The Boat of Fate (10 page)

‘Are you an idiot?’ he shrieked, startlingly. ‘Where’s your tongue, boy? Your
tongue
...’ His voice changed again. ‘There are rumours,’ he said unctuously, ‘familiar to every person of consequence, that the Emperor Theodosius and his lovely consort are to honour us with a State visit.’ His voice sank conspiratorially. ‘And I, Lucullus Paullus, having a certain reputation in high quarters--in very high quarters--have received a commission to supply ...’ He raised a finger.
‘One dozen beds’

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask what even an Augustus could want with a dozen beds at once, but a dig from Marcus silenced me. My uncle saw the gesture; I was afterwards to find out he saw just about everything, despite his habitual air of bemused incompetence. He turned his attention to Marcus, who was grinning broadly. ‘Wipe that smirk off your face,’ he said coarsely. ‘I can tell you right now, there’s nothing here for you.’ He bounced suddenly from the chair. ‘Beds!’ he cried, as if some magic resided in the very word. ‘
Beds
... Such beds as the world has never seen. Beds that will epitomise the finest flowering of the civilisation of Rome. Look, look ....’ He grabbed feverishly for a roll of paper. ‘Inlaid,’ he said, shaking with suppressed emotion. ‘Ivory, tortoiseshell, gold . . . while the Royal couches are to bear on their backrests portraits of Theodosius and the Empress, executed in the finest--but look!’

He stooped dramatically, snatched a cloth from a shapeless mound at his feet. Beneath, twin blocks of pure white stone shimmered in the dimness of the little room.

‘Alabaster!’ breathed my uncle. ‘If I told you their cost, if I hinted at it ... But I am no piddling chairwright. I am Lucullus, Bedmaker to Emperors!’

His face reddened again, abruptly. ‘And then,’ he said, ‘I try to engage a sculptor. A man of reputation, of dignity; one would imagine, of principles ... An’ what does the filthy wretch do?’ His voice rose to its former pitch. ‘He tries to beggar me,’ he yelled. ‘Ask a price that would reduce the Augustus himself to scrounging in the market-place!’

I said, ‘Wouldn't it have been easier ...’

‘But I am not deterred,’ shrieked Lucullus, dancing with passion. ‘Sod the sculptor, and all his traitorous tribe. Let the thieving rats squabble with dogs for crusts; I’ll do the work myself!’

He took a turn up and down the office, as far as its cluttered state allowed, twitching and mumbling, kicking irritably at the stacks of rubbish that rose on every side. One pile collapsed, sending up a cloud of dust; my uncle burst out swearing afresh, then rushed to me to grip my chin in his fingers. He turned my head to the light, nodding and cursing to himself. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you’re a Paullus all right, worse luck …‘ He seated himself again, heavily, squinted at the pair of us and picked up the letter again. ‘Form your own opinion of his worth,’ he muttered. He fixed me with a calculating eye. ‘So you want to be an architect,’ he said. ‘How much are you prepared to pay me for your training?’

I opened my mouth again, but couldn't for the moment think of anything to say He rose again, and gripped my arm. His fingers were surprisingly strong. ‘Since you obviously haven’t got a bean,’ he said viciously, ‘I’ll not charge you for your apprenticeship. But you’ll get nothing else from me; I’m not having you under my roof, wasting my food and money. You’ll have to make your own way, same as I did.’

As we re-entered the workshop, the din, which had abated considerably, rose once more to its former pitch. At the far end of the place, beneath the one grimy window, an elderly, sallowfaced clerk, whom I was later to discover was the missing Abinnaeus, sat working at a desk. Uncle Lucullus deposited me at his side. ‘Brother’s boy,’ he said abruptly. ‘Must be mad. See what you can do with him....’

So I began my apprenticeship with my uncle, and four of the most curious years of my life.

My feelings on that first day can probably be better imagined than described. To reach Rome, I had ridden seventeen hundred miles. I had crossed mountains, skirted seas. I was hungry, tired and thirsty, but the suddenness of my induction left me too bemused to argue.

I had been parted abruptly from Marcus; I could only hope that I would see him again. I couldn’t believe my uncle meant what he said; that he would neither pay me nor give me board. I was to come to know him better. When I was finally released from my chores--I had been set to smoothing a stack of cheap paper, with ivory combs and a shell--I met him on the stairs. He didn’t betray by the flicker of an eyebrow that he had ever seen me before; just stumped past me, head rolling and nodding, and hurried away along the street.

