The Course of Honour (18 page)

Caenis and the schoolmaster sat for a while in silence. Caenis was lost in her thoughts. The schoolmaster leant forwards, twisting his winecup between both hands. He was obviously shy. He did not on this occasion feel able to stare at her.

A well-trained secretary does not gaze silently into the distance for long. Caenis roused herself and dutifully asked the man how he enjoyed his work. He replied in gruff monosyllables. He looked about forty but that was because he had badly thinning hair; he grew the rest longer to compensate, but instead of appearing intellectual as he may have hoped, he merely looked badly groomed. He seemed unhappy and unhealthy—someone who regularly drank too much and ate too little, and who paid no attention to personal hygiene, exercise or sleep. It was well known that immediately after parents paid their fees he spent heavily, then towards the end of each term he ran out of cash. How he kept discipline remained a mystery for he seemed too indolent to use his staff and too dull to hold the attention otherwise.

‘Personally,' suggested Caenis, who had been wanting to tackle
this subject ever since she arrived, ‘I believe it is time traditional schoolroom methods were challenged. Don't you agree?'

She knew the traditional method was how he taught: the children recited their letters and numbers over and over, without illustration, without variety, a dreary daily singsong through one or another alphabet. ‘I was educated at the Palace; they wanted quick results. I have to say that when the Palace needs good secretaries its methods of obtaining them are excellent.'

She herself had been blessed with inspired teachers. Every time she went by the nursery here, the sad, bored, patient eyes of these children caused her distress.

Caenis had the rare gift of remembering what it was like to be a child. She wanted to explain to the schoolteacher how half his class were aimlessly repeating by rote what they had learned long before, though they did not understand it, while the rest knew nothing at all but had the knack of joining in a second after the others spoke. None of them ever progressed. She wanted to encourage the man to devise some rapport with his charges. She wanted to convince him that he must be interested in what he was doing, so the children would be interested too . . .

Most men are not keen to hear they are bad at their work. The schoolmaster changed the subject. He lifted her hand and placed it under his grubby tunic upon his private parts.

 

Caenis could not immediately accept what was happening.

Shock transfixed her. She could not bear it. She sprang up; the wine jug flew from the bench; she was furious.

Partly, she was furious with herself. She had forgotten people were not neighbourly. Her time with Vespasian had made her too safe. Once so sensitive, she had just issued an invitation without a thought of how it could be misinterpreted.

She felt ill with dismay. She was imaginative enough to realise her response would damage a soul that was already inadequate, but really there were times when an intelligent woman, with burdens of her own, needed to think of herself. Without a word spoken on either
side the schoolmaster got to his feet and blundered from the shop. She saw the scorn in his eyes. She realised he had now brutally defined her—for himself, and probably half the neighbourhood: tense, teasing, frigid, mentally odd.

She was more angry then, because she saw how easily men might deprive a woman in her circumstances of her self-esteem and her public confidence. It was true she carried within her a great pain. Even so, she knew she lived her life more vividly and with greater good humour than most people around her.

Thanks to that, she was able to put aside all thought of this schoolmaster, his solitary world, his misplaced contempt, before she gained the third flight of stairs to her room. By then she was remembering only a face that was alive with sardonic intelligence. She was exulting in the frank, straight-forward, enduring friendliness of a man who had been her lover, a man she had once loved.

Caenis would always have the courage to be true to herself; at her lowest ebb, she now possessed the gift of a joyous past.

Sanely, she went on with her life.

 

 

 

 

W
hen the Emperor's uncle Claudius married Valeria Messalina—this sad jest was entirely a whim of Caligula's—Caenis was privileged to attend. Messalina came of impeccable family, she was wealthy, she was exquisite—and she looked about nineteen. Claudius was forty-seven.

Teenage brides were common in patrician society; it gave a man the chance to train up the child in his own house his own way, which is what men sometimes imagine they want. For a person so susceptible to women as Claudius though, this girl was a disaster. He fell head over heels in love, before he had spoken to her twice. The sly cat would run rings round him. Still, that too is what some men want.

