by Paul Waters
We were drawing close to the rabble from the tavern. One of them, falling-drunk, called out to Equitius because he knew him.
Equitius cursed under his breath. ‘Listen,’ he said, stopping in the street, ‘you don’t want to get caught up with this lot.’ He looked at me. ‘Shall I say anything to Durano?’
One of the soldiers cat-called; and when I looked, made a lewd unmistakeable gesture. I suppose he thought I was some clinging bath-boy Equitius had picked up and could not shake off. My face burned. It filled me with shame to be taken for such a creature.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Leave it.’
‘As you wish. Well, I must go.’
He hesitated. Then, leaning forward he kissed me on the cheek; and outside the tavern the drunken soldiers cheered, and whistled through their fingers.
Three days passed. I could not settle to anything.
Equitius, in his straightforward way, had shown me what I could not, or would not, face. I felt the absence of my friends. I realized, now that it was too late, that I had assumed Durano would be waiting when I was ready to return. I grieved – for time wasted, and words left unsaid.
But then Balbus received the deeds to his new villa, and announced he had hired a pleasure-barge to take us upriver.
‘Leave me in London, sir,’ I said.
But he cried, ‘No, no; come and enjoy yourself, my boy; you have been looking peaked these past days; the change will do you good.’
The barge was my aunt’s idea. She summoned her friends to see her off, and they stood on the quay beside the dock-workers, vying to outshine one another in their fine jewels. Volumnia was at the front, in a low-cut dress and an array of rubies set in Keltic silver, wearing one of her blonde German wigs. She cast a pinch-faced glance at me, and snapped her head away when I looked. I was loathed by all Lucretia’s friends.
The oarsmen pushed out. Lucretia took her place under the garlanded canopy, and I went to sit at the front beside the anchor, away from her ceaseless chatter.
At another time, I daresay an escape from the city would have pleased me. But I was in no mood for Lucretia and Albinus. As for the villa, I took little interest, not knowing then what it would bring for me. It was a pretty enough place, run-down, with rain-stained, pink-washed walls, set within an old orchard. It lay down a dusty track, about a mile from the river. A small tributary brook flowed on the eastern side, shaded by a thick line of rowan and willow.
We passed under the gateway, into a walled inner court thick with unkempt bushes of yellow honeysuckle. The stables and outhouses, which filled one side of the courtyard, stood abandoned and broken; but the agent, on my uncle’s orders, had travelled ahead to tidy the main house. Hearing our approach he came hurrying from within – a dapper, fast-talking city man – just as Lucretia was stepping down from the curtained carriage.
She scowled at the stained and flaking walls, and the ruined outhouses dense with brambles and nettle. ‘What are all these plants?’ she enquired, fluttering a hand at the chaos and decay.
‘An aspect of farming, madam,’ answered the agent quickly. ‘It can soon be cut back if the lady requires it, and of course the house can be repainted . . . But we were advised’ – with a nod at Balbus – ‘that you may wish to make changes, to modernize and decorate, and with a new mistress such as yourself, who is known in London for fashion and refinement, I did not think it my place to impose my own tastes upon the property without consulting you.’
Her aggressive expression softened. The agent, seeing she was taken in by this patter, continued talking, at the same time conducting her to the porch, where the servants were waiting in an obedient line. I left them and wandered off to explore. Albinus came following grumpily behind.
He had sulked all the way from London, and bickered with his mother. He hated the country; why had she forced him to come, when he had things to do in the city? The motion of the barge made him feel sick. He was too hot. He was hungry. He was bored. Eventually Lucretia, reclining on a pile of silk cushions under the canopy, while she picked languidly at a bowl of sweets, snapped at him that he was spoiling her special day, which she had looked forward to all year, and if he was hot he had better put his hat on. At this he threw the hat in the bilge and came up to the bow to sit with me, and grumbled under his breath about her.
So today he was my friend. Now, seeing me wander off, he came trailing after me, with many a backward resentful glance at his mother.
‘Wait, can’t you!’ he cried as I stepped out beyond the courtyard.
