Roland sidled up to Hilary, winking, conspiratorial. ‘I’ve been warning Lawrence off trying to be popular. He’s brewing up a scholarly piece on Les Mis. You must have seen Les Mis? Everyone has.’
‘Les Mis?’ she said, round-eyed. ‘The musical? I – well – I read the novel, years ago. But I don’t know any of the songs.’
‘You needn’t know the tunes,’ Lawrence assured her, tearing brown paper off a round, crusty loaf of bread. ‘Roland’s faking. You haven’t seen it, Roland. Own up.’
Roland’s chin shot out; his face reddened.
In the burning silence that ensued, Lawrence opened his case, with a kind of polite indifference, to put Hilary at her ease. ‘You remember the convict, Hilary? Jean Valjean? Tries to steal a loaf of bread – just like this,’ and he whacked the bread down on a wooden cutting board by the sink. ‘For this audacious, antisocial crime, he is sentenced to five years’ hard labour.’ Lawrence crumpled the paper showily with one hand and tossed it into the bin which stood lidless nearby. ‘He begins his sentence in tears with an iron collar riveted on around his neck. Might as well be a slave, you see? Just my sort of thing.’
Hilary was silent, eyes on the floor, conscious that Roland was watching her, and that she hadn’t responded to his opening gambit in the way he had evidently hoped she might. That she had failed even to recognise it as an opening gambit. She felt herself being caught up in somebody else’s argument, and she didn’t want to reveal sympathy for either side. Lawrence is only trying to be kind to me – that’s what she would have liked to say to Roland – he wouldn’t sideline his own friend on purpose.
Lawrence went on, gently but tenaciously, with his performance. It was irresistible to him to try to capture whatever youthful, feminine attention was in a room. ‘When he is eventually freed, the convict soon steals again.’ He reached for a bread knife, unsheathing it from the wooden knife block with a dangerous flourish, high in the air, eyes aglow. ‘But this time he steals from a bishop who has the power to free him physically and spiritually – by forgiving him. And as a sign of his forgiveness, the bishop gives the convict two silver candlesticks.’
Hilary looked up almost involuntarily and said, ‘I remember that.’
Lawrence cut into the bread with energy, the toothed blade scoring loudly through the crust and sinking into the doughy middle, rasping and biting all the way down to the powdery surface of the well-hacked board. He cut another slice, then stopped and looked about the room as if he had forgotten something. He spotted a pair of pewter candlesticks on the Welsh dresser, walked across and collected them with a package of long white tapers from a shelf above, and set them at the centre of the table among the place settings. ‘Perfect,’ he said, spreading his palms in the air over it all and smiling with satisfaction. ‘Maybe you’d put in the candles?’ he asked, handing them to Hilary.
‘You’re an atheist, Lawrence; surely Hugo was not,’ Roland grumbled. And he stalked off a few paces to sit down by himself on the sofa.
Lawrence ignored him, still smiling. He lifted the lid of the poaching pan ever so slightly with the corner of a spatula, looked at his watch. Then he began opening and shutting drawers, hunting. ‘Jean Valjean keeps the bishop’s candlesticks, despite the risk that they will eventually reveal his criminal past, just as Trimalchio – you know the Satyricon too, I suppose, Hilary? Being a classicist?’
Hilary looked guiltily towards Roland, then back towards Lawrence who was snatching and slamming at the drawers, rattling spoons, flaunting dish cloths, all the artillery of his domestic power. She fiddled with the package of candles, finding a way in through the cellophane, and nodded reluctantly, curious in spite of herself.
‘Well, I’m sure you recall that Trimalchio keeps by him the candelabrum which once belonged to his master, despite the fact that it marks him as a former slave. Just like Valjean’s candlesticks, you see?’
She approached the table, twisted the tapers into the sticks, straightened them.
‘The candlesticks and the candelabrum are mementos,’ he said, ‘– symbols, if you like – of the greatest moment in their lives: the moment of being freed.’ There was an easy comedy in his voice, as if he wasn’t insisting.
‘But Petronius writes nothing about this!’ Roland expostulated. Up he stood again. ‘You are importing modern psychology into a text of which only fragments survive in any case. Where is the documentary evidence for what you say? Or any evidence at all? Are you forgetting that Trimalchio is not a real person?’
Lawrence turned away from the oven door where he was crouching to peer through the glass at the soufflé, his hands cosied in the two halves of an oven mitt. He smiled at Hilary as she stood tangled between himself and Roland. ‘Petronius gives us extravagant detail! Trimalchio does nothing but celebrate his freedom. Hideous as he is, he becomes rich and he feasts – for ever, as it were – and in his own vulgar way. Feeding the appetites pent up in him as a slave.’
‘We have one of the collars,’ Hilary said. It burst out of her, as if it were proof of something. She lifted her eyebrows, surprised at herself. There was a little silence.
‘Collars?’ Roland bristled at her.
‘A slave collar. Made of bronze. It’s inscribed, so we know it’s late antiquity. Early Christian period, fourth century. Found in Italy. I’ll tell you what –’ She paused, turned from one to the other of them and then raised her hands towards her neck, resting her fingertips on her collarbone, squinting a little in dismay. ‘Sounds weird, but I put it on one time. It has a piece missing.’ She held out her right thumb and forefinger, about two and a half inches apart to show the size of the gap, then rested her fingers back on her collarbone.
‘I tried it with Eddie – Edward Doro.’ Her hands moved ever so slightly as she recalled the stiffness, pulling the collar open wider, whether she would snap it, how the ragged edges scraped her skin when the two of them nestled it into place. ‘It’s surprisingly delicate, actually – thin, like the leather strap you’d put around a dog’s neck; it’s not like you couldn’t get it off if you were determined. It would have been more – well, also a symbol. Even with the tiny rivets soldered into place. Which just shows how completely the slave was resigned to the whole system, his place in it. A kind of settled, polished arrangement. It’s almost unbearable to imagine –’
‘Imagine. Exactly.’ Roland pounced in triumph. ‘Why would any slave resist a master who could torture him, have him crucified? Or have his head put on a spike along the road? Where was a slave to run to even if he didn’t have a collar? The empire was monumental. You can’t go around imagining history.’
But Lawrence pounced back. ‘How the bloody else are we to understand it? It’s not as if it’s still here around us!’
Roland smiled, an artful, curling smile. He came towards the table, tut-tutting, reached for the white wine and poured himself another glass. ‘Yes, yes. All right. But judicious use of same. In any case, these collars are a very late phenomenon. And by the fourth century, a freed slave didn’t become a citizen of Rome, did he?’
‘We have two or three branding irons, too,’ said Hilary grimly.
‘Touché,’ said Lawrence. He was rinsing parsley at the sink, shaking water off it with a snap of his wrist. He reached across the counter and flung a few droplets on to the flame of the gas burner where they made a sizzling sound. ‘As it were.’
They all laughed.
‘Give it up, Roland,’ said Lawrence in a congenial tone. ‘We’ve scored a hit for the imagination. No history without it. No nothing, in fact.’
Hilary looked compassionately at Roland, and she said under her breath, uncertainly, ‘What I meant was, imagine if you had to wear the collar yourself. It’s degrading. And you feel that. Even though it is only a symbol of something else – real power, real servitude.’
Roland took a