Pandora's Boy: Flavia Albia 6 (Falco: The New Generation) Page 11

  ‘Safely,’ Sabinilla enjoyed saying. ‘Our careful parents always insist on sending slaves out with us. We girls had litters. We stick in pairs. The rule is, whoever has borrowed her mother’s litter, takes the other girl home first. Some of the boys had bodyguards, I think.’

  ‘Juno, the street outside Fabulo’s must have been packed,’ I commented. I reckoned the slaves who were with the boys were probably sent not for protection but to stop them getting into fist fights with innocent passers-by. Aggressive young drunks are a menace on the streets at night. ‘Don’t the neighbours complain about traffic congestion and noise?’

  Redempta and Anicia looked shocked by this question. Ummidia was too busy using Sabinilla’s mirror and kohl compact. Sabinilla answered, practising a flirt with her newly blackened eyes. ‘I expect they do, but it’s not ours to worry about, is it?’

  ‘I imagine the aediles have to negotiate with the restaurant management to minimise nuisance.’ I was thinking of my own aedile. The Quirinal lay outside his area, or I would have heard moans about Fabulo’s. The cost of fines for running a disruptive thermopolium would hike up customers’ bills, but if the bill was being sent to their parents, which of these would care, or even know? ‘I don’t expect you thought about it at the time.’

  ‘No,’ Anicia agreed, implying I too should not bother with this.

  ‘So, diners spill out into the street, full of wine and cheeriness, all unaware of how loudly they are shouting. For me, that can be helpful, in fact. All I have to do is ask around …’ I gave these posturing girls a threat now: ‘There may be some agitated neighbour who monitors what happens. You may not see them, but they are there behind their shutters, watching obsessively. People look for outrages to make complaints about. I expect if I toddle along there, I can find a witness for that night – possibly one with detailed notes scrawled on a tablet. Complainants can be meticulous … Tell me, were people in your own party drunk when you left?’

  Ummidia, who now had the hand mirror, laid it in front of her on the table, staring at me.

  I began to regret interviewing this quartet together. They synchronised their responses. They posed; they pouted. They watched for each next question from me as if it was a challenge, then put on a public show, like pantomime dancers expecting applause for each new turn.

  ‘No more drunk than normal.’ Anicia took back the kohl palette and tiny spatula. She added more to her already laden eyelids. ‘We try not to create a public commotion. We are considerate.’

  I wondered. Would their parents ground them if there were too many complaints? ‘So,’ I asked finally, ‘did anything happen that evening that I ought to be told about?’

  All I received were more surly looks, with more disinterested shoulder lifts.

  I asked one new question suddenly: did they know anything about a love-potion Clodia had acquired? They showed no surprise, but all briskly told me no.

  I closed my note-tablet, doing it gently. ‘Where do you buy your kohl?’ I asked the owner of the hand mirror, like somebody changing the subject.

  ‘From Pandora,’ Sabinilla answered.

  18

  There seemed to be a conspiracy to keep me away from Pandora – so I was determined to unearth her. Sabinilla repeated what Redempta’s aunt had said, that the cream-creator would turn up so nobody needed to visit anything so low as a retail shop. There is a tradition of tradesmen bringing fine goods for home perusal. It belongs to the ancient struggle of fathers or husbands wanting to control their womenfolk. Modern women prefer escaping – which, as feared by their husbands, helps them take lovers. But viewing luxury goods and trying on clothes and jewellery in private still happens.

  After taking an order, Pandora would later send along a discreet parcel. She could be selling from a barrow parked in the next street or from a hilltop palace built with the proceeds. Presumably reclusiveness suited her.

  However, I did learn that she supplied other beauty treatments. These gilded girls at the feast all had smooth legs and arms, similar manicures, pedicures and eyebrow shaping. Many hours were spent with the wise woman’s team of assistants; again, these facilitators visited houses and apartments. They would pamper several girls at a time or even the whole group, mostly without their mothers present.

  ‘Of course they can attend if they want. It is a social occasion,’ Anicia assured me. ‘We do let them have some fun.’