Marcus was waiting for me in the street, still with a broad grin on his face. He hadn’t been idle; he was carrying one of our saddlebags across his shoulder and a bulky parcel of bread, cheese and wine. I fell into step with him silently. As we walked he told me he had already found a job for himself, in a big farrier’s yard down towards the Tiber, and had secured a room for us. We headed down towards Subura, buildings rising grimly beside us under the lowering sky. He stopped finally outside a tall, dilapidated block of flats. ‘Well,’ he said, nodding, ‘this is home. I got a top-floor room. At least we shan’t have anybody dancing on the ceiling.’

I stood and looked round me at the rubbish-choked street, up at the facade of the place. A reek came from it: an old, sour stench of boiled cabbage and dirt. I saw cracked and broken plaster, slime-stained walls. In one place, above a crumbling cornice, grass and shrubs had seeded themselves over the years. The biggest of the stunted bushes, still sporting a handful of decrepit leaves, was indubitably a pear sapling. I shook my head. ‘It’s a long way,’ I muttered, ‘from the Forum to the Pear Tree. Not counting the stairs ...’

That got Marcus. He had always tended to have a curious sense of humour; now he sat on the offending stairs and laughed till the tears shone on his cheeks. ‘Sergius,’ he said finally, when he could speak again without choking, ‘you have the soul of a scholar, I swear it. Rome’s going to do you a great deal of good ...’ He rose, and lifted the bundles. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come and see the worst.’

The room we finally reached was tiny, not much more than a pace or two across. It shared with the rest of the house an odour of decay. Rain had seeped through the ceiling in several places, staining the walls, while in one corner the floorboards were so rotten that unless one stepped carefully there was a lively danger of plummeting to the floor beneath. One window, small and square, admitted air and light to the cell. I moved to it, peered through. The view was unexpectedly grand. To the right the cluttered length of the Argiletum ran towards the Capitoline, crowned with the ancient Temple of Jupiter; across the opposing roofs reared the walls of the Flavian Amphitheatre; to the left I saw clear across the huddle of Subura and the Viminal to the great Baths of Diocletian. Suddenly I realised what the curious events of the day had almost driven from my mind: that I was in Rome, living in Rome, at the heart of the Empire. I turned back, feeling a heart-lifting surge of excitement. ‘Marcus,’ I said, ‘I’m already so much in your debt I shall never be able to repay you. But I promise you one thing. I’ll certainly earn my keep somehow, and pay my way.’

‘You certainly will,’ said Marcus with characteristic abruptness. ‘I’m not supporting you, any more than your uncle.’ He sat down on one of the beds and began pulling at the straps of the pack. ‘That half,’ he said, pointing, ‘from the end of the bed there to the door, is yours. This bit’s mine. Keep the place tidy; you know I can’t stand a clutter, and I’m not walking round behind you putting things away.’

‘Marcus,’ I said, ‘what do you think of my uncle?’

He grunted. ‘Nowhere near as mad as he looks,’ he said. ‘But quite mad enough.’

I arrived early next morning to find the office a shambles. The tools were flung about in confusion; one piece of alabaster lay on the floor; the other was cracked clean across, while the slaves were engaged in scrubbing copious bloodstains from the bench and wall. Apparently my uncle’s remark about carving the reliefs himself had been meant in grim earnest. Tackling the business with customary vigour, he had soon succeeded in badly gashing his thumb. Undaunted, he wrapped the wounded member and carried on. He rapidly cut himself again; the second injury was so severe he fainted on the spot, and had it not been for the timely return of Abinnaeus, who knew his employer better than I realised, the career of Lucullus Paullus might have ended then and there. He reappeared at the works a few days later, still swearing blue fire. By that time the offending alabaster had been removed from sight; the job was put out quietly, and nothing more was said. In the end the Emperor never came; my uncle took the whole thing as a personal affront, removed the board from his door and swore never to work for royalty again.

I was to come to know him well, too, over the years, but to this day I don’t pretend I ever understood him. Though he styled himself an architect, most of his profits came from projects as widely removed as the repair of aqueduct channels and the restoration of furniture. Nothing was too small for him to tackle, though he took most pride, obscurely, in his manufacturing of beds. The sideline had come about largely by accident. A few years before he had acquired a gang of skilled slaves from an Ostian businessman who had succeeded in bankrupting himself. He had no real use for them at the time, but they had been knocked down for next to nothing and my uncle was a man who hated the thought of any useful commodity going to waste. The speed with which they could produce a bed was nothing short of wonderful; and Lucullus, by virtue of his curious persuasiveness and wide range of contacts, had succeeded in re-equipping half the households of the city. Couches of all shapes and sizes issued from the little manufactory off the Argiletum in a steady stream; and I, who was largely involved in matters arising from minor contracts, spent most of my days immersed in the intricacies of headboards and frames, webbing and cushions. It was an odd fate for a would-be leader of the Empire.

