Page 10 of Cleopatra

10

SERVILIA

W hen I met the Princess Cleopatra in Rome, of course I did not think how one day we would share a lover. That Caesar was the fulcrum point between us. I knew he was in Egypt, I did not know at first that he was with her. Over the years, when Caesar embarked upon campaigns away from Rome, he would disappear again and again into silence. Sometimes I would receive a letter with news, mostly the letters just served to tell me that he was alive when he had written it. I was used to silence and hated it all at once. We shared so many last kisses. He’d left Rome once more, this time to chase Pompey around the world. Months bled into a year, and I received no letter or news at all, and I did not know if I missed a dead man and this separation was to be forever. Then at last a ship arrived. It did not bring me Caesar but the news I’d been longing for since the death of my first husband. Pompey was dead. Caesar lived.

They might have made me wait – for gods do not keep to mortal time – but Mars and Diana enacted my revenge in the end. When I heard the news of Pompey’s grisly demise, I made offerings to them in gratitude. At last, he had suffered as he deserved. I liked the grubby and foul manner of his demise. It was underhand, brutal, and fitting. It might have been decades since he’d had my first husband murdered, but my hatred of Pompey had not mellowed. I’d tended it carefully, keeping it cruel and sharp.

Perhaps it was the news about Pompey that made me think back to those early days with Caesar – it was Pompey’s murder of my first husband that sent me into Caesar’s arms – or maybe it was simply that Caesar was still gone from Rome and I missed him. Whatever the reason, I found myself thinking about him and our first days together, my mind straying back to those first months after my husband’s murder. It was a period of grief, confusion and new-found love. My loss sharpening my new love for Caesar, like the fresh scent of the earth after rain.

The ship bringing news of Pompey brought gossip too; whispers that he was living in the palace with the Egyptian queen. I was used to his lovers by then, but only a fool doesn’t notice when her lover takes a queen as his mistress. The rumours in Rome were full of scorn and innuendo, but I did not join in their denigration of Cleopatra. I knew she was shrewd, her mind more captivating than her beauty. And I was aware that it was a women’s mind which kept Caesar’s attention once he wearied of her physical charms.

Caesar and I had met many times over the years, and I always felt the tug of him. Rather than becoming lovers at once, we’d become friends. My family often describe me as quiet – I never think of myself so, for it is always loud in my mind – but I was certainly never quiet with Julius. I stored up the little happenings of my day, sweet morsels of amusement to feed him when we next met. At parties and gatherings, he sought me out the moment he spotted me, and before accepting an invitation, I know that he would check first whether I too would be in attendance.

As soon as we found one another, there was no room for anyone else in our conversation. We talked about the works we had read and admired and those we scoffed at and I would recite snatches of the latest speeches by famed senators, aping their manners and exaggerating their age and pomposity, sometimes pretending to fall asleep mid-rendition, until he snorted wine. I found him funny, although I noticed that he rarely seemed to amuse other people. At social occasions I watched for him, impatient, hungry for his presence, and if he wasn’t there, I felt a sudden snag of disappointment and was then unable to attend to the chatter of others. I had no appetite for anyone else. I did not know then that these were the seeds of love.

We enjoyed a friendship bolstered with longing. After my husband died, when the initial keenness of grief and shock faded, I found myself thinking again of Caesar. He came to see me some months after the news of my husband’s death. My son, Brutus, and I remained at home in mourning, the death masks of our ancestors shrouded or turned to the walls. It was a profound sorrow and insult that his father’s face was not amongst them – another ignominy we placed at Pompey’s feet. Brutus, now fatherless, went daily to my brother Cato’s house, where Cato was beginning to teach him rhetoric and the politics of Rome. I could have taught him myself, but I thought it prudent to encourage uncle and nephew to form a close bond. And, Brutus seemed to find it a relief to walk to Cato’s house accompanied by one or more slaves and spend the morning studying there. He appeared to enjoy his company – which surprised me at first. Brutus, although his spirits were depressed by the recent death of his father, had a joyful, irascible streak – quick to temper and to laughter. I have no memory of my brother Cato ever laughing. He hardly smiled, merely bared his teeth in a grimace. He was a man who scowled with pleasure, even at a joke.

