Katherine Bucknell - What You Will

‘Well, I’m sure you recall that Trimalchio keeps by him the candelabrum which once belonged to his master, despite the fact that it marks him as a former slave. Just like Valjean’s candlesticks, you see?’

She approached the table, twisted the tapers into the sticks, straightened them.

‘The candlesticks and the candelabrum are mementos,’ he said, ‘– symbols, if you like – of the greatest moment in their lives: the moment of being freed.’ There was an easy comedy in his voice, as if he wasn’t insisting.

‘But Petronius writes nothing about this!’ Roland expostulated. Up he stood again. ‘You are importing modern psychology into a text of which only fragments survive in any case. Where is the documentary evidence for what you say? Or any evidence at all? Are you forgetting that Trimalchio is not a real person?’

Lawrence turned away from the oven door where he was crouching to peer through the glass at the soufflé, his hands cosied in the two halves of an oven mitt. He smiled at Hilary as she stood tangled between himself and Roland. ‘Petronius gives us extravagant detail! Trimalchio does nothing but celebrate his freedom. Hideous as he is, he becomes rich and he feasts – for ever, as it were – and in his own vulgar way. Feeding the appetites pent up in him as a slave.’

‘We have one of the collars,’ Hilary said. It burst out of her, as if it were proof of something. She lifted her eyebrows, surprised at herself. There was a little silence.

‘Collars?’ Roland bristled at her.

‘A slave collar. Made of bronze. It’s inscribed, so we know it’s late antiquity. Early Christian period, fourth century. Found in Italy. I’ll tell you what –’ She paused, turned from one to the other of them and then raised her hands towards her neck, resting her fingertips on her collarbone, squinting a little in dismay. ‘Sounds weird, but I put it on one time. It has a piece missing.’ She held out her right thumb and forefinger, about two and a half inches apart to show the size of the gap, then rested her fingers back on her collarbone.

‘I tried it with Eddie – Edward Doro.’ Her hands moved ever so slightly as she recalled the stiffness, pulling the collar open wider, whether she would snap it, how the ragged edges scraped her skin when the two of them nestled it into place. ‘It’s surprisingly delicate, actually – thin, like the leather strap you’d put around a dog’s neck; it’s not like you couldn’t get it off if you were determined. It would have been more – well, also a symbol. Even with the tiny rivets soldered into place. Which just shows how completely the slave was resigned to the whole system, his place in it. A kind of settled, polished arrangement. It’s almost unbearable to imagine –’

‘Imagine. Exactly.’ Roland pounced in triumph. ‘Why would any slave resist a master who could torture him, have him crucified? Or have his head put on a spike along the road? Where was a slave to run to even if he didn’t have a collar? The empire was monumental. You can’t go around imagining history.’

But Lawrence pounced back. ‘How the bloody else are we to understand it? It’s not as if it’s still here around us!’

Roland smiled, an artful, curling smile. He came towards the table, tut-tutting, reached for the white wine and poured himself another glass. ‘Yes, yes. All right. But judicious use of same. In any case, these collars are a very late phenomenon. And by the fourth century, a freed slave didn’t become a citizen of Rome, did he?’

‘We have two or three branding irons, too,’ said Hilary grimly.

‘Touché,’ said Lawrence. He was rinsing parsley at the sink, shaking water off it with a snap of his wrist. He reached across the counter and flung a few droplets on to the flame of the gas burner where they made a sizzling sound. ‘As it were.’

They all laughed.

‘Give it up, Roland,’ said Lawrence in a congenial tone. ‘We’ve scored a hit for the imagination. No history without it. No nothing, in fact.’

Hilary looked compassionately at Roland, and she said under her breath, uncertainly, ‘What I meant was, imagine if you had to wear the collar yourself. It’s degrading. And you feel that. Even though it is only a symbol of something else – real power, real servitude.’

Roland took a step towards her, holding his wine glass in front of his face, half obscuring it. ‘You have to forgive us. We go on at each other like this all the time. It’s part of our brief.’ He looked down at his shoes, sipped the wine.

Lawrence set the basket of sliced bread on the table. ‘Oh, yes, the brief. Nowadays we’ve got to fill out endless paperwork. What we plan to publish in the next five years – daunting to say the least. The whole department gets a grade. To ensure we’re on to something worthwhile with our work, contributing to the gross national product. And they set our colleagues on us: Haven’t we got something ready to go, something tucked away we could bring to print?’

‘They are around our necks, speaking of collars, all these bureaucrats with their research assessment procedures,’ Roland said contemptuously. ‘What are we up to? they keep asking. Forgetting they have given us the nation’s youth, and that some of us are devoted to teaching, which is, after all, very time-consuming. Otherwise it’s, What do we need? What do we want? How can they make us happy? They should bloody well go away. People need to think life through for themselves or they don’t learn to care about it. The state is mothering everyone to death.’

‘I’ve taken on Roland as a mentor,’ said Lawrence with amiable disdain, clueing Hilary in, ‘and he defends me from the entire process of assessment.’

Roland giggled. He leaned towards Hilary and said, ‘Or maybe we should say, Lawrence has taken me on as his mother – in this post-feminist era. We’ve all been turned into women, really. Oxford dons, the government, whatever. The men, the fathers – their time is gone.’ He smiled and said to her with zest, ‘You’ve won.’

Hilary was taken aback. ‘Won what? I wasn’t fighting for anything.’ She felt strangely embarrassed by his pronouncement. She sat down at the table and Roland sat down opposite her.

‘I had a mentor,’ she said, as if admitting to a character flaw. ‘Edward Doro. He died, and I’ve been at sea ever since.’

‘That’s bad news,’ Roland said. ‘I mean – forgive me. What happened exactly?’

Lawrence knew all about it from Gwen, but he was intrigued now to hear it straight from Hilary. He drew a little closer to the table.

But for a moment Hilary didn’t say anything because she was wondering why it was that everyone she met in England assumed she was fighting for something, something of which she herself was unaware. Paul had seemed to think that she had an agenda of some kind. Were Americans more complacent than the English? Were they insufficiently political about day-today matters? Or is it me, she pondered, who has failed ever to become conscious of having any particular ambitions? Roland assumes I’m a feminist just because I’m a woman. Maybe I ought to be a feminist? But she and Gwen had agreed: it was out of the question for them, for a whole swathe of girls back in America, girls of their moment, of their type. Had she somehow misunderstood what it was, feminism? Had she received the benefits without signing up for the cause?

She looked up, sensing their expectation, wondering how to begin to answer Roland. ‘Edward Doro collected antiquities and so that’s what he taught me how to do.’ She lifted her palms in the air, apologetic, self-deprecating. ‘It was amazing – being with someone who always knew what he wanted. And who always got what he wanted – at least in the way of objects.’