She went down. I watched her all the way to the street. I stood staring for five minutes after she had gone.

She had transformed my day.

I sat back at my table pretending nothing was wrong. My face tingled where Helena had touched me with her hand before she left.

My mother was waiting. She knew there had been plenty of times when I came sauntering back from seeing off a woman with some long-winded pantomime of affection. They came; they went; they threatened no one’s peace.

Now mother stomped over to the opposite bench, purse-lipped. “So that’s her!”

My heart turned over beneath a rib. I laughed awkwardly. “How did you know?”

“I know you!”

I stretched my chin and looked up at the ceiling; I half noticed there was a new bulge where rain was coming in. I thought of Helena Justina as my mother must have seen her, so fine-skinned and elegant in her understated jewellery, with such beautiful manners that she took on her father’s knack of appearing diffident, though that strange mixture of moral grit and mischievous humour constantly shone through. Helena Justina, a senator’s daughter, talking to me so coolly about fees and warehouses while her eyes sang in silence of the happiness we had shared…Everyone knew I was searching (when I bothered, because the search was quite haphazard) for someone like Marina, my brother’s girl: an uncomplicated soul with some brains and a pretty face, who could just about keep house and who owned enough friends of her own to stay out of my way. Everyone knew that; I knew it myself.

I stared back at the table, fiddling with escaped tarragon twigs.

“Well!” challenged my mother. “Do I start baking saffron cakes, or throw on a black veil and wail at Juno’s Temple? What happens now?”

“Nothing,” I said, squaring up to the facts. “She told you who her father is. There’s nothing I can do.”

Another angry quirk puckered my mother’s mouth. “Marcus, having seen her, I don’t imagine it is up to you!”

Then I gazed at my mother with a long face, while my mother looked rather oddly back at me.

LII

I had nothing to do that evening, so I went to the barber’s at the end of our street. I sat out on the pavement while he scraped my chin. I managed to trip up some minor official’s lictor and make it look like a genuine accident. The lictor himself was nearly castrated on his ceremonial axe; I felt proud of myself.

I was going to see her again. Who? No one. Just a girl. Just a client. Forget I mentioned it.