Where've you been to this time, and was there profit in it?'

'The East. And of course not.'

'You mean you're too tight to tell me.'

'I mean I'm not giving Smaractus any excuse to bump my rent up!' That reminded me of something. 'This deadly dump is getting too inconvenient, Lenia. I'll have to find somewhere more salubrious to live.'

'Oh Great Mother!' Lenia exclaimed immediately. 'He's pregnant!'

Taken aback by the shrewdness of her guesswork, I blushed-losing any chance of disguising my plight. 'Don't be ridiculous,' I lied as brazenly as possible. 'I know how to look after myself.'

'Didius Falco, I've seen you do a lot of stupid things.' That was true. She had known me since my bachelor days. 'But I never thought you'd be caught out in the old way!'

It was my turn to say mind your own business, and Lenia's to laugh seditiously.

I changed the subject. 'Does your slimy betrothed still own that decrepit property across the court?'

'Smaractus never disposes of a freehold.' He never bothered to redevelop a wrecked tenement either. As an entrepreneur, Smaractus was as dynamic as a slug. 'Which property, Falco?'

'The first-floor spread. What's he call it? "Refined and commodious self-contained apartment at generous rent; sure to be snapped up." You with me?'

'The dump he's been advertising on my wall for the past four years? Don't be the fool who does snap it up, Falco. The refined and commodious back section has no floor.'

'So what? My shack upstairs hardly has a roof. I'm used to deprivation. Mind if I take a look at the place?'

'Do what you like,' sniffed Lenia. 'What you see is all there is. He won't do it up for you. He's short of loose change.'

'Of course. He's getting married!' I grinned. 'Old Smaractus must be spending every day of the week burying his money bags in very deep holes in faraway fields in Latium. If he's got any sense, he'll then lose the map.'

I could tell Lenia was on the verge of advising me to jump down the Great Sewer and close the manhole after me, but we were interrupted by a more than usually off-putting messenger.

It was a grubby little girl of about seven years, with large feet and a very small nose. She had a scowling expression that I immediately recognised as similar to my own. She was one of my nieces. I could not remember which niece, though she definitely came from the Didius tribe. She looked like my sister Galla's offspring. They had a truly useless father, and apart from the eldest, who had sensibly left home, they were a pitiful, struggling crew. Someone had hung one of those bull's-testicle amulets around this one's neck to protect her from harm, though whoever it was had not bothered to teach her to leave her scabs alone or to wipe her nose.

'Oh, Juno,' rasped Lenia. 'Take her out of here, Falco. My customers will think they'll catch something.'

'Go away,' I greeted the niece convivially.

'Uncle Marcus! Have you brought us any presents?'

'No.' I had done, because all my sisters' children were in sore need of a devoted, uncomplicated uncle to ruin their characters with ridiculous largesse. I couldn't spoil only the clean and polite ones, though I had no intention of letting the other little brats think me an easy touch. Anyone who came and asked for their ceramic Syrian camel with the nodding head would have to wait a week for it.

'Oh Uncle Marcus!' I felt like a heel, as she intended. 'Cut the grizzling. Listen, what's your name - '

'Tertulla,' she supplied, without taking offence.

'What are you after, Tertulla?'

'Grandpa sent me.'

'Termites! You haven't found me then.'

'It's urgent, Uncle Marcus!'

'Not as urgent as scratching your elbow - I'm off!'

'He said you'd give me a copper for finding you.'

'Well he's wrong.' Needing to argue more strongly, I had to resort to blackmail. 'Listen, wasn't yesterday the Ides?' One good thing about helping Petronius at Ostia was that we had missed the Festival of the October Horse - once a savage carnival and horse race, now just a complete mess in the streets. It was also the end of the official school holidays. 'Shouldn't you be starting school now? Why are you loose today?'

'I don't want to go.'

'Tertulla, everyone who has a chance to go to school should be grateful for the privilege.' What an insufferable prig. 'Leave me alone, or I'm telling your grandma you've bunked off.'

My mother was helping with the fees for Galla's children, a pure waste of money. Ma would have stood for a better return gambling on chariot races. What nobody seemed to have noticed was that since I gave my mother financial support, it was my cash being flung away.

'Oh Uncle Marcus, don't!'

'Oh nuts. I'm going to.'

I was already feeling gloomy. From the first moment Tertulla mentioned my father I had begun to suspect today might not be all I had been planning. Goodbye baths; goodbye swank at the Forum ...'Grandpa's in trouble. Your friend Petronius told him to get you,' my niece cried. Persistence ran in the family, if it involved telling bad news.

Petro knew what I felt about my father. If Pa was in such trouble Petro reckoned even I would help him out, the trouble must really be serious.