Counting the Stars

by Helen Dunmore

It was the story of the ideal son all over again, only perhaps this time there was a grain of reality in it. Catullus had even felt a certain pride as the responsibility was placed in his hands. Lucius was right: his father had become old. He had a perpetual tremor in his hands now. He rarely spoke of Marcus, but his bowed, shuffling silence was eloquent. Catullus had never imagined that the fearsome uprightness of his father could change so suddenly.

  An old man, weak but still obstinate. They got on no better than they ever had in those long weeks in Sirmio before Catullus left for the East. He stayed out of the house as much as possible during the day, walking the hills, seeing nobody. If he found Marcus anywhere it would be there. He could almost imagine that he would come round a bend in the path and see the two boys squatting in the dust, heads together, watching a slow-worm make its way into the scrub. Or they might be hiding in an olive tree, concealed by the dapple of sun and shade. But he was tired of his own imagination. He wanted Marcus, not some shade in his mind.

  He heard the shepherd boys calling each other from hill to hill. Sometimes he came on them, wild, dusty, ragged, their matted hair down to their shoulders. He would greet them respectfully, and they would stare. He wondered if they still fought the boys from the fishing village, and if the Lakers had a leader to plan raids on the shepherd boys’ camps.

  He would sit for hours in the shade of an olive tree, thinking of nothing, listening to the sheep in the distance, the cicadas and busy sparrows. Once or twice he heard a boy playing a pipe he’d whittled. It was a harsh sound, but it had its own sweetness as the wind carried the note away.

  He never felt his brother’s presence, although he longed for it. ‘Marcus?’ he asked once, but he heard his own voice fall away into the silence.

  Julia had gone to her father’s estate. He would visit her and ask her about Marcus’ illness and death, but not now. Later, when he was back from Bithynia. First, he wanted to walk where Marcus had walked, and see the places he’d seen.

  There was no baby. He realized how much his father had hoped that Julia might be pregnant, when he received the news that she was not. She put it delicately: ‘… our sorrow that the gods never chose to give us a child’. His father seemed to sag. Later he tried to be bluff, announcing: ‘It’s all on your shoulders now, my boy.’

  It was becoming real to Catullus that soon Sirmio would be his. There was no one else to lead the family, or to ensure that the line continued. His father expected it.

  Lucius was right. His father would not live more than a few years. They had never been a long-lived family. It was almost impossible to imagine Sirmio without his father there, directing the management of the estates, always vigilant, making greater what was already great. But Sirmio without his father would be a different place in another way. Slowly the pain and disappointment might leach out of it, leaving the linen clean. He might find himself eager to be there. He certainly wouldn’t have to entertain his father’s friends. No more lengthy visits from Caesar –

  Impious, he was. Unfilial. Imagine having a son like him. Catullus smiled. The thought of a son was beginning to gain on him, just as Sirmio was changing in his mind from somewhere that had his father’s identity branded on to it to somewhere that might become even more to Catullus than the lost and beautiful home of early childhood: his own place, here, now. He would like to show Lucius his son. And his father too, naturally, before he died. It would be like saying: Don’t be afraid. All this will go on. He could see himself putting the child into Lucius’ hands.

  He would call his son Marcus.

  Suddenly his mind stalled with grief. There was no Marcus. He could call his name for ever, and hear nothing but sheep and cicadas. His father was busy writing letters, making plans for the Bithynia trip, calling his son into the study every evening to go over contracts, contacts, figures and possibilities. They’d gone into everything, except the one thing that haunted both their minds: Marcus’ grave. That is, until last night, when his father suddenly started rubbing his eyes as if the lamp smoke was irritating them, and said, ‘Of course you will make the offerings.’

  Catullus couldn’t speak. He bowed his head, and his father snapped, ‘You heard me? The offerings.’

  ‘I heard you.’

  His father stopped rubbing his eyes and almost glared at him, his eyes inflamed. ‘You’ll do everything that is proper?’

  ‘You can trust me, Father.’

