"Doesn't trust you?" he scoffed, clearly thinking that was probable.
"She trusts me absolutely, sir. Our pact is, that she is always present to supervise!"
Vespasian, who had met Helena in one of her fighting moods, decided to back off. He asked me at least to think about the job. I said I would. We both knew that was a lie.
HIV
jupiter, juno and Mars- I had enough to do that spring. The house move was complicated enough- even before the day when Pa and I smashed up the bath house floor. Having Mico under my feet at the new riverbank place constantly reminded me how much I hated my relatives. There was only one I would have liked to see here, my favourite nephew Larius. Larius was a fresco painter's apprentice in Campania. He could well have repaid all my kind treatment as his uncle by creating a few frescos in my house, but when I wrote to him there was no reply. Perhaps he was remembering that the main thrust of my wise advice had been telling him that painting walls was a dead-end job…
As for that feeble streak of wind Mico, it was not just that he left plaster floats in doorways and tramped fine dust everywhere; he made me feel I owed him something, because he was poor and his children were motherless. Really, Mico was only poor because his bad work was notorious. No one but me would employ him. But I was Uncle Marcus the sucker. Uncle Marcus who knew the Emperor, flash Uncle Marcus who had a new rank and a position at the Temple of Juno. In fact I bought the rank with hard-earned fees, the position was literally chicken-shit and Vespasian only asked me over to the Gardens of Sallust when he wanted a favour. He saw me as a sucker too.
At least, unlike Mico, Vespasian Augustus did not expect me to buy riss oles all round as an end-of-week treat for his horrible family. With gherkins. Then I had to keep a pot handy, because gobbling the gherkins made Mice's awful toddler Valentinianus sick in my newly painted dining room. All Mico's children owned top-heavy names, and they were all villains. Valentinianus loved to humiliate me. His chief ambition currently was to vomit over Nux, my dog.