  ‘But while you are under the bean-meal face packs, you encourage your mothers to go out and visit their own friends?’

  ‘Good works take up a lot of their time.’ That from Redempta, pretending to sound pious.

  ‘They don’t want to hear their darling daughters scream during the plucks.’ Sabinilla this time.

  ‘And you don’t want to hear them telling you how silly you are?’ I challenged, with fellow feeling. ‘I know mine would say it.’

  ‘A critic?’ Sabinilla again, sounding genuinely curious. Who knows what subtle chord of sympathy had struck her.

  ‘Believes in natural looks – and in discouraging my younger sisters.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Two. Sometimes it feels as if there are six.’

  ‘What ages?’

  ‘Sixteen and fourteen. You?’

  ‘Three stepsisters: eight, seven and five.’ A second family, after divorce or death. Would awkwardness at home affect Sabinilla’s behaviour, I wondered. How long since she had lost her own mother? How did her fecund stepmother regard her?

  ‘The oldies can always have their own party, to get their chins tweezed and their wrinkles pasted over,’ giggled Ummidia, breaking up our brief heart-to-heart. The others shared her laughter. I simply waited for them to finish, aware that the mothers I had met today were as well preserved as anyone who had enjoyed good nourishment and a protected life.

  ‘I am amazed. You see a lot of Pandora and her organisation. Yet none of you have ever been to her premises?’ This only produced the blank stares with which I was now so familiar.

  I gave up on them. But first I pointed out quietly that if they were out to deceive me, it only suggested that the busy Pandora was involved in some way they thought worth hiding. For instance, it could mean they were sure Clodia Volumnia had purchased something from Pandora that would have been best left alone.

  They were unmoved.

  Iucundus had gone home. I went up to my room, where I sat, thinking.

  I had begun to understand how Clodia’s social group worked. I knew now what kind of young woman she would have become. She had aspired to be like the privileged, brainless, untrustworthy snippets I had just met. That should help me understand her motives.

  I needed to meet Numerius Cestinus, who stayed away today, but I had had enough of her other friends; I chose not to face that interview right away.

  He might not be like the others, Albia.

  Wrong! He would be just as bad, but with homespun Stoic parents.

  I did not expect Numerius to be homespun himself. The other lads called him ‘the big man’; it sounded like admiration of character, not physical size. No, Numerius Cestinus would be yet another athletic, slick-haired, money-spending casual bonehead. He played with the group. If he was like the ones I had met, I questioned his loyalty. He had dallied with Clodia, yet swiftly moved on to Anicia even though she was supposedly attached to one friend of his after dumping another. It said little for her and less for him. Let him wait.

  One thing needed to be remembered. Just because parents spoil their offspring then tut about their lifestyles, it does not mean those parents fail to love the awful children they have produced. Nor, perhaps, does it mean the children utterly despise their parents. There could be love. I should not utterly condemn either generation.

  Feasting had filled me up, but later I went out to the food-sellers I had bought from yesterday. I needed nothing, but I was on the trail of the potionista. Pandora might like to be elusive, but even witches must eat. She bought provisions somewhere. Witches know t
he horrid contents of their cauldrons; they don’t rely on their own stewpots.

  Someone like Pandora, with a professional interest in people’s love lives, might be a customer for fertility greens. I headed to the booth that was advertised by Min, the lord of virility. I found a short queue ahead of me. I recognised some neighbours. Nobody who had attended the Nine Day Feast of the Volumnii could possibly still feel peckish, but perhaps some were now after a lettuce aphrodisiac. The men would want to pretend they had natural prowess, the women were probably desperate to give their lovers more oomph. One way or the other, on the Quirinal it was salad evening. Perhaps later the clean streets around the Temple of Flora would resound as respectable inhabitants let rip with cries of conjugal joy …

  While I waited, I was dreaming. Even so, I noticed the man in charge size up the queue as he handed out his glaucous produce in a flurry of salacious banter. The assistant he complained about must have been around because he yelled into the back, ‘Customers! Get out here, will you?’

