“Of course I will, if you chose it.” I was often firm. Helena had always ignored firmness, so it might have seemed pointless, but the statement made it clear who would be blamed if we were stuck with a bummer.
As we were. I could already tell.
Because of the daytime wheeled-vehicle curfew in Rome, after we took my mother home that evening we hitched the mule in Lenia’s laundry and planned to rise very early in order to leave just before dawn. After a few hours’ sleep at our apartment, I dragged myself awake the next morning only reluctantly. We put Julia and Nux in the back of the cart, still both asleep in separate baskets, and set off through the silent streets like defaulters doing a bunk.
“This seems to be the first disadvantage. Our house is miles outside town?”
“I was told that the distance is walkable.” Helena looked miserable.
“Time to own up, lady. Is that true?”
“You always said you wanted to live on the Janiculan Hill-with a view over Rome.”
“So I did. Very nice. I saw a superb gangster’s house there oncemind you, he had excellent reasons for guarding his privacy.”
The house Helena had bought was the other side of the Tiber: secluded, you could say. If it had a view as she promised, I knew it must be an upland property. Every day when I returned home in the evening (I would obviously not bother nipping back just for lunch as I did now), the last part of the walk would be up a steep hill. I could manage that, I told myself. I had lived all my life on the Aventine.
“We can afford our own litter now,” Helena ventured nervously as we drove past the Theatre of Pompey and rattled over the Agrippan Bridge. This was already further out of the city than I normally enjoyed tramping.
“If you want a social life, we’ll need one each.”
The house had tremendous potential. (Those deadly words!) Renovated-for it was suffering about twenty years of total neglect-it could end up truly beautiful. Airy rooms led from lofty corridors; attractive interior peristyle gardens separated pleasingly proportioned wings. There were good polychrome geometric mosaic floors in the principal rooms and hallways. Old-fashioned, slightly faded frescos posed interesting problems: whether to keep them or invest in more modern designs.
“It had no bathhouse,” Helena said. “There is a spring, luckily. I don’t know how the previous owners managed. I thought it was essential to have our own facilities.”
I gulped. “Gloccus and Cotta?”
“How did you guess?”
“They sound likely candidates for a job that can easily go wrong. I don’t see them here.” I could, however, see their various piles of ladders, litter, and old lunch crusts. They also had a large trade plate advertising their services, which had pushed over the welcoming herm at the entrance gate. No doubt they would reerect Hermes for us before they finally left.
I jest. The situation was clear to me. These were, without question, boys who left a trail of destruction in their wake. Snagging, in this contract, would mean employing a major contractor to put right everything that these smaller folk had done wrong-and all they had ruined which they should never have touched. There was nothing new or surprising in this situation. It is carefully worked out in the builders’ guild. It is how they perpetuate their craft. Every time one comes in and ruins your home, the next in the chain is guaranteed work. Don’t try to escape. They know every trick the luckless householder can pull. They are gods. Just leave them to get on with it.
“Gloccus and Cotta are never here,” Helena replied in a taut voice. “That, I am forced to admit, is their big disadvantage. If I tell you I bought this house before we went to Africa-”
I smiled gently. “We went in early April, didn’t we? We were there nearly two months?”
“Gloccus and Cotta were supposed to build the bathhouse while we were away. It was a simple construction on a clean site and they had told me they were free to program it in. It was to take twenty days.”
“So what happened, fruit?” She was so dismal it was easy to be kind to her; I could wind her up later, once she had provided the ammunition.
