Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  ‘No, of course not,’ agreed Drusus regretfully. ‘I want you to tell me how I can help.’

  ‘All right,’ said Marcus. He stopped briefly to face Drusus. ‘We’ve had as many people die in fires this summer as we lost yesterday on the Wall. We don’t seem to be able to do anything about these forest fires in Terranova and Gaul, and there have been some terrible house fires around Rome, too. I don’t know when I’m going to be able to read the reports. It would help if you could do that: find out if it’s arson, if it’s because of the heat, if there’s something that’s not being done. I wondered if the people who should be working on it have got too isolated from each other. Can you get them together and find out?’

  Drusus did not answer at once, although his face remained fixed unnaturally in an expression of friendly eagerness to help. ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘Of course I’ll do that. But Nionia – what does Salvius say about our next move?’

  Marcus turned away again and walked on. ‘Our next move is waiting to see how the Nionians respond to the message I sent this morning.’

  Drusus face began to rearrange itself slowly into a detached, quizzical look. ‘Oh?’

  ‘About peace talks in Bianjing,’ explained Makaria.

  Now it was Drusus who stopped in his tracks. He stared at Makaria. ‘Is that even an option at this stage?’ he demanded, and then broke briefly into a run to catch up with Marcus again.

  ‘Well, obviously it’s an option, Drusus,’ retorted Makaria.

  ‘And you won’t listen to another view, Marcus?’

  ‘I have, I will,’ said Marcus, with faint violence.

  ‘Isn’t this rewarding them for an attack against us?’

  ‘We seem to have killed an awful lot of them,’ interjected Makaria again.

  ‘It’s hardly a reward,’ said Marcus. ‘I don’t know if they’ll even trust us enough to listen. It wasn’t something they were expecting.’

  ‘Well, how do you know that?’ asked Drusus, sounding very reasonable and adult now. ‘If it’s because they couldn’t have known you’d be in charge, then isn’t that an admission that this isn’t what Uncle Titus would do?’

  Marcus stopped again, struggling to sound equally rational, for he felt like shouting, ‘That doesn’t mean anything.’ The sleeplessness of the night before was battering his eyes. ‘I don’t know what he would do. I can’t do things for that reason.’

  Drusus passed a hand over his face. ‘No, I know you can’t. But there has to be – there must be – discussion. You do need advisors, Marcus.’

  ‘I know I do,’ Marcus said.

  ‘I’ve been thinking. We had better meet every morning.’

  Marcus began to walk again. ‘I’m meeting someone now, Drusus. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well,’ protested Drusus, ‘if you’re having a meeting, shouldn’t I be there? If our uncle has asked me to advise you, that’s an instruction to you as well, isn’t it? Or do you propose to ignore it?’

  ‘I’ll be back in an hour. This isn’t a Palace meeting. I’m going over to Transtiberina.’

  ‘Oh, Marcus,’ said Drusus, finally openly exasperated. ‘Don’t waste everyone’s time. Whoever it is, pull him over here. He can’t very well refuse, can he?’

  ‘He might,’ said Marcus, walking ahead with Una, leaving Drusus decisively behind.

  But Una lagged along beside him, looking back over her shoulder.

  *

  Varius was at his desk. There was no breath of air from the windows at his side, and he felt a treacherous little urge to make sure they really were wide open, to go and see if they could be pushed any further. He resisted it. He could remember opening the windows. He mustn’t start doing things like that, checking things he knew he had done. He did not look up from his work.

  The sterilising boiler was broken. They needed – they always needed – more money. He was trying to school himself out of a slight impatient disdain for these tasks. They were not beneath him, as he realised he was dangerously close to feeling. They were important.

  In the corridor outside his office he could hear two of the doctors talking in distracting detail, because his door was gaping open too. Sulien and the others who worked in the clinic had learned that this did not necessarily mean he wanted anyone to come in.

