afternoon, setting herself little goals each time: the bandstand, the fishing lake, the Tube station. She binned the takeaway leaflets and bought a stack of supermarket ready meals, which she told herself was progress. She searched the Internet for news of her case, though there was nothing. She took her pills.
And then the letter came.
She almost threw it out. The address and the postage were both printed on the envelope: it looked like another reminder from TV Licensing. But it had her name on it, and she was grateful for anything that proved she still existed to the outside world.
It wasn’t a demand from TV Licensing. It was a single sheet of paper, with three lines of text typed in the centre.
Jenny Roche
36 Bartle Garth
York
VI
A LIFETIME WITH Constantine has allowed me to form certain opinions. One is this: that the secret of greatness is escaping the past. The past is a fog, always trying to smother you, a chorus of cavilling voices counselling caution, restraint, moderation. A reproachful ‘No’ with the full weight of history.
A great man is dissatisfied with the world and impatient to improve it. The past’s a messy impediment. A great man wants to rationalise the world, to remake it in the image of his own clarity.
That’s why Constantine never liked Rome. Too much history. Too much mess. Temples built of mud and reeds, palaces overshadowed by tenements. In our youth, when we were taught how Julius Caesar grew up among plebeians in the Subura, I could see this jumbling of the natural order appalled Constantine. Grandeur and disease, divinity and squalor all tangled together. Too much history, too many ghosts.
I don’t like Rome either.
Constantinople gave Constantine a blank canvas to start afresh (not literally – there had been a town here for a thousand years, Byzantium – but another aspect of greatness is the ability to see only what suits you). And so the new city, Constantine’s city, fits his vision of how the world should be. It stands on a promontory, not a marshy river basin. It progresses in orderly grades along the peninsula: plebeians out by the land walls; then the middling sort, merchants and
Or that’s the theory. In practice, the city’s only five years old and already it’s beginning to deviate from Constantine’s plan. Weeds have sprouted in the tiered garden he laid out: a tenement block somehow growing in the space between two villas; a grand house sold and converted into apartments; jumped-up merchants muscling in on an upscale neighbourhood. I imagine it causes Constantine more grief than barbarians or usurpers ever have.
I walk up the Via Mesi towards the palace. In my hand I clutch a paper scroll, a list of the men who were in the library that afternoon, as much as the porter could remember them. I’ve spent the last two hours interrogating the men who were still there and not learned a thing. Nothing seen, nothing heard. No one recognises the monogram necklace. A part of me whispers this might all be some elaborate hoax.
But the blood on the desk was real enough, and there are names on my list I haven’t yet seen. Starting with that notorious hater of the Christians, Aurelius Symmachus.
Aurelius Symmachus lives suitably close to the palace, as befits his impeccable status. His doorman looks at me in disbelief when I announce myself: he can’t believe I’ve come alone. He cranes his head out so far looking for my retainers he almost falls into the street. Of course, he’s too well schooled to say anything. He admits me through to a peristyle garden surrounded by colonnades. White carp sit motionless in an oblong pool, watched over by a quartet of stone nymphs. In the shadows under the colonnades, I glimpse painted scenes of reclining gods. Dark heads watch me from the alcoves. Everything’s exquisite and strangely dead.
Aurelius Symmachus emerges from a door, glancing over his shoulder as if midway through a conversation. He’s a short, stout man who walks with a stick. He’s almost bald, though white hair sticks out in tufts from behind his ears. He’s wearing a toga: he must be getting ready to go somewhere, though for the moment it just enhances the impression that he’s an anachronism. But his jaw is firm, and the eyes that watch me are as clear as diamonds.
We exchange pleasantries and size each other up. I suspect he dismisses me as a jumped-up soldier who’s risen beyond all reason on a great man’s coat-tails. He probably thinks I see him as a fossil of an order that passed a hundred years ago. Neither of us is entirely wrong. But neither of us has lived as long as we have without keeping an open mind.
‘Were you at the Egyptian Library this afternoon?’ I ask.
His stick scratches the ground, leaving a snake trail in the dust. ‘I was.’
‘Why?’
‘To read.’ He cocks a bushy white eyebrow, as if to say
‘Who were you reading? Hierocles, maybe?’
‘Not today. Seneca, I always go back to, and Marcus Aurelius. They speak to our age.’
The mask on his face hasn’t moved. Neither has mine. His stick still draws patterns in the dust.
‘What do they say?’ I ask.
