Wolf Whistle

Claudia peered down at his scrubbed and eager face. ‘What are you? A gannet?’

Jovi fell on to his knees. ‘No, I’m a bear.’ He stuffed the last corner of the pie into his mouth and scampered round the floor. ‘A big, brown mountain bear-watch me. Grrr!’

But Claudia wasn’t watching. Her eyes remained fixed on the vestibule door, where the image of a man with still-damp tendrils round his forehead remained imprinted on her retina and whose sandalwood ungent lingered persistently. She heard again the gentle drop of the latch as he left, and the street sounds he’d momentarily admitted-the plod of an ox, the rumble of a barrel being unloaded echoed repeatedly inside her head.

Oh, sod it.

‘Call that a bear?’ she said, turning to Jovi. ‘I’ll show you bears.’ Looping up her arms, she made claws of her fingers and chased him round the fountain. ‘Arrrrr!’

I have a wine business, I have a house, I have a villa and vineyard in Etruria. What more, Claudia asked herself, diving round the pedestals and podiums, could I possibly want?

*

In a dingy garret boasting ill-fitting shutters and a damp patch on two walls, a stinking tallow burned low. There was no incense to sweeten the air here, no joyful frescoes, and the only window faced a blank wall. Because you had to really crane your neck to see the street below, it was easier to lift your eyes to the roofs all around you. You could see whose tiles were missing, who had sparrows under their eaves, who was superstitious enough to grow houseleeks to ward off Jupiter’s thunderbolts.

The man in the garret rarely looked out. The sounds rising upwards didn’t touch him-not the rattle of chariot wheels, nor the crank of the building cranes. Hunched in his creaky chair, he dipped the nib of his reed pen into the inkwell and wrote carefully.

He did not wish to blot.

Satisfied with his efforts, he paused and looked round his walls. In pride of place over his bed-where else-he had nailed the original. Every day he dusted it, lightly, with an ostrich feather stolen from the market, and every day he examined it for signs of deterioration. If the paper curled, he would push a small tack in, but already the edges were ragged; brown marks were creeping relentlessly. Not that there was anything wrong with the ink. Top quality, imported from India, it withstood the test of the elements. The words, and he knew them by heart, still stood out clear. But he could not take chances.

He had only received the one letter from Claudia Seferius. He had no intention of losing it to mishap.

Pursing his lips in concentration, he returned to his work and the only sound he heard was the scratching of the nib. He did not smell apples baking in the apartment below, he did not hear the giggles of the newly-weds next door, he did not feel the damp from the Tiber meet the damp from the low clouds and creep its way into his bedding.

Satisfied the copy was perfect, right down to the angle of the serifs, he sat back and admired it for several minutes then picked up his hammer and four nails. Where should he put it, this precious document? Here? Over here? What about-yes, what about over there, just above the door and to the left?

Next door the newly-weds laughed at their neighbour’s ritual. They had been married but a month, yet every night at precisely the same hour came the hammering of four solitary nails. Sometimes they listened out for it, a signal to blow out their own lantern and dive under the covers.

Once, she had met her neighbour on the stairs and asked him what it was he stuck on the walls every night, but the look he gave her shrivelled her to the spot and she averted her eyes whenever she saw him after that.

She would have moved house altogether, had she known that his walls were plastered with more than two hundred such reproductions of Claudia’s letter.

IV

Darkness in Rome did not signal an end to the working day; for some it was merely a beginning. Come dusk, wheeled traffic, which was not permitted during daylight hours because it clogged the narrow streets, began rumbling along, nose to tail. Low-sided wagons carrying everything from crated hippos to Phoenician cedars clanked along ruts made by centuries of ox-carts before them. There’d be salt brought in from the flat coastal plain, wool from Campania, hemp from the Rhone and Corsican pitch. By the light of a thousand flickering brands, carts would roll through the arches and up at the Collina Gate, the northernmost gap in the city walls. The thirtieth of March was a night like any other.