Second Act Page 3

  On the steps of the Senate, a bearded Arab with bangles round his wrist was selling bottled lizards’ tongues mixed with seal rennet and yellow spiders as a cure for obesity and pots of sticky purple cream, guaranteed to restore hair, while a boy of no more than nine made dogs with ribbons round their collars dance through hoops.

  For the first time this afternoon, Claudia felt a faint stirring of hope. Strange as it might seem, Butico’s procrastination might actually work in her favour. Defrauding merchants was undoubtedly a crime, but quite how far the Security Police were prepared to push the matter was moot. Give him a good old-fashioned conspiracy and you wouldn’t see Marcus Cornelius for dust, and this was Rome, after all. Plots hatched faster than lice, all she had to do was hold on to her nerve.

  She was approaching the corner by the prison on Silversmith’s Rise when a rainbow exploded from a tavern.

  ‘Get out and stay out,’ the landlord was bellowing. ‘All of you!’

  ‘Good sir, I must protest,’ the smallest and most portly element of the rainbow complained, as it picked itself up from the flagstones. ‘These dear ladies—’

  ‘Them ain’t ladies, and them ain’t expensive, neither. Set one foot within ten yards of this establishment, you or yer cheap tarts, and I’ll set the dogs on yer.’

  ‘Go to hell,’ one of the ladies in question retorted, and the shortest and most portly component of the rainbow groaned.

  ‘Such sentiments, dear Jemima, aid our cause not.’

  To prove his point, a volley of trunks, packs and cases came hurtling through the hostelry door, much to the delight of the crowd which was starting to gather. Far from being embarrassed by the concourse, his little fat face brightened.

  ‘An audience,’ he breathed, and when he bowed, the feather in his bright blue turban swept the ground. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to acquaint you with “Caspar’s Spectaculars”. Pantomime, opera, tragedy—’

  ‘Ham!’ someone shouted.

  ‘—comedy, drama, political satire—’

  ‘Your actors are so wooden,’ another wag called, ‘I’ve seen better performances from oak trees.’

  The crowd quickly warmed to the theme. ‘Oak-smoked hams!‘

  ‘With lots of stuffing,’ someone added, indicating Caspar’s rotund belly.

  Then a wagon delivering jars of olive oil to an address up the hill came rumbling round the corner to spoil the fun and, with one last rattle of good-natured insults, the audience dispersed into the night. Claudia would have gone, too, only she was stuck between the cart and the tavern wall.

  There were about twenty members in Caspar’s patchwork troupe, she counted. Mostly male, but the group also included half a dozen well-upholstered girls.

  ‘Madam. I am utterly charmed to make your acquaintance.’

  This time Caspar swept off his turban when he bowed, revealing a gleaming bald head encircled by tight black shiny curls. A better arena for staging a performance Claudia hadn’t seen, even in the Theatre of Marcellus. He replaced the turban and brushed the dust off his rose-red embroidered tunic.

  ‘I trust this ugly contretemps will not deter you from coming along to enjoy one of Caspar’s Spectaculars whilst the company is in Rome?’ He flicked a piece of stale pie crust off his elbow. ‘Mention my name at the door, dear lady, and you are assured of the best seat in the house.’

  Don’t mind if I do. ‘Which house might that be, exactly?’

  ‘Ah.’ Plump hands spread in an open-palmed gesture as his fellow thespians collected up the baggage. ‘The appropriate venue, alas, is proving troublesome.’ He flashed a caustic glance at the landlord. ‘I shall have to advise you in due course, dear lady, of our next theatrical address.’

  ‘Which particular Spectacular do you recommend?’ Not that it mattered. Any one of them must be a hoot.

  ‘My word, you pose some tricky questions,’ Caspar said, wringing his hands and inspiring Claudia to wonder whether his appendages were ever still, even when he slept. ‘A major problem for touring companies such as ours lies in the transient nature of the workforce,’ he explained. ‘Most of these lovely people have been with me for only a matter of weeks, and one can hardly train them in the nuances of the classics when they’re still wet behind the ears.’

  ‘Which reduces the options to what?’

  ‘To writing the scripts myself,’ he sighed. ‘And therein lies another problem. An impresario runs the most terrible risks if his scripts owe more to plagiarism than originality.’

