He did not move. He put his hand out. Palm up. The cussed supplicant. Let Mammon come to him. The fat man was not proud. He did not mind that he would have to move a pace or two. He took three steps. He spread his weight across both legs and leant his stick against a chair. He rolled the half note in a ball, dismissively, with studied irony. He dropped it on the outstretched, flattened palm. And then he took the market trader’s hand in both of his and wrapped the fingers round the paper ball.
‘Now talk,’ the fat man said.
Both traders felt more foolish than they’d done since they were adolescents. They did not hang around. They did not walk away, of course, arms linked, their two half lives already interlocked. They disappeared like cats, their heads and shoulders down, their ears alert, their fur on end. They would not talk that night – but who can doubt that they would trade weak grins the following day and then handshakes? They’d see the sense in being partners once again.
The fat man did not watch them go. He waited for a moment, on his stick, while three waiters put the chairs and table back in place, wiped up the beer, removed the mushy eggs. The proprietor himself brought out a replacement beer, the best. ‘It’s on the house,’ he said, thankful for the damage and the mayhem that the blue note had thwarted and thankful, too, for all the rich absurdities which they had witnessed.
The fat man started on his beer, as unbothered, it would seem, by the spat which he had ended as by the money he had lost. The no-expression on his face said, Five thousand? That’s a morsel for a man like me. I’d throw a hundred of them to the wind just so long as I can have my beer and eggs in peace and quiet. He looked up, then. The thought of eggs had made him lift his eyes and run his baby tongue along his lips.
Victor was standing where he always stood. Hypnotized. The fat man held three fingers up. Victor selected three more eggs. He cracked their shells at their thick ends and peeled them white and bare. He brought the sugar from another table. He stood and took the coins from the fat man’s hand. He hoped that he would tear a note in half for him as well. He was not old enough to fully understand what he had witnessed: the fickle, slender contrivances, the artifices, the stratagems of wealth, its piety, its fraudulence, its crude finesse. But – given time – he’d understand it all and make a scripture out of it.
‘The fat man taught me,’ Victor explained, to those who wished to hear or read the complex moral of his anecdote, ‘that money talks.’ He did not know that such an insight was old hat and crassly simple. Or that his variations of this insight – such as ‘Money is the peacemaker’ and ‘Money’s muscle’ – were simple complications of the truth. What the fat man had displayed was cynicism, if cynicism is the trick of seeming to engage with chance and danger but without taking any risks. Money has no moral tact. It’s true, the rich have power to intervene, to heal and damage as they wish. Toss money in the ring and see the drama that it makes of other people’s lives. But, more, they have the power, if they choose, to stay more silent and discrete than monks. The rich – and here was Victor’s unacknowledged dream – can simply make a wall, a fortress shield of wealth, beyond which the dramas of the world can run their courses unobserved.
Victor so far – he was nine or ten – had led a life not free of drama of the tragic kind. The misfortune of his father’s death. The journey into town. The nights beneath the parasol. The fire. The days with Aunt and Dip. The liberation and the tyranny of eggs. His was a moral tale, an exemplar of how miserably the small fry of the world can fare. Someone could write a book on his first years and make it stand for all our city’s woes. No wonder, then, that Victor now wished for something more mundane than poverty. He wished to be a fat man, too, protected from the city by what his wallet held. In this, he sought what Joseph, decades later, sought. And that was privacy. He saw himself, an older, wealthy man, alone and dining in a public place. At times it was a city restaurant, at other times a trestle in the countryside, with chickens and with trees. There was no noise, except the sound of cutlery on plates. He was quite calm and unafraid. No one around was close enough to disappoint him or betray him. A waiter, paid to do his job, was all he needed. He did not need or want a family, or friends. He did not need the warmth of company or conversation, or the reassurances of praise. No one could come and give him Chinese burns. No one could let him down or disappear. There was no comfort which could not be bought. There was no problem that he could not solve by tearing notes in half. What is more eloquent and reassuring than a shield of private wealth?
