“I was told that the distance is walkable.” Helena looked miserable.
“Time to own up, lady. Is that true?”
“You always said you wanted to live on the Janiculan Hill-with a view over Rome.”
“So I did. Very nice. I saw a superb gangster’s house there oncemind you, he had excellent reasons for guarding his privacy.”
The house Helena had bought was the other side of the Tiber: secluded, you could say. If it had a view as she promised, I knew it must be an upland property. Every day when I returned home in the evening (I would obviously not bother nipping back just for lunch as I did now), the last part of the walk would be up a steep hill. I could manage that, I told myself. I had lived all my life on the Aventine.
“We can afford our own litter now,” Helena ventured nervously as we drove past the Theatre of Pompey and rattled over the Agrippan Bridge. This was already further out of the city than I normally enjoyed tramping.
“If you want a social life, we’ll need one each.”
The house had tremendous potential. (Those deadly words!) Renovated-for it was suffering about twenty years of total neglect-it could end up truly beautiful. Airy rooms led from lofty corridors; attractive interior peristyle gardens separated pleasingly proportioned wings. There were good polychrome geometric mosaic floors in the principal rooms and hallways. Old-fashioned, slightly faded frescos posed interesting problems: whether to keep them or invest in more modern designs.
“It had no bathhouse,” Helena said. “There is a spring, luckily. I don’t know how the previous owners managed. I thought it was essential to have our own facilities.”
I gulped. “Gloccus and Cotta?”
“How did you guess?”
“They sound likely candidates for a job that can easily go wrong. I don’t see them here.” I could, however, see their various piles of ladders, litter, and old lunch crusts. They also had a large trade plate advertising their services, which had pushed over the welcoming herm at the entrance gate. No doubt they would reerect Hermes for us before they finally left.
I jest. The situation was clear to me. These were, without question, boys who left a trail of destruction in their wake. Snagging, in this contract, would mean employing a major contractor to put right everything that these smaller folk had done wrong-and all they had ruined which they should never have touched. There was nothing new or surprising in this situation. It is carefully worked out in the builders’ guild. It is how they perpetuate their craft. Every time one comes in and ruins your home, the next in the chain is guaranteed work. Don’t try to escape. They know every trick the luckless householder can pull. They are gods. Just leave them to get on with it.
“Gloccus and Cotta are never here,” Helena replied in a taut voice. “That, I am forced to admit, is their big disadvantage. If I tell you I bought this house before we went to Africa-”
I smiled gently. “We went in early April, didn’t we? We were there nearly two months?”
“Gloccus and Cotta were supposed to build the bathhouse while we were away. It was a simple construction on a clean site and they had told me they were free to program it in. It was to take twenty days.”
“So what happened, fruit?” She was so dismal it was easy to be kind to her; I could wind her up later, once she had provided the ammunition.
“I expect you can imagine.” She knew how I was playing this. Helena, who was a stalwart girl, took a deep breath and recounted the odyssey: “They were late starting; their previous contract overran. They have to keep returning to Rome for more materials-disappearing for the rest of the day. They need money in advance, but if you pay them up front as a courtesy they take advantage and vanish again. I gave them a clear list of what I wanted, but every item they supply is different from what I chose. They have broken the white marble bowl I ordered specially from Greece; they have lost half the tesserae for the hot-room floor-after the first half were firmly laid, of course, so the rest cannot now be matched. They drink; they gamble, and then fight over the results. If I come here to work on other parts of the house, they interrupt me constantly, either asking for refreshments or announcing that I have a problem with the design that they did not foresee… Do stop laughing.”
“What’s the fuss about?” I was now openly doubled up with mirth. “ These seem like prime delights from the world of contracting-and what’ s more, Pa found them!”
“Don’t mention your father!”
“Sorry.” I took a grip. “We can sort this.”
Helena was beginning to show her panic and despair. “Marcus, I cannot get anywhere with them! Every time I take them to task, they just admit they have let me down in an intolerable fashion, apologize cringingly, promise to apply themselves diligently from now on-then vanish from sight again.”
I had caught her eye. Relief at involving me was softening her tragedy. It was a mess, but now she could cry over it into my tunic braid. Just knowing that she could admit the truth to me was making her brave. “Good thing you live with a man who never beats you, Helena.”
“Oh, I am grateful for that. I would be happy if you restricted any teasing too.”
“Ah, no chance, sweetheart.”
“So I thought.”
Looking rueful, she let me caress her flushed cheek. She was wearing a dark red dress with a bevy of bracelets to hide her forearm, scarred where a scorpion had bitten her outside Palmyra. Due to our early start that morning her fine dark hair was simply tucked in the neck of her tunic; I reached around and started pulling it loose. More relaxed, Helena leaned her head against my hand. I gathered her close and turned her around to survey the property.
It was the hour of the morning when the sun’s heat first begins to strengthen as it fires up for a blazing day. We gazed at the fine twostoried house, with its satisfying rhythms of repeated arched colonnades below shuttered windows on the upper floors. The exterior facade was regular, and so fairly plain, with small red turrets on each corner and a porch with low steps and two thin pillars to break up the frontage.
A nervous white dove fluttered onto the pantiles; probably it had nested messily up in the warm roof space, though the roof in fact looked sound.
The grounds, in which the famous bathhouse was not being built, hosted a terrace with stone pines and cypresses, unkempt topiary dotted through a sloped area, and near the house the usual box hedges and trellises. Graveled paths, with most of the gravel missing, led in a determined way from gate to house and then wandered about the gardens, pausing now at the detached site of what Helena had planned as the bathhouse. What the property lacked in pools and fountains would provide plenty of scope for a schemer like me to design and install them (and tear them out again after a child fell in). It was very peaceful here.
I twisted my belt around so the buckle would not dig into Helena as I held her tight against me, looking over her shoulder and nuzzling her neck. “Tell me the story.”
She sighed. “I liked it as soon as I saw it,” she said, after a moment, speaking quietly and with the direct honesty I had always adored in her dealings with me. “I bought it for you. I thought it would delight you. I thought we would enjoy living here as a family. It was in decent condition, yet there was plenty we could do to make improvements in our own taste when we had time and the inclination. But I see it is a disaster. You cannot be so far from Rome.”
“Hmm.” I liked it too. I understood just what had made Helena choose this place.
“I can sell it again, I suppose. Build the bathhouse, then pass it on as a ‘newly renovated home of character- fine views and own baths.’ Somebody else can discover that Gloccus and Cotta have failed to install a working soakaway.”
“And that the new hypocaust leaks smoke.”
Helena squirmed around to look at me in horror. “Oh no! How can you tell?”
I shook my head sadly. “When boneheads like Gloccus and Cotta install them, they always do, love. And they will leave the wall flues blocked up with rubble-and quite inaccessible-”
“No!”
“As sure as squirrels eat nuts.”
She covered her face and groaned. “I can already see the scroll with the new owner’s compensation claim.”