  Claudia was getting the drift. ‘In other words, you’re without a play and you don’t have a venue to put it on, even if you had one?’

  ‘Staging a production is nothing if not a challenge, madam.’

  Notoriously slow movers at the best of times, the oxen had ground to a halt, refusing point-blank to turn the corner into Silversmith’s Rise. Caspar, his shivering troupe and Claudia seemed doomed to spend the evening squashed together in the tavern door, and the drop in trade wasn’t improving the landlord’s temper any.

  ‘This is yours ’an all, mate,’ he growled, tossing down a marble bust from the balcony overhead.

  Caspar just managed to catch the statuette before it lost its nose on the rear wheel of the ox cart. ‘That, sir,’ he called up, ‘is no way to treat the dear departed.’

  ‘Your wife?’ Claudia asked, watching him tenderly brush the painted face and blow the dust off the smiling cheeks of the figurine. Like the other female members in his troupe, the dear departed had been far from the final throes of starvation.

  The feather in the turban nodded sadly.

  ‘How did she die?’ Claudia asked. He certainly liked his women big, did Caspar.

  ‘Die?’ His little eyebrows rose. ‘Good heavens, madam, the good lady didn’t die, she just departed.’ He tucked the bust underneath his arm and patted it. ‘Somewhere around Athens, if my memory serves me correctly.’

  Claudia sucked her cheeks in. ‘You obviously miss her.’

  ‘You have no idea,’ he intoned sombrely. ‘Damn good playwright, that woman. Oh, I beg you not to laugh, madam. The company faces a serious predicament this year. Once upon a time, we could put on a show and people would just be pleased to see us. Today every pleb’s a critic and when certain criteria are required of one’s production, it can prove difficult.’

  Caspar was referring to the stringent rules which governed every script, be they enacted on the streets or in stone amphitheatres, where every play had to conform to a stereotyped cast list.

  ‘Between ourselves, madam, not all the dramatics in the range I proclaimed are performed by our company.’

  ‘No opera?’

  Gloomy shake of the turban.

  ‘No tense dramas?’

  Again, the turban shook sadly from side to side. ‘Even tragedy is out of the question,’ he said. ‘When things go wrong, as they are prone to do in a small touring company whose thespian turnover is faster than the blink of an eye, a laugh on a child’s deathbed scene makes the difference between being showered with silver and being showered with distressed vegetable waste.’

  ‘Which only leaves comedy.’

  ‘I do not pretend to understand modern audiences when I tell you that the best laughs come from storylines involving pimps and prostitutes,’ Caspar said. ‘But sadly they’ve been done to death this season. What I’m left with are plots revolving round swaggering soldiers who think they’re the gods’ gift to women, grasping misers who get their comeuppance and beautiful girls without brains in love with penniless poets. Of course, I need the obligatory mix-up surrounding identical twins, and if the poor playwright can throw in a couple of cuckolds, so much the better.’

  Caspar rubbed the statuette with affection.

  ‘A sad miss, my dear wife, a sad miss.’

  ‘So why don’t you write a play round a grasping miser with an airhead of a wife who conspires to relieve him of his gold so she can elope with her handsome, but penniless, poet lover?’ Claudia as
ked.

  ‘Ho!’ Caspar was jumping up and down, and not from the cold. ‘Magnificent, madam, absolutely magnificent. Dear me, you possess more creative talent than the dear departed! Now if I could only devise a happy ending, whereby the lovers run off with the money and make the husband look small…’

  ‘How about the poet has a secret identical twin who agrees to recite his poetry before a group of drunken, swaggering soldiers to provide his brother with an alibi for the time of the robbery…?’

  ‘Sublime!’ For a moment she thought he’d wet himself. ‘Utterly, brilliantitiously sublime!’

  ‘Not utterly, brilliantitiously implausible, you don’t think? To the point of, say, ludicrous and far-fetched?’

  Caspar calmed down enough to roll his eyes at the very suggestion. ‘We are looking at comedy here, madam. At pantomime. Farce. Escapist entertainment. Nudity.’

  ‘Nudity?’

