Rome Burning (66 page)

Sulien was there.

Lal slammed her eyes shut in strange, embarrassed shock. For the first year after leaving Holzarta, she’d daydreamed intensively about Sulien, until picturing an ardent reunion with him in luxuriant detail had become a habit. And later, when she’d lost serious hope of that, she’d still, from time to time, allowed herself to picture a more poised, restrained meeting. They would both be different. Perhaps they would not say much, just wish each other well. He would see that she was more adult now, and she would have a simple, pleasing memory of him. She had long ceased to really think of herself as in love with him, but he was still the very last person she would have wanted to see her unconscious, dirty, half-dead. For a few seconds she almost hoped he’d go away.

But of course she was curious. She lifted her eyelids again tentatively, observing him while hoping he would not notice yet that she was awake. He was standing at the foot of the bed, looking down at her with a calm, professional concern, but without worry – he must know she was well. He must have made her so. Even now he was still tanned after the long, unblinkingly bright summer, but her memory of the warm look of his skin was right. His mouth was perhaps
smaller and narrower than she’d come to picture it, over the years. Against the characterless pallor of his work clothes, the different browns of his body were warm and clear: his hair chestnut, and longer than she remembered; his eyes surprisingly light – so that in an older or less-prized face she might have considered them yellowish and ugly – but in his like gold, like burnt sugar. The structure of his face was stronger now, his frame more solid. But if it was possible to judge from such a quiet, relaxed expression, she thought there was something a little less direct and candid in the set of his face than there had been once, something more guarded.

She carefully acted out waking up again, and said, ‘Hello, Sulien.’

He seemed to feel none of the awkwardness she did, and perhaps the faint reserve or sadness she thought she’d seen in his face had never really been there. He just grinned, happy to hear her speak, and said, ‘Isn’t it great that you’re here?’

Lal grew aware of her hair straggling in scratchy ropes on the pillow, the hard stripped-down feeling of her bones under the covers, ‘That I’m where?’ she asked, cautiously, as it occurred to her that she didn’t know for sure.

‘Rome,’ said Sulien, gesturing grandly, as if the Pantheon and the Colosseum lay like packing cases around his feet.

She tried to piece together what had happened while she was ill. But she kept falling asleep. At some point, to her dismay, she must have drifted off while talking to Sulien. She felt so lapped with weakness and with safety that she could not summon the urgency she needed in order to remember. The last thing she was sure she remembered was walking endlessly through the countryside outside Jingshan, looking for the next village and the temple. She was almost sure she must have reached it, but there her memories began to shimmer and float apart. Her impression that Una had brought her to Rome would have seemed no more solid than any of the other fluttering scraps of fever, except that the fact that she was here confirmed it. But in between – where had she been? How had Una found her?

She prised herself out of bed, shocked at the effort needed and at how her legs seemed as thin and unstable as stilts underneath her. She crept out of the ward to look for a mirror and a window, in that order. Her reflection was even more discouraging than she had feared. Her skin looked sunken and patchy, her lips were cracked, her body more wasted than she would have believed it could be. Her face looked old, her body childlike. She felt frantic to do something immediate to correct the damage, and her dogged attempts to unpick her matted hair with her fingernails filled her with gradual anxiety about the future. The paper bag of her remaining make-up and trinkets was somewhere in Sina. She did not even own a comb. Where was she to go? And she thought of her father and Ziye, and wept a little.

Still, to be in Rome after so many years of wishing it, to be well even if she was so weak, kept her in possession of a certain optimism. She tottered resolutely round to the landing and looked down the stairs towards the lobby.

She saw Sulien talking with a young blonde woman, whose clothes, hair, and way of standing suggested somehow that she was beautiful, even though Lal could not see her face. She had a little girl about two or three, who was complaining vaguely, until Sulien hoisted her up into his arms.

Lal looked at the three of them with her head on one side, and a feeling of abrupt, flat, prudence. She did not exactly make any assumptions, and therefore did not feel wounded. But she did feel herself reminded that it was not her business what he did.