  Catullus turned away as soon as he could do so without giving offence. He felt as if he’d been running a long race, until his heart was swollen in his chest and close to bursting. All he wanted was to fall to the ground that covered his brother’s ashes. To kneel and cut a lock of his hair with a sharp knife, and place the offerings, and talk to his brother.

  Through many lands and over many waters

  I come, brother, for this sad leave-taking

  to give you what the dead ask of us

  and speak to your silent ashes.

  Since fate has torn brother from brother

  shamefully parting us for ever

  here, now, I follow our ancestors’ custom

  and tender your grave-offerings –

  take them, soaked with a brother’s tears.

  I greet you, dear brother,

  I say farewell to you for ever.

  ‘Ave atque vale… ave atque vale…’ He said the words aloud, kneeling on the earth by his brother’s grave. The words moved through the air, shadowing it. ‘You understand, Marcus,’ he said, ‘that words are all I can give you.’

  Twenty-two

  Shafted, both of them. A right royal shafting they’ve had, his Fabullus and Veranius too. Now they’re both back from Macedonia, where they thought they’d make their fortunes. They are poorer now than they were when they went out, utterly buggered by serving under that skinflint Piso.

  Get a staff job and get rich. And so off they’d gone, full of high hopes, optimism and greed, dreaming of bribes, private arrangements with tax farmers and lucrative little levies on exports. What the hell else do you go out to the provinces for? as Fabullus had remarked. They’d wangled the posting, just as Catullus’ father had wangled the posting for him in Bithynia, with good old Governor Memmius. And now they are all back with nothing to show for it. What a thorough buggering they’ve all had. Skinflint Piso has done the dirty on Catullus’ friends out in Macedonia, while incompetent, corrupt, tight-fisted Memmius has done the same favour for Catullus in Bithynia.

  Turned over and shafted to the hilt, it’s the same story with all of them. And now Fabullus and Veranius have lugged home their sackloads of zero, poor bastards. How do men like Piso and Memmius get away with treating their staff so badly?

  It’s like the old times tonight, all of them back together in Rome. Catullus isn’t here for long. A couple of weeks, and then he must get back to Sirmio. He’d been shocked, on his return from Bithynia, to see that the months had shrivelled his father as quickly as years might once have done. It was Lucius who ran everything now, deftly, with a tact that mastered his father’s uncertain temper.

  His father had welcomed Catullus. Not warmly, that would be too much to expect, but correctly.

  ‘You’ll find it good to sleep in your own bed,’ his father had said.

  The night before Catullus left again for Rome, his father had stayed up late, not really talking, because they never had anything much to talk about, but seeming to want to be with his son. Just before he went to bed he said something Catullus had never thought he would hear.

  ‘Don’t stay too long in Rome, my boy. We need you here.’

  He’d expected that Lucius would stay at Sirmio. After all, he was needed there, and he knew Catullus was coming back soon. But Lucius wasn’t having it.

  ‘You don’t look after yourself unless I’m keeping an eye on you,’ he’d said. ‘Look at you. You’ve lost weight out there. And how long have you had that cough?’

  ‘I’m not staying in Rome, Lucius. It’s only for a week or so.�
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  ‘All the same, this time I’m coming with you, to make sure I bring you home. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cursed myself for giving way over your going out to Bithynia alone. I couldn’t help thinking, when there was a storm, of all the salt water that lay between us.’

  Lucius’ phrase jolted through him. All the salt water. The dark sea, its crests plunging like horses. He’d stood on deck and stared out over the wastes of water, as spray made a fur of bubbles over his cloak and blew salt into his face.

  Marcus was in Bithynia and he would never see him again. Salt water would lie between them for ever.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘We separate from one another too easily, all of us. We don’t believe that the storm will come, and then it does. It was good to get your letters, Lucius. We’ve hardly ever written to each other, have we? I suppose it’s because we’re not often parted.’

  A faint smile crosses Lucius’ face, ironic and questioning. ‘In my view,’ he said carefully, ‘it’s better to be near those you love than to write to them.’