I waited, kicking at the grassy pathway while he snatched, cursing, at his sandal strap, trying to free a stone.
To the east, following the edge of the grounds, the brook looped round a low, wooded hill and disappeared northwards between fields and woodland towards the river. Nearer the house, in what must once have been gardens, there were overgrown remains of terraces and crumbled trelliswork. The whole place had an air of lush desolation, and I half expected, if I dug through the rampant shrubs, to find forgotten dried-up fountains and the marble plinths of statues.
‘Where are you going?’ demanded Albinus. He glanced back at the house. Through the courtyard archway, the servants were unloading Lucretia’s baggage. I could see his mind working in his sulky face: she liked to know where he was. He was considering whether to tell her, or punish her for being sharp with him. After a moment he sniffed and hurried on after me, slapping irritably at the overhanging branches as they caught his hair. Just then the desire to irk her was uppermost.
The path narrowed and steepened. We came to steps cut into the rock, old and foot-worn and soft with moss. On one side, down a slope of rowans and fern, I could see the brook glittering in diffused shafts of sunlight. Someone had built a dam of boulders and branches, and a pool of clear water had formed behind, a perfect place to swim.
‘You swim if you want to,’ muttered Albinus. ‘I’m not going in there.’
He hated water like a cat.
We went the other way, climbing the steps. At the top of the hill the path opened into a clearing dominated at its centre by an ancient brown-barked yew, surrounded by oaks and twisting hazel. I paused and looked about. There was a pleasing balance to the place, like the precinct of a temple.
Albinus, meanwhile, had gone wandering off, and after some moments I heard him call out, in a voice tinged with disgust, ‘Come here! Look at this!’
He was standing on the far side of the yew, beside a great block of rectangular stone, frowning down at it. The sides were rough and lichen-covered; but the surface, I saw, had been carefully smoothed, and at the edge there was a shallow channel.
‘It’s an altar,’ he said, twisting his face with distaste. He traced his chewed finger-end along the line of the groove. ‘See? This catches the blood, and over there is the run-off. Filthy pagans! I hate it here. Why did Mother choose this place?’
Lucretia, in her haste to acquire a country villa, had not thought it necessary to come and view; and Balbus, who was not interested, had left everything to the agent.
I picked at the pale-green lichen. As I turned, something caught my eye. On the ground lay a garland of forget-me-not, bound with a sprig of straw. The flowers had scarcely begun to wilt.
Deciding it would be best to keep this find to myself, with a tap of my foot I eased the little garland out of sight, into a thicket of tall grass at the base of the stone. But Albinus had an eye for the surreptitious. ‘What’s that?’ he cried, snatching it up. He peered at it; then cast it to the ground and trampled it with his heel.
‘Why do that?’ I shouted at him.
‘It’s horrible! It’s an offering, no doubt from one of those miserable house-slaves. I thought there was something sly about them. Wait till Mother hears; she will turn them out before nightfall.’ It was an aspect of Lucretia’s religion not to have any servant in the house who did not believe, or profess to believe, what she did. At the house in London, only the Spanish cook seemed to have escaped this rule
.
Albinus now became suddenly animated. He began pacing up and down, peering about in the sun-dappled clearing in case there was something else to find. The sun had scorched his nose during the journey, leaving a red blotch between his brows. His thin lips were pressed closed with indignation – an expression he got from his mother – and as he strutted about he prodded clumsily at the undergrowth with his foot. He looked, I thought, like some light-hating creature, dragged out unwillingly in daytime from its lair.
I said, ‘You don’t have to tell her, you know. It was just a garland, just flowers. Anyone could have left it.’ Then, deciding to employ a little of his deviousness, I picked up the trodden flowers and added, ‘If we wait a few days we may discover who left this, for surely they will return, and then you will catch them.’
He narrowed his eyes at me. After a moment his mouth formed into a smile.
‘Yes, a trap,’ he said. ‘You shall keep watch and report what you see. Do you understand? And then I’ll decide whether to tell Mother.’