She pulled herself up the next flight of stairs, and, with a struggle, opened the window on the higher landing. She could see no landmark, only a close, reddish-brown building, a bedsheet hanging from an upper window, a house further along the narrow street clothed in red creeper, some dustbins. Nevertheless:
Rome
.

A nurse found her and nagged her back to bed; indeed now she seemed to have come such a huge distance that it was exhausting to retrace her steps, the mere sight of the bed overwhelmed her with relief as she approached it. She
fell back onto the mattress and began trying to remember again.

‘I’ll get you out of here – you’ll be safe,’ breathed the memory or the idea of a voice. But it was all as mixed and scattered as a brightly coloured heap of feathers, and then once again she was asleep.

For the moment, Sulien barely gave a thought to the past he’d had with Lal; he was simply glad that she was here now. He gave Tancorix back the spare key to her flat, and went off with her to buy Xanthe a bag of sweets. Finally he was beginning to feel safe in Rome again. Deliberately, he relished the good mood; it came like a deserved respite from the confused sadness he felt whenever he thought of Marcus – which was hard to avoid with news of the engagement gushing from every public longvision all the time – and serious worry for Una, who remained as white and tight-lipped as when she’d first arrived. He hadn’t yet finished clearing the mess the vigiles had made of his flat, but it was at least habitable enough for him to have moved back in. Una had spent the last two nights there, but already she was hunting grimly for work and a place of her own. He feared part of her haste was an impulse to get away from him. Stupidly he’d said to her, wanting only to offer comfort: ‘But it hasn’t happened yet; they might still find some other way.’ It was the only time he’d seen her burst into tears.

Sulien and Tancorix sat down on the parapet over the embankment of the Tiber, above the hem of colourful plastic rubbish bobbing against the river’s walls. Tancorix tried to get Xanthe interested in the sparse snowflakes fluttering down through the bare plane trees onto the water. On the Bridge of Agrippa, workmen were already – months ahead of the event – attaching a system of glass lamps shaped like white roses and camellias and lilies, in anticipation of the Imperial wedding. Sulien glowered at them vaguely on Una’s behalf. He allowed himself to think bullishly of Marcus as nothing more than an untrustworthy rat who’d broken his sister’s heart, and pushed him to the back of his mind.

For some minutes, Tancorix had seemed on the point
of telling him something, but kept hesitating, so at last he asked obligingly, ‘What is it?’

Tancorix frowned uneasily at the river. ‘I think I’ve seen Edda.’

It took him a moment to remember who she meant. The slave from her former husband’s house, the one who’d been kind to her – dead in the fire that had destroyed the Maecilii estate. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I was singing at the bar last night,’ she said. ‘It was quite a good audience. And I saw her. She was round at the side, watching me. She’d come to see me.’

Sulien was willing enough to listen to this, but not very convinced. ‘It wasn’t just someone who looked like her?’

‘No, it can’t have been,’ insisted Tancorix. ‘It was her.’

‘But you didn’t speak to her, you just saw her in the crowd?’

‘Oh, it’s never really a
crowd
, is it?’ said Tancorix. ‘And I didn’t know what to do. I even thought she was a ghost for a second! I sort of went on to the end of the song somehow, and then I called to her and I tried to get down off the stage. And she pretended she didn’t know I meant her! She tried to hide behind the people in front of her. And you know I can’t move very fast in that dress. She was gone before I could get near her. If it wasn’t her, why would she run away?’ Tancorix shook her head, bewildered and unnerved, and then laughed sadly. ‘But then, why would she run away if it
was
her?’

Sulien still doubted there was more to this than a fancied resemblance, but he said, ‘Well, if she escaped when the place burned, she’d have to lie low. You don’t tell the world you’re a slave on the run.’

‘But I know that, you’d think she could have trusted me,’ said Tancorix, sounding hurt.

*

I trust that you are now well.