So Victor now – and almost by design – became an undramatic boy. He had his room, his job, his street routines. He had ambition, too, but nothing to make good grand opera from. He set his sights painstakingly on targets within reach – more sales of eggs, a market stall, an orchard and a field, a motorvan, some staff, some ledgers and a desk … He told himself that when he was more safe and certain, he would test the magic of the torn banknote. Not five thousand, naturally. He was the timid sort. A hundred note, perhaps. But that day never came, despite the money that he made. Because he never felt that he was safe or certain? Because he was mean and unadventurous? That was the judgement of the town. No one expected such a man – and so late in life – to lower his defences for a while and toss his money in the ring.
Part Three
VICTOR’S CITY
1
IT WAS THE MONDAY after Victor – pent up all his life, between the nipple and the purse – had celebrated being old with a birthday lunch of coddled fish, fresh air, accordions. It was the Monday after he became engrossed in his last, his first, his only civic fantasy, to publicly display his private wealth at last by building a market worthy of a beggar woman and a millionaire. A damp and windy morning, just short of nine o’clock – and Victor the Insomniac, a boss who normally was at his desk a little after dawn, was nowhere to be seen.
Rook, with Anna at his side, walked the two kilometres of cobble, stone, and asphalt between his apartment and the tunnel below Link Highway Red. Her hand was on his arm. They seemed as fearless as lovers half their age, made adolescent by the comfort – unexpected, overdue – of flesh on flesh. No one would think these two – this sparrow-chested, greying man, this woman, warm and pouchy as a pastry bun – were husband and wife. Such wooing, binary displays belong to fledgling romances. Maturer ones are more abashed, less startled and enraptured by the luck of love. These two fledglings on the street were not the married kind. Their circumstance was clear: here was an out-of-season grande affaire between two people almost old enough to be too old, too sleepy for such public love. ‘Sleepy’ is the word the growers use to specify a pear, and other soft-fleshed fruits, which have matured but, though they have their colour and their shape, will soon begin to brown and rot and lose their flavour and their bloom. To taste such fruit is to taste the gamey pungency of middle age.
As they cut diagonally across the town, between the rush-hour traffic and the crowds, beneath the ochre-coloured eiderdown of clouds, Rook and Anna seemed misplaced, late Sunday revellers caught by the Monday morning light. The hastening single people in the street, toothpaste and coffee on their gums, a day of labour summoning, a desk, a loom, a till, gave way to them, as if a couple so engrossed and casual had passage rights, like yachts, to an unhindered channel at the pavement’s crown. We all defer to couples, do we not? A man and woman hand in hand can make the toughest of us step aside, can stop a tram.
This couple were not rushed. They were not hungry for their desks or eager for their colleagues and their phones. They held each other by the hand, the upper arm, the elbow, and the wrist. They held each other’s waists. And when they reached the walkers’ tunnel – just at the spot where Rook had used his keys and fists and where the mugged and flattened laurel leaves still lifted in the draught – they took advantage of the solitude and gloom to kiss. Once they reached the windy mall, however, they separated by a metre, and walked in parallel. The weekend spent in Rook’s apartment had been refreshment for them both. They?
??d hardly left Rook’s bed by day, and then at night they’d taken to the streets and bars to fuel themselves, with the reckless alcohol of crowds, the aphrodisiacs of drink, for more lovemaking. Yet now they walked demurely, chastely, along the coloured marble flagstones. It was not wise to love too publicly. Who knew who might be watching from the greenhouse on the 28th, or through the tinted windows of his office suite? Who knew if Victor – that unimpassioned, loveless man who seemingly had never tried the luxuries of pressing skin to skin, who could not understand the pleasures of the thigh, the tongue, the abdomen, the breast – might take against two lovers in Big Vic.