  So he got up now, went briskly to the door and pulled it to. But before he had even reached his desk again he knew it was useless; he had such an oppressive sense of being locked in that he could attempt nothing until he’d turned and pushed the door open again. He even had to walk through into the corridor, smile pleasantly at the doctors – it would be unfair to ask them to be quiet; they were tired, they weren’t doing anything wrong – before turning back.

  Oh, stop this now, he thought irritably, standing in the centre of his office. These habits that had grown upon him – it was as if someone were repeatedly making an insultingly obvious point, and would not be silenced, no matter how doggedly Varius answered yes, yes, all right, I understand.

  He saw the doctors walk past his door, leaving the corridor quiet, and was able to concentrate again. He arranged for the boiler to be repaired; he wrote a letter.

  His wife had died. He had been locked up, interrogated. He had expected to die as well. More than that, he’d been convinced of it, deliberately so; the certainty of death had been a weapon, a tool, a consolation, finally. But then everything, everything, he had expected had been overturned. Or had just been wrong, not to mince words about it. The aim of it all of course had been to make him say where Marcus was. And he had done so, in the end.

  He was sick of thinking and thinking over it, for years now, trying to see exactly how it had been done, how it could have gone differently. He thought of it as like taking apart an engine, say, or a clock, neatly and methodically, breaking nothing, displaying the separated components, as he had heard torturers displayed their implements at the start of the session. But then, when each part lay tidily, separate, flat – and although all this had been done on the reasonable understanding that it was final – the pieces were somehow made to re-assemble, and they did, and the thing still largely worked. But now in each joint was the proof that this need not be so, that it was not inevitable that the clock, the engine should run. It – he – knew that it could stop at any time. Whenever it liked.

  Torture had been one of the things he had expected, which had not happened. Not exactly, not as such. Varius did not think the things that had been done to him qualified. But torture, and the ways he had tried to prepare himself for it, were part of the structure of things now, subtly tangible, everywhere.

  So about six weeks into the foreign and inexplicable time afterwards, while he was still navigating the daytime by striding around the city, as committed as if it were a job – it was about then he’d started noticing how difficult it was to tolerate a room for long without clear and certain ways out. But he had tolerated it; he had made this stop – for months, for more than a year, which seemed to count for humiliatingly little now. He’d given himself no time, to care about windows or doors or the things he’d been forced to know about himself, because he was feeding the clinic. Marcus’ parents had wanted to build a place where ill or injured slaves who might otherwise have been left to die could be treated for free. It had nearly come to nothing after Leo and Clodia’s deaths, and everything that followed. It had been left so fragile, so endlessly and querulously hungry – even more for his time and thoughts and strength than for money. And at first he did not feel that he had much of any of these things, except for time, but the need was so bad that he produced them somehow, although wearily and dutifully to begin with, as if he didn’t really expect anything to come of any decision he made, any sum of money he spent. But the walls went up. The place was real, it worked. Varius had been amazed, even exhilarated. And it occurred to him: no one needs to be happy, only interested. That is all that’s required. And the excitement and relief at the thought were, for a little while, almost happiness in t
hemselves.

  But he kept uneasily remembering what Gabinius had promised him, during the worst time of his life: you will feel better one day. He did not entirely like the fact that the prediction seemed to be right. It was something Gabinius could not be made to surrender, even in death – a wisp of power.

  Surprisingly soon after his wife’s death he’d found that people began encouraging him to look at other women, even tried to arrange meetings for him with sisters or friends. When a year had passed – almost the day after the anniversary, it seemed to him – this small mutter of suggestions became suddenly clamorous and insistent. To his outrage, his parents joined in. They would drop a young woman’s name into conversation and start innocently praising her, and then they would make him come to some small party and the young woman would be there. They would try and steer him towards her, leave them alone together. It was the more galling because they really seemed to believe that he did not know what they were doing. Varius resisted, out of fury at first, and later, when he was still angry but more resigned, on principle and out of habit. He reminded himself that his parents were trying to help; he did not always give the others so much grace.

