The Course of Honour Read online

  On the third floor lived two separate families of equestrian rank who were enduring temporary shortages of funds. These good people felt no necessity to pass the time of day.

  On the fourth floor lived four brothers all engaged in running a second-rate gymnasium for third-rate gladiators. They constantly quarrelled with various strangers who rushed up from the street to complain when slops were sluiced from their windows on to clothes and heads. The law took a strong line on flinging down slops; however, in the Twelfth District, law took second place to huge men with brutal tempers who trained gladiators.

  On the fifth floor at the front lived Caenis.

  At the back were several other ladies on their own. Eumolpus said he liked female tenants because they were quiet, and keen to pay. their rent. Caenis soon worked out that Eumolpus was disappointed if they paid up in minted coin rather than by taking him to bed: she herself stoically paid him in coin, to his visible distress. The other ladies who shared her landing kept households that constantly ran out of flour or oil or salt. One or two could be abusive but on the whole they were a feckless, bleary, harmless group. Most were caring for infants of the tousled, gravy-faced sort who were put out for long periods on the stairways playing with surprisingly expensive toys while their mothers, who did a lot of entertaining, entertained.

  On the sixth and seventh floors above lived innumerable groups of people in several sad generations, crowded many to a room. To these belonged swarthy men with set faces who broke roads, stoked furnaces, and unbunged the sewers. With them lived weary, bowed, meticulously clean women, who looked sixty but were probably not yet thirty, women who embroidered marvellous scarves, threaded cheap beads, and stood at street corners silently offering penny packets of sunflower seeds for sale. Some of these families disappeared abruptly sometimes; others seemed to have existed in that place for many decades. They spoke strange languages, when they spoke at all, and occasionally burst into wondrous song. With them, more than anyone, Caenis felt a dark affinity.

  One of the painters from the Palace decorated her apartment with purloined paint. ‘I’ve sealed up the walls with new plaster as best I could,’ he told her cheerfully. ‘Hardly soundproof, but it might hold back the bugs.’ Caenis swallowed. ‘I take it you’re familiar with the mouse?’ She had seen the mouse.

  There had been much mention locally of Doris, the previous tenant of her rooms. Apparently this Doris had been a very peculiar girl. Caenis made no comment; she was peculiar herself – and probably proud of it. The oddest thing Doris appeared to have done was to rush screaming from the apartment when she first saw the mouse, threatening to take Eumolpus to court. Foolish people sometimes did that. It was very expensive; landlords learn the art of litigation with their mothers’ milk.

  When Caenis first saw the mouse she walked quietly on to her balcony until it went away. She stopped up its hole with depilatory wax, then watched in horrified fascination as it chewed its way straight out. Burrius, the painter, brought her some poison, which he said came from the private cabinet of the late Empress Livia; the mouse dropped dead before it had time to jump back from the saucer where Caenis had laid the bait.

  She had her few rooms painted the colour of mature honeysuckle flowers, a thin dry gold through which the pale plaster beneath seemed to gleam.

  ‘Want an erotic fresco in the bedroom?’ offered Burrius. ‘Satyrs with gigantic phalluses? Get your men in the mood? Nice?’

  ‘Nice; but no thanks,’ returned Caenis drily. ‘I’m having a rest from moody men.’

  ‘That’s very sad!’ commiserated Burrius. Like everyone, he knew her history.

  Caenis laughed. She bore no grudges against men. She regarded her past as fortunate. ‘The saddest part about it is the fact I do agree with you it’s sad.’

  Burrius thought about that. Any casual painter tries his luck. ‘I don’t suppose –’

  ‘Quite right,’ agreed Caenis mildly. ‘Don’t suppose!’

  Despite her own occasional depression and the constant amazement of her friends, Antonia Caenis lived in the Twelfth District for over three years. She was surrounded by life at its most varied, life at a level to which she dismally believed she belonged. Luckily she had never been afraid to be alone.

  She was sometimes afraid of going mad.

  ‘People who see the risk,’ Veronica assured her, ‘never manage to go mad, however hard they try.’

