Counting the Stars

  It’s a con, of course. That honey-sweet voice comes from hour after hour of voice exercises. Nothing’s off the cuff. All his jokes are rehearsed, and he’ll defend a liar and murderer in court as passionately as he’ll defend an innocent man. But that’s the job of a brief. At least Chickpea has the guts to define what he wants and try to get it. He’s not been afraid to plunge his hands into the muck.

  He must have been standing there for a long time, lost in his own head. One of the shackled slaves is eyeing him curiously, although he doesn’t dare let up work for a second. The foreman has his whip out: perhaps they are behind schedule with this section of road.

  ‘You there! Get on with it, you idle bastard, or you’ll feel my whip across your back!’ he yells, and then touches his forehead with his knuckle and calls across to Catullus, ‘They’re a useless idle lot, begging your pardon, sir, but we won’t let up, we’ll have this stretch laid by nightfall.’

  He thinks I’m one of the villa owners who has paid for the new road and has strolled across to inspect its progress.

  ‘Excellent,’ Catullus calls back weakly, and the gang bends to its work again, shovelling gravel into the trench. The whip cracks down. It’s a long time until nightfall, he thinks, and walks on across the hill.

  He’s almost there now, at her house on the Clivus Victoriae. Everything is ahead of him. Anything can happen. Clodia is all the perfection that he can imagine.

  Fool, Catullus. You’re such a fool that you’re even a fool to yourself. Go in. Announce yourself.

  I apologize, my dear Chickpea. You are no more a con than I am a man who can put together an argument, even with myself.

  He goes to her doorway.

  Nineteen

  They sit side by side, on a marble bench overlooking the fish pond which was Metellus Celer’s pet project, and which he saw completed a few months before his death.

  Aemilia told him Clodia was out here in the new pool building. ‘My lady spends half her life watching those fish these days.’ Aemilia was tight-lipped. She looked older and angrier; there were brown stains under her eyes. ‘Albus will show you the way,’ she said, and called raucously for the slave, who came running. This wasn’t one of the perfectly trained Metelli slaves who had made so many great parties appear as effortless as a dinner with a couple of friends. This boy with his shock of pale, matted hair looked as if he’d just finished digging a trench for beans. He stank of frightened sweat.

  In fact there were signs of disintegration everywhere. Small lapses, but they’d never have been allowed six months ago. The girl who had washed his feet when he came in hadn’t got the water at the right temperature, and it was plain water. The Metelli had always used lavender water. Someone had left a scrubbing-brush on the corridor floor. A reception-room door was wedged open with a block of wood. A great household like this couldn’t run on Aemilia’s bad temper. He wondered whether Clodia had just stopped noticing… or whether she didn’t care any more.

  ‘Come along with me, master,’ said Albus, leading the way. Behind them, Aemilia began to bully a child who was cleaning the crevices of a stone faun.

  ‘Dear gods, don’t you ever listen, you imbecile. The feather duster, not that great clumsy brush. It’s a valuable antique, one scratch and my lady’ll have you sold into the salt-mines to pay off the damage.’

  Albus winked as they turned the corner of the corridor. ‘She’s got a tongue on her, that one,’ he remarked, as if to an equal. ‘Where I come from they’d sew up her lips. No wonder missus keeps out at the pool.’

  This was a new household, in which the slaves’ attitude veered between a cringe and an overfamiliar grin. That ‘missus’ was a long way from the formal, mirror-smooth ‘mistress’ or ‘my lady’ of the Metelli house in the old days.

  But Catullus was probably reading too much into it. This boy looked as if being indoors at all was a novelty to him.

  ‘She’s a lovely lady, though, my missus,’ went on the boy, gormlessly.

  ‘I can find my way from here. Get back to your work.’

  He is with her at last. Aemilia’s ranting and Albus’ stupidity fade to nothing. The household is bound to be upside down after such a death. It’s natural and there’s nothing Clodia can do to prevent it. Everything will settle, he insists to himself, comforting himself with the repetition. Things will come back to how they were.

