Free Women in the Wall by Julia O'Faolain Page A

good for business either. I could have my money back and was welcome to come again any time I liked. He apologized for the incident. But why mention it to anyone? People came here for a bit of fun, after all, not for …
    “What happened to the girl?” I asked.
    “Oh, she’s all right. They’re both all right. They’ll be dancing tomorrow. We can’t allow them to have babies, naturally. We’re quite used to this sort of thing. She’s had the best of care. The midwife had just stepped out for a minute but she’s back now. Everything is all right. Really. Would you like a glass of honeyed wine?”
    I refused with courtesy. Curtly, however, and left. He was being coherent. For what had I come to his place if not in search of women and wine? How could I blame him? That God blamed me was clear from what I had found there, and from the memories which haunt me and won’t be conjured away. They have kept me from sleeping again with women, contaminating their beauty for me with an awareness of what lies beneath the thin white veil of their skin.
    A week later I picked a fight with Clement and gave him a knocking about. He must have wondered why. It was unworthy and ineffective. A persistent disquiet has stayed with me since and I cannot diagnose it. Almost as though I could not accept the human condition—which is in itself an act of blasphemy. We are fallen and imperfect. That’s dogma. Our society, it follows, must be imperfect too. God’s kingdom is not of this world.
    And Ausonius’s roses? Did he know what the birth and death he so blithely invoked smell like? That smell of blood, mallows and fenugreek is in my nostrils now. Well, perhaps I lack liver.
    Cold again. Poke up the fire. If only I were at Gogo’s villa now or at Duke Lupus’s where the heat is diffuse, unlike my fire which burns my knees while my backside freezes. Those Gallo-Romans know how to live! I couldn’t believe it when I came on my first Gallo-Roman villa. Even now something weeps in me when I see one of those porticoed façades. How long can they last? Yet the owners go on playing chess and backgammon and laying out lawns and pruning vines. Just as though this were still the Roman diocese of Gaul. I suppose there is something a touch deliberate, theatrical even about Lupus’s ease. He gives me too many presents for one thing. His grandfather would not have extended such a welcome to poets. There were more around.
    Am I the last?
    What a responsibility? Should I flame? Grow incandescent ? Overblow like a ripe rose reddening the earth? Die—when I do—in a spasm of passion or smoulder wetly like this wet-peat age?
    If Radegunda heard me! “Pagan posturings!” she would say.
    I should work on my acrostic: nothing pagan about that. It’s the subtlest I’ve devised and will consist of four holy proverbs—which should please her—placed two aslant, one vertically and one athwart to form two superimposed crosses so cunningly concealed in a poem that they might pass unperceived if not picked out in coloured inks. That’ll impress the patrons! “An astounding piece of work, Fortunatus! Unique. The ancients themselves never …” “Oh spare my blushes, my lord bishop,” (or duke? Why not send it to Lupus? Or the kings?) “it is a trifle, merely a token of my profound and heartfelt etcetera. The cross, they say, is the ladder to heaven and so I have sent your lordship (or majesty) two. Not that your lordship needs …” Flourish and reflourish. Meanwhile my fingers are frozen. Skin sticking to the pen. Rub. Shake. Swing. Pull. Have a drink of mulled wine. Oh these lonely, lonely nights! To think I was once gregarious! In taberna quando sumus . I had, have, a nice voice. But who would sing alone? Alone, all alone and with enough lamp-oil to see the night through. Few men around here can afford that—but then few suffer from insomnia. Does that make me Fortunatus or infortunatus? Old question. Radegunda too is probably awake but