  He met another widower, once, who blurted out, nearly weeping, ‘You lose friends, don’t you? People avoid you. I suppose they think it’s infectious. Don’t they?’ Varius was surprised by this, and did not know how to answer, because though it was true that his group of friends had quietly thinned, he knew that he was the one who had done it, and not only to those who tried to matchmake him. It wasn’t that he liked being alone, quite the contrary; the little time he spent at home in the evenings before going to sleep was horrible. But it was Gemella that he wanted then; remembering what you were supposed to do with other people was possible, but tiring. He had spent most of the time in the prison, and at Gabinius’ house, trying not to be a person at all. The best thing was to be – as he was at work – in a room in a building full of people that he liked, but who diluted one another.

  But perhaps he had paid more attention to his parents and the rest than he’d thought, or at least that was one of the ways he could account for what he’d done. Why hurt someone so unnecessarily? Was it a sort of arrogance, that because the clinic was going so well, because all this time had passed and things were all right, he’d believed that this was another thing he could just do? As well as the more obvious reasons of physical need, and the quiet at nights.

  Octavia still lived in his building. Coming and going they greeted each other civilly, but even after eight months she looked so miserable at the sight of him that he thought, sooner or later one of us will have to move. What had happened between them had finished almost at once, but it had been no less disastrous for that. Even now he couldn’t shake the tainted feeling that Gemella was no longer the last woman he’d touched, made love to.

  She must have been in the flat next to his for weeks before he noticed her one afternoon, crouched outside her door, desperately sorting through a little heap of things she’d laid out from her bag. In a vague way he realised that she was attractive, more clearly he saw that her face was taut with panic.

  ‘Are you locked out?’ he asked.

  She looked up with an agitated nod. ‘Would you let me try your key …?’ she began, then uttered a little gasp of angry self-reproach. ‘That’s not going to work, is it?’ She went through her possessions again. ‘My family’s coming,’ she said with a certain grimness. ‘Oh, they’ll love this. Do you know a locksmith?’

  ‘They cost a fortune if you want it done the same day.’

  ‘Really?’

  He doubted she could afford it; the flats in the block were small and cheap. The salary he paid himself now was less than what he’d earned as Leo’s private secretary. ‘Don’t worry.’ He opened his own door, let her follow him in and went out onto the battered little iron balcony, which overlooked only a yard with a single tree and some dusty cars.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’ll go through and let you in. Your windows aren’t locked, are they?’ He’d put his foot on the bottom rail.

  ‘What? You’re not going to climb across? You can’t, you’ll kill yourself,’ she said.

  ‘No, I won’t.’

  In fact, as he stepped over the railing onto the outside edge, he felt how it would be to drop, twist in the air; he saw an improbably garish swoop of red blood as the ground below smashed up through him. He sighed. These abrupt visions of possible deaths – always violent and usually slightly ridiculous – offered themselves to him annoyingly, on the prompting of the most ordinary incidents and sights: pens, bottles of cleaning products, razors of course, and knives of all kinds, the electric hedge-trimmer he saw a slave using on the Caelian. Often the flashes seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with him. A fence post, for instance, flung into the air by an unexplained explosion, hurtling like a javelin across the street and pinning him to the wall through the heart – this when the sunlight was pleasant, the day was going well and he didn’t especially want any such thing to happen.

  ‘Come back. I mean it. Please,’ said Octavia behind him.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he assured her. He stretched his arm around the corner of the building to grasp the bars of Octavia’s balcony and stepped easily across. They were only two floors up. Probably he’d do no more than break his legs. In any case he knew he wouldn’t fall.

  He walked through a sparsely furnished flat, bleaker-looking than his own, and opened the front door to find her standing there, looking both intensely grateful and appalled.

