He hesitates then passes her the scroll he is studying. “From there,” he says, indicating the point in the text with his thumb.

This time there is no Secundus to bring her discreet glasses of water and the treatise on plants is unfamiliar and even worse, the scribe’s handwriting is cramped and hard to decipher. More than once, she hears Pliny wince or tut impatiently as she stumbles over a phrase, but still, Amara reads on and on, until she thinks she’ll lose her voice or fall asleep exhausted over the parchment. Finally, he has had enough and gets ready for bed. “I see we are alike in our avoidance of sleep,” he says. “It always seems a kind of death to me.”

She lies closer to him as he gets in beside her, hoping he will put an arm round her. He doesn’t. “Amara is not a name I have heard before,” he says, when they are lying facing one another in the dark. “I take it it is not your real name.”

“My master gave it to me,” she says, and the mention of Felix is like the cold of a knife laid flat against her heart. “He told me it is halfway between love and bitterness.”

“Yes, amare, amarum,” he says. “A bit poetic for a pimp.”

Pliny rests his hand in the hollow of her waist, the same as he did last night, and she is afraid he is going to fall asleep. She leans toward him, so that his hand slides into the small of her back and kisses him. His lips are as dry and unmoving as before. She kisses him again, trying to imagine he is Menander, that he will respond to her like Menander, but instead, he pushes her gently away.

“I just want to please you.” It’s a line that she has repeated endlessly to so many customers without a trace of sincerity. This time she wishes the need wasn’t so abject in her voice.

“You do please me,” he says, as if humoring a child. “I like looking at you; you are very lovely.” He runs his fingers slowly through her hair, the same way he did when he woke her in the morning. “I don’t feel the need for more.”

He must be impotent, she thinks, and finds the idea neither disturbs nor reassures her. She is too exhausted and the bed is too comfortable for her to mind anymore about the puzzle of Pliny. She falls asleep, lulled by the sensation of him still stroking her head.