‘I should be grateful if you felt able to come, Caenis,' he had faltered. ‘A man at his wedding needs the support of his family and friends. Of course, I will have the Emperor . . .'

Caenis gave him one of her looks. ‘Sir, your nephew the Emperor may stand as your family, though I doubt whether in this matter he has acted as one of your friends!'

She always spoke to Claudius firmly and extremely frankly. He permitted it. In all other respects Caenis treated him as her patron, a courtesy which few members of his late mother's household would ever emulate.

When he had realised, many months after everybody else had
noticed, that Caenis was no longer Vespasian's mistress, Tiberius Claudius had enquired tentatively whether she would like to become one of his mistresses instead, but Caenis had dealt frankly and firmly with that too.

‘I shall come to your wedding, sir,' she promised. ‘For your daughter's sake, for your mother's—and as one of your good friends.'

They both knew, there were not many of those.

 

Going to a wedding attended also by the Emperor won Caenis a certain amount of prestige in the Twelfth District. Another event at about the same time lent even more crazy colour to her reputation. This was a visit to her apartment by Veronica. That girl surely knew how to make herself useful. Every man in the block now treated Caenis with awe. The vintner and furrier became positively chummy, longing for another glimpse of her dazzling friend. Caenis did not point out that Veronica had no energy to spare for walking up five flights of stairs so was unlikely to repeat their treat.

She never understood why Caenis did it. Least of all for a steep rent. Paying money to a man for anything was a concept Veronica found ridiculous.

Veronica herself had decided with the advent of Caligula that sharing the Palace with an emperor was not for her. For one thing, she was disgusted by the imperial bordello he devised. Having finely decorated a suite of rooms at the Palace he threw them open to all comers, offering loans to the men who visited and shamelessly listing the income as donations to the imperial treasury. With such competition, how was a simple girl expected to make her way?

Veronica had acted with alacrity. She understood that senators did not want compulsory brothels at the Palace, where Caligula's idea of adding insult to the Senate—whom he now passionately hated—was that they should be forced to bring their wives. A man enjoying off-side relaxation wanted a different face than the one at home. Veronica purchased her freedom, skipped the Palace, and began to offer an establishment that was equally expensive without the political disadvantages and the risks. At Veronica's there were no wives.

She did not, of course, pay rent. She occupied a prestigious mansion which she looked after for an octogenarian ex-consul who never visited Rome. The consul paid all the bills and when he died he left Veronica the house. Meanwhile her success was assured. She let it be known that no one need apply who commanded less than a hundred million sesterces; rather than be thought too poor to attend her salon, clients flocked in.

Veronica repeatedly asked Caenis to live with her. Caenis always refused. She did however go there sometimes in the evening. She liked Veronica's house for the same reasons as the elderly gentlemen of conservative opinions who treated it like a military dining club: the place was warm, the cooks were excellent, the women were civilised, and the sanitation worked.

Caenis came to be regarded as a kind of inky-fingered duenna. Her connections were respectable and when she felt like it (not invariably) she made people laugh. She never slept with men, though for three years Veronica tenaciously shovelled men her way. If necessary, Caenis slid them off elsewhere. It was not always necessary. Many were grateful that she made no demands. Some men who patronise exclusive salons are frightened they cannot live up to expectations (Veronica agreed tartly that most could not). For them, talking to Caenis was polite and safe.

Caenis herself did not altogether appreciate the arrangement. The men Veronica thought suitable for her all fell into a certain type: recent widowers with for too much to say now about their previously neglected wives, or bachelors so trying that their loneliness was all too understandable. The other thing they had in common, Caenis soon noticed, was that none of them was a man whom Veronica wanted to have to entertain herself. Being a convenience sometimes rankled.

She put up with the situation. Caenis never lost her sense of humour entirely.

