Yet that in itself was disturbing. I would need to get used to it. For the past eight years, since I had persuaded the army that it wanted to release me from legionary service, I had lived in fear of starvation and being thrown on the street by my landlord. I had once felt unable to marry, for dread of dragging others down with me. I had lived in filth. I lacked leisure and intellectual refinement. I had been forced into work that was dangerous and demeaning. So I drank, dreamed, lusted, complained, conspired, wrote gauche poetry, and did all that informers are reckoned to do by those who insult them. Then in Britain, on my first mission for Vespasian, I had met a girl.
For a man who sneered at snooty women, I had thrown myself into wooing Helena Justina with a wholeheartedness that appalled my friends. She was a senator’s daughter and I was a street rat. Our relationship seemed impossible-a wondrous attraction to a fellow who liked challenges. She at first hated me: another lure. I even thought I hated her: ridiculous.
The story of how we came to live as we did now, so much more closely and companionably than most people (more, especially, than my turmoiled clients) would fill a few scrolls for your library. That Helena loved me was one mystery. That, even though she cared, she chose to endure my way of life was even stranger. We had lived for short periods in my old apartment, the one Petronius now filled with his mighty frame when he forced himself to return for a night’s sleep under the leaky tiles. We had briefly shared a rental in a building that was “accidentally” demolished by a crooked developer-fortunately when neither of us was at home. And now we lived in a three-room first-floor sublet, from which we had removed the obscene wall frescos and to which we imported our child’s screams and our own laughter, but little else.
I had long harbored grandiose fantasies of owning a mansion-in a few decades, when I had time, money, energy, motive, and the name of a trustworthy real estate vendor (well, the last criterion ruled it out!). More recently Helena Justina had talked of acquiring somewhere spacious enough for us to share with her younger brother, whom we liked, and whose young lady (if she stuck with him) was as pleasant as we could hope for. I was not sure I liked anyone enough to endure a joint tenure of my home. Apparently, it was a closer possibility than I had thought.
“While we have the mule cart on hire,” Helena announced, looking only slightly sheepish, “we could drive out tomorrow and look at this house I bought.”
“This is the house that I know nothing about, I suppose?”
“You know it is.”
“Right. If a man takes up with a formidable woman, he has to expect some curtailment of his domestic liberties. A whole house has been bought for me, without anybody telling me the street or the locality, showing me the site plan, or even, if I may be so coarse as to raise this, Helena, mentioning the price.”
“You will like it,” Helena assured me, sounding as if she had begun to doubt that she liked the place herself.
“Of course I will, if you chose it.” I was often firm. Helena had always ignored firmness, so it might have seemed pointless, but the statement made it clear who would be blamed if we were stuck with a bummer.
As we were. I could already tell.
Because of the daytime wheeled-vehicle curfew in Rome, after we took my mother home that evening we hitched the mule in Lenia’s laundry and planned to rise very early in order to leave just before dawn. After a few hours’ sleep at our apartment, I dragged myself awake the next morning only reluctantly. We put Julia and Nux in the back of the cart, still both asleep in separate baskets, and set off through the silent streets like defaulters doing a bunk.
“This seems to be the first disadvantage. Our house is miles outside town?”
“I was told that the distance is walkable.” Helena looked miserable.
“Time to own up, lady. Is that true?”
“You always said you wanted to live on the Janiculan Hill-with a view over Rome.”
“So I did. Very nice. I saw a superb gangster’s house there oncemind you, he had excellent reasons for guarding his privacy.”
The house Helena had bought was the other side of the Tiber: secluded, you could say. If it had a view as she promised, I knew it must be an upland property. Every day when I returned home in the evening (I would obviously not bother nipping back just for lunch as I did now), the last part of the walk would be up a steep hill. I could manage that, I told myself. I had lived all my life on the Aventine.
“We can afford our own litter now,” Helena ventured nervously as we drove past the Theatre of Pompey and rattled over the Agrippan Bridge. This was already further out of the city than I normally enjoyed tramping.
“If you want a social life, we’ll need one each.”
The house had tremendous potential. (Those deadly words!) Renovated-for it was suffering about twenty years of total neglect-it could end up truly beautiful. Airy rooms led from lofty corridors; attractive interior peristyle gardens separated pleasingly proportioned wings. There were good polychrome geometric mosaic floors in the principal rooms and hallways. Old-fashioned, slightly faded frescos posed interesting problems: whether to keep them or invest in more modern designs.
“It had no bathhouse,” Helena said. “There is a spring, luckily. I don’t know how the previous owners managed. I thought it was essential to have our own facilities.”
I gulped. “Gloccus and Cotta?”
“How did you guess?”
“They sound likely candidates for a job that can easily go wrong. I don’t see them here.” I could, however, see their various piles of ladders, litter, and old lunch crusts. They also had a large trade plate advertising their services, which had pushed over the welcoming herm at the entrance gate. No doubt they would reerect Hermes for us before they finally left.
I jest. The situation was clear to me. These were, without question, boys who left a trail of destruction in their wake. Snagging, in this contract, would mean employing a major contractor to put right everything that these smaller folk had done wrong-and all they had ruined which they should never have touched. There was nothing new or surprising in this situation. It is carefully worked out in the builders’ guild. It is how they perpetuate their craft. Every time one comes in and ruins your home, the next in the chain is guaranteed work. Don’t try to escape. They know every trick the luckless householder can pull. They are gods. Just leave them to get on with it.
“Gloccus and Cotta are never here,” Helena replied in a taut voice. “That, I am forced to admit, is their big disadvantage. If I tell you I bought this house before we went to Africa-”
I smiled gently. “We went in early April, didn’t we? We were there nearly two months?”
“Gloccus and Cotta were supposed to build the bathhouse while we were away. It was a simple construction on a clean site and they had told me they were free to program it in. It was to take twenty days.”
“So what happened, fruit?” She was so dismal it was easy to be kind to her; I could wind her up later, once she had provided the ammunition.
“I expect you can imagine.” She knew how I was playing this. Helena, who was a stalwart girl, took a deep breath and recounted the odyssey: “They were late starting; their previous contract overran. They have to keep returning to Rome for more materials-disappearing for the rest of the day. They need money in advance, but if you pay them up front as a courtesy they take advantage and vanish again. I gave them a clear list of what I wanted, but every item they supply is different from what I chose. They have broken the white marble bowl I ordered specially from Greece; they have lost half the tesserae for the hot-room floor-after the first half were firmly laid, of course, so the rest cannot now be matched. They drink; they gamble, and then fight over the results. If I come here to work on other parts of the house, they interrupt me constantly, either asking for refreshments or announcing that I have a problem with the design that they did not foresee… Do stop laughing.”