I wish I could have done something earlier to spare you the ordeal I now know you have been through, but I am grateful that I can at last repay the debt I owe to you and your family. Of course you have a home in Rome as
long as you need or want it. I know you must be very anxious for your father and stepmother, and indeed for other Romans and former slaves, and I wish to reassure you as much as possible. I have been pursuing Delir and Ziye’s case since first I heard of it; I have been assured they are both well, and have been moved into better conditions. I am fully confident they will be transferred into Roman supervision and that the only question that remains is how soon we may expect this. I have every faith it
will be
soon.

Please make the Palace steward’s office aware of anything you need.

Marcus Novius Faustus Leo

Lal had a sense of earlier drafts floating like ghosts behind these measured phrases, of missing paragraphs that Marcus had stared at and crossed out. There was no mention of his pending marriage, or return to Rome, and nothing about Una or Sulien. The letter as it survived was painfully suspended between intimacy and formality, the warmth of its promises now and then melting through the cool surface of the lines. He had not signed himself Caesar.

This letter was waiting for her when a pair of junior household officials from the Palace took her from the clinic to a stylish first-floor flat at the edge of the Field of Mars. It was close to the centre while still an easy distance from Transtiberina, but in a far safer, more sedate district. It was not large, but pristinely finished, and its soft unscratched colours and clean contours seemed to radiate a calm, affluent safety into the spotless air. A little balcony overlooked a flower market in the quiet square below. Lal could not move to look out at it; she stood with tears in her eyes, overwhelmed both at Marcus’ generosity and at the fact that she had never even been inside a room like this before.

One of the Palace staff told her, ‘We thought a place of this size would be best for the time being; when your parents arrive we can look at the matter again. And you will have an allowance, paid monthly.’

So she had money, and she began spending it ravenously. The very thought that it was shameful to be behaving
like this when her poor father was shut in some Sinoan prison camp spurred her on and she bought wildly, clothes, jewellery, trinkets, paints. The mere sight of things she could not afford pleased her. The plenty of Rome was even more astonishing than she had imagined, the stock of the whole world seemed to roll helplessly into the waiting city, like goods from a fantastic shipwreck washing up unspoiled on an island shore. Every kind of food, all fabrics; long-visions and cars of all sizes and grades of extravagance. And as she’d dreamt in Jiangning, there were all kinds of people, hurtling through the city at speed, and she was as at home as any one of them. She bought armfuls of tropical flowers and took them to Una.

She’d made sure to come on the one day out of each eight that Una was not working. She’d taken a job clearing tables and serving drinks in a gigantic, factory-like bar in the station complex at Vatican Fields, where people drank in brief, crowded solitude, waiting for long-distance trains to arrive. Her small rooms were in a tenement block north of the station, not very close to Sulien, or anyone she knew.

There was a pinched look to Una’s face, as if all the muscles were braced in permanent effort. Her hair was scraped back into a tight plait. The scarlet flowers looked incongruous in her arms, even more so when she trudged, holding them, back into her flat. Lal was shocked that Una was living somewhere so much more bleak and meagre than she was. In fact, there was nothing really wrong with the flat; it was plain and clean, everything in it functioned. At first it seemed ascetically devoid of any kind of decoration, but there were two Sinoan ink paintings hanging side by side on the wall of the cramped main room: a scene of wooded mountains, and a winter landscape. There was no vase for the flowers; Una began mechanically dividing them and placing them in mismatched cups and beakers, arranging them in a row on the kitchen table, where they looked odd but at least added some life to the room.

Una efficiently offered Lal things to eat and drink, but the guarded silence about her seemed somehow to persist even when she spoke. So Lal talked, trying to empty out some of her own strength and eagerness into the spartan
rooms, and into Una herself, like a blood transfusion. ‘Una, thank you so much for everything. You’ve been so good to me. I remember being on the train, I think, and you looking after me. And yet it’s still strange that it really happened, because I remember so much other stuff I thought was going on. My father being there …’