Sometimes there was political talk. Veronica discouraged this. Treason could lead to trouble, and if things became too heated men lost their tempers and stormed off without wanting a girl, which reduced her income. Caenis, who only went there for something to eat and companionship, rather enjoyed the politics.

On one occasion she thought Veronica would have a seizure: someone openly raised the question of disposing of the Emperor.

Caenis noted that there was not the shocked silence that anyone who lived outside Rome would expect. By now Caligula had worn the purple for four years; he had also dressed up in silken robes encrusted with gemstones, theatrical costumes, elaborate military uniforms (usually with the breastplate of Alexander which he claimed he had stolen from the hero's tomb), and rather common women's dresses in colours which did not suit his pasty face. His behaviour had been odd, baffling, and exorbitantly expensive. While staying at Antonia's villa at Bauli, he dreamt up a plan to defy the old prophecy that he could as soon become Emperor as ride dry-shod over the sea at Baiae: he built a three-mile bridge of galleys, turfed it over and for two days trundled in a chariot to and fro across the Gulf; several people cheering his entourage were knocked into the sea and drowned. He had bankrupted the Treasury with his constant Games and circuses; he brought business to a standstill and even cancelled the rites of mourning so no one had an excuse not to attend his shows. His cruelties extended from the execution of his own cousin King Ptolomy of Mauretania (who had offended him at a gladiatorial display by winning the crowd's applause for a smart purple cloak), to dispatching common criminals in batches, without even a glance at the charge-sheet, in order to feed their carcasses to his panthers and lions. He blighted trade with fierce taxation. He chained up the granaries when the populace were starving. No one forgot how he had worried his grandmother to death.

People were now looking back fondly to the golden age of Augustus, a man who in retrospect had genuinely seemed to want to do right. People remembered that even under Tiberius the city and the provinces were efficiently run. After four years there was a slow groundswell of understanding in Rome that Caligula must be removed. He was still not yet thirty. People felt tired just thinking how long they might have to endure him if nothing was done. Needless to say, most people hoped somebody else would volunteer to risk doing it.

There had been one plot, apparently brewed by his sister Agrippina. Drusilla, to whom he was most deeply attached, had died suddenly;
her death caused a florid outburst of grief in the Emperor, who proclaimed Drusilla a goddess, established a cult for her, ordered public mourning on a scale that was disaster for small traders, and then fled to the country to soak himself in misery (mitigated by occasional gambling bouts).

Afterwards the position of the surviving sisters, Agrippina and Livilla, had declined. While accompanying their brother on a visit to Germany they found themselves accused—probably rightly—of plotting with Lepidus, Drusilla's widower. He was executed and they were exiled, but first Agrippina was compelled to bring the cremated remains of Lepidus, who was allegedly her lover, back to Rome in a casket—a grim parody of her mother returning from Syria with the relics of the dead hero Germanicus. The Senate had had to frame its reaction cautiously, and since the plot had been put down, there was only one tactful course: one of the praetors issued congratulations to the Emperor on his expedition, then denounced Lepidus and suggested that his ashes should be denied the family mausoleum and cast out unburied.

The praetor concerned was Flavius Vespasianus.

 

When plotting came up in conversation it was Caenis herself who said quietly, ‘There will always be the convention that the Senate creates the Emperor—then cannot be seen doing away with him.'

There were senators in the room. Mostly they followed the pattern of slow, sombre, self-opinionated men in late middle age. Now, after feeding on swan cunningly presented as porpoise, turbot in aspic, and suckling-pig served with two wine sauces reduced to a delicate glaze, they were lying on their couches holding back belches whilst pontificating bitterly on the world's decline. They thought this was daring enough.

Caenis felt disinclined to let them get away with it. ‘It will be,' she suggested, ‘some disgusted individual who dares to plunge in the knife.' Veronica closed her eyes, gleaming silver with mercury. Caenis refused to take the hint. ‘Then the Senate, to excuse its own cowardice, will execute that individual for his courage.'