  ‘Thank you. Thank you, but if you’d fallen because of a key …’

  ‘It was fine, really,’ he said, walking back to his own flat and already forgetting about it.

  She called after him, ‘I’m Octavia, by the way.’

  He told her his name, and saw her face change very slightly. She’d worked out who he was.

  That week she had a copy of her key cut and gave it to him. ‘I do this all the time,’ she warned him.

  Later he discovered that she was divorced and that her family were vocally disappointed in her because of it. And it was true, she did seem to get herself locked out a lot. She also brought round letters of his that had gone to her by mistake. It seemed idiotic now, but for months none of this meant anything at all to him. He liked Octavia; he could sit in her kitchen sometimes and listen to her, and was glad to put off shutting himself in the flat and going to bed. The nights were worse now than before, because often he heard a baby crying overhead. He and Octavia could complain companionably about it to each other. But he scarcely thought about her when she was not there. Although she was the only one of his neighbours whom he had anything to do with, still his time at home was as small a part of his life as he could make it. Even when he was there for a whole day, he only thought of it as a place to sleep.

  One evening, though, home earlier than usual, he found he was climbing the stairs with a man who evidently lived on the floor above his own. It seemed they had spoken more than once before, for this man – around his own age, with a pale, prim face – called him Varius and knew about the clinic, but Varius simply couldn’t remember anything about him, could not even have picked out this face as being in the least familiar. He wondered if this might be the father of the baby, in which case the decent thing would be to ask about it, but the risk that this was someone else entirely was too great. He walked up the stairs as fast as he politely could, aiming just to get to his own flat without betraying the fact that he didn’t know the man’s name.

  The man knew Octavia too, which was not unexpected, Varius knew she wanted to be friends with everyone in the building; he thought that was the main reason he saw so much of her. Because of this though, he was a little surprised that the other man should need to ask after her.

  ‘She’s well,’ Varius replied.

  ‘Are you going to make it official?’ The tone was odd – trying to sound light-hearted, but faintly censorious.

&
nbsp; Varius made an enquiring noise, not realising they were still talking about Octavia.

  ‘Well, she’s … Octavia is a decent, a good – she shouldn’t be …’ Varius’ neighbour exhaled; he was genuinely bothered about this. ‘She must feel – not respectable. I don’t mean any criticism. But she’s plainly not happy.’

  ‘What?’ asked Varius, and realised not only what the man meant, but the reasons for it, in the same instant as he saw the other man realise his assumptions were wrong. They both blinked, and looked at the floor in confusion.

  ‘Did she say to you that we …?’ began Varius, alarmed at the idea.

  ‘No!’ interrupted the neighbour, hastily, blushing now. ‘No. But we thought – we always see you together. And she … Well …’

  ‘We’, noted Varius, so, probably married, and yes, probably the man with the baby; there weren’t that many couples in the block. At least that much was cleared up. ‘I see. No, Don’t worry about it.’

  It was December, but he went out onto the rickety balcony, looking across towards Octavia’s. He thought back over her visits with the post and for her keys and saw that they were transparently excuses to see him. He seemed after all to have registered certain things about her smile and way of talking to him, and kept them stored until he could attend to them, for he found he remembered their conversations more clearly now than he’d experienced them when they were actually happening. He could see her face more sharply, too, than he’d ever seen it when she was there.

  When he next saw her, he watched her with more attention than before, observing as facts that he did like her, that she was pretty, intelligent. And a good person. They walked together down towards the river. Now that he was alerted to it, it was clear what the upstairs neighbour had seen. There was a vividness about her that rose when she looked at him and slackened off visibly when she looked away. It was flattering, if a little baffling, to have that effect on another person. It made Varius feel obliged to her. She didn’t deserve to be unhappy because of him. When, between their two doors, they were saying goodbye, he bent his head to hers and kissed her lips. Startled and delighted she put her arms round his neck and they kissed more deeply, for longer.