I said, “My father never had a cell phone. Didn’t need one, he said, even though I tried to give him one for emergencies. You know, in case he fell … Didn’t have a computer, either. Enjoyed his DVD, though.”
“He wasn’t a Luddite like you, then,” she said.
“No. He was just selective.”
She sloshed her wine around her glass. “My parents died a few years back. Ten years ago, actually.”
“How?”
“Car accident. It was a mess to sort out, as they’d gone together. Their wills were out of date … Well. I think I know how your sister feels. I wanted to just run from the whole thing. But oddly, it wasn’t such a bad time in the end. People come together, you know.”
I tapped my thumbnail against the bottle’s foil label. “You’re not counseling me, are you, Viv?”
“No. Just telling you how I felt.”
“But it was different. You were younger. I feel — shit, I suddenly feel old. It’s as if now he’s gone, the lid is off my generation, antiquity-wise. Do you know what I mean?”
She laughed. “So what do you want to do?”
I snorted. “What can I do? I’m trapped.”
“By what?”
“By my routine. The choices I’ve made, good or bad, that have landed me here. By the way I’ve slowed down.” I slapped my belly. “By this. The way I get out of breath, and ache in the mornings. Even the way I get pissed on a couple of bottles of beer at lunchtime. I’m trapped by myself.”
“There are always choices, George.” She put her glass down on the table and leaned toward me, rumpled, kindly, earnest. “I wasn’t counseling you before, but I am now. I think you need to reconnect. I went back to face what had happened to Mum and Dad.”
“I did go back.”
“Well, I think you need more. Take some time off. I bet you’re owed some vacation. And you wouldn’t be missed for a while,” she said dryly. “Maybe you ought to talk to — uh—”
“Linda?” My ex-wife. We’d divorced before I’d come to work for Hyf; Vivian had never met her. “Don’t think so.”
“She’s going to know you better than anybody else. Or go see your sister in Texas.”
“Florida.”
“Wherever. Spoil your nephews a little.” She snapped her fingers. “Why don’t you follow up this business of your missing sister?” I’d told her about that. “A little mystery to solve to occupy that analytical brain of yours — and nice deep family connections to soothe your heart …”
I felt uncomfortable. “There’s probably nothing. Maybe she was adopted.”
“Why would that have happened?”
“Or maybe she died,” I said brutally. “And they wanted to spare me.”
“Well, even if so,” she said gently, “you surely want to know.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Ask your sister in Florida,” she said. “She’s, what, ten years older? She ought to know something. And if this kid was three or four in the photo, maybe she’ll have been to school somewhere. A prep school maybe.”
“But which one?”
“I’d start with the one your older sister went to. Du-uh. ” She rattled her fingernails on the table. “Come on, George, snap out of it; get that brain working again.”
“But it’s all a mess, Viv. Christ, families. They all lied to me throughout my life. Even Gina!”
“Unresolved issues,” she said. “So resolve them. Reconnect with the past.” There was an edge to her voice now. You’ve had as much sympathy from the world as you’re going to get, George; stop whining.
“You know, that’s pretty much what Peter said. That I should ‘reclaim the past.’ “
She frowned. “Who’s Peter?”
At that moment I found myself looking at the TV carrying the news channel. The pretty newsreader had gone, but the image of the Kuiper Anomaly remained. And there, beside it, was a chunky, high-browed face, talking rapidly. It was Peter McLachlan.
I pointed. “Him,” I said.
Chapter 5
Regina, her hand firmly clasped by Cartumandua, was allowed to attend the anointing of her father’s body.
Jovian touched the dead man’s eyes, formally closing them. Jovian was her uncle, her father’s brother, from Durnovaria. He was a big, doleful man, a bronze worker, with big hands scarred by splashes of liquid metal, and he wore a Phrygian cap, just as her father had done. As the body was washed and anointed, Jovian stood over it, singing a soft Latin lament. The air was filled with powerful scents, like very strong perfume. But Regina knew that somebody had already cleaned up her father’s body, for there was not a trace of all the blood she had seen before.
When the cleansing was done, Marcus was dressed in his toga. It took several men to lift him as the woolen sheet was draped over him, for his body was stiff, his limbs like bits of wood.
After that the funerary procession formed up. Eight men carried Marcus on a kind of litter. Musicians went before him. They played double pipes and a cornu, a kind of curved trumpet with a sweet, sad voice. Everybody else, including Regina, had to follow on behind. Lit up by candles and lanterns, the procession filed out of the grounds of the villa and over a hardened track through the fields.
As they walked, Regina glimpsed her mother for the first time that day. With her hair coiffed and her dress immaculate, Julia looked as elegant as ever, but she kept her face hidden behind scented cloth. Regina wanted to run to her, but Carta kept a firm hold of her hand.
They came to the mausoleum. This was a little stone building, like a temple. There were only three tombstones here, marking the deaths of Regina’s grandfather and grandmother, her father’s parents — and one small, poignant plate that marked the infant death of a little girl, born to Marcus and Julia some years before Regina’s own birth, taken by a coughing sickness in her first month. She had been the “sweetest child,” according to her stone. Regina wondered if any toys had been put in the ground for her to play with in the afterlife.
A coffin had already been placed in the ground, ready for Marcus. It was a lead box, its walls elaborately molded with scallops, an oceanic motif to symbolize the crossing to the afterlife.
Carta murmured soothing nonsense words. But Regina didn’t feel distressed. This little scene, the lanterns and musicians and mourners gathered around a hole in the ground, was too strange to be upsetting. And besides, the awkward thing on the litter didn’t seem to have any connection to her father.
Jovian placed a coin, a whole solidus, in his brother’s mouth, payment for the ferryman. Then the body was lowered, a little clumsily, into the coffin. Marcus was wearing his best shoes, Regina noticed. Well, you couldn’t go into the afterlife without shoes. Under Aetius’s orders, Marcus was placed facedown.
One by one the mourners came up and dropped tokens into the coffin. There were remembrances of Marcus’s life, like farming tools, and even a handful of tesserae from an unfinished mosaic; and there were objects to ease the passage to the afterlife, a vial of wine, a haunch of pork, some candles, a little bell to ward off evil.