"But you have – You told me. I mean, the experience, though not with."

"I've drabbed, briefly and cheaply. That I try to forget."

"You really mean," Severn said, with the eye of fascination all against his better instincts, "you think she should have – given herself to you?"

"Like you, like Lieutenant Isaac Marmaduke Elton, she accepts the cant of the feathers and the iron meeting holily when the holy words have been burbled. Poets do not marry, though. Not on a sale of fifty copies."

Severn, still standing by the pianoforte, lifted the limp wings of his arms to waist height then let them limply fall. "Lord Byron can live on his verse. But who would wish to be Lord Byron?" A candle flickered at that question, and a wind brought the chuckle of the fountain a fraction nearer. "It is love that is the thing, remember, the warmth of two hearts conjoined. She returns your love."

"Dum pendebat on the crux she returned his amore. And yet her name, now I say it to myself in this room, Rome I would say where names are tunes -" He was weary. "The name of any leering fishwife. A seller of headcheese. Give me some of my laudanum, Severn. I need sleep."

"I gave it to Dr Clark, you know that. I want no repetition of what of what."

"Happened on the ship to Naples. Good. The suicidal poet must be protected from himself. Good good. Meanwhile I may not sleep."

"The fountain will send you off. You say it does."

"By the waters of babble on there we shat down and flung our arses on the pillows."

"That is not funny."

"No, merely blasphemous. I blaspheme against love and against both testicles I would say testaments. But a testimony is to do with swearing on one's balls. An old Roman custom. And there are two testaments. Interesting."

"If blaspheming makes you more cheerful, then I suppose you must blaspheme," Severn said stoically. "But I wish there were some other way of making you cheerful."

Soon John lay in the Roman dark listening to the fountain he thought of as his. It was not a question of being cheerful, rather of shedding the shameful rotting stuff that was himself by making that inner nub which cried I, I, I into the centre of something free of the agony of thought. He tried to turn himself into the music of Haydn that Severn had played, but the image of Severn's all too human fingers intruded like a meddling elf. As for the water of the fountain, it remained obdurately other, singing mindlessly and unoppressed by time.

TWO

Giovanni Gulielmi, doctor of letters of the University of Bologna, had a small private income, derived from the rents of the land in Lazio left him by his father, who was untimely dead of Naples cholera, some British gold invested with the banker Torlonia, and what he got from the tenants of the first and second floors of the large house facing the Basilica of Santa Cecilia in the piazza named for her in the Trastevere district of Rome. The third, top, floor was enough for his mother and himself. Their cook and maid lived out. They had no coach. Gulielmi had a study of his own, very bare, with rugs on the marble, a massive English mahogany table that had been his maternal grandfather's, and three pictures on the walls. These were respectively by Labella, Macellari and Zappone, minor painters of respectively the Umbrian, Florentine and Venetian schools, and were respectively of the Annunciation, the Jordan Baptism and the Scourging at the Pillar. Here he worked at translations from English into Tuscan – unprofitable work, except for his version of Byron's Beppo, which had gone into three Turin printings. He sat with Endymion and the 1820 poems of John Keats and the fine-eyed, wavy-maned Guiseppe Gioacchino Belli one forenoon of November sunlight and intense blue Roman sky, song and the noise of fish and vegetable vendors coming from below. Belli looked without favour at the beginning of Gulielmi's draft translation of the Ode to a Nightingale.

" 'My heart is sad and my senses are oppressed by a stupor as of sleep, as if I had been drinking hemlock.' Yes yes yes. What does he know about drinking hemlock? We have all heard this kind of thing before."

"The content, yes. The shape, the melody, no."

"Which you cannot translate."

"That argues its superiority as poetry. Byron is all too translatable."

"Poetry should be about things. What things is poetry about since 1815? The poet's mistress is cruel to him. The poet fears he is going to die or fears he is not going to die. Rather like seasickness. The world is a fearful emptiness, but birds and flowers grant some little consolation. Perhaps next year there will be a new subject, but I think most poets have their elegies on Napoleon waiting."

"Here is something different," Gulielmi said, picking up a single sheet from his table. "The young man gave me this as an example of a sonnet in the Petrarchan form, difficult in a language like English, which has so few rhymes."

"Why does it have few rhymes? It is not natural for a language to have few rhymes. Italian is full of rhymes."

"Something to do with the endings dropping off," Gulielmi vaguely said.

"I cannot understand English and you say this little man is untranslatable."

"This poem is about a cat. A cat belonging to some lady called Signora Reynolds."

"Facetious then, light, nothing."

"Catullus wrote on a sparrow."

"Light, nothing."

"But listen to the sound. It sounds like a cat."

"A sonnet?"

"Listen.

'Cat, who hast past thy Grand Climacteric,

How many mice and rats hast in thy days

Destroy'd? – how many tit bits stolen? Gaze

With those bright languid segments green and prick

Those velvet ears – but pr'ythee do not stick

Thy latent talons in me -' "

"Enough. It is nothing but noise."

"Latent applied to claws is good. Latentes. What to an Englishman is an abstract Latin word takes on here the right physical attributes. The claws are not just hidden but latent – ready to come out. Not just hidden but known to be hidden. Like Christ in the tabernacle."

"Blasphemy blasphemy blasph -"

"Blasphemy to discuss the word latens?"

"It is a bad poem."

"But you don't quite understand my meaning, his -"

"Nor do I wish to."

"Let me finish. It's only fourteen lines."

Belli got up from his chair, really a kind of Scotch creepystool, and addressed an invisible audience of academicians. "Gentlemen," he declaimed, "I have an astonishing new discovery to impart. The sonnet-form is at last known to possess fourteen lines. The truth has been ascertained and confirmed beyond all possible shade of doubt by means of the new computorial digital device invented by the learned and honourable Doctor Giovanni Gulielmi -"

"Let me finish," said Gulielmi, grinning, "damn you."

"As the man said to the whore who received a message her mother was dying. No, no, I am sorry. That was unworthy. There is something unworthy in me that spurts out, like a night emission. There I go again. I am sorry, sorry. This lowness in myself. I try to subdue it." He beat his breast thrice and histrionically. And then: "It's a strong hand," he admitted, glancing at the manuscript before, with heavy grace, reseating himself. "More of a man's hand than a boy's."

"He's only a few years younger than you, than me."

"He has a boy's mind. Finish the thing."

" '- and upraise

Thy gentle mew – and tell me all thy frays

Of Fish and Mice, and Rats and tender chick.' "

"So ends the octave," Belli said. "I can tell it was the octave. But what noises – eis, icch."

"Cat noises. Listen.