  The entrepreneur gave an exaggerated wink. ‘Nudity pays the rent, dear lady. Especially volumptuous beauties like mine.’ He laced his little fat fingers. ‘And since musical farce is the one area in which women are allowed on the stage, it would be a shame to waste their plumptious talents. Nudity.’

  Claudia smiled as the oxen were finally coerced into moving. Never let it be said that this had not been one eventful afternoon.

  Caspar took advantage of the space to envelop her in his arms and shower her face with kisses that smelled of rosewater. ‘You have bestowed upon me a veritable triumph, madam. This play will be the talk of all Rome.’ More kisses rained down on her cheek. ‘How can I ever thank you?’

  The oxen had plodded off and were out of sight round the corner. Claudia drew her beaver fur around her. The litter stand was just across the street.

  ‘Well, Caspar. It’s funny you should ask.’

  *

  Forget the five to six pounds of silver. This latest Spectacular, with its ‘volumptuous’ beauties and musical farce, couldn’t fail to impress potential clients. And with four days of public holiday, that was a lot of clients Claudia could squeeze in to be impressed.

  As Caspar said, bawdiness was the order of the day as far as Roman comedy was concerned, and Claudia could see her clients’ eyes popping out on stalks when the girls were on stage and a mischievous wind, manufactured in the wings, accidentally blew aside the thin scarves that draped round their bodies or forced their clothes to cling tight to their spectacular curves.

  Best of all, though, by staging the revue at her house, no financial outlay was required. She looked around the rainbow group, shivering in the cold as they staggered under their burdens of chests, trunks and baggage, their stomachs rumbling from hunger, and marvelled at this amazing new direction that her life was taking.

  Not taking on a string of gadfly actors.

  Going straight.

  *

  Excitedly, the company gathered up the array of trunks and clutter.

  Packed in the tight, concise way that only travelling people manage to achieve were all the things essential to a theatrical performance. Costumes. Buskins. Musical instruments. Masks. Painted scenery boards were far too bulky for a troupe of strolling players to cope with, and for that reason painted canvases served as backdrops. These could then be rolled up tight and hung quickly and easily by means of a simple pulley system.

  Gripping the leather strap of one of the prop chests and oblivious to the running chatter of the young lad on the other, the Digger smiled.

  A lot of things had happened since autumn.

  And they kept getting better and better.

  Five

  Claudia’s lanky Macedonian steward did not so much as blink when his mistress charged into the atrium, threw her fur cloak into his arms, chafed her hands over the charcoals in the brazier, then calmly announced that there would be twenty strolling players arriving shortly who would be staying over Saturnalia, oh and could he prepare a hot bath, please, her feet were blocks of ice.

  Leonides didn’t blink, for the simple reason that he couldn’t.

  He just stood there, beaver fur halfway up his nostrils, paralysed.

  God knows, when Master Gaius was alive, there was a constant traipse of clients, scribes, secretaries and messengers buzzing in and out. It wasn’t that he couldn’t cope. Or that there had been any less traffic in the house since the master’s death. Admittedly, it was a different kind of busy and heaven help him, it was nothing to have the master’s carping relatives in one room, members of certain law-enforcement agencies in another and irate moneylenders in a third, whilst he ran back and forth between them like some demented monkey, serving wine and honey cakes while the mistress was out implicating herself in an even deeper jam. But all the same. Strolling players?

  Leonides dragged himself to his senses. No point in lamenting. The deed was done and the person who could talk the young mistress into changing her mind hadn’t been born yet.

  ‘Lock up the silver,’ he urged the household slaves. ‘Take everything away that might be flogged before we’ve had a chance to notice that it’s missing, plan on four to a room and don’t forget to count the blankets on the bed.’

  Outside, voices, common ones at that, were growing louder. The dog next door began to howl. Leonides knew exactly how it felt. Within seconds, a laughing, shivering, grumbling prism of colours, shapes and textures surged through the vestibule door, filling the atrium with odours of wet wool and leather, cheap scent and cosmetics. What had he done to offend the gods, he wondered? He, who led the household prayers piously every morning and poured generous libations with conscientious regularity.

  ‘Dear lady.’

  A small tornado in scarlet embroidered kaftan and what looked for all the world like a blue parrot bobbing on his head pushed his way to the front of the crush, his shining eyes on Claudia.

