Funeral Music by Morag Joss Read Free Book Online Page B

led down through the museum and out to the Great Bath.
    They stood staring into the great rectangle of milky greenish water from which wisps of steam were rising. The open flares on the stone columns surrounding the bath underlit the colonnades, where a few people were already standing or strolling in the twilight. The flames cast their light upwards and caught the aloof stone figures standing on the Victorian balustrade above. Downwards, their glow touched the surface of the water, revealing the edges of the stone steps which descended into its depths. A breeze caught the water’s surface, which rippled delicately with the slight guttering of the flares. Steam eddied upwards. As she always did, Sara tried and largely failed to imagine the Great Bath roofed over in hollow brick as it once had been, for to see the sacred water now held in its rough stone cradle, lit by torches and open to the summer night sky, intensified its watery magic. Generations of Romans had come here to bathe, swap news, argue and do business, and Sara knew that they had come to show off too, which put the representatives of moneyed Bath presently sipping their drinks under the colonnades in their proper context, as merely continuing an old tradition. But long before the Romans, the spring had been a place of pilgrimage and devotion. Sara wondered if it had been, when dedicated to the Celtic goddess Sulis, somehow more holy. ‘Minerva is patron goddess. In her temple eternal flames never whiten into ash,’ so the Roman historian had said. What had become of Sulis? The Romans, unnerved by a foreign, elusive deity, had simply superimposed one of their own, the familiar Minerva, a goddess they could talk to, one who spoke their language, one whom they could capture and contain within the carved stones of their new temple. Sara left James’s side and made her way over the lethally uneven flagstones to the edge of the water, crouched down and swirled her hand in its unearthly heat. She did not feel like talking, particularly. She looked out across the green pool where the reflections of the flares, against the darkening sky, trembled. Perhaps it was just the passing of time, these walls having borne witness to so much skulduggery, gossip, barter and supplication, which now made the place seem not hallowed, but over-exposed. The Romans, as was their way, had tried to articulate and quantify the spring’s sanctity and, in so doing, had rendered it utterly secular. No ghosts of holy tenants were lingering here. It was the wind, only the wind, that caused the flares to shiver with such malevolent-seeming delicacy, and only silence that was in possession now. Again tomorrow, and the next day, and every day, people would come to the Roman Baths not to visit the ancient and sacred shrine of a pre-Christian deity, not any more to bathe for physical, let alone spiritual, renewal, but to be impressed by engineering. And that was the glory that was Rome. Sara rose, turned gingerly and returned over the stones to James, who stood patiently holding her drink. As she took it, an echo of cocktail laughter reached them from the other side.
    ABOUT AN hour after his public humiliation and two minutes into his first glass of Cecily’s plonk, Derek began to calm down. He had tried inwardly ridiculing the man: ‘Oh, yes...and I am the Director of Museums and Civic Leisure Re
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!’ Oh, yes? Arrogant prat! Upper-class bastard! But it had not worked, because the man had not been ridiculous and Derek, knowing himself to have been the arrogant prat, found less than the usual comfort in not being upper class. It is a terrible thing, at fifty years of age, to be sufficiently embarrassed to blush in an empty room. He sank back on the sofa, a whale in a dolphin’s shirt, rested his glass on the straining button in the middle of his high stomach and looked at the ceiling. What had made him go on like that? He had been swept along by the excitement of getting the letter,