‘Next stage of the torture. The diners have been sent home,’ Lucilla told him. ‘Their last scare will be Domitian sending presents. They will assume it’s their personal executioner. But they will get their pageboy, washed and adorned, plus their fake tombstone, which will turn out to be a big slab of silver, and the platters they were served off, also made of costly materials.’ Gripping the boy by his hair, she dredged off the last of his paint, sloshing water from a pannikin.
More outrage gripped Vinius. ‘You are washing him all over!’
‘Yes, first I painted his little winkle — what a thrill — and now I have to clean it off… One imaginative evening takes hours of unseen work.’ Lucilla gritted her teeth as she struggled with the flailing child. ‘Don’t be pompous. It’s only the same as bathing my nephew.’
For Vinius the most hideous aspect was that he had found himself caught in this scene of watery mayhem, while simultaneously trying to start a furious argument with the love of his life. ‘It is not respectable!’
‘What a prude! You surprise me… It’s all Domitian’s sinister showmanship.’ Lucilla released the boy, who ran to be fluffed up and dressed. ‘Can you imagine household after household full of elderly maids and set-in-their-ways secretaries, when they wake up tomorrow to find they have to take in a gruesome little stage child with the morals of a rabbit warren. And they dare not get rid of him.’
Lucilla reached for Vinius’ hand and dabbed at the paint, but his dark mood reached her; she gave up and threw the sponge at him. ‘Oh do it yourself.’
As rapidly as the baths must have filled with the blackened boys, they emptied. A parade of imperial gifts, some human, was leaving the Palatine. Relieved officials ticked off addresses on note boards.
‘When I said to explain, Lucilla, I did not mean this fiasco.’ Thoroughly self-righteous, Vinius sensed he was making no impression. ‘You got divorced.’
Lucilla was gathering her equipment, then pushing her way to a changing room. It was almost deserted, since most of the other attendants were still involved in swilling away the grimy water, or just descending into horseplay now their earlier frantic activities had finished.
‘Turn your back, Vinius.’ Her undertunic was drenched; she intended to remove it before climbing back into her other clothes, which she had retrieved from a manger above the bench. ‘ Face away! ’ Vinius haughtily held up a towel to hide her. She must have forgotten he had once seen her all by starlight.
‘You got divorced!’
Lucilla shook down her dry gown and, once decent, began forcing on sandals. As the straps resisted, she snatched the towel to dry her feet roughly. ‘So?’
‘You bloody well got divorced and never told me.’
Silence.
‘Every pervert in this putrid palace knows — but not me. We had a conversation earlier and you never even mentioned it.’
Lucilla bundled her wet tunic into one of her baskets.
‘ When were you intending to tell me?’
Silence.
‘What — never? ’
‘My marriage is private.’
Vinius was livid. ‘And this sudden split has no connection with me?’
‘Causing a divorce would do you no credit.’
Lucilla was ready to leave. She made her way to the vestibule, gave her name to an orderly, and a litter was called for her. Vinius had tailed her like a hopeful dog. There was no room for him in the conveyance, especially as those who had helped behind the scenes tonight were being sent home with hampers of leftover food and unused amphorae.
Lucilla gave the bearers instructions for Plum Street. A fraught transport queue was building up behind. ‘Leave it, Vinius.’
‘Am I expected to follow you?’
‘Do what you like. Go to the Camp.’
‘I thought I meant something to you.’
‘For heaven’s sake. I only just left one man I regretted — Goodnight, soldier.’
Lucilla was carried away. Vinius was left standing in the vestibule in his gorgeous array, while hard-hearted imperial planners with rotas to organise openly sneered at him.
As the litter bumped her homeward, Flavia Lucilla longed to weep unshed tears on his strong shoulder.
It was the wrong time of the month. For aesthetic reasons, even though her libido was always high, she kept to herself on those days. Had Gaius known her better he might have recognised the signs. She had dark circles under her eyes, she felt uncomfortable in her body, she was prone to making mistakes. Unfortunately, on such days she was incapable of taking precautions against the mistakes…
‘You never do my hair as well, dear,’ her client Aurelia Maestinata had told her frankly. ‘Still, once you get to my age you will be blissfully free of all that.’ Aurelia also had a view on the male reaction. ‘Every month is a surprise. The problem is, dear, men cannot count!’
With three wives and many aunts in his history, Gaius had certainly encountered women’s sudden flare-ups. He never dreamed Lucilla rebuffed him for that reason. He thought it could only be because she did not like him (surely not?) or, more likely, she was a teasing little bitch. He called himself an understanding man, yet he loathed women who were unpredictable.
Lucilla knew she had just taken a decision she regretted. In the course of it, she had seen Gaius Vinius in his worst light. Petty, peremptory, authoritarian, unrealistic, self-centred and vain.
Aurelia Maestinata would say, all men are like that, just ignore it. Aurelia’s tart good sense being unavailable, when Lucilla got home she drank too much from the amphora they had given her at the palace, and simply added new adjectives for Vinius to her list.
Nemurus would have called it hyperbolic auxesis. Vinius would have called that crap.
Gaius Vinius made one further attempt to court Lucilla: hating himself for giving in first, he called in at Plum Street the next day. Lucilla was not there. (She was curled up among many cushions in the back of the manicure salon downstairs, where Glyke and Calliste had dosed her with hangover and cramp cures; she had done the same for them on many occasions.)
The dog was gnawing his rush mat because he missed Lucilla. He had already torn down the curtain that normally hid the lavatory. He growled at Gaius, having insultingly forgotten who he was. Balanced on a stool to rehang the curtain, Gaius growled back.
He waited around as long as he thought reasonable (not long). Then he reckoned the trollop must be off wasting herself on Domitian’s dwarf in some foul palace burrow.
Gaius gave up on her.
After that, his life descended into chaos.
He invited his brothers for a men’s night out. He still did not want to be his father, but he intended to get drunk out of his skull. Felix and Fortunatus were up for it. Their wives tried to forestall them with requests to put up shelves, which they parried with traditional delaying tactics. Gaius also invited his old mucker Scorpus and even his superior, the cornicularius. Luckily the cornicularius could not make it; he always visited a brothel on Wednesdays where he had been going so long the bawd made him supper and most times he just talked to her.
During many long hours in wine bars, Gaius expressed his current loathing of women so luridly that his brothers thought it was a convoluted hint. They set about what they reckoned they did best on his behalf: fixing up Gaius with a new wife. Soon Felix and Fortunatus were negotiating with a widow who was looking for security; they continued manoeuvres even though their own wives, Paulina and Galatia, cruelly suggested it was a mistake on the widow’s part to expect security from fly-by-night Gaius Vinius.
He didn’t need Felix and Fortunatus to organise his life, he reckoned. Left on his own in a bar one evening, after those wimps scuttled home, Gaius found his fourth wife for himself. At the time she seemed perfect, being the type of woman who did not mind picking up a new husband in a bar. Just his sort of girl, he thought.