  Caenis simply recognised that she thought now, as she always had thought: life was hard; life was foul; but if you were too poor and too unimportant to have hopes of a heroic eternity in the Elysian fields, you must make the bitter best of it, for life was all there was.

  It was towards the end of the first year, when madness still seemed a vague possibility, that something happened which could well have tipped a less robust person into that long slide down into the desolate pit. She was walking in her self-contained way along the Via Appia towards home. She had been to see Claudia Antonia, the daughter of Antonia’s son Claudius by one of his enforced marriages. As his mother’s freedwoman, a client of the Claudian family, Caenis was helping informally with the young girl’s education.

  Returning home, her slaveboy ambled with her. Veronica had taken on the wistful little girl Caenis had owned in Antonia’s house, whose regret at the loss of Vespasian’s bribing coppers had grown too much to bear. So now Caenis had instead this boy, Jason, a dim but cheerful child, constantly ravenous, who carried up her water, carried down her rubbish, and on trips out loafed along behind her with a meat-pie in one hand and a truncheon slipping through his belt. He was supposed to be her bodyguard. Looking after Jason occupied much of her mind.

  It was a wild day at the end of spring. After a long spell of wet weather the streets were choked with mire. Picking her way to try to avoid taking in squelchy sandalfuls of mud, Caenis soon noticed irritably that the hem of her dress and mantle had been heavily splashed by less careful passers-by. At the crossroads where she would turn off the main highway she found herself in the middle of a curious crowd. The source of the commotion was not the normal dog fight or stall-holders’ argument.

  The Twelfth District was being visited by the Emperor.

  By this time Caligula had developed the startling mania for which he would become a legend. The previous year he had suffered a devastating illness. Rumours ran riot about what form this took – epilepsy, perhaps, or some inflammation of the brain brought on by stress. Whatever it was, once he recovered he had changed fully into the monster that had been merely foreshadowed before. He was ready to test his power to the limit – and there was no limit.

  He killed his rival, Gemellus. Son of Livilla, Antonia’s disgraced daughter and according to scandalmongers son of Sejanus too, Gemellus had been pushed aside by the Senate in the euphoria which greeted Caligula’s accession. Although Caligula had formally adopted him as a gesture assuring the family succession, his generosity soon gave way to suspicion and contempt. His own illness caused him to accuse Gemellus of plotting to seize power. He complained that Gemellus was afraid of being poisoned – a wise enough fear and that he constantly stank of antidotes (Gemellus was a hypochondriac, who regularly took linctus for a cough).

  Caligula had Gemellus executed. A military tribune sliced off his head with a sword. There was no antidote for that, as Caligula remarked.

  Shortly afterwards Macro, the commander of the Guards, was impeached for pandering his wife to Caligula, then forced to commit suicide. He had possibly conspired with Gemellus while the Emperor was ill – and had certainly reminded his protégé once too often of services rendered.

  The Emperor then declared himself a living god. Caenis thought privately that Caligula’s claim to be Capitoline Jove did founder on the fact that it was reported he regularly slept with his own three sisters. Caligula’s sisters were a frightful trio. The real Capitoline Jove would have better taste.

  Even before Caenis saw him on the Via Appia, she realised it was Caligula from the sneering pr
esence of the Praetorian Guard, strutting like spurred fighting cocks in their glittering breastplates and stiff red helmet sprouts. The trades-people craning their necks were suitably wary, more of the Guards’ dismal reputation than the man at their centre who was so incongruously dressed up as Jupiter. Caenis instantly recognised his high forehead and balding head. Hard to tell what the people made of that false curling beard, the bracelets, the face-paint and the stage thunderbolt; it was an insult to their intelligence, yet they seemed to respond with good-humoured sympathy. They stared at Caligula not because he was demented, but simply because he was the Emperor. Apparently they accepted his mania as matter-of-factly as they accepted the local cooper’s spastic child and the pastrycook who saw cockatrices biting his legs when he was drunk.

