sufficiently competent to forge a “guardian’s” signature!’
‘I meant, Nemurus taught me to read literature.’
‘Oh that’s lofty!’
Nemurus. She’s married an intellectual. Have to give him the once-over. The bastard.
Gaius had noticed that this room contained scrolls. Not in fancy silver boxes, but either in boxwood, or no container at all, just collections tied around with ribbons. Written works as owned by people who either lacked cash or were too miserly to go for expensive containers, but people who read for pleasure.
Out of his league. Out of his sphere of knowledge, anyway. He really had lost her.
‘And how are you finding marriage?’
‘Oh, we exist in a state of mutual exasperation.’ Lucilla’s answer was honest, apparently satirical. ‘Absolutely normal, I suppose.’
Gaius stood up. Time to be leaving. Lucilla jumped to her feet too, running from the room to fetch his door key as promised.
Out in the corridor he took the key on its old wire ring, which he stuffed in a pouch on his belt. At parting, he offered his hand, feeling her shock at his weak grip. His knuckles looked too large for his fingers. He had lost his rings, stripped off him by his captors in Dacia, she realised.
Gaius then turned Lucilla’s hand over, opened her palm and closed her own firm, slim fingers over his mother’s earrings. ‘I want you to keep these.’
Lucilla said nothing, once more too close to tears.
From the door he turned, asking sadly, ‘Are you happy, Lucilla?’
She thought about that. ‘As happy as anyone.’
‘Oh,’ replied Gaius. He sounded depressed. ‘Not very, then!’
So that was it. Whatever it was, or might have been.
Gaius had been in love with a memory for four years, but it was all a mistake. Well, it had kept him going.
Lucilla was too polite to say that when she had first walked out into the corridor, she almost failed to recognise him. She was so upset and confused, she never managed to say all she should have said to him.
Once he left the apartment, it was too late.
Gaius Vinius reported for duty with the cornicularius.
Staff officers in the headquarters unit, the Praetorian Prefects’ back-up team, were responsible for all it took to quarter, feed, clothe, arm, locate, discipline and, where necessary, bury ten thousand men. He was first allocated the lowest, least-coveted role, looking after the property of the dead. It had been neglected for years. He was put to work on the backlog, which he did not object to, since it involved colleagues who died at Tapae. Identifying bequests and rooting to find legatees, even writing the sad letters to friends and families, was his kind of job.
Gaius buried himself, diligent and methodical, but the task affected him more than he realised. Finally he pulled up short when he came upon the unfinished affairs of his old centurion, Decius Gracilis. He went to his room and wept.
For two whole days he kept to himself, wrecked. Luckily, no one noticed.
Shaking off the misery, he took his unease about the centurion’s will to the cornicularius.
‘So how much is involved?’
‘Savings, plus property in Spain. Some kind of business.’
‘Tell you what. We’ll split the cash, you sell the land, then we’ll go halves on that too.’ Though uncertain how to take this, Vinius saw he had been a fool to speak. ‘Only joking. Halves won’t do. Normally the split is eighty- twenty in my favour. Just check that he never wrote a will.’
Vinius moderated wrath that welled up on behalf of his lost centurion. ‘Oh Decius Gracilis was a stickler. There is a will.’
The cornicularius growled. ‘Why bother me then? We do not override the testaments of our beloved deceased comrades. Tally up the value, pay the putrid inheritance tax to the putrid Treasury, then hand over the loot to the heirs.’
The officer misunderstood why the new boy felt leery, arriving here and straightway handing a bequest to himself: Gracilis had left everything to him: ‘my deserving beneficarius, Gaius Vinius Clodianus’.
For some reason, when he came back from Dacia he started using all his names. At the Camp from now on, he was Clodianus. A weak attempt to distance himself from what had happened to him.
Clodianus pulled himself together.
‘Right, sir. The loot goes promptly to the heir. Actually, Cornicularius, my feeling is, our regular split should be sixty-forty.’
‘You’ll go far!’
‘Very good of you to say so, sir.’
I suppose you want my putrid job?
Just looking, sir.
The cornicularius was not all bad. On the verge of retirement, he was a rough gem of limited talent but very long service, who had been posted here when the authorities ran out of other options. Nevertheless, he made few mistakes — that is, few that came into the open; he was liked, as far as anyone liked staff officers.
He knew men too; he was a good superior. He now allocated time for a pep talk with Clodianus, whose vulnerable state he had identified. Even though he must be cursing the powers that had dumped this disturbed soldier upon him, he leaned on his tall desk, acting friendly and fatherly: ‘Four years in captivity must have been hard.’
‘I’ll get over it.’
‘Word of advice — that’s exactly what you will not do, son. Don’t fool yourself; don’t keep waiting to recover because, soldier, it is never going to happen. Your experience in Dacia is part of you now, and the only way you are going to cope is if you roll with it.’
His new man, surprisingly, accepted the wisdom. ‘I hear what you say, sir.’
‘Good. I don’t want you cracking up on me. We have quite enough head-cases around here… Anything else?’
Vinius spoke meekly: ‘Quick technical query, if I may, Cornicularius. I’m trying to grasp the headquarters scene… Is “putrid” the new word?’
‘It’s my word, soldier. I don’t allow fucking swearing in this office.’
Vinius returned to his work-station. His superior’s slightly surreal sense of humour was just like his father’s. He still did not want to be his father, but this calmed him, at least temporarily. Now he knew for sure he had come home.
He thought he was fine. But he began visiting too many wine bars.
The first time Vinius Clodianus was sent to Alba on duty, he tracked down Nemurus. The teacher of philosophy and literature. Staring at Nemurus during a public lecture, he found out that Lucilla’s putrid husband wore bifurcated socks.
Clodianus took this morosely. She was a woman of taste, now that she could afford the trappings; she had natural elegance. She would see her mistake one day.
Socks! And I bet he can’t screw her properly.
Men like that don’t even realise they are useless.
No, but she will. She’s had the real thing.
19
Domitian became more cruel. Commentators, writing afterwards, assigned this to the year of the Saturninus Revolt and the Dacian treaty, either a bad reaction to Domitian’s betrayal by the German legions and his suspicions of conspiracy, or inability to take criticism heaped on him for buying off the Dacians. Certainly the joy Domitian hoped would greet his return failed to materialise. His brooding presence simply depressed everyone. He knew it.