  ‘Maybe,’ says Catullus, also smiling, thinking of Clodia and those dozens of poems written to her. ‘You know, Lucius, when I read Sappho I think I’m uncovering the heart of the past, as if I could see through flesh and bone. But maybe it’s not true. What about all the others who stayed so near to what they loved that they never wrote a word?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Lucius, ‘write your thoughts down in words, and they’re not safe any more. They don’t belong to you.’ His boy will never understand that. The habit of silence that you get, being born a slave, is one of those things that gets into the grain of you. You don’t even want to let go of it. It’s a kind of power, that no one can ever see into your heart. Not even his boy, whom he loves more than his life.

  ‘I shan’t stay long in Rome,’ said Catullus. ‘Look after my father.’ You are my father, he didn’t say. My true father, who has given me everything that a father can give to his son. Even to him, it sounded impious, dangerous, one of those truths that should never be put into words.

  ‘No,’ said Lucius, ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘Gods, it’s good to be back in Rome,’ says Veranius, stretching luxuriously.

  ‘I’m not back here for long.’ Catullus doesn’t look up as he says it. Fabullus already knows, but no doubt Veranius and Camerius will make a meal of it. Sure enough –

  ‘Not back for long? What do you mean? Rome is home, have you forgotten? You can’t leave. Besides, you won’t want to miss the trial –’

  ‘Which trial are you talking about?’ he asks sharply.

  ‘The trial of the noble Marcus Caelius Rufus, of course. You can’t have not heard about it. Even we have, and we’ve only been back in Rome five minutes.’

  ‘It’s not even certain that there’s going to be a trial, from what I heard,’ says Catullus.

  ‘Oh, yes, there will be,’ says Camerius. ‘And guess who’s going to defend Rufus? Old Chickpea. I wonder how much that’s costing.’

  They are all looking at Catullus, waiting for his reaction.

  ‘Mind you, even old Chickpea will have his work cut out on this one,’ goes on Camerius ruminatively. ‘Sedition, assault, theft, murder…’

  ‘And conspiracy to murder,’ adds Veranius, watching Catullus.

  They think, of course, that he knows much more than he knows. But they are wrong, because he is not an insider in Clodia’s life any more. Rufus is alleged to have plotted to poison Clodia. Clodia’s position has shifted while he’s been away in Bithynia. The talk about her has a jeering tone that sets his teeth on edge. She has gone far away from him, into a highly coloured world of plot and counter-plot, poison and antidote, threat and counter-threat. It is her brother’s world, the element where Pretty Boy swims like a fish.

  And now, it seems that Clodia swims there too. She claims that Rufus tried to have her poisoned after she refused his request for money to get hold of poison to kill someone else. A conspiracy with as many layers as Hell itself.

  It would have sounded to Catullus like a melodrama written for the plebs, had he never met Gorgo. The scandal is swelling. Since he arrived in Rome two days ago, everyone’s been fighting to be first to tell him all about it.

  He refuses to react. The Clodia they talk about is not his Clodia. That is his only defence.

  ‘The word on the street is that it’s pretty definite there’s a strong case against Rufus,’ says Camerius. ‘Witnesses, and circumstantial evidence, and all that kind of thing. Clodia has made a deposition about the plot to poison her.’

  Poison. How has she allowed that word to rub against her name? Does she not realize how dangerous it is? Clodia seems to think that she’s invulnerable. But then, he doesn’t know what Clodia thinks any more.

  ‘It’s all politics, when it comes down to it,’ says Fabullus quickly.

  ‘Pretty Boy will be at the back of it somewhere, and half these allegations will collapse before they ever come to court.’

  ‘Of course they will,’ say the others, rather too quickly.

  ‘But all the same, old Chickpea defending Rufus is going to be too good to miss,’ adds Camerius. ‘You’ve got to stay for that at least.’

  ‘The estates need managing. I’m the only son now.’

  They are silent. Perhaps they think that he’s running away. Perhaps they are right.