The eccentricities of Uncle Lucullus were many and varied, so varied that he seemed to contain within himself every contradiction imaginable. Normally he was the meanest of men, but he was capable of bursts of startling generosity. He was a shrewd businessman, yet he was often guilty of acts of gross stupidity. One of the stories that circulated about him fits so well with his character that I’m sure it must be true. He had a fine house, on the Viminal; one day he decided he was not enjoying the respect due to his station, and let it be known through Subura that he was willing to receive clients. The following morning his porch was invested by an anxious swarm of beggars, some dolled up in the ancient and degraded toga, all clamouring for the benefits of his wisdom and wealth. My uncle was delighted with the effect, and so far forgot his habitual parsimony as to shower the mob with gold. The following day its numbers, of course, doubled; the night after that the din from the street woke Lucullus in the small hours. The house was besieged by a chanting mob, all hoping for a share of this sudden and mysterious largesse. My uncle, enraged at the loss of his sleep, appeared among them with a horse-whip; he was severely buffeted in the ensuing brawl, narrowly escaping with his life. For weeks afterwards small aggressive groups tended to follow him about in the streets; he eventually shut himself up in his house, refusing to make an appearance till the plebs, traditionally fickle, had found other objects of amusement.

To this misplaced vanity he added an acute hypochondria. He snivelled and coughed his way through the winter months, swathed in a dozen or more assorted tunics and scarves; in the summer he developed violent and I’m sure largely imaginary hay fever. He was also perennially convinced his eyes were failing, and that he would one day go stone blind. That on its own would never have surprised me, for the light he habitually worked by was dim enough to ruin anybody’s sight. If, as often happened, the rest of us stayed on after dark he would make a perfect nuisance of himself, stamping round the workshop snuffing out a taper here, extinguishing a lamp there, till he had reduced us to the same Stygian gloom; he viewed each unnecessary flame as a positive financial haemorrhage, and an insult to his business acumen. On grand days he sported a concave emerald, through which he would peer in lordly imitation of the Emperor Nero; other times he would fall into a fit of fretting and wailing, summoning oculists half a dozen at a time to attend him. Then we would spend hours pounding up his salves: the Unconquerable, prepared in accordance with a secret Thessalian formula, the Victorious (as used by the Pharaohs of Egypt) and many more. He would lie back in his chair, damp pads over his eyes, while Abinnaeus, with a set face of resignation, dripped the stuff on to his closed lids. Usually the cure was miraculous; he would spring up revitalised, and curse us all soundly for neglecting our proper work.

Another recurring fantasy was his mausoleum. Death obsessed him; he belonged to one of the richest funeral clubs in Rome and was for ever buying plots of land round the city, on which he swore he would raise a monument rivalling that of Hadrian himself. One of these periodic outbursts took place shortly after I joined him. He called me to his office early one morning, bubbling with enthusiasm; he had; he said, acquired a first-rate plot close to the Porta Flaminia, which after due consideration he had decided was ideally suited for his final resting place. Nothing would suffice but that plans for his Temple of Death be drawn up at once; I would work with him on the building, which would be of weighty but classic simplicity. I hurried to Abinnaeus, highly excited, but the old man merely sniffed. ‘If you look in that cupboard,’ he said, ‘you’ll find it’s full of the stuff. There must be at least a score of designs, each one bigger than the last. He might settle for one of them, though I doubt it; he usually starts from scratch. He’ll sell the land before the month’s out, of course; but you’ll have to learn, like all the rest ...’

I worked hard for a fortnight, regardless. For the first time the endless Orders Abinnaeus had had me learn, the details of columns and capitals, architraves and pediments, seemed to make sense. Whether what I finally envisaged would ever have supported its own colossal weight is highly doubtful; as things turned out, it never had the chance to. A week later, Uncle Lucullus called me sadly to his desk. He had decided, he said--head rolling and bobbing miserably, tears standing in his eyes--that he was unworthy to lie within sight of the great of Rome. Instead he would be cremated and his ashes scattered on the Tiber which would bear them to the sea. It would be a fitting end, full of that humility which had been the virtue of our forefathers. I accepted defeat with as good a grace as possible; the plans, tied sadly with ribbon, were filed away and the whole project forgotten--except that a few months later I found out that just as Abinnaeus had predicted he had received a good offer for the plot from a senatorial speculator with more money than sense, and promptly clinched the deal. Nothing could have been more typical of my uncle.