Alone again. Too tired to care.
Wrong, Albia. I cared.
26
I had breakfast at the Stargazer and was not surprised when Manlius Faustus hove into view. He always followed up on messages from me. That was how he had come to notice I was missing, the time he found me ill.
‘Tiberius! Don’t you need to be with Sextus?’
‘He can manage. I was told you needed to speak to me.’
The waiter, my deaf cousin Junillus, brought more bread and cold sausage to the rustic table where we sat. This wasn’t so much that Junillus had learned our favourites: it was the only choice. Some fashionable eating houses have a limited menu because they only serve that day’s freshest produce at market. The Stargazer gave you whatever had been available two days ago at the cut-price bakery and run-down stalls my aunt frequented, searching for giveaway items with not too much mildew.
Aunt Junia did not believe in spoiling her customers with variety. Her attitude was that if they never came back it meant fewer people to annoy her by expecting service. She rarely served at the Stargazer herself. She said people were rude to her. Even if we told her why, she failed to hear the message.
The aedile and I gnawed our rolls. Choosing words with care, I explained my discoveries about the missing Julia, and about her mother and relatives. Her family links to Volusius Firmus and Ennius Verecundus caught Faustus by surprise. Watching him, I felt satisfied that he had known nothing either about Sextus being abandoned.
‘Now I am cursing myself. Oh, Albia, I should have seen there was something wrong – I have been visiting the house for weeks. He said nothing. Nor did his mother.’
‘But she obviously knows.’
It would not be the first time a mother-in-law actually connived at shedding her son’s wife, though I refrained from saying so. Faustus was too fond of Marcella Vibia.
‘I can’t understand it.’
‘The upstairs apartment is neat, the children seem happy,’ I told him. ‘It looks as if, whatever happened, they have all settled into a new routine. There is no sign of Sextus feeling agitated, or worrying about how to be reconciled.’ I dropped my voice and asked, ‘Will you take it up with him?’
‘I have to. If this comes out, we need to have our reply prepared … Are you absolutely sure?’
‘She has taken all her things. The children came home from school and never asked after her. They appear to be eating and sleeping downstairs with the grandparents, Sextus as well, to some extent.’
I confessed what had happened when I met Laia Gratiana. Faustus groaned.
‘Now don’t blame me too much. I know she’ll tell her brother but, Tiberius, isn’t it better to come clean, rather than have Laia and Gratus find out from other sources?’
Faustus decided he must go and speak to Sextus now, before Gratus and Laia turned up fuming. He wanted to waylay Sextus on the way to the Forum, before he made his speech.
‘Should we cancel the speech?’ I suggested.
‘Problematic. We have stirred up an audience. It’s too late.’
I said he could borrow the donkey. Patchy must like him: Faustus rode off like a prime jockey on a fine-bred Spanish mare. The donkey boy could hardly keep up, running along after him. Dromo did not bother to try.
I chewed my way through the aedile’s unfinished sausage. Junillus threw in a free gherkin, but it failed to cheer me.
Only then, too late to mention it, did I remember Nothokleptes saying of Vibius Marinus, ‘Isn’t he the wife-beater?’
27
That shocked me. Could it be true? Had Sextus been knocking Julia about? Had she gone because he hit her?
I felt doubtful. Vibius Marinus had been boorish about informers (who wasn’t?) but on the whole he seemed too bland; he lacked the kind of intensity that I associate with violent men (I had encountered enough to know). I summed him up as impetuous, though only in the sense of misjudgement. He jumped in without thinking. He lacked measure and gravitas − but that is not the same as exploding with rage and using your fists.
I had seen him with his mother, with his children. All the same, how many violent men seem to outsiders to behave normally? In public, they conceal their brutality under a show of utter decency. How many friends and neighbours tell you, after a tragedy, that they had no idea? They are stunned. They would never have allowed it to continue − or so they maintain.
And how many times have I heard that while standing beside the pyre for some miserable, skeletal victim after the undertaker has told me privately that the poor woman had sustained many broken bones and scars over the years, before the attack that killed her?
If Vibius beat his wife, it explained why she might leave him − though if she was any kind of mother, why had she left behind her still-young children with a man who hurt her?
Even if Vibius hit Julia, Rome might be slow to call it reprehensible. Historically, Roman men had the right to chastise their wives and children, and if they committed crimes that shamed the family, to kill them even. The paterfamilias had been king, trial judge and executioner in his own household.
In theory he still was. Wives found ways around that system, mainly by ignoring the supposed rules.
We no longer lived in traditional times. Cruelty was frowned on, at least if the bruises were visible; love – or a pretence of love – was applauded. Even in cases of adultery, a husband or father was not legally permitted to put his wife or daughter to the sword, although if he caught her with a lover in his own house, he could slay the lover. Adulterers had to be quick at shinning out of windows. Women were wise to conduct love affairs in friends’ houses. The friends had to pretend not to know about it, else providing a love-nest was pimping.
Suppose a man went too far and did kill his wife or daughter. He was virtually let off if it happened in the heat of the moment. However, husbands who battered their wives for pleasure, or for no reason, or to hide their own guilt at screwing a prostitute, or when too drunk to know what they were doing, or too drunk to care, were denounced. Husbands had to protect the weaker members of their households. After all, if a man really needed to take out his temper on someone, he was supposed to knock the lights out of his slaves.
Wives could leave. Divorce was easy. Fathers had to take back brides who found married life unbearable. We were civilised nowadays. Fathers might curse but, after all, they could always find the returning daughter a new husband and offload her again. Under the rigid Augustan marriage laws, a divorced woman was supposed to re-wed promptly. She lost her right to receive legacies otherwise, assuming that bothered her. Really unhappy wives might think money did not matter.
There was a moral code, too. If people thought Vibius had caused the break-up of his family, the kind of family the law directly encouraged, that would lose him votes. He had two children; he was supposed to persuade his Julia to let him father three. In the kind of senate we had, some would disapprove of violence yet others would actually envy a man who had dared to chastise his wife. But the governing fathers would never let him get away with his deception.
What about the other candidates?
In general, I had thought marriage was so much the norm for would-be politicians I had not even asked the question. To be an aedile, a candidate must be thirty-six; since men tended to marry first in their early twenties it was likely they had all done so at one time. The only one I had ascertained as married was Dillius Surus, who notoriously lived off his very rich wife. Presumably, since she paid his bills, he paid her respect, though perhaps he drank so hard simply to endure having to be grateful to a woman some called unpleasant. Arulenus Crescens stood accused of refusing to marry his mistress, so he must be single now but had been married before and left a wife pregnant; it was possible he had ditched the latest mistress (a woman with a blowsy reputation) because he had wanted a more suitable wife for show. Laia’s brother, a widower, was making a new marriage, unusual only in cynically timing it for the election.