Marilyn Todd - Second Act

‘Which only leaves comedy.’

‘I do not pretend to understand modern audiences when I tell you that the best laughs come from storylines involving pimps and prostitutes,’ Caspar said. ‘But sadly they’ve been done to death this season. What I’m left with are plots revolving round swaggering soldiers who think they’re the gods’ gift to women, grasping misers who get their comeuppance and beautiful girls without brains in love with penniless poets. Of course, I need the obligatory mix-up surrounding identical twins, and if the poor playwright can throw in a couple of cuckolds, so much the better.’

Caspar rubbed the statuette with affection.

‘A sad miss, my dear wife, a sad miss.’

‘So why don’t you write a play round a grasping miser with an airhead of a wife who conspires to relieve him of his gold so she can elope with her handsome, but penniless, poet lover?’ Claudia asked.

‘Ho!’ Caspar was jumping up and down, and not from the cold. ‘Magnificent, madam, absolutely magnificent. Dear me, you possess more creative talent than the dear departed! Now if I could only devise a happy ending, whereby the lovers run off with the money and make the husband look small…’

‘How about the poet has a secret identical twin who agrees to recite his poetry before a group of drunken, swaggering soldiers to provide his brother with an alibi for the time of the robbery…?’

‘Sublime!’ For a moment she thought he’d wet himself. ‘Utterly, brilliantitiously subl i me!’

‘Not utterly, brilliantitiously implausible, you don’t think? To the point of, say, ludicrous and far-fetched?’

Caspar calmed down enough to roll his eyes at the very suggestion. ‘We are looking at comedy here, madam. At pantomime. Farce. Escapist entertainment. Nudity.’

‘ Nudity?’

The entrepreneur gave an exaggerated wink. ‘Nudity pays the rent, dear lady. Especially volumptuous beauties like mine.’ He laced his little fat fingers. ‘And since musical farce is the one area in which women are allowed on the stage, it would be a shame to waste their plumptious talents. Nudity.’

Claudia smiled as the oxen were finally coerced into moving. Never let it be said that this had not been one eventful afternoon.

Caspar took advantage of the space to envelop her in his arms and shower her face with kisses that smelled of rosewater. ‘You have bestowed upon me a veritable triumph, madam. This play will be the talk of all Rome.’ More kisses rained down on her cheek. ‘How can I ever thank you?’

The oxen had plodded off and were out of sight round the corner. Claudia drew her beaver fur around her. The litter stand was just across the street.

‘Well, Caspar. It’s funny you should ask.’

*

Forget the five to six pounds of silver. This latest Spectacular, with its ‘volumptuous’ beauties and musical farce, couldn’t fail to impress potential clients. And with four days of public holiday, that was a lot of clients Claudia could squeeze in to be impressed.

As Caspar said, bawdiness was the order of the day as far as Roman comedy was concerned, and Claudia could see her clients’ eyes popping out on stalks when the girls were on stage and a mischievous wind, manufactured in the wings, accidentally blew aside the thin scarves that draped round their bodies or forced their clothes to cling tight to their spectacular curves.

Best of all, though, by staging the revue at her house, no financial outlay was required. She looked around the rainbow group, shivering in the cold as they staggered under their burdens of chests, trunks and baggage, their stomachs rumbling from hunger, and marvelled at this amazing new direction that her life was taking.

Not taking on a string of gadfly actors.

Going straight.

*

Excitedly, the company gathered up the array of trunks and clutter.

Packed in the tight, concise way that only travelling people manage to achieve were all the things essential to a theatrical performance. Costumes. Buskins. Musical instruments. Masks. Painted scenery boards were far too bulky for a troupe of strolling players to cope with, and for that reason painted canvases served as backdrops. These could then be rolled up tight and hung quickly and easily by means of a simple pulley system.

Gripping the leather strap of one of the prop chests and oblivious to the running chatter of the young lad on the other, the Digger smiled.

A lot of things had happened since autumn.

And they kept getting better and better.

Claudia’s lanky Macedonian steward did not so much as blink when his mistress charged into the atrium, threw her fur cloak into his arms, chafed her hands over the charcoals in the brazier, then calmly announced that there would be twenty strolling players arriving shortly who would be staying over Saturnalia, oh and could he prepare a hot bath, please, her feet were blocks of ice.

Leonides didn’t blink, for the simple reason that he couldn’t.

He just stood there, beaver fur halfway up his nostrils, paralysed.

God knows, when Master Gaius was alive, there was a constant traipse of clients, scribes, secretaries and messengers buzzing in and out. It wasn’t that he couldn’t cope. Or that there had been any less traffic in the house since the master’s death. Admittedly, it was a different kind of busy and heaven help him, it was nothing to have the master’s carping relatives in one room, members of certain law-enforcement agencies in another and irate moneylenders in a third, whilst he ran back and forth between them like some demented monkey, serving wine and honey cakes while the mistress was out implicating herself in an even deeper jam. But all the same. Strolling players?

Leonides dragged himself to his senses. No point in lamenting. The deed was done and the person who could talk the young mistress into changing her mind hadn’t been born yet.

‘Lock up the silver,’ he urged the household slaves. ‘Take everything away that might be flogged before we’ve had a chance to notice that it’s missing, plan on four to a room and don’t forget to count the blankets on the bed.’

Outside, voices, common ones at that, were growing louder. The dog next door began to howl. Leonides knew exactly how it felt. Within seconds, a laughing, shivering, grumbling prism of colours, shapes and textures surged through the vestibule door, filling the atrium with odours of wet wool and leather, cheap scent and cosmetics. What had he done to offend the gods, he wondered? He, who led the household prayers piously every morning and poured generous libations with conscientious regularity.

‘Dear lady.’

A small tornado in scarlet embroidered kaftan and what looked for all the world like a blue parrot bobbing on his head pushed his way to the front of the crush, his shining eyes on Claudia.

‘Allow me to compliment you on your charming house. Utterly enchanting, madam. Just like your wondrous self.’

‘Enough with the flattery, Caspar, I’ve already allocated you a guest bedroom,’ Claudia laughed. The others would have to take their chances in the slave quarters.

‘Dear lady, my motives are entirely selfless,’ Caspar said, affecting a mock wound. ‘Your domicile positively oozes taste. Sophistication and elegance weep from every marble column.’

Claudia was glad he approved. Many of the features were additions (costly ones at that) she’d had installed upon her husband’s death. Features designed to impress potential business contacts, proof that Gaius’s business ventures were not merely ticking over in his widow’s hands, but prospering. A lie, of course, but image is everything when it’s a man’s world, dog eat dog. Her eyes ranged with pride over the soaring atrium with its exquisite mosaics, marble busts and Nile frescoes, the fountain which babbled gently night and day, the aviary of tiny birds which sang their little hearts out. Not all new, of course. But combined, the house was the embodiment of commercial success.