  ‘Allow me to compliment you on your charming house. Utterly enchanting, madam. Just like your wondrous self.’

  ‘Enough with the flattery, Caspar, I’ve already allocated you a guest bedroom,’ Claudia laughed. The others would have to take their chances in the slave quarters.

  ‘Dear lady, my motives are entirely selfless,’ Caspar said, affecting a mock wound. ‘Your domicile positively oozes taste. Sophistication and elegance weep from every marble column.’

  Claudia was glad he approved. Many of the features were additions (costly ones at that) she’d had installed upon her husband’s death. Features designed to impress potential business contacts, proof that Gaius’s business ventures were not merely ticking over in his widow’s hands, but prospering. A lie, of course, but image is everything when it’s a man’s world, dog eat dog. Her eyes ranged with pride over the soaring atrium with its exquisite mosaics, marble busts and Nile frescoes, the fountain which babbled gently night and day, the aviary of tiny birds which sang their little hearts out. Not all new, of course. But combined, the house was the embodiment of commercial success.

  ‘Allow me, madam, to introduce the cast, starting with the star of our Spectaculars—’ Caspar presented a tall, blond chap whose hair owed more to art than nature ‘—the sinuous Felix.’

  On cue, Felix bent himself backwards so his palms touched the floor behind his heels and then effortlessly performed the splits.

  ‘Felix is our mime solo,’ Caspar added proudly. ‘And this is Jupiter.’

  As with all strolling players, every male member of the company was typecast in certain roles, but towering over everyone, with his curled beard and long black hair falling to his shoulders, his olive skin and saturnine good looks, the actor could easily be mistaken for the King of the Immortals.

  ‘Should I swoon or curtsy?’ Claudia asked.

  ‘With Jupiter, you should probably be taking your clothes off,’ the young man laughed, ‘but sometimes Caspar forgets that I’m only the Sorter of Problems on stage. My name,’ he added with a broad grin, ‘is Ion.’

  But before Claudia could reply, a swarthy individual with thick, bushy eyebrows was kissing
both of her cheeks.

  ‘I’m Urgularius Philippus,’ he said. ‘But you may as well call me what everyone else does. Ugly Phil.’

  The nickname was unfair. He had a pleasant face and green eyes that twinkled, but you could see how he’d got the name.

  ‘And because I’m the shortest, I’m cast as the Satyr.’

  ‘He doesn’t need much by way of costume, either,’ quipped a craggy-faced actor, whose shaven head marked him out as the Buffoon. ‘The furry leggings are natural,’ he chortled.

  The introductions went on. She met Periander, a fat youth, who’d been castrated at the age of twelve to keep his soprano voice clear and pure, but her attention had wandered. It was attracted by a young man with finely chiselled cheekbones whose eyes bore a thin but nevertheless distinctive trace of kohl and who was watching her closely.

  ‘Finally, madam—’ with a sweep of his little fat hand, Caspar ushered forward the female members of the troupe ‘—please welcome my splendiferous harem of beauties.’

  Good grief. Claudia had no idea that fat could be broken down into so many different categories. There was solid fat, wobbly fat, provocative fat—this latter category being Jemima of the bright red hair and unfettered tongue, who seemed perfectly oblivious to the amount of bosom she was showing, goose pimples and all. Then there was fat that tried to hide it, fat that tried to enhance its beauty with cosmetics and, finally, there was fat that simply didn’t give a damn.

  Behind them, the men were admiring the acoustics more than the decor and had already launched into their stereotyped roles. Jupiter was courting an effeminate Venus, while the leering Satyr prowled behind him, playing his imaginary pan pipes. The Poet, on bended knee, was wooing his Lover into adultery with verse. But it was the Buffoon who stole the scene, launching alternately into monkey walks, then pretending to trip over invisible obstacles before being chased by his own shaven-headed shadow.

  ‘Renata,’ Caspar said, having to raise his voice over the babble as he kissed the hand of the woman whose face was a stiff mask of white chalk and rouge. ‘Our musician and our rock. She plays flute for Felix’s mime, but clever girl that she is, Renata also plays the pan pipes and tuba.’