  She’s here, beside him. They’re not quite touching, but she’s there, next to him, breathing, being. He can rest his mind from its constant, painful search for her, from imagining what Clodia might be doing, how she might look, whom she might be with. But he doesn’t try to touch her yet.

  He was up in the hills with his brother once, early on a winter morning, and they found a little clump of wild hyacinths that had come out in a sheltered spot. But there had been a frost, and the flowers were sheathed in ice. Marcus said not to touch them, or they would bruise and blacken when the ice melted. If you leave them alone, they’ll be fine when the sun comes out. He’d always remembered it: his brother, the leader, the fighter, caring that much for a flower.

  ‘Clodia?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. The fish. They’ve been eating one another. We must have bought cannibals by mistake.’

  ‘Surely not. They’re carp, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes. If we could have installed saline tanks, we’d have tried gilt-headed bream. They’re terribly in demand. You can make a fortune farming them, apparently.’

  ‘You don’t need a fortune, Clodia, you have one already.’

  She laughs half-heartedly. She’s pale, dressed in a dark woollen tunic and a hooded cloak which shades her face so that he can’t see it as well as he’d like. Such dull, plain clothes. Her face looks pinched, and she shivers as a breeze blows over the pond’s surface.

  ‘It’s cold, isn’t it?’

  ‘How long have you been out here?’

  ‘Oh, quite a while. I don’t know.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be sitting on bare marble at this time of year.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says vaguely, ‘I should have asked Aemilia to set cushions on the bench. There are dozens in the pool room. But I can’t be bothered with having Aemilia out here. Everything’s still so chaotic – we haven’t begun to get the new slaves trained.’

  ‘What’s happened to the old ones?’

  ‘Oh, well, you know, some of them were granted their freedom in my husband’s will.’

  But they would have stayed on. Freedmen stay on in the household. Why did they leave? Why did you want to get rid of them? No, don’t think of that.

  ‘Some of them went to my sister-in-law,’ she goes on with the same uneasy vagueness, ‘and I sent some to Formiae, and to the estates. We needed fresh staff here. They get into bad habits, you know how it is.’

  ‘Not really. Most of our slaves have been with us for ever.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice for you, isn’t it,’ she says sharply, to close the subject. But he persists.

  ‘You kept Aemilia, though.’

  Something leaps in her eyes. ‘Oh, yes,’ she says quickly. ‘Aemilia has to stay, of course.’ She shivers again and huddles deeper into her cloak.

  ‘Come here. Come here, Clodia. Let me hold you. I’ll warm you up.’

  She allows him to put his arm around her, and draw her close. But she doesn’t soften against him, and after a minute or two she pulls away.

  ‘Would you like me to turn on the jets? It’s quite impressive. My husband helped design the whole thing.’ She waves her hand at the big oval fish pond, the formal flower beds, the fountain. ‘He always wanted a fish pond here,’ she says reflectively, catching her underlip between her teeth.

  ‘All right.’

  He follows her to the pool room. There’s an array of brass levers, and he wonders if she knows what she’s doing. She pushes back her hood and stands there, frowning.

  ‘You could send
for someone.’

  ‘No. I do know how to do it. He showed me. I think it’s this handle, on the left, to turn on the jets.’

  She fiddles for a while, but nothing happens. Suddenly she exclaims, ‘Of course, how stupid, you have to open the sluices first. It’s this big lever here you have to pull down. Don’t watch me, you’re making me nervous. Go outside and you’ll see in a minute. The water will come through.’

  He goes back to stand beside the pool. The oval is more than ten yards long, cupped in the hands of a high-walled rectangular building which is open to the sky. A big project, a magnificent addition to one of the most splendid villas on the Palatine. There are mosaics of Neptune set into the floor of the pond. The images waver as fish pass over them, stirring the water.

