Shadows in Bronze

XXIV

Next day the sun was shining; in my mood, this came as a surprise.

I strolled out to take stock; to the right and left the two arms of the Bay lay shimmering in a fine grey haze. Ahead, Capri was entirely hidden by mist, and when I glanced back over my shoulder the cone of Vesuvius loomed as a mere blur too. But even at that early hour the light off the sea was beginning to dazzle; this soft, all-pervading haze would precede a hot, blue, brilliant day.

I felt dismal. My nephew had slept soundly, despite our rocky mattress. Petronius snored. So (I discovered) did his wife.

'Falco looks jaded. We must find him a girlfriend!' Arria Silvia chirruped brightly at breakfast, piercing a peach with her vixenish front teeth. I told myself that at least we had not been away long enough for people to collect stomach disorders and start comparing notes on them while we ate.

'Give him five minutes in Pompeii,' quipped Petro, 'and he'll find one for himself…' For a moment I thought he meant a stomach ache.

I could not concentrate on pointless domestic chat. I felt thoroughly preoccupied. Here I was in Campania in the holiday season. As we drove in yesterday I had sized up the laughing faces on all sides – frank young women in the pink of condition, relaxed and plumped up in the warm seaside air, each one wearing very little and just looking for a reason to take it off… So here was I, a handsome devil in a nearly-new mustard tunic (a snip from a second-hand stall, jollied up by my mother with two rows of crinkled braid). And if a woman who looked like a Venus of Praxiteles had jumped out of a fountain straight into my lap wearing nothing but a pair of fancy sandals and a smile, I would have tipped her off and stomped away to brood on my own.

Breakfast was water and fruit. If that was not what you were used to at home, you could omit the fruit.

We men slunk off to Pompeii the same day.

Just out of town at the mouth of the Sarnus lay a small harbour which also served the larger centres at Nola and Nuceria. We left the cart at the port; the Marine Gate was too steep to take it up. Larius wanted to stay watching the boats but I could not face telling my sister that her firstborn had received a rude awakening on the River Sarnus quayside from a barrel-waisted bosun, so we dragged him along with us. Petro and I went through the pedestrian tunnel on the left of the Gate; there was a separate slope for pack animals, which Larius pointedly shuffled up by himself. As we waited at the top, we could hear him muttering scornfully.

Pompeii had wine, grain, wool, metalwork, olive oil, an air of thrusting prosperity, and ten smart watchtowers set in vigorous city walls.

‘A place that intends to last!' One of my sharper remarks.

All right; I do know what happened at Pompeii – but this was eight years before Mount Vesuvius exploded. Any student of natural science who did notice their local mountain was shaped like a volcano deduced it was extinct. Meanwhile, the Pompeian playboys believed in art, Isis, Campanian gladiators, and ready cash to purchase gorgeous women; few of the flashy bastards were great readers of natural science.

At that time Pompeii was famous for two events: a riot in the amphitheatre when the Pompeians and Nucerians set about each other like hooligans, leaving quite a few dead: then a devastating easthquake. When we visited, eight years after the quake, the whole place still resembled a building site.

The Forum was rubble and ruins, mainly because the townsfolk had made the mistake of commissioning their architects to rebuild it on a grander scale. As usual, given this excuse, the architects dreamed and spent their fees, oblivious of the years that passed. A freed slave who was out to make a name for himself reconstructed the Temple of Isis and the citizens had propped up their amphitheatre in case they ever wanted to beat up their neighbours again. But the Temples of Jupiter and Apollo stood shrouded in scaffolding with their statuary stored in the crypt, and it was hard work forcing a path round the contractors' wheelbarrows to get ourselves up past the provision markets, under one of the ceremonial arches, and on into town.

This seemed an educational spot for Petronius and me to bring young Larius. Having Venus as their patroness, the town councillors wanted her to feel at home. Once they rebuilt her own Temple it would dominate the Marine Gate, but she hardly needed that. The fashionable marker for every Pompeian's elegant vestibule was a wall painting of Priapus with his tireless erection; the richer they were, the more immense the welcome the god of procreation extended at their door. It was none too easy for strangers to distinguish the commercial brothels from private homes. (Judging by the town's racy reputation, it might not matter if you got it wrong.)

Spotting my nephew staring about with his sweet air of astonishment, a prostitute outside a genuine bordello grinned at him through her few blackened teeth. 'Hello, sonny! Want to meet a pretty girl?'

In a chalk sketch on their wall the lord of fertility, visibly virile yet again, demonstrated what was required of a lad, though the madam did not inspire much confidence. She was quite revolting under the clogging layers of kohl.

'We're just looking round at the moment,' I apologized sociably as Larius dodged back under my wing. 'Sorry, grandma -' For some reason the old bag of bones started shrieking abuse. Petronius grew flustered so we dived into the safety of an open-air winery.

'Don't expect me to lead you into bad ways,' I muttered to Larius. 'Your ma thinks I'm looking after you. Ask your father when you get home.'

My sister Galla's husband was a lazy river boatman whose main advantage was the fact he was never at home. He was a hopeless womanizer.

We could all have coped if my sister had not minded, but Galla was unusually fastidious and she did. Sometimes he left her; more often Galla threw him out. Occasionally she relented 'for the sake of the children' (that tired old myth); the family's father stayed with her a month if she was lucky, then he drifted off after his next short-sighted garlandseller, my sister produced another unhappy baby, and the whole brood were left on their own again; when they were stuck, the poor things were sent to me.

Larius was looking morose as usual. I could not decide if it was being stuck, or being sent to me.

‘Cheer up!' I chivvied. 'If you want to waste your pocket money ask Petro what to pay. He's a man of the world-'

'I'm happily married!' Petronius protested – though he then revealed to my nephew that he understood a fairly basic service could be had for a copper as.

'I wish,' Larius pronounced haughtily, 'people would stop ordering me to cheer up!' He stalked off to lean over the fountain at the crossroads, scooping up an abstemious drink of water by himself. A pimp spoke to him and he scuttled back; Petro and I pretended we had not seen.

I leaned on the counter with my nose in my beaker, facing up to the fact that I had half a score of nephews, of whom Galla's gloomy Larius was only the first to throw off his boyhood tunic at fourteen. Thanks to my own elusive father, I was acting head of our family. Here was I, meddling with high politics, scouring the coast for a renegade, dodging a murderer, booted into oblivion by the woman I had set my heart on – yet I had also promised my sister that sometime during this trip I would enlighten her boy on whichever facts of life he had failed to pick up already from his dreadful friends at school… Petronius Longus is always kind to a man in a crisis; he clapped me on the shoulder and treated us by paying for the wine.

As we went out I found myself glancing behind, afraid I might be followed by a grim wraith in a green cloak.