The day of Caesar’s visit to me, Brutus was already with his uncle. He’d left, still a little pale, quieter than he’d once been, but children have a natural buoyancy, and I could tell by his fidgeting that he was excited to spend time with Cato. I wondered if my brother revealed a softer aspect to his character with his nephew. I doubted it. As I considered these questions, the slave announced Caesar. At once my heart raced inside my chest, a hare pursued by hounds. I reprimanded myself for such silliness. Although every morning I wondered whether this might be the day that he appeared, now seeing him in the flesh standing before me in the tablinum made the blood swish in my ears, and heat rise in my cheeks.

Yet, the man who stood before me was different from the one I’d first known. The smart youth in his nifty toga was gone, along with any hint of boyishness. This was a man, mature and self-assured. His beard was shaved off, his hair cropped short and I saw the first hint of a bald patch on the crown. He’d broadened too, the arms that held me were muscled, the skin latticed with new scars. Glancing up at him, I felt almost shy, although as a grown woman, already a widow, I should have no such girlish affectations. He saw my shyness and smiled, gratified. It had now been some years since we had met, although my interest in him had never wavered. As he walked slowly towards me and then after the briefest hesitation took my hands in his, secreting a kiss in each palm, I realised that neither had his. We stared at each other in wonder and wordless delight.

‘I am sorry for your husband. He did not deserve such an end,’ said Julius at last.

I found that I could not speak.

‘And as you grieve for him, then I am sorry for you too,’ he continued.

I swallowed and forced myself to reply. ‘I grieve for the father of my son. For my son I feel the loss most piteously.’

Julius drew me closer, and held me in his arms, whispering words of consolation and regret. I inhaled the warmth of him, the solidity, the faint tang of salt and leather. I had forgotten the scent of his skin. We stood there for some time in one another’s arms, his chin resting on my head. Time slowed and swelled, the beat between the chirping of the cicadas seemed to lengthen and pause. I wanted to stay here always, breathing in the scent of him, feeling his warmth, the tightness of his arms around me, the comfort of his words.

‘I have been away too long,’ he said, running a finger along my cheek. ‘We are not as we were.’

‘No. And yet, I am still Servilia and you are still Caesar.’

He pulled me closer, and gently bit my ear lobe, hard enough that I cried out in pain and desire, and then to my surprise released me. He looked down at me, his expression half amused as though deciding what to do next.

‘Well, are you going to kiss me?’ I demanded, impatient.

He leaned forward and placed a featherlight kiss upon my left cheek.

‘Enough?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘More.’

He bestowed another on my forehead, his lips lingering a moment longer.

‘Enough?’

‘No,’ I answered honestly.

He kissed me now on the lips, pulling back after a few seconds.

‘Still not enough,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you, boy.’

He laughed at my teasing. I tugged him towards me, impatient, and kissed him properly. A kiss that demanded an answer, and his arms tightened their grip on my wrists. After a minute, a kiss was not enough to satisfy us. He picked me up and carried me to one of the sofas, and setting me down, began to undress me, pulling my tunic over my head. In our impatience, I got tangled, and giggled as he freed me.

‘Do you laugh at Caesar?’ he asked, smiling over me.

‘I do,’ I said.

I reached for his belt and unbuckled it. I wondered that we’d waited this long. I did not think about the slaves busy in the villa, nor of Brutus at his uncle’s house. I only thought about this man, the feeling of his fingers on my bare skin, his lips kissing my throat and my breasts, his murmurs of love and lust. I felt drunk with the way he looked at me, eyes wide with delight. He did not see the marks on my body from bearing Brutus, the fading stretchmarks, the slight softness on my belly, or if he did, he accepted them as part of my story, just as I caressed the scars on his forearms. He pulled back for a moment, simply to look at me.

‘How did we wait this long?’ he asked, amazed, voicing my own question.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

Turning and shifting on the sofa, he pulled me onto his lap, covering me with caresses and muttering words of love.

‘I choose you,’ I said. ‘Whatever else happens after, I choose you.’

This is who I want to be, I realised. This woman of desire who is desired and loved in return.