  ‘It’s coming!’ calls Clodia.

  Water pours from a dozen niches set into the walls of the pond. The fish spurt across the mosaic and it disappears in clouds of bubbles. There are many more fish than he thought. Some are sheltered beneath tiled overhangs, others hide in plants. He kneels down and puts his hand under one of the spouts. The flow of water is cold and strong.

  Clodia has come out to join him. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ she says, her face changed and glowing. ‘No one else has a pond with jets like this, not in Rome anyway. My husband commissioned the design after I told him about a pond I’d seen in a villa down in Baiae. He visited it last summer. You should see the architect’s drawings: they’re a work of art. There are about four hundred yards of pipes in the pool complex alone, you know, and you can adjust the flow any way you want. We’re lucky, of course, we’ve got a wonderful spring that never runs dry. He was planning to build a second pool, for bathing. Of course we’d have had to buy more land for the extension.’

  He glances at her. ‘You could continue the project in his memory,’ he says. She gives him a sharp look, but he keeps his face impassive. Just for a moment, he neither hates her nor loves her. What he feels is something new: a cold, dry sorrow, as if something has died.

  Pale green water bubbles thickly into the pond. He listens to the sound of it gurgling through hidden pipes, rushing as it comes to the lip of the pipes. It sounds like a waterfall in early spring, when heavy rains rush off the hills to fill the lake at Sirmio. He always loved to sleep in the sound of water.

  There was always a part of Clodia that was like his child. No one else saw it.

  No one can see them here. The pool complex stands apart from the villa, joined by a covered way. High walls hold both sun and shade. The flower beds are not yet planted, but vines and roses are beginning to climb the walls. You can still almost smell the fresh cement. There are no statues yet, but Metellus Celer would have planned them. Perhaps he had already commissioned a sculptor. It seems that there was some artistry in the man after all. Or more likely it was all money, and a tactful architect who let the client believe he was the designer.

  The flow weakens. A few more gouts of water spill from the niches and fall slackly into the pond.

  ‘It shouldn’t stop like that,’ says Clodia, drawing her brows together.

  ‘You could send for one of the slaves,’ he suggests again. ‘Isn’t there someone who understands the system?’

  ‘Of course there is. But I want to do it myself. I do know how, I’ve just forgotten.’

  She goes back into the pool room and he imagines her wrestling with the levers, pulling at one and then the next.

  ‘Is that working?’ she calls.

  ‘No.’

  ‘And this one?’

  ‘No. Nothing’s happening.’

  A long pause, then she comes out, her eyes bright with temper.

  ‘He should have left me some diagrams,’ she says. ‘That’s the whole point of this complex, it’s somewhere we can come to relax, on our own. The slaves do the gardening and pool-cleaning first thing in the morning and after that they leave us alone. Somewhere that’s completely peaceful, where you’re alone with your thoughts – can you imagine what a luxury that is, when you’re in the thick of public life?’

  He’s never heard Clodia talk such rubbish. She seems to pity her husband, now that he’s dead. Catullus hates it. It’s the same old crap you hear everywhere, the whingeing of rich politicians who have their hands deep in Rome’s purse. The cares of a consulship – the sacrifice of private pleasure for the sake of the city – the unique pressures of responsibility. Every jack-in-office, every on-the-make politician, every puffed-up toady prates about their ‘sacrifices’. What has Clodia to do with all that? It nauseates him to hear her praise her dead husband now in this way.

  ‘He chose all the fish himself,’ says Clodia.

  ‘Individually?’ he gibes, and she doesn’t answer.

  Clodia and Metellus Celer’s shared, married life seems to spread itself before Catullus’ feet, like the mosaic that is slowly clearing as the water becomes still. But it’s false. They had no shared life. Their marriage was an arrangement and their life together a formality. They did not love each other.

  ‘He used to skim the leaves off the surface with a net,’ continues Clodia, and laughs. ‘The slaves used to complain that there was never anything left for them to do.’

