shared laughter, ruefully and with their heads together, like children giggling at a rude word.
‘Well,’ Lucilla assured him kindly, ‘I shall protect you. But Vinius and I are not as close as you think. We never even speak these days.’
‘I find that odd.’ Nemurus sounded sarcastic, as he rose to depart. ‘Especially as the man is standing in the shadows over there, observing us right now.’
Lucilla refused to look that way, but she made a point of jumping up and kissing Nemurus on the cheek before he left her. Startled, he made a clumsy half-response, but she dodged that and sat down again.
She remained waiting on the bench, pulling her light stole up over her hair and rearranging the bangles on her arm.
As she expected, Vinius came into the open and marched over.
‘Cosy scene. Does he want you back? He bears gifts, I see!’
‘Rather out of character. There must have been a remainder sale.’ This was disloyal to Nemurus but Lucilla hoped to distract Vinius. ‘Ovid. The Art of Love contains advice for women on how to look attractive — “a round- faced girl should pile her hair in a topknot” — hardly news to a trained hairdresser.’ At the end of the poem, Lucilla happened to know, were extremely frank lists of positions for lovemaking. Some she would never have thought of. Most seemed feasible. She wondered: had Nemurus been using this book as pornography? ‘This will interest you, Vinius — Ovid was exiled, for mysterious reasons, which may involve promiscuous relations with the Emperor Augustus’ raunchy daughter. They stuck him in Tomis which is, I believe, at the far edge of Dacia.’
‘Poor bloody bugger!’ exclaimed Vinius forcefully.
Lucilla tightened her grip on the scroll and rattled her bangles again. ‘Why are you spying on my ex- husband?’
‘The man does not concern me.’
‘So I told him. But you once went into a lecture he gave?’
‘Just curious. When you were married, did you have to knit his socks?’
Lucilla tried not to react. ‘His mother makes them. Vinius, don’t menace him; leave him alone, will you?’
‘Oh, have I got him worried?’ demanded Gaius cheerfully.
‘Don’t abuse your office. I rely on you to be fair.’
‘Fair?’ Rely?
‘Your decency was the first thing that struck me when you worked with the vigiles. Vinius, I want to believe in you. There have to be good men, when everyone swims in a sewer of treachery.’
Gaius listened, looking unemotional.
‘I wish you were back there,’ Lucilla told him in a morose voice. ‘You made your own choices. You were aware of human failings, yet you stood for enlightenment. You were honest. You were even kindly.’
‘Within reason.’
‘I would take your reason over Domitian’s fake benevolence any day. Don’t lose your humanity.’
‘You think I changed?’
‘Dacia changed you.’
‘ You changed me.’
‘Do not blame me. Working for the Emperor is your own choice.’
Gaius thought Lucilla’s assessment was right. Society had tipped up and gone topsy-turvy. While Domitian pretended to nurture correct behaviour, he undermined it. Everyone now behaved like shits. As the despot supposedly reinforced Rome’s moral system, he was destroying it. He, Vinius Clodianus, was helping. He was an instrument of the police state. He had taken the oath. He accepted the not inconsiderable money. He followed orders.
In doing so, had he lost his own values and his independence?
Lucilla stood and began to walk away. She did not give Vinius the farewell kiss she had given Nemurus; Vinius noted that bitterly. As she marched off to find her friends again, he called out one last appeal.
‘Flavia Lucilla! I don’t suppose you have ever considered that somewhere in all the years we have known one another, I might have fallen in love with you?’
Lucilla stopped and looked back. Since people had told her he was still married to Caecilia, this soul-baring did not endear him. ‘Never!’
‘You might give it thought.’
The last thing Gaius wanted as he strode away in the opposite direction was for a wraith to manifest itself among the monumental architecture, then to be confronted by her bloody husband.
‘Clodianus!’ cried the ghastly Nemurus, as he popped up like a ghost in a bad Saturnalia story. ‘I take it amiss that you destroyed my marriage, stole away my wife — yet you have not had the decency to make her happy.’
The man was ludicrous. When seen close up he was also much younger than the fusty, self-neglecting academic that Vinius wanted to envisage. Nemurus must be similar in age to Lucilla. He looked as if he might even throw a ball around at the gym, though probably one stuffed with feathers. He bit his fingernails, perhaps absent- mindedly while reading.
‘Not my fault!’ retorted Vinius. ‘I would have taken her on — the poor girl deserves some excitement — but she loathes what I stand for.’
‘I heard that,’ Nemurus exulted. Vinius cursed. It was doubly annoying for a spying Guard to discover he had been spied on. ‘You need public speaking lessons. Decorum, man! Telling a woman you love her ought to be an act of worship — not hurled at her as a punishment.’
This was where Vinius became tempted to abuse his power. He was too frustrated to hold back. He lowered his voice and threatened Nemurus: ‘ I have seen your name on a list. ’
Nemurus, no actor, was visibly perturbed.
‘Luckily for you, it is not my list.’
Nemurus could not know whether to believe this: if any list really existed; if so, what list it was, or whose; or what Vinius proposed to do about it. That was how fear worked these days.
Whether or not Nemurus had been denounced, his panic told Vinius that he must be guilty of something, even if it was unprovable chicken-stealing. Nemurus had just given himself away before he was even under suspicion.
‘I do not descend to the personal,’ claimed Vinius piously. ‘If I am ordered to exterminate you, you’re done for. But I don’t lean on people without evidence. What is your secret, by the way? — I bet I know. I bet you are an undercover republican. Or are you a conspiratorial philosopher? What’s your fancy? Cynic? Sophist? Stoic?’
‘I am slightly unnerved to think of the Guards studying ethics.’
‘You would be surprised!’ Vinius boasted with relish. ‘Know yourself, the old sphinx said — and I say, know your enemy. I produced a memo only the other day to warn my troops that not all philosophers wear convenient beards, so watch out for a devious mentality too. For example, we know the stoic creed is avoidance of anger, envy and jealousy… Would that apply to you?’
He had guessed right — not difficult, because most educated Romans with a liberal outlook were apt to call themselves stoics.
‘How can I look at you and set aside those regrettable emotions?’ Nemurus fought back.
‘Believe me, I see you and feel anger in enthusiastic quantities — though I am not troubled by envy and jealousy,’ returned Vinius as spitefully as possible. ‘Sadly, Flavia Lucilla has enough reasons to despise me. Perhaps I shall not add another by arresting you.’
Perhaps…
Nemurus tried to engage him: ‘Flavia Lucilla assures me you are not malicious.’
This was what nobody could know about anyone any more. Who would act ethically? Who would destroy others before others could destroy them? Who would do it for a vengeful reason? For amusement? For the Emperor’s favour? For money? Or to save their own neck? Who for no reason at all?
Vinius laughed bitterly. ‘Oh she thinks me a dumb soldier.’
Nemurus looked him up and down. He raised one eyebrow; he did it far too archly, being awkward socially.
‘ Does she?’
He taught oratory. As a young man, he himself had taken lessons at the fine Quintilian school. He knew how to pose a rhetorical question to be subtly destructive, causing doubt to linger with his hearer for a long time
