Lindsey Davis - A dying light in Corduba

'Maybe she'll leave you!' he speculated eagerly. That had always been a possibility.

'I see you really have her interests at heart.'

'Oh, I'm happy to see her with you. I think when I stand for the Senate I'll make my election platform denouncing your relationship – I'll be a man of such traditional rectitude I even criticise my own sister -'

'You won't succeed,' I told him. He might. Rome loves a pompous bastard.

Aelianus laughed. 'No; you're probably right. My father would refuse to finance the election.' Camillus Verus, father of my beloved and of this poisonous young ferret, always looked like an uncomplicated old buffer, but evidently Aelianus was sharp enough to realise that their parent loved Helena and understood that I did too; however much he regretted our relationship, the senator knew he was stuck with it. I had a sneaky idea he was quite looking forward to having a grandchild too.

'Jupiter, you must be really gloating, Falco!' Helena's brother's bitterness was even worse than I had realised. 'You've jumped up from nowhere and seized the only daughter of a patrician house -'

'Cobnuts. Your sister was glad to fly off her perch. She needed rescuing. Helena Justina did her duty and married a senator, but what happened? Pertinax was a disaster, a traitor to the state, who neglected and mistreated her. She was so miserable she divorced him. Is that what you want? Now she's with me, and she's happy.'

'It's illegal!'

'A technicality.'

'You could both be accused of adultery.'

'We regard ourselves as married.'

'Try that in the Censor's court.'

'I would. No one will take us there. Your father knows Helena made her own choice, and she's with a man who adores her. There is no moral objection the senator can make.'

Across the room the dancing girl with the limited technique shook out her waist-length hair. She seemed to know how to do that. I realised she had been watching us quarrelling. It gave me an uneasy qualm.

To end the fight I stood up, preparing to return to my own couch. 'So, Camillus Aelianus, what does bring you among the revered Society of Baetican Olive Oil Producers?'

The angry young man calmed down enough to boast: 'Friends in high places. How did you get in, Falco?'

'Much better friends, in even more select positions,' I told him crushingly.

Settling back the other side of Anacrites came almost as a relief. Before he tried to have me killed we had been able to work together. He was devious, but like me he had lived. He enjoyed a good wine, he was in control of his barber, and he had been known to crack the occasional joke against the Establishment. With an emperor who liked cost-cutting and hated too much security, Anacrites must be feeling beleaguered. He wanted me, for one, well out of his way. He had tried to discredit me, and he had planned to get me executed by a tricky foreign potentate. But even now, I knew where I was with him. Well, I knew it as much as you ever could with a spy.

'What's this, Falco? Is my young friend from the noble family pursuing vindictive claims against you?'

I said his young friend was about to get his nose pulled off. Anacrites and I resumed our usual hostility.

Gazing up, I fixed my eyes on a lamp. Burning with the clear, odourless flame of fine Baetican oil, it was in gleaming bronze and the shape of a flying phallus. Either this rude vessel was swinging more than it should, or the whole room had begun to manoeuvre in some swooning routine… I decided I had reached my full capacity for Barcino red wine. At the same moment, as so often happens, a slave poured more into my cup. I sighed and settled down for a long night.

I must have had yet more drink later, though I cannot provide a catalogue. As a result, nothing of interest happened – not to me, anyway. Others no doubt threw themselves into risk and intrigue. Someone presumably made an assignation with the dancer from Hispalis. It seemed the kind of party where traditional customs would be observed.

I left when the atmosphere was still humming. Nobody had noticeably fallen out, and certainly at that stage there was nobody dead. All I recall of my final hour are some tricky moments trying to shoulder my amphora; it was half as high as me and immovable to a man in my condition. The young fellow in the oatmeal tunic from the other row of couches was also collecting his cloak; he seemed relatively sober, and helpfully suggested I roust out some more slaves to lug the cumbersome container home for me on a carrying pole. I suddenly saw the logic of this. We exchanged a laugh. I was too far gone to ask his name, but he seemed pleasant and intelligent. I was surprised he had been at the dinner all on his own.

Somehow my legs must have found their way from the Palatine to the Aventine. The apartment where I had lived for some years was six floors up in a dismal tenement; the slaves refused to come up. I left the amphora downstairs, tucked out of sight under a pile of dirty togas in Lenia's laundry on the ground floor. It was the kind of night where my left foot set off in one direction and met my right one coming back. I have no recollection of how I persuaded them to co-operate and find their way upstairs.

Eventually I awoke from troubled blackness to hear the distant cries of market stallholders and the occasional clonk of a harness bell. I realised the activity in the streets below had been disturbing me for some time. It was the first day of April and the outdoor street life was hectic. Watchdogs were barking at chickens. Cockerels were crowing for the fun of it. Day had dawned – quite a few hours ago. On the roof tiles outside a pigeon cooed annoyingly. Light, with a painful midday intensity, streamed in from the balcony.

The thought of breakfast marched into my brain automatically – then receded fast.

I felt terrible. When I squirmed upright on the saggy reading couch where I had flung myself last night, one look around the apartment made everything worse. There was no point calling out to Helena, not even to apologise. She was not here.

I was in the wrong place.

I could not believe I had done this – yet as my head throbbed it seemed all too plausible. This was our old apartment. We did not live here any more.

Helena Justina would be in our new home, where she would have waited for me all last night. That's assuming she had not already left me on the grounds that I had stayed out partying. A fact which any reasonable woman would interpret as meaning I had stayed out with another girl.

There was a dark first-floor apartment on the shady side of Fountain Court. At first glance the shady side looked superior, but that was only because the sun failed to light the decay that encased all these buildings like a mouldy crust. Shutters peeled. Doors sagged. People frequently lost heart and stopped paying their rent; before the landlord's muscle-bound assistants beat them up as a penalty, they quite often died in misery of their own accord.

Everyone who lived here was trying to leave: the basket- weaver with the street-level lock-up wanted to retire to the Campagna, the upstairs tenants came and went with a rapidity that said much about the facilities (that is, that there were none) while Helena and I, the weaver's subtenants, dreamed of escaping to a plush villa with piped water, a boundary of pine trees, and airy colonnades where people could hold refined conversations on philosophical subjects… Anything, in fact, would be better than a three- room, small-dimensioned let, where the spitting and swearing totters who lived in the upper storeys all had a right of way past our front door.

The front door had been stripped and planed down, ready for new paint. Inside, I squeezed down a corridor full of stored items. The first room off it had bare walls and no furniture. The second was the same, apart from an unbelievably obscene fresco painted straight opposite the entrance. Helena was spending much time doggedly scratching off the lewd copulating couples and the coarse satyrs in garish hyacinth wreaths and panpipes who lurked behind laurel bushes while they ogled the scene. Obliterating them was slow work and today all the wet sponges and scrapers lay abandoned in a corner. I could guess why.