  This finally lured out his helper. Someone behind me muttered, ‘Oh, he’s hopeless, he just likes to chat! All he ever does is stand there asking, “Did you hear about that young girl’s death in Apricot Street?” We’re going to be here for ever!’

  Wondering how long the queue would now take, I gave him the once-over. Then suddenly my heart was churning. Lettuce had nothing to do with it.

  The assistant at Min’s booth was a sturdy piece of solemnity. He was dressed in a decrepit nut-brown tunic with loose threads hanging off its unsewn hem. He had grey eyes, plus a scar on his left hand that looked as if an assailant with a temper had speared him with a skewer.

  Catching my eye, he gave me a wink. I can take the usual barrow boy’s cheek, but not from this man. I knew him, the reprobate. He was my husband. So a mysterious condition had indeed drawn him to a new life – as a lettuce salesman.

  Apparently, he was no good at it. Customers complained.

  I did more than that. Unable to confront him while in shock, I flounced off to buy my supper somewhere else.

  19

  If I had still thought he was ill, I would have abandoned my case on the spot; sought help; taken him home … That wink said it: while he left me distraught, the conniving swine was enjoying himself in fancy dress. I couldn’t even bear to speak to him, certainly not in front of those people who were queueing for Min’s prodigal leaves. But when I did, Tiberius was for it.

  Moving on, I decided to take back their basket to the ladies who sold meats. I would ask them if they knew Pandora. Luckily they did. They supplied her address. Well, that was easy.

  Pandora lived south of the vigiles station-house, close to the New Temple of Fortune and New Temple of Hope. Perhaps that had inspired her working name, for hope was the one thing that remained in Pandora’s Box, after all the world’s ills had flown out. Hope is certainly what most women need for survival.

  On the way, I was hardly aware of scenery or landmarks. My mind was too full of Tiberius. It was clear he had spotted me. I myself had been so surprised, I could not tackle him until I settled down. If I still believed he had been taken over by a strange phase of illness, I might have wondered whether Laia Gratiana’s visit, with her talk of the Quirinal, had subconsciously brought him here. As it was, I knew she lured him here all right, but only because he was fascinated by the mystery she talked about. I cursed him, but I cursed her more.

  He looked well, at least. He looked like any dopy assistant at any local shop, being complained about in classic style by his master and everybody else. He had melded in at Min’s.

  Tiberius could do that. When I first met him, he was in disguise as the kind of disreputable runner you would cross the street to avoid; you would shun him even if it took you to where all the pigeons shat. He was rather good at this deception. He went about the Aventine, catching out people to fine for misbehaviour. A clerk had told me he was the most productive aedile anyone could remember holding the magistracy. His colleagues couldn’t decide whether to be jealous or to hate him for showing them up.

  Finding himself as a man of action instead of a playboy had led to his new business and marriage to me. Yet why live rough now, when he had an exciting home with a loving wife who was too brand new to be bothersome? As a tolerant woman, I did wonder. It was still possible that being struck by lightning had affected his personality.

  I had arrived at Pandora’s, so dealing with the rascal I had married would have to wait. I knew where he was. If I had tied myself to a fidgety insect who couldn’t stay on any leaf for long, I was stuck. Some husbands are like that. I couldn’t spend the rest of my life wondering where he was all the time. When I finished here, I would have to root him out from the lettuce stall and confront him about exactly how our marriage was going to work.

  Juno. That’s just the kind of thing men hate having to discuss.

  So – Pandora’s.

  Two girls in matching long white tunics lounged on an outdoor bench, waiting to lure passers-by into beauty treatments. I decided I needed a brow shape. They did ask satisfactory questions about whether my skin was sensitive (they could sell me an oil, it goes without saying, at five times what I would normally pay) or what design I wanted (they showed me unconvincing diagrams). I asked for a natural shape, though what I got was the same as they had themselves. I was already familiar with it from the group of girls I’d met today, and indeed Granius’ mother and Redempta’s aunt: a narrow pantile arc, which seemed to always turn out not quite level on the left-hand side.

