Wolf Whistle

His great aunt shot him a glance. ‘I suppose I’d better tell you,’ she said sourly. ‘In your line of business, you’d probably find out soon enough, now that little bitch has aired it.’ She paused, looking up at the giant statue for a full thirty seconds before saying, ‘Walk me home.’

‘I-’ He thought of the coups and the murders and the crises rocking the Empire, and then looked at this proud, old woman, dwarfed by the temple. ‘I’d be delighted.’

As she slipped her arm into his, he realized that Daphne had been considerably rattled by the encounter. All her energies had been expended in bluster, and he was not surprised that she did not speak until they reached the Esquiline, that pocket of aristocracy known as Nob Hill, and even then it was not to him, but to dismiss her servants. Continuing past her own front door, she led him to the public gardens which, unsurprisingly on a day like this, were deserted. Why this urgent need for privacy, he wondered, passing the nodding purple heads of fritillaries and spikes of larkspur pushing up through feathery leaves. The air was heavy with the resinous scent of terebinth trees and with the sound of songbirds calling out their territories.

‘There.’ Daphne pointed past the elegant portico which, on a summer’s day, would cast shade on the rippling watercourses, then tersely addressed the gardener clipping the laurels. ‘Leave us.’

His protestations were cut short at the appearance of silver, and Marcus was steered towards an evergreen grotto of box, bay and myrtle, where even the marble seat was dry. Across the pond, a blackbird trilled from a birch.

‘I don’t suppose you remember Penelope?’ she said with a deep exhalation of breath.

And suddenly the reason for secrecy became clear. Marcus Cornelius felt his stomach flip over. For eighteen years that name had been taboo in his family.

‘Actually, I do.’ It was an effort to make his voice neutral, but he knew he’d succeeded. Penelope, the youngest of Daphne’s five daughters, had committed suicide when Marcus was too young to understand the meaning of the word scandal. But he cherished vivid memories. Her long, fair lashes making butterfly kisses on his cheek. Teaching him to climb trees. Playing tag in the garden. And she bought him a kitten, he recalled, which ran away two days later. ‘She was very beautiful.’

Daphne gave a bitter smile. ‘Perhaps if she’d looked like a carthorse, life would have run smoother for us all.’

A maelstrom of emotion surged up to engulf him. Feelings which, by necessity, he’d kept hidden for most of his life swam now before him. Penelope had meant more to him than his own mother. She’d been brother, sister, friend and conspirator rolled into one, a girl who never walked when she could run and whose laughter and lullabies brightened days like summer heather. For a boy of seven, her death-sudden and without explanation-was like the very sun had set for ever. Who would he chase butterflies with now? Or ride piggyback? The day Penelope died, his childish world became a darker, quieter, rather sombre place and just to speak her name could earn him a thrashing.

For years afterwards he had wondered, was it his fault she was dead? Had he, somehow, failed her?

Secretly, painfully, on each anniversary of her death, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio would consign a garland of poppies, Penelope’s favourite flower, into the Tiber where she’d thrown her weighted body.

He swallowed hard. ‘She’d be thirty-eight by now.’

‘What? Oh. Oh, yes.’ Daphne did not wish to be reminded of her own advancing years. ‘Anyway, the point is, that… that creature back there-’

‘Yes?’ he prompted, inhaling the soothing, aromatic mix of evergreens as a goldfinch searched the germanders.

His aunt gave an imperious sniff. ‘Penelope was touched from birth, singing like a common slave, and was there ever a girl for giggling. No decorum, that child. You won’t remember, of course-’

He saw no gain in contradiction.

‘-but we found her an excellent husband, son of a tribune from Crete. Or was it Mauritania? I don’t recall his name offhand, but he died somewhere in Gaul a year before Penelope…’ She cleared her throat. ‘What I’m saying, Marcus, is that it wasn’t as though she had nothing to show for herself.’

Orbilio felt his world spin. Was this a dream? A nightmare? After eighteen years of the strictest silence, was he really sitting in a sheltered grotto listening to his great-aunt talk about Penelope as though she was the butcher’s wife, and not her own flesh and blood? Did suicide bring such shame that Daphne could not recall things that even he, young as he had been, could remember in such detail? Or had she never cared how Penelope doted on her Cypriot husband? The devastation she’d felt at his death not in Gaul but Pannonia? And, tragically, how the news brought on a miscarriage?