Rome Burning (12 page)

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.

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.

A little while later she confessed to him, ‘I’d been telling myself to give up.’

Varius found that the pleasure at the touch of lips on his was overwhelming, but he felt strange afterwards, a kind of dry quivering in the nerves that he couldn’t name. He thought it would wear off.

But it did not. It gathered to a horrid and familiar restlessness, a fear that wherever he stood or sat or lay down might be a trap, and he could not quiet it by working, as he had done before, because there was no real urgency or difficulty left in the slave clinic now. For the first time he realised how routine his job had become, that he must have been manufacturing a burden of work that was not altogether necessary for some while.

And after they slept together for the first time it was far worse. He lay awake in her bed, with her warm arm over his chest. The baby wept and screamed somewhere on the floor above, for hours.

He had never shared the flat he lived in now with Gemella, but unlocking his door afterwards he seemed to expect to walk into their old rooms. He did not quite feel that he would find her there – she would be over in Tusculum, arranging a party perhaps, helping Clodia with a speech. Clodia would be working her hard, as ever. He would sit on their bed and wait for her to come back, trying to decide if he should tell her what he’d done. He went in and found himself in tears because it was not the same, because Gemella wouldn’t come home. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ he said, aloud.

Because he knew this wasn’t reasonable, he carried on, although he managed to control things so that they were never in his flat together, only Octavia’s.

He grew preoccupied with wondering why she wanted him, why she was, apparently, in love with him. She knew the gist of the events around Gemella’s death and Marcus’ disappearance. Everyone knew. Varius’ picture had been screened on longvision over only a few days – not enough for people to recognise him in the street – but often his name would do it, and if not, they only needed to hear what his previous job had been, that his wife was dead, and then
they would remember. It was a fact he hated. He could
feel
people knowing, whether or not it showed in the way they treated him.

As for her, why should she have liked him so much when all she knew about him was that his wife had been killed, that he had first been said to be a murderer, then not; when – he thought resentfully – that was indeed the main fact of his life. And was
that
attractive? Perhaps to her it was. In which case the whole thing was ghoulish and unhealthy. He found himself thinking about this more and more; at first only when they were apart, but later in her presence, too. For it seemed to him the only explanation – that she
liked
the idea that something horrible had happened to him, that she found him romantic because of it. When what he had meant to be was simply a conscientious, happily married civil servant. When what he manifestly was now was unjust, ungrateful and malicious – because look at the way he was thinking about her.

She did not ask about his past – not that part of it, anyway. Sourly he wondered if she was hoping that he would break down and volunteer everything dramatically, weep and wail. He found it increasingly hard to say anything to her at all.

Gemella had been dead now longer than they had been married. The thought was intolerable, but intolerable also was the fact that it didn’t seem to be true. When he slept he kept waking up as he had woken in the prison hospital. All the time that had passed since then was a delusion. He was still there. It had just happened. She had just died. And all the rest of it still to go through.

He did not know how he, or anyone, managed to breathe in their sleep. It seemed to require such a conscious exertion of will, like working a stiff pair of bellows, day in and day out, without the possibility of rest.

He now neither believed that the affair with Octavia could be salvaged nor wanted to do it. He had said nothing to her of what he was thinking. But it was so constant, and the most ordinary elements of conversation – where shall we eat? What did you do today? – felt so unnatural and needed so much huge, physical effort, that he supposed it
was bitterly obvious, that she must have expected something like this. But apparently not. She was shocked; her eyes sparkled with tears, which she tried to conceal at first but had to give up, because it was a long time before she would stop trying to retrieve something of him. She mentioned Gemella by name for the first time, she guessed that perhaps he felt guilty, but that he shouldn’t, he was not, it would change …