  ‘But you’ll come back to Rome. Bugger it, you’ve got to come back. Your old man can run things, can’t he?’

  ‘He’s not well; they need me there.’

  He doesn’t want to spoil the reunion by talking about how much things have changed for him. It feels like a betrayal of them and of himself. He has made a life here in Rome, and it’s the life he dreamed of all the years of his adolescence. He’s become Roman, and what his life will be back in Sirmio, he can’t really imagine. Only his poems are left. Clodia has destroyed many things, but not his poems.

  No. Be truthful. She’s in them, part of them, indestructible. He won’t get away from her, any more than he can escape from the self that is in love and in hate with her. But in Sirmio, maybe he’ll find a little peace.

  I don’t ask for the stars

  for a return of her love

  for what cannot exist

  for truth or faithfulness –

  all I want is to be free from this sickness

  this soul-sucking corruption –

  He changes the subject away from his own future.

  ‘We ought to have taken lessons from Caesar and Mamurra,’ he says. ‘They could have taught us a thing or two about profiting from the provinces.’

  ‘Those two know how to fill their boots with gold.’

  ‘And we never even got any dinner invitations, while others –’

  ‘Others – Always others, never us,’ laments Veranius. ‘We get fucked over when every other aide comes back loaded –’

  ‘Maybe we made the wrong friends –’

  ‘We were serving under the wrong man, that was our problem. The meanest bastard in the whole of Macedonia just happened to be our boss –’

  ‘We were paying him for the privilege of licking his arse on a daily basis –’

  ‘And that’s certainly not why we chose to put up with the horrors – No, let’s put it more strongly – the deadly, tedious, vile abomination of provincial life. The only variety you’ve got to look forward to is an uprising by some tribe which refuses to get the point that it’s been conquered. All they want to do is stick a javelin up your arse –’

  ‘He went down on his knees as soon as we were off the gangplank and kissed Italian soil, didn’t you, Fabullus?’

  ‘I’m never leaving Rome again, I swear it. They get you out there on false pretences, with all this crap about how you’ll make your fortune from taxes and concessions –’

  ‘And then you’re forced to watch while all the gravy gets carried straight past your plate, hot and steaming.’

  ‘Yes, I had your
letters. Did you like the poem I sent you?’ inquires Catullus.

  ‘The poem! That fucking poem went the rounds. We were entirely discreet, as you can imagine,’ says Fabullus, ‘but somehow it got copied and then someone else made a copy of the copy, and so on. I’m amazed no one got court-martialled. In the end it was being scrawled on walls by the infantry.’

  ‘Let’s hear it!’ shouts Camerius.

  Catullus looks around. ‘I’m not going to recite from a couch. It’s unworthy of our noble calling.’

  He stands, strikes a Ciceronian pose, and runs up and down a couple of octaves.

  ‘I need to prepare – ahem! – my inestimably valuable vocal instrument –’

  ‘Get on with it, you cocktease, before I start throwing these inestimably valuable quails’ eggs at your head.’

  O empty-handed aides-de-camp,

  Piso’s idiots, ready for action

  with your keen little backpacks –

  – You remember how we loaded ourselves up with luggage?

  – Because we thought we’d be bringing it home rammed with stuff.

  Veranius, dearest of friends

  and Fabullus, my own,

  how are things going?

  – Absolutely fucking grim from start to finish.

  – Fucked over to the highest degree of fuckdom.

  Had enough of the dregs, the cold

  and the crappy food over there?

  – Goat casserole five nights running.

  – Wine that makes your teeth hurt.

  – Ice on the latrines.

  Are you in negative equity, as I was

  in Bithynia with that bastard Memmius?

  O Memmius, how you turned me over

  and did me slowly, tho-rough-ly

  with that super-long member of thine!

  – ‘Super-long’ – you had it easy. I could feel Piso’s prick coming out of my mouth –

  Now I see you two have met

  the same fate, you’ve been done by Piso

  with a tool of equal size

  while following our fathers’ advice

  to ‘make connections with the great’.

  Gods and goddesses, punish