‘Just as you say, Albinus.’
I walked off. After a moment, with a cry for me to wait, he followed.
We arrived back at the villa to a great commotion. The servants were rushing about, looking fearful and bewildered; from within I could hear Lucretia’s scythe-like voice, lashing out, and the agent in between, attempting to reason with her.
I thought at first it was something the servants had done; but as I entered through the atrium I heard Lucretia shout, ‘I don’t care if it is fine work or not, get rid of it. I shall have no sleep till it is gone. I cannot rest with it here.’
She must have heard us. She rushed from one of the inner rooms, followed by the pale-looking agent and Balbus.
‘Where have you been?’ she cried at Albinus. ‘Did you not hear me calling?’ This was mere ritual complaining; her heart was not in it. Albinus started to answer, but she pushed past him through the doorway behind, into the dining-room. ‘See this obscenity!’ she cried pointing, her voice rising in pitch as her anger possessed her, ‘I cannot bear it! I will not live in a house that is not decent.’
Full of curiosity, we followed her in through the high doorway with its pilasters of red marble.
The dining-room was spacious and light-filled, part square, part oval, with a large curving bay facing westwards and bathed in afternoon sun. There were couches and a table – for the dining furniture had come with the house. Where the dust-sheets had been removed, I could see the decorated cushions of rich dark-red damask, with a pattern of ivy-twined urns picked out in green and gold.
But Lucretia was not concerned with the furniture. Her staring eyes were fixed on the space behind where, half in shadow, a trompe-l’oeil fresco filled the wall. Within a cascading border of creeper-twined columns and garlanded lyres, it showed an outdoor dining scene of couches and tables, set among shading cypress trees. The diners, having finished their banquet, had turned their attention from the overladen tables to one another. A man sat entwined with two adoring girls on one couch; two youths lay on another, with an older woman laughing in between, all semi-clad in falling silks and festive wreaths, while from the shadows on one side naked Bacchus looked on from a vast wine-krater, goat-legged and smiling.
It was a lush, sensuous scene, vivid and over-ripe; but there was nothing gross, nothing that was not human; and the work was, as the agent had protested, finely done.
But Lucretia would have none of it. ‘You told me the house was decorated with taste, but everywhere I look is an invitation to sin and debauchery. Why was I not warned?’
The agent made a helpless gesture. Clearly he saw nothing wrong.
‘I will tell the decorator to touch it up,’ he said.
‘Touch it up?’ she cried. ‘Touch it up? I want it chiselled off, all of it, chiselled off and buried. Every room is an offence.’
Balbus caught my eye and looked away. Albinus said, ‘What debauchery?’
‘Don’t start!’ she snapped, rounding on him. ‘Why didn’t you come when I called you? Anyway, the bedroom is far worse.’
She was right. In the main bedroom, opposite a large heavy bed-frame, another fresco had been painted in the same style, but this time instead of revellers there was Pan – hairy, horned, point-eared and priapic, pursuing an epicene youth.
‘Is that a girl or a boy he is chasing?’
‘Don’t be prurient, Albinus!’ She turned to the agent. ‘You see? Already my child is corrupted. It must be removed at once, all of it, cut away, filled in, plastered and painted over. I wonder that you recommended such a house – what kind of woman do you suppose I am? What kind of family lived in such a place?’
‘I believe the owner lived alone, madam.’
‘I am not surprised. See to the work, and get out of my sight.’
But in the days that followed, while the house was full of the sound of masons’ tools and the reek of paint, the previous owner seemed to prey on Lucretia’s mind. She cross-examined the servants; but they were slow, rural folk, made halting and inarticulate by her hostile questioning – or so they affected in her presence. The old Master, they said, had been a kindly man. He had removed to Italy, to somewhere near Naples, where the weather would suit him better. He had liked to entertain when he was younger; no, they could not recall a wife; certainly no wife had lived with him at the house, though there were many friends who came and went. He was often away, for he liked to travel. They could not comment on his religion, and her questions on this subject seemed to bewilder them.