  These were the kind of service providers who offered much, but could only do one thing. Like most, in fact. Like cauponas with a lengthy menu, but all they can offer is soup of the day. If you’ve ever tried to buy a couch, you know: you may as well have the one on display and demand a discount for saleroom damage. Otherwise, go ahead and specify your wood finish, your stuffing, your finials and your cover material, but it’s still the display model they will deliver, complete with scuffs from customers trying it out. And for that you pay top whack.

  I was a new bride and had become bitter about aspects of the domestic world.

  It is not easy to talk when you are braced against tweezer torture. Nevertheless, I managed to ask a bland question about how the beauticians worked for Pandora. They carried out treatments either here or in women’s own houses. If at home, Pandora came with them to supervise, but would sit to one side in a queenly manner while they carried out procedures or demonstrated beneficial ointments. Pandora let them do all the work, though she exercised tight control. She took the money, needless to say.

  Pretending I might use this at-home service myself, I asked for more details. These two, Meröe and Kalmis, were trained to push Pandora’s range, though they claimed only to show skin and hair products.

  ‘No waters from the fountain of eternal life?’ I joked.

  ‘No,’ they answered. There is no humour in the world of professional beauticians.

  I wondered whether to risk asking about love-potions. It was too soon. Meröe, who was the more cautious, stopped our gossip even though it had been harmless. ‘Your husband will be delighted with this look!’

  ‘He won’t,’ I retorted. ‘The swine ran off.’ I said I would have a manicure as well, speaking as if I badly needed to spend money to console myself. Possibly I could claim all this as expenses with the Volumnii, though I might have to fudge it. ‘Vital purchases on obs’ is an informing ledger entry. I learned it from my father, who had it from a slick accountant; I believe he was investigating the man for fraud.

  ‘Oh, you poor dear!’ The brow and nail experts took an interest. Misery always works. It gives them scandal they can use for entertaining other clients. ‘Do you think you will find him?’

  ‘I know where he is. All I need now is to spy out which bitch is he seeing there, and settle on what shall I do to her.’

  Working on me busily, the girls both sympathised. Passers-by, no doubt accustomed to this, walked in large circ
les, moving across to the other side of the road so as not to disturb what they could see was vital counselling. That was considerate.

  I lay back in the lounging-chair, staring at the sky as if planning murder. Picturing Tiberius would have been disrespectful to my marriage. Even though I had learned today it might not be as sound as I had previously fooled myself, I showed it respect and instead I remembered an old boyfriend. In my rogues’ gallery, several were crass or creepy, or indeed both.

  ‘Try not to upset yourself. If you get all worked up, you won’t be able to tackle him. You need to stay calm.’

  ‘And buy poison!’ I growled. It was worth a try, though for once, no supposedly fail-safe product from Pandora’s range was offered to me.

  They were sweeties. One was younger than seemed possible, given her skills, and one a lot older than she looked at first. Both were exquisitely painted in exactly the same way. I could now see that they had taught Redempta, Sabinilla, Anicia and Ummidia how to replicate this. All the women on the Quirinal were turned out as a matched set. I felt I was among a hundred mythological beings, indistinguishable.

  Still, there is always one who breaks away from the bunch. All I had to do was find her among these immaculate demigoddesses. The special one, who put her beauty spot on the left instead of the right cheek. Better still, the one who defied fashion, refusing to wear a patch at all. Once identified, she might break out of the clique and tell me secrets.

  I would not test the eyebrow girls too much, not at this stage. Luckily I had my chance elsewhere. Once we ran out of work to have done, we held the inevitable discussion of scrubs, packs and waxes. There was determined praise of radiance. Apparently, though, I carried my own inner glow so did not need as much assistance as their older clients.

  I agreed on the cheapest pot I could; my mother’s birthday was approaching, so that could be its destination. As I finished settling up, two women sallied down from an upstairs apartment. Each wore clothes that must have required a mortgage on a small farm. As a triumphal gesture, they both boasted those ludicrous high curly frontispieces of false hair that Domitian’s court had made fashionable.