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only as old as the woman he feels, and at my age so long as I can feel something, I know I'm still alive.'
    'You'd feel something, if you try to scale my fence again.' 'Y'know, I like you,' Volcar said. 'You've fire in your belly, gel, and I've always had a hankering for women with spunk. Not like that frosty faced fossil over there.'
    He used an asparagus spear to point to Leo's sister-in-law,
    the exquisite, immaculate, glacial Silvia, whose age was the same as Claudia's - twenty-five - whose plucked eyebrows arched in perfect symmetry. And whose honey-coloured ringlets wouldn't dare to droop, no matter what the circumstances.
    'Wouldn't think, would you, seeing them tiny tits, that Silvia was a mother of three? Here's another thing I'll bet you didn't know.' Volcar lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. 'For all her airs and graces, madam there daren't show her pretty face in Rome.'
    Didn't show it much round here, either. In the week that Claudia had been on the island, she'd barely exchanged a dozen words with the only other female in the villa. 'Because ... ?' she asked.
    'Don't know, and to tell the honest truth, gel, don't care to know more about the prissy bitch. To listen to her, though, you'd think she owned the bloody place. Huh. Gets right up my nozzholes, does Silvia.' He chewed on a succulent white truffle. 'Mind, if I were to hazard a guess, I'd say, wouldn't you, that abandoning her children might have a bearing on the scandal.'
    'You, Volcar, are a wicked old man.'
    'One who's too old for flattery, gel. Why don't you just let me feel your bum instead?'
    The small man sitting next to Silvia leaned over to his host's couch, tapped him lightly on his forearm and mumbled something Claudia couldn't hear.
    'Oh, not again!' Leo muttered. He turned to Volcar. 'Llagos tells me you're up to your old tricks again, Uncle.'
    'Me, lad? Never laid a finger on the lassie.'
    Scepticism expressed itself in a twist of the lips. 'Sorry I've left you to the randy old sod's mercy,' Leo told Claudia, as the dishes for the first course were cleared away. 'Only as the wedding draws ever closer, conversation tends to be more progress report than witty repartee.'
    Looking round the couches, Claudia tried to imagine any of the assembled party being remotely amusing. Silvia? Too selfabsorbed to waste her energies on exploring the philosophies of the meaning of life. Saunio? The fat, pretentious but brilliant artist reserved his animation for his work, while Nikias, the
    famous Corinthian portrait painter, would never use one word when none would do. Llagos the priest might be capable of levity, but his accent was invariably too heavy to follow and in any case, when he laughed, his protruding front teeth had a tendency to spit. Which just left Shamshi, Leo's personal astrologer-cum-augur. And the less that man said the better!
    Persian by birth, Shamshi retained the traditional garb of knee-length baggy trousers and shoes which tied in a bow. Like most of his people, he wore thick bands of gold in each ear, though Shamshi went one stage further and drew attention to his earrings by shaving the whole of his head apart from a small cap of black hair right on the top. What really made the hairs of Claudia's neck stand on end, though, was the way his soft, sibilant, girlie voice seemed to caress every inch of her skin. With Volcar, you knew where you were: he was forthright, outrageous and funny. Whereas Leo's human channel to the future was as slimy as you can get without leaving a trail.
    'So if I'm neglecting you, I apologize,' Leo told Claudia as the main courses were ferried in on steaming silver salvers. 'But I'm concerned the building work won't be completed in time for the wedding. Any idea when the atrium will be finished, Saunio?'
    'Tomorrow,' Rome's most illustrious artist announced pompously. 'Tomorrow you may go in and have a look at the finished artistry, if you wish.'
    'Very kind,