  Jupiter was enough in command of his senses to have noticed that conditions in the Twelfth District were scruffy. He was now enjoying himself, having a divine rant. The gracious god had been struck by the filth in the road and pavements, and to the delight of the populace, he was venting his fury on the officer who held public responsibility for cleaning the streets. Berating this man at Olympian length, Jove paused long enough to restick a corner of his beard that had in the heat of the moment come unglued, then ordered his soldiers, ‘Fill up the folds of his toga with this mud!’

  Caenis stood appalled. It was a terrible humiliation for an aedile – and she immediately recognised this one: Vespasian.

  Evil with malice, the Praetorians set to. Gleefully seizing potsherds from the clogged gutters, they began to scoop up mud and load it into the heavy folds of the aedile’s toga. He knew what he had done – and he knew the risks of offending a mad emperor. He stood meekly enough, arms outspread and head bowed before the rattling of the tinsel thunderbolt. It was a disgrace, but a light punishment. In a different moment of Caligula’s caprice he could as easily have called for an executioner.

  The crowd cheered. Caligula acknowledged the applause and passed on. The Praetorians reluctantly abandoned their sport and followed him.

  Left behind, Vespasian folded his arms to support the strange weight of his filthy garments. The crowd stilled. He made no attempt to shake free the clods.

  ‘Well, citizens –’ His voice carried grimly; people began to shuffle amidst their mirth – ‘we all know the system. Shovels out!’

  They all knew the system. In the ten days it would take him to arrange official contractors to do the work at their expense, each piece of pavement would be transformed by its frontager, rather than face a fine to pay the contractors; then the aedile would move on to harry the next district; in another two weeks all the mud and debris and donkey droppings would be back. The problem was not entirely his fault; the hallowed system had a great deal to do with it. Faced with their own responsibilities, the crowd diplomatically melted away.

  It had begun to rain. Jason started to dart across the road, but Caenis trapped him with a firm grip on the scruff of his neck. ‘Wait, sunshine!’ Absently he began to pick at the loaf she intended for lunch.

  Caenis stood absolutely still. Nonetheless she had been found by the aedile’s temperate stare. He was shaking off his personal slaves as they fussed around his ruined clothes. Across the five-yard width of the Via Appia her quiet eyes locked on to his. Vespasian had the grace to blush.

  And then, allowing his muck-encumbered toga to be plucked away by his dithering slaves, he broke into what she knew was his rarest and richest grin. He made no move to cross the street; neither did she. Very slowly, in disapproval of his public disgrace, Caenis shook her head. Then she spun neatly on the ball of her foot. Slim and straight, with one hand gripping the elbow of her youthful bodyguard, she slipped across the highway and disappeared into the impenetrable warren of streets on the other side.

  Flavius Vespasianus made no attempt to follow her.

  XVIII

  She had tried to forget. She had tried to stabilise her life. Now she was plunged once again into turmoil and loss. The worst part was how, even while the familiar wash of panic set her heart banging, she recognised that simply to see Vespasian had lit her life. All her being sang with happiness.

  Yet Caenis refused to feed on tragic foolishness. She knew she must reject such stupid joy at the mere glimpse of some man smiling at her in the street.

  Watching Vespasian take his native soil so curiously to his bosom had delayed her beyond the time when she usually reached home. Midday: the tiny children who sat on cut-down benches under the street-awning and chanted their lessons so automatically while their great eyes wandered from their master to any distraction, had now finished their sad torture and scampered home. Their desultory master was starting to furl the leather awning on a pole.

  The furrier had drawn and bolted his shutters, then retreated up the ladder to the backbreaking loft above his workshop where he lived with his family. The wineshop was still open; wineshops rarely closed. However, the three old men who habitually sat there had decided to drain the earthenware tumblers over which they had been dreaming for the previous two hours, and go home to whichever bent little wife or brawling, sprawling daughter normally provided them with lunch.

  Jason set off at once up the five flights of stone stairs. Caenis stayed behind, for somebody was waiting in the wineshop wanting her to write a letter about a will. Since she had her stylus case with her, she sat down at a stained table. The task was swiftly done.

