John said: "It's his mother's – Italojacobite exilic, Charlie is my darling. How were the Ewing marbles?"

"I think," said Severn reverently, "he has an exquisite talent. There is a quality of true sentiment, the stone eyes have a look positively languishing in one of his demure maidens. He has done a pair of spaniels that belie their marble. His marble comes from Pietrasanta, where Michelangelo got his. That alone makes him take fire. Oh yes, exquisite work."

"Alas alas," Gulielmi said, "it was not the marble that Michelangelo would have chosen if he had had any say in the matter. His and everyone's preferred blocks come from Carrara. But he was at work on Medici commissions and the Medici family owned the Pietrasanta quarries and imposed their stuff upon him. Soft and dirty he called it." The poet's eyes smiled. I take to him, thought Gulielmi.

"Ewing in Italy," John said, "hewing so prettily."

"Oh, very prettily, John," Severn said. "You must come, you will be impressed."

"I must be impressed to come, press-ganged. I have had my fill of marble and only half-digested it. The Elgins, I chew their cud still. Give us some music, Severn. Something not too melting."

All this time, nursing his rebuke, Clark had said nothing. Now he said: "Haydn."

John smiled and said: "We are grateful, Dr Clark, you must know that. For the loan of your music. For much else." Clark reluctantly smiled back.

Severn pulled at his fingers, cracking them, then sat at the ill-tuned pianoforte they had rented. He played the first movement of a Haydn sonata, one in D major. John leaned on the instrument, surveying Severn's dancing or walking fingers in wonder. "He's like a child," he said in glee at the end. "You never know what he will do next."

Severn looked faintly offended. "I can assure you, John, I followed the notes as written."

"I meant Haydn, not you. And yet we do know what he will do next. I dedicate this evening to the bubbling out of stupidities. Play that movement again and I will know what he is going to do next. If I could read those hieroglyphics I would see it all planned, not at all childlike." In comic gloom, "It justifies or vindicates or something Dr Clark's John Calvin. All planned from start to end and I am fool enough to talk of childish unpredictability." He chuckled. "Still, it is a good impersonation of childlikeness. Not like old Willy Wordsworth."

Severn did not attack the second movement. He folded his hands and looked up in reproach. "These days you laugh at everything."

"Not at everything, Sabrina. I do not laugh at our comic writers."

"I think," Gulielmi said, "you must plunge into our Roman dialect at once. It is not like the Tuscan. Its very make and sound is different. And it has never had the terrible dantesco vision imposed on it. It does not have that sense of high responsibility that for half a millennium the tongue of Florence has had to bear. The Roman tongue is coarse and rough and full of the Rabelaisian. There are, for instance, hundreds of words to describe, to describe, well, the -"

"Ah," John said, "I see we are on the marge of bawdry. Can you stomach some of that commodity, Dr Clark? Severn can drown his ears in Haydn."

"I have a friend," Gulielmi said, "a poet, scholar, actor, a fine-looking man, a fine man altogether, who did an admirable thing and then, in a sort of pudic remorse, destroyed it. His copy, that is. I had and have my own. A sonnet based on the Roman cant terms for the ah male pudendum. A long sonnet."

"I do not think, with respect," John said, "you may speak of a long sonnet."

"Come, you will have met sonnets with codas. Petrarch wrote them. Your, our, Milton wrote one too."

"I'm stupid again. Of course. A sonnet on the penis with a tail. Just, very just. Who is your friend?"

"A man tugged many ways – towards respectability, even holiness, towards the dirty suffering life of the holy and unholy city the papal rule has made, on its surface, somewhat dull and conforming. You see, sir, we may love our popes spiritually but, in the secular sphere, be unhappy about them. However. If you want laughter here, you will find it in the obscenity of desperation."

"That," John said, his face glowing in the pianoforte candles, "is a fine phrase, obscenity of desperation is a."

"I will give you a fine word," Gulielmi said, "that you will not find in Dante. It is for the male organ and it is dumpennente. Is not that a fine word?"

"I think," Dr Clark said, in unscotch, "Mr Keats has had enough excitement for the evening. I would say it is time for him to go to his bed."

"Taking with him his lonely dumpennente," John said. He kissed the delicious word. "Duuuuuum - A pendent pen, dumb and in the dumps."

"Yes, you see the way Roman language operates. An n and a d following become a double n. Dumpendente. The origin of course is the Latin dum pendebat. You catch the reference? No?

Stabat mater dolorosa

Apud lignum lachrymosa

Dum pendebat filius."

"An unholy reference, if I may say so," Severn said, unwontedly assertive, the Haydn slow movement evidently not now to be attacked.

"Come, Mr Severn, I take you to be of the Reformed Faith. It is our Stabat Mater, not yours, and we may do blasphemies with it if we will."

"Blasphemy is blasphemy."

"One and indivisible," said John with joy. "Severn gets his Stabat Mater from Haydn or Mozart or somebody. But how wonderful – dum pendebat - while he was hanging. From the cross, from the crotch. But this is exquisite, and in no feathery way. This is the good groiny iron. You've given me a fine present, Mr Gulielmi."

"There are more in store, if you will have them."

"We will go," Dr Clark said sternly. He returned to Scotch, language of health and holiness, for his patient. "Ye're unco excitable, ye ken that? Bye and bye I maun consider what tae dae wi' yon stomach."

John facetiously took the yon for a true yonder and peered for the stomach in the corner shadows. "Aye," he then smiled. "Bye and bye is easily said. I do not mock. Remember I am still, on engrossed and wax-sigillaed parchment, of your confraternity. I do not think it is the stomach."

"We will see."

"Alas, yes. You will see."

When the visitors had left, Severn and John looked at each other. Severn brought the pianoforte lid gently down and looked again. John's eyes were now dulled, stilled, the lids brought gently down. He was sitting with left foot on right knee, shoe off, fondling his instep. He said:

"You were shocked. You will be shocked more before we are done."

"It is not to my taste, no more than that. It will seem namby pamby to you that I spoke so, but it is the way I was brought up. You are unused to Christians, I know. I think sometimes now of Providence. My being here, I mean."

"Cant and humbug, by your leave. Anyway, I talk of bigger shocks. The obscenity not of desperation but of dying. It will not be pretty, like some marble spaniel of Mr Ewing. Are you sure you wish to stay?"

"If I did not love you I would still speak of my Christian duty. Besides, I do not believe it. You are already better."

"In terms of my posthumous life, yes. I am not spewing blood. I fear our friend Clark may be right. I have pains in my stomach. I may add I have pain in my dumpendebat. Oh no, don't look newly shocked, nothing to do with the clap, big or little. Shall I say that I have loved like a gentleman, meaning to end unfulfilled, not to have cupped those breasts naked or even kissed deeply, and as for the other, the right true end – And I am wrong too to say gentleman, because we have been confined by our class which is neither gentlemanly nor ruffianly but plain pure middle, and poets of the middle zone are not permitted, by reason of their small sales, to be married. So I end unsatisfied, Severn my dear boy, and I would curse loudly now if I were not so, ah, spent. Spent without spending."