‘But my dear, what does it matter?’ Balbus said to her eventually.
‘It matters to me,’ she retorted.
Balbus, who knew how to read the danger signs, said no more.
But Lucretia’s fantasy of country life had been shattered. From that day, everything was wrong. Each painted urn and ornamental border, each dancing figure or scene of woodland calm, carried for her some hidden hateful meaning which she strained to discover; and soon the meandering patterns, and dryads, and river vistas were lost under a veil of bland whitewash, or, if they were mosaics, of damp-smelling raw plaster.
Next she discovered a colony of ants in the atrium; then she complained of the silence, which unsettled her. The slaves, she said, were slow and stubborn, and she had already quarrelled with the housekeeper, who was, she declared, a stupid, vicious woman.
It was Albinus, with unusual insight, who revealed what lay behind her ill temper.
‘There is one thing,’ he said to me, ‘she did not think to bring.’
‘What’s that?’
‘An audience. Maria and Placentia and that old bitch Volumnia are not here for her to impress, and what pleasure is there without it?’
I laughed. He even laughed too, with his odd, braying fox-bark noise. No one could say he did not know his mother.
Lucretia’s irritation was increased by Balbus. He had not wanted to be parted from his work, but now he seemed to be enjoying himself. He made light of her complaints; and then, one day, he announced that he intended to go hunting, like a country gentleman.
‘Hunting? Whatever for? Can’t you send one of the slaves? I shall not go.’
‘No, my dear, of course not. You stay and see to the decorating. The house is looking much better; I told you not to fret.’
And so, one morning at dawn, he assembled a team of footmen and set out on an aged stubborn hack, which the agent had sold to him. I watched from the top of the honeysuckle wall as he lumbered off, with the men spread out around him, holding nets and sticks to beat I know not what wild animal out of the tall grass.
Before midday he was back, with dirt in his hair and grazes on his elbows. The horse, when he had encouraged it with a switch, had cast him off into a bramble thicket. I saw it following some way behind, led in disgrace by one of the grinning bright-eyed beaters.
There was no more hunting.
Most of my days I spent swimming in the clear water of the dam-pool, and dozing afterwa
rds on the bank beneath the willow branches.
It was here, one afternoon, when the shadows were lengthening, that something happened for which I have tried to seek answers since. But still I have none. So I tell it as it was.
I had swum, and was lying naked on the slope, when I was roused from my half-sleep by the sound of footfalls kicking through the dry leaves. I listened with half an ear for Albinus’s reedy voice summoning me; but no one called, and soon the footsteps ceased.
Somewhere above, a bird stirred in the branches. Then, close by, a female voice said, ‘Greetings, young satyr.’
I bolted upright. A crone was gazing down at me, her face dark and weathered like old wood, her sharp green eyes appraising me like a hawk’s. She had spoken in British – the ancient language of the land.
I looked for something to cover me, but my tunic was still on a rock beside the water. She chuckled at my confusion and eased herself down beside me, laying her rough-wood walking-stick across her lap.
‘Who are you?’ I demanded, embarrassed, and angry at being disturbed.
She looked over my naked body shamelessly, dwelling on my chest and legs and groin. She seemed ancient beyond measure; yet her eyes were quick and young, and oddly luminous, like moss caught in sunlight.
When she was ready she spoke, saying, ‘I keep this place.’
‘You do not. It is the property of Lucius Balbus the merchant, or have you not heard?’
At this she merely laughed, which annoyed me.
‘Where do you live?’ I said sharply. ‘Where have you come from? Are you a servant of the house? I have not seen you there . . . Well? Why don’t you answer?’
She spat casually on the ground beside me.
‘It is you,’ she said, ‘not I, who is the intruder here.’ She paused. ‘Whom do you serve, satyr of the woods?’
‘Why do you call me that?’ And then, when she did not speak, ‘I serve no one. I am a free man.’
She laughed, and in a gesture that was almost girlish flicked her long grey hair back over her shoulders. ‘Then think again, child. We all serve, if we are wise. What matters is whom, and how.’