  Caenis looked ruefully at the handful of coppers she had earned. ‘Just enough for a jug of my new Campanian!’ consoled the vintner. ‘Steel yourself for the stairs!’

  Campanian his brutal red ink never was, but for once she agreed cheerfully to being bamboozled. The vintner took a tumbler himself; he liked any excuse. The schoolmaster had now come in for what was obviously his regular midday tipple so with blissful expansiveness she offered him a drink too. Caenis had never lost her slave’s habit of sharing whatever she might have with those she regarded as her equals in low fortune. The vintner carried off his tot into the curtained nook behind the counter, leaving customers to plunder an amphora for themselves and deposit the money in a dish.

  Caenis and the schoolmaster sat for a while in silence. Caenis was lost in her thoughts. The schoolmaster leant forwards, twisting his winecup between both hands. He was obviously shy. He did not on this occasion feel able to stare at her.

  A well-trained secretary does not gaze silently into the distance for long. Caenis roused herself and dutifully asked the man how he enjoyed his work. He replied in gruff monosyllables. He looked about forty but that was because he had badly thinning hair; he grew the rest longer to compensate, but instead of appearing intellectual as he may have hoped, he merely looked badly groomed. He seemed unhappy and unhealthy – someone who regularly drank too much and ate too little, and who paid no attention to personal hygiene, exercise or sleep. It was well known that immediately after parents paid their fees he spent heavily, then towards the end of each term he ran out of cash. How he kept discipline remained a mystery for he seemed too indolent to use his staff and too dull to hold the attention otherwise.

  ‘Personally,’ suggested Caenis, who had been wanting to tackle this subject ever since she arrived, ‘I believe it is time traditional schoolroom methods were challenged. Don’t you agree?’

  She knew the traditional method was how he taught: the children recited their letters and numbers over and over, without illustration, without variety, a dreary daily singsong through one or another alphabet. ‘I was educated at the Palace; they wanted quick results. I have to say that when the Palace needs good secretaries its methods of obtaining them are excellent.’

  She herself had been blessed with inspired teachers. Every time she went by the nursery here, the sad, bored, patient eyes of these children caused her distress.

  Caenis had the rare gift of remembering what it was like to be a child. She wanted to explain to the schoolteacher how half his class were aimlessly repeating by rote what they had learned long before, though th
ey did not understand it, while the rest knew nothing at all but had the knack of joining in a second after the others spoke. None of them ever progressed. She wanted to encourage the man to devise some rapport with his charges. She wanted to convince him that he must be interested in what he was doing, so the children would be interested too . . .

  Most men are not keen to hear they are bad at their work. The schoolmaster changed the subject. He lifted her hand and placed it under his grubby tunic upon his private parts.

  Caenis could not immediately accept what was happening.

  Shock transfixed her. She could not bear it. She sprang up; the wine jug flew from the bench; she was furious.

  Partly, she was furious with herself. She had forgotten people were not neighbourly. Her time with Vespasian had made her too safe. Once so sensitive, she had just issued an invitation without a thought of how it could be misinterpreted.

  She felt ill with dismay. She was imaginative enough to realise her response would damage a soul that was already inadequate, but really there were times when an intelligent woman, with burdens of her own, needed to think of herself. Without a word spoken on either side the schoolmaster got to his feet and blundered from the shop. She saw the scorn in his eyes. She realised he had now brutally defined her – for himself, and probably half the neighbourhood: tense, teasing, frigid, mentally odd.

  She was more angry then, because she saw how easily men might deprive a woman in her circumstances of her self-esteem and her public confidence. It was true she carried within her a great pain. Even so, she knew she lived her life more vividly and with greater good humour than most people around her.

  Thanks to that, she was able to put aside all thought of this schoolmaster, his solitary world, his misplaced contempt, before she gained the third flight of stairs to her room. By then she was remembering only a face that was alive with sardonic intelligence. She was exulting in the frank, straight-forward, enduring friendliness of a man who had been her lover, a man she had once loved.