`Well do you believe,' she leered at him, `his name seems to just escape me.'
`You're a lying little flirt,' Petronius told her, fairly pleasantly. He put away the note tablet. We stepped out into the street with her jibes ringing along the narrow passage at our backs.
`So that's a brothel!' Petro said, and we both nudged each other, grinning at an old joke from the past.
We had hesitated, lacking plans. We should. not have laughed. Laughing on a brothel doorstep can lead to disaster. Never do it before you have taken a careful look in both directions down the street.
Somebody we knew was coming towards us. Petro and I were already helpless. It was too late to make off discreetly; far too late to look less like guilty men.
Approaching down the narrow lane, crying loudly, was a little girl with big feet and a dirty face. She was seven years old, in a tunic she had outgrown months ago; with it she wore a cheap glass bracelet that a kind uncle had brought her from abroad, and an extravagant amulet against the evil eye. The evil eye had not been averted; the child was being dragged along by a small, fierce old lady with a pinched mouth who had an expression of moral outrage even before she spotted us. Spot us she did, of course, just as we two emerged like utter layabouts from Plato's Academy.
The little girl was in deep trouble for playing truant. She was glad to see anyone else she could drag down to Hades with her. She knew we were exactly the distraction she needed.
`There's Uncle Marcus!' She stopped crying at once.
Her jailer stopped walking. Petro and I had been reprobates in our youth, but nobody in Rome knew that. Petro and I. had not been stupid. We were reprobates abroad.
We had just blown our cover. My niece Tertulla stared at us. She knew that even bunking off school after her grandma had pinched and scraped to pay for it failed to match our disgrace. We knew it too.
`Petronius Longus!' cried the old lady in frank amazement, too horrified even to mention me. Petro was renowned as a good husband and family man, so this disaster would be blamed on me.
`Good afternoon,' murmured Petro shyly, trying to pretend he had not been chortling, or if he had it was only because he had just heard a very funny but perfectly tasteful story about an aspect of local politics. With great presence of mind he embarked upon explaining that we could not make ourselves available to escort people to a safer neighbourhood, owing to a message he'd just received about a crisis over at the station house.
At the same moment a flying figure whom I recognised as my fraught sister Galla came hurrying down the lane crying, `Oh you've found the little horror!' Galla spent half her life oblivious to what her children might be getting up to, and the rest in guilty hysterics after somebody stupid had told her.
`I found more than that!' came the terse reply, as a pair of unmatchedly contemptuous eyes finally fixed themselves on me.
There was nowhere to hide.
`Hello, Mother,' I said.
XXII
WHEN I WALKED into my apartment I found someone standing in the doorway from the balcony. Her dark hair shone in the sunlight behind her; she had left its warmth immediately she heard my football.
She was full of grace and serenity. She wore a simple dress in blue, with a late October rosebud in a pin on the top seam. If she had used perfume, it was so discreet that only the favoured fellow who kissed her neck would be aware of it. A silver ring worn on her left hand showed her loyalty to whoever he was. She was everything that a woman should be.
I gave her a courteous nod.
`People will be racing to tell you,' I said, `that Petronius and I spent an hour in a brothel near the Circus Maximus this afternoon. It's famous for offering disgusting services as bribes to the vigiles. We were witnessed coming out nudging each other guiltily, and with happy grins.'
`I know,' she said.
`I was afraid of that.'
`I dare say!'
The slender links of one bracelet slipped over her fine wrist as she lightly held a scroll. Her feet were bare. She, who should have been cushioned on swan's-down amidst some great man's marble colonnades, had been reading in the warm sun, high above the squalor of the Aventine where she lived with me.
I selected a cool and formal tone. `People overreact sometimes. I was with Petro when he reached his own house and couldn't make his wife answer the door. A neighbour shoved her head through a shutter and bawled, 'She's taken the children to her mother's and your dinner's been thrown at the cat.' I had to help him pick the lock. He loves that cat; he insisted on going in to look for it.'
She smiled. `Every hero should have a tragic flaw.' I happened to know she didn't care for cats. I suspected she despised heroics too.
I thought it best to maintain a serious approach. `Despite his pleading, I felt unable to escort him to fetch Arria Silvia from her mother's lair.'
`Did you leave him by himself then?'
`He was all right. He had his cat…' Something caught in my throat. `I wanted to make sure you were still here.'
`I'm here.'
`I'm glad.'
It was mid-afternoon. I had been as quick as possible, but I had gone to bathe. Now I was clean. Every inch of me was oiled and scraped, but I felt as if I walked in grime.
`Were you worried?' I asked.
Her dark eyes were fixed on me with a steadiness my heart was failing to match. `I do worry when I hear you're in a brothel,' she told me in a low voice.
`I worry when I go into a brothel myself.' For some reason, I suddenly felt clean again. I smiled at her with special warmth.
`You have to do your work, Marcus.' There was a shade of resigned amusement lurking deep in Helena Justina's gaze. It seemed to me she had deliberately placed it there. While she waited for me she had taken her decision: either we could fight, and she would only end up feeling more wretched then when she started, or she would make it be like this. `So what did you think of the brothel?' she asked quietly.
`It was a dump. They didn't have a monkey. I wouldn't take a senator's daughter near the place.'
`The monkey in the one we ran through was a chimpanzee,' she reminded me. Her tone was serious, but the seriousness was a joke.
Sometimes we did fight. Sometimes, because she wanted me too badly to use reason, I could make her quarrel bitterly. Other times, the intelligence with which she handled me was breathtaking. She set trust between us like a plank, and I just walked straight across.
I could see a very faint twist at the corners of her mouth. If I chose to do it now, with merely a look in my eyes I would be able to make her smile.
I crossed the room. I came right up to her and took her by the waist. A slight colour stained her cheeks, echoing the unopened rose pinned to her dress. As I had suspected, the perfume was there for somebody who knew her well enough to come close enough to treat her tenderly. Not many had ever had that privilege. I breathed slowly. A whisper of cinnamon crept over me, not just any perfume, but one I particularly liked. It was fresh, only recently applied.
I let myself enjoy looking at her for a while. She enjoyed herself letting me drown gently in old memories and new expectations. I must have dropped my hand without intending it. I felt her fingers entwine in mine. I drew up
