Twenty-three

WELL,BACK TO reality. I went to the baths, got warm again, was insulted by my trainer, met a friend, took him home for a bite.

You know how it is when you have moved into a new apartment and invite an important guest home with you. If you don't own a slave to send on ahead, you arrive, playing suave, and just hoping not to be greeted by an embarrassing scene. That evening I brought home a senator-an infrequent occurrence, I have to say. Naturally we found something extremely embarrassing as soon as we walked in: my wife, as I now forced myself to call her, was painting a door.

"Hello!" exclaimed the senator. "What's going on, Falco?"

"Helena Justina, daughter of the illustrious Camillus, is painting a door," I replied courteously.

He gave me a sideways glance. "Is that because you cannot afford a painter," he mused anxiously. "Or because she likes doing it?" The second suggestion seemed worse than the first.

"She likes it," I admitted. Helena went on painting as if neither of us were there.

"Why do you allow this, Falco?"

"Senator, I have not yet discovered how to stop Helena doing what she likes. Also," I said proudly, "she does it much better than any hired painter would."

This was why she had not spoken to us. Helena paints her doors with great concentration. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, with a pannikin of evil dark red liquid beside her, slowly laying off the paint with relaxed, regular strokes, leaving a perfect even finish. It was one of my life's great pleasures to watch this. I explained that to the senator and when I pulled up a stool he did the same.

"Notice," I murmured, "that she starts at the bottom. Most painters start at the top; half an hour after they walk away, spare paint oozes down and forms a line of sticky drips all along the lower edge. They set hard before you notice. Then you never get rid of them. However, Helena Justina leaves no drips."

In fact, it was not the way I would have done it, but Helena made her method effective, and the senator looked impressed. "Yet what do your people think, Falco?"

"Oh they are horrified, of course. She was a respectable girl from a very good background. My mother is particularly shocked. She thinks Helena has suffered enough through living with me." Helena, who had just risen to her knees as she worked upwards, paused in the action of reloading her paintbrush to look around at me thoughtfully. "She is allowed to tell people that I make her do it."

"And what do you say, Falco?"

"I blame the people who brought her up."

Helena at last spoke: "Hello, Father," she said.

The lead in the paint was affecting her, so she sniffed. I winked at her, knowing that when she was painting she normally wiped her nose on her sleeve.

The senator Camillus Verus, her father, my dinner guest, offered politely, "I could pay for a painter, Marcus, if you're pushed."

I deferred to my wife. I was a good Roman. Well, I knew what was good for me.

"Don't waste your money, dear Papa." Helena had reached the level of the door handle which I had previously removed for her, at which point she stood up so she could reach the upper half of the door. Camillus and I moved our stools back slightly, giving her more room. "Thanks," she commented.

"She does make a good job of it," her father remarked to me. He seemed uneasy speaking directly to his singleminded child.

"I taught her," I said. He gave me a look.

"I made him, of course," Helena added. He turned the look on her. Where I had deemed it good-mannered to appear rather diffident, Helena carried on, ignoring him. "What is there to eat for our guest, Marcus?"

Her father accused me roundly, "Now I suppose you will make her prepare our dinner too?"

"No," I told him very gently. "I am the cook here."

Having reached the door's top rail, Helena stepped back and consented to kiss her father, albeit rather distantly for she was busy inspecting her work for snibs of dust. The light was too poor for her. December was the wrong time for such work, but household maintenance has to be done when the mood strikes. She drew her brush over some minute bubbles near the top, frowning. I smiled. After a moment her father smiled too. She turned around to look at us, both still sitting on our stools and both still smiling because we loved to see her happy in her life. Suspicious of our motives, Helena suddenly gave us her full attention, defiantly smiling back at us.

"She hates cleaning the paintbrush," I said to her noble papa. "So do I." Nonetheless I took it from her, kissing her hand (avoiding the paint splodges). "Cleaning up is one of the small tasks I undertake for her." I gazed into her eyes. "In return for the many generosities she gives to me."

It would have been unseemly to add that on occasions when her father was not present I liked to enjoy myself rather wickedly cleaning up the painter too. Helena 's one fault was that she tended to get paint on herself everywhere.

Luckily the senator was easily sidetracked; we sent him into another room to play with his granddaughter, leaving us to snatch some fun.

Later, when I had fed everyone, our illustrious visitor confided the reason why he had so keenly accepted my invitation to our tiny apartment when he could have been dining on richer cuisine and in comfort at his own home. It was some time since we had walked over the Aventine to the slightly run-down Camillus mansion near the Capena Gate to visit Helena 's family. We had never been formally debarred, but since Justinus absconded with the girl that we two had introduced as a suitable (that is, rich) bride for his elder brother, there had been a cool atmosphere. Nobody blamed Helena for the family troubles. On the other hand, I made a good target. The jilted Aelianus had been particularly ribald.

"What's this?" demanded the senator; he had found a parchment on which I had drawn a large onionlike plant.

"A botanical sketch of a silphium plant," I said neutrally.

Helena, who had been feeding the baby, handed Julia to me. This meant I could occupy my attention with patting up the baby's wind. Helena herself was keeping her eyes down, refixing her dress brooches.

"So you've heard from my son too!" Camillus looked from one to another of us. He could read the omens from a skyful of rooks.

While we admitted it shiftily, pretending we had of course been planning to mention it, the senator laid aside my botany and brought out a map. I realized that meeting him at Glaucus' baths had been no coincidence; he had come prepared. He must have been intending to discuss the missing couple with us. Although I believed that his relationship with his wife Julia Justa was as open and confiding as it traditionally ought to be, a disloyal thought did cross my mind that her husband might not yet have told her that Justinus had written home. Julia Justa had taken the elopement pretty hard. For one thing, the missing girl's elderly grandparents had arrived in Rome all the way from Spain only two days afterwards, intending to celebrate Claudia's betrothal and marriage; Julia Justa had had to endure a tricky period with the furious old couple as houseguests before they left in a huff.

"He's got as far as Carthage." The senator spread the map skin from his home library. "Clearly has no idea of geography."

"I expect they fled on the first boat going south." Acting the peacekeeper was not my natural style. " Carthage is a short hop from Sicily."

"Well, now he knows," said Camillus, placing one forefinger on Carthage and the other virtually at arm's length away on Cyrene, "that he's in the wrong province, with a ship's graveyard between him and his purported goal."