`I can supervise them if they bother to turn up.'

`Take the baby. I may come too – we have so many friends abroad nowadays, I ought to work on The Collected Letters of Helena Justina.'

`Authorship?'

What – by a senator's daughter? Most are too stupid and too busy counting their jewellery. None are ever encouraged to reveal their literary skills, assuming they have them. But then, they are not supposed to live with informers either.

`Badly needed,' she said briskly. `Most published letters are by smug men with nothing to say.'

Was she serious? Was she privately romancing? Or was she just twisting the rope on my pulley to see when I snapped? 'Ah well,' I said mildly. `You sit in the shade of a pine tree with your stylus and your great thoughts, fruit. I can easily run around after our darling daughter at the same time as I'm keeping a check on a bunch of slippery builders who want to destroy our new steam room. Then I can dash off my own little odes whenever there's a pause in the screaming and stonecutting.'

Every would-be author needs solitude and tranquillity.

It would have been a wonderful way to pass the summer, escaping from the city heat to our intended new home on the Janiculan Hill – except for this: the new home was a dump; the baby had embarked on a tantrum phase; and poetry led me into a public recital, which was foolish enough. That brought me into contact with the Chrysippus organisation. Anything in commerce that looks like a safe proposition may be a step on the route to grief.

II

I MUST HAVE been crazy. Drunk too, maybe.

Why had I received no protection from the Capitoline gods? All right, I admit Jupiter and Minerva might feel I was their most insignificant acolyte, merely slave to a sinecure, a placeman, a careerist, and a half-hearted one at that.