NINE

The next time I ate dinner the surroundings were more luxurious, though the ambience was less comfortable: we were being formally' entertained by Helena's parents.

The Camilli owned a pair of houses near the Capena Gate. They had all the amenities of the nearby busy area around the Via Appia, but were ensconced in a private insula off a back street where only the upper classes were welcome. I could never have lived there. The neighbours were all too nosy a about everyone else's business. And someone was always having an aedile or a praetor to dinner, so people had to keep the pavements clean lest their highly superior enclave be officially criticised:

Helena and I had walked there over the Aventine. Her parents were bound to insist on sending us home in their I beaten-up litter, with its just-about-adequate slave bearers, so we enjoyed a stroll through the early evening stir of suburban Rome. I was carrying the baby. Helena had volunteered to lug the large basket of Julia's impedimenta: rattles, spare loincloths, clean tunics, sponges, towels, flasks of rosewater, blankets and the rag doll she liked to try to eat.

As we came under the Porta Capena, which carries the

Appear and Marcian aqueducts, we were splashed by the famous water leaks. The August evening was so warm we were dry again by the time we arrived at the Camillus house and I worked up a temper rousing the porter from his game of dice. He was a dope with no future, a lanky lout with a flat head who made it his life's work to annoy me. The daughter of the house was mine now. It was time to give up, but he was

too dumb to have noticed.

The whole family had assembled for the ceremonial meeting with our new daughter. Considering the household boasted two sons in their early twenties, this was quite a coup. Aelianus and Justinus were ignoring the call' of theatres and the races, dancers and musicians, poetry parties and dinners with drunken friends in order to greet their firstborn niece. It made me wonder what threats to their allowances must have been issued.

We handed over Julia to, be admired, then beat a retreat to the garden.

`You two look exhausted!' Decimus Camillus, Helena's father, had sneaked out to join us. Tall, slightly stooped, and with short, straight, upstanding hair, he had his problems. He was a friend of the Emperor, but still laboured under the shadow of a brother who had tried to hijack the currency and disrupt the state; Decimus could not expect to be awarded any senior post. His coffers were light too. In August a senatorial family ought to be sunning themselves at some elegant villa on the spa coast at Neapolis or on the slopes of a quiet lake; the Camilli owned farms inland, but no proper summer haven. They passed the million sesterces qualification for the Curia, yet their cash in hand was insufficient to build on, either financially or socially.

He had found us sitting side by side on a bench in a colonnade, heads together and motionless, in a state of collapse.

`Having a baby's hard work,' I grinned. `Were you allowed a glimpse of our treasure, before she was mobbed by cooing women?'

`She seems skilled at handling; an audience.'

yet unlike a conventional patrician son-in-law I did not come round once a month whining for loans.

`So, Marcus and Helena, you are back from Baetica – in good repute as usual, say those in the know on the Palatine. Marcus, your resolution of the olive oil cartel greatly pleased

the Emperor. What are your plans now?'

I told him about working with Petronius, and Helena described our skirmishes with the Censors' clerk yesterday.

Decimus groaned. `Have you done the Census yourself yet?,I hope you have better luck than I did.'

`In what way, sir?'

`Up I marched, full of self-righteousness for reporting promptly, and my estimate of my worth was disbelieved. I had reckoned my story was foolproof too.'

I sucked my, teeth. I thought him an honest man, for a senator. Besides, after, the business with his treasonous brother, Camillus Verus had to prove his loyalty every time he stepped into the Forum. It was unjust, since-he was that political rarity: a selfless public man. The condition was so rare, nobody believed in it. `That's hard. Do you have any right of appeal?'

`Officially, there's no audit. The Censors can overrule anybody on the spot. Then they impose their own tax calculation.'

Helena's dry sense of humour was inherited from her father. She laughed' and said: 'Vespasian declared he needed four hundred million sesterces to refill the Treasury after Nero's excesses. This is how he intends to do it.' `Squeezing me?'

`You're good-natured and you love Rome.' `What an appalling responsibility.'

'So did you accept the Censors' ruling?' I asked, chuckling slightly.

`Not entirely. The first option was to protest which meant I would have to put in a lot of effort and expense producing receipts and leases for the Censors to laugh at. The second option was to pay up quietly; then they would meet me halfway.'

`A bribe!' cried Helena.

`She is,' confirmed Helena, finding, the energy to kiss her papa as he squashed informally on to our seat. `Then when the flatterers finish, she's good at being sick on them.'

`Sounds like someone I knew once,' the senator mused.

Helena, his eldest child, was his favourite; and unless I had lost my intuitive powers, Julia would be next in line. Beaming, he leaned' across Helena' and clapped me on the arm. He ought to view me as an interloper; instead I was an, ally. I had taken a difficult daughter off his hands, and proved I intended to stick with her. I had no money myself,

Her father looked shocked; anyway, he made a pretence of it. `Helena justina, nobody bribes the Emperor.' `Oh, a compromise,' she snorted angrily.

Feeling cramped with three on the bench, I stood up and went to investigate the garden fountain on a nearby wall: a spluttery drunken Silenus pouring feebly from a wineskin. The poor old god had never been up to much; today his flow was being additionally obstructed by a fig which had dropped from a tree trained to grow against the sunny wall. I fished out the fruit. The gurgle resumed slightly more strongly.

`Thanks.' The senator tended to put up with things that failed to work. I strolled to a fancy border, where last year's pot lilies had been planted out. They were struggling against beetle their leaves bitten and badly stained with rust. They weren't flowering, and would be seriously ailing next season. Lily beetles are bright red and easily outwitted, so I was able to knock some off on to the palm of my hand, then drop them on to the paving where I flattened them under my boot.

Checking the result of my work on the fountain, I told the senator about the dismembered hand. I knew he had paid for private access to one of the aqueducts. `Our supply seems pretty clean,' he said. `It comes from the Aqua Appia.'

`Same as the Aventine fountains,' I warned.

`I know. They receive priority. I pay a huge premium, but the rules are strict for private householders.'

`The water board regulates your quantity?'

`The board gives me an officially approved calix let into the base of a water tower.'

`Can't you bend it a bit and increase the flow?'

`All private access pipes are made from bronze to prevent

their being illegally enlarged – though I believe people do try.'

`How big is your pipe?'

`Only a quinaria.' Just over a digit in diameter. The smallest, but given an uninterrupted flow day and night sufficient for a reasonable household. Camillus had no spare cash. He was the kind of millionaire who seriously needed to economise.

Too small for objects to come floating down, Helena commented.