Counting the Stars by Helen Dunmore

Author:Helen Dunmore
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Historical
ISBN: 9780670914548
Publisher: Fig Tree
Published: 2007-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

There is poison everywhere. It jumps to his ears and his eyes. It’s like the time eight months ago when Clodia thought for a week that she might be pregnant. Everywhere he went, women’s bodies swelled ripely under their tunics, when he could have sworn that only the day before they’d been flat-bellied girls. Babies howled all night long. Friend after friend sent messages, proud and bashful, to announce a wife’s pregnancy.

It can’t really have been like that. He’s a poet, he makes things up. He even makes people up. Clodia accused him of that once. ‘You don’t know who I am! You only know the woman in your poems.’

But she loved the poems. He knew that. No one, not even Clodia, could fake that slow, warm, delighted smile.

Poison. He heard Lucius berating the cook for buying mixed wild mushrooms from a market stall instead of from their usual supplier, who came in from the country with a basket over his arm and knew every mushroom like his own child.

‘Are you trying to poison us? In this household, false economy is not a virtue!’

Then there was that imbecile Egnatius in the bathhouse yesterday, telling some rigmarole about a girl who sent poisoned sweets to her rival, but the younger sister whom she sent to deliver the basket peeped under the cloth, saw honey and almonds, and swiped just one.

‘Just one, and she was rolling on the ground in agony. It’s true, I had it from someone who knows the girls’ aunt.’

A flash of teeth and a roll of the eyes to see just how much he’s the centre of attention. Yes, you’re like a child, my dear Egnatius. A grown man with a sodden mass of napkins hanging around his knees.

Later on, in the Forum, a group of pompous baldheads debated the niceties of an inheritance case that had been dragging and droning its way through the courts for longer than even they can have been alive. One of them hee-hawed confidentially, nodding his head like a donkey which has been tethered outside a school of rhetoric for so long that it thinks it’s a polished debater: ‘And then – hee-haw – it has to be said that there was some question – hee-haw – of potentially improper interference in the sequence of events, if you understand me, the sequence of events leading to the decease of – hee-haw – the deceased.’

And they were off, muttering about decoctions, potions, preparations and symptoms –

The decease of the deceased. You barbarian. Ye gods, if language were ever granted a triumph, you should be led in rags and chains in the procession. The populace of Rome should hurl the contents of their chamberpots over your heads, until the outside matches the inside.

All the grave donkey heads bobbed up and down, as solemn as the judges they longed to be. Wag away, you impotent, prating word-slaughterers. If you want to see the decease of the deceased, you’ve only to look in a mirror.

Wherever Catullus went, poison haunted him.

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