  ‘Really,’ he says. You liar. I know you. You let him do whatever he wanted, you took no part in it. You went on with your own life. You weren’t watching him, you were in my bed. Don’t try to sell me this story of a pious matron, humouring her husband, allowing him his hobby because it’s such a good form of relaxation, isn’t it, for men who work so hard.

  ‘I’m planning to build a little studio out here,’ she continues. ‘I’ve been looking around for an architect. I haven’t told anyone yet, not even Aemilia. But it’s a perfect place to write, don’t you think?’

  ‘A studio,’ he says flatly. The conversation seems more and more bizarre. First a fish pond and then a studio and then what? What’s it all for? Her poems aren’t free of talent, but they don’t merit a studio. It’s Clodia herself who is the work of art. But only when she is herself, his Clodia, his Lesbia, who holds a rarer spice than anything that comes from the East in every grain of her body.

  A fish-pond owner with artistic inclinations, who respects the memory of her unfortunately deceased husband – that’s a stranger. And not a very likeable one either. He takes in a sharp breath. The solution is so simple, so close. All he has to do is to stop loving her.

  ‘I’ll write out here, with the sound of the water,’ she goes on, ‘and I’m going to get another sparrow, did I tell you that? A little one born this spring, I’ll take it as soon as it’s fledged and then I can tame it.’

  ‘No, you didn’t tell me,’ he says.

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ she says. ‘Don’t you like it here?’

  ‘Who could not like it? It’s so beautifully designed. Once the flowers are growing, and those little trees have gained some height, it’ll be exquisite. Your husband must have thought a great deal about the future.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘he did.’ Her lovely eyes gaze into the distance.

  Only the gods know what she sees there, he thinks, and he feels cold.

  ‘You could come and write here too,’ she suggests. ‘It’s very peaceful.’

  ‘No, I don’t think I could write here.’

  ‘You’re shivering.’

  ‘It’s damp out here. Why don’t we go back into the house?’

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘I prefer it out here. Aemilia follows me around the house like an old nanny-goat. It’s not very restful. She’s getting above herself. Sometimes I almost think she’s in the pay of the Metelli – but never mind that. Here, come under my cloak.’

  She spreads her cloak around him like a bird’s wing. The smell of her hair, her skin and her perfume fold around him. Her face is only a few inches from his. He can see the grains of powder on her cheeks. She isn’t wearing rouge, and she hasn’t reddened her lips. She’s in mourning, after all. The darkness of her cloak makes her look even paler and more fr
agile, as if she’s been ill or wounded, and has ventured into the first sunlight of the year to recuperate. Her eyes are huge and liquid. Wide open, they hide everything.

  He puts his arms around her, and draws her to him. He must never set his thoughts against her. She is his girl.

  ‘I thought you’d come before this,’ she says. ‘I was waiting for you.’

  ‘I thought your house would be full of the Metelli.’

  ‘Not any more. Even my daughter’s gone back to the country. But they still keep calling on me, the Metelli, at all hours – almost as if they’re expecting to discover something.’ She laughs very softly, in her throat, and glances at him so that he can share the joke. His face feels stiff as he moves his lips in a smile. He looks beyond her, and sees a splash of dark purple at the corner of a stone flower bed. He folds back the cloak, gets up and goes to see what it is.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  It’s only a wild hyacinth. It must have come up in one of the prepared flower beds, and a garden slave has pulled it out and tossed it on to the flagstones. He stoops. The plant is limp and the flower crushed, as if a boot has trodden on it.

  ‘Come back to me,’ says Clodia. ‘Oh, heavens, look at those fish. It’s revolting. That one is actually swimming about with a chunk out of its side – look. It doesn’t even seem to notice. I don’t know what I’m going to do about them. He got so many, and now they’re eating each other. And I’m sure that’s some kind of fungus – look at that one there, those white spots on its side.’