The mall was cunning preparation for the lobby of the office block. It cooled and shrank pedestrians. It echoed with the click of heels, and the heavy doors of taxi cabs, and sighing ventilation ducts. The shiny brick-veneers, the mirrored colonnades, the fish-trap cloisters leading to the finance palaces and the trading brokerages which were the tenants there, did not invite ill-discipline or dawdling. The mall’s misanthropy struck Rook and Anna dumb, just as the deep, cool shade of conifers will silence those who exit from a field. They did not speak. They even blushed a little, as if they guessed their weekend intimacy could not be hidden here. Their entry to Big Vic was self-conscious, too, Anna’s face a little too composed and Rook’s – unanswered – greetings to the lobby staff, the uniformed commissionaires, too hearty for the time of day. They shared – a shade too clumsily – a segment of Big Vic’s rotating doors. They shared the lift for twenty-seven floors. But once they reached the office lobby they headed for their desks as if the only love they shared was love of work.
Rook was in the best of moods, and with good cause. He was relieved to find his desk was, for the moment, clear. Normally by that time on a Monday, Victor would have sent his Fix It list – a sheaf of notes, queries and instructions, recriminations. Victor himself did not like to deal with people on the telephone, or even speak to clients face to face. What was to blame for that? His hibernating temperament? His hearing aid? His shield of wealth? He read reports. He scanned accounts. He watched the share and stock prices dance banking quicksteps round their decimals on the office VDUs. If there was anything to be done, then Rook could do it. He had younger legs and ears. But on that Monday, there were no tasks for him, no estate manager to intimidate by telephone (‘We note that field beans are a trifle mean this year. And late’), no groundless tension to diffuse amongst the market traders, no thin letter of regret, refusal, to be composed and sent, no group executive meetings to be called and chaired while Victor claimed some old man’s malady as pretext for staying in his room or on the roof.
Such liberty! It suited Rook. He had his own plans for the day and these involved a little horseplay at the office desk. He was used to having sex with Anna on his bed. A day or two of anything is time enough for it to seem routine. It had been fun – exhilarating fun – but not adventurous. His sexual needs were escalating. Making love to her at work was what engrossed him now. Big Vic’s solemnity was more a stimulation than a restraint. The need for stealth and speed and stiflement would blunt the appetite, you think? Think twice. Lovemaking is at its best when it transgresses social ordinances and strays far from the trodden path into the briars of the undergrowth, where risk and lust run neck and neck.
Rook wanted something more subversive than bed-steading. He wanted intercourse with Anna in the place where he had sat for months and contemplated her. He wanted office sex, with all the office work continuing, and all the VDUs alight, and these two colleagues, ankled by their underclothes, and pressed together like a pair of angler’s worms. No one would think it odd if, later in the day, he called Anna to his room for consultations. She’d come, an innocent. He wasn’t sure that she would share his eagerness – but from the appetite she’d shown for making bed-top love he had an inkling that she might.
He draped his jacket on his chair and then – with nothing else to do so early in the day – he went to Victor’s office suite. The birthday throne was still outside, its plastic foliage evergreen and fresh. It seemed so foolish now that he had wasted so much effort on this birthday gift, for a man who had no appetite for sentiment. He pulled the foliage with its sticky tape free from the wood. He’d get someone to take it to the atrium and reconnect the stems where he had snapped them free. Or else he’d put them in a pot, a comic bouquet for Anna’s desk – a teasing prelude for the courtship that he planned for her in his own room, at his own desk. But first – the bouquet in his hand – he knocked on Victor’s door. He knocked again. And tried the handle. The door was locked. The old man’s growing soft, Rook thought. He’s slept through dawn for once. Rook bent to peer through the keyhole in the door. The inner key was in the lock.
‘No signs of life!’ he called out cheerily – and inanely – to the company accountant who, carrying a steaming coffee and a bank of ledgers, was passing through the lobby, tiptoeing through, in fact, as if he wished to keep his presence secret.
‘Where’s Victor, then?’ The accountant shook his head and seemed unwilling to meet Rook’s eye or match his cheeriness. ‘Where’s Victor, then?’ Rook asked again.
‘He won’t be down today.’
‘Why not?’ Again Rook had to settle for the shaken head. The accountant went into his room, and slammed the door shut with his heel.
Rook took his bouquet to Reception. The women there were busy at their desks.
‘Where’s Victor’s schedule for today?’ he asked. Again he had to ask the question twice.
‘It’s cancelled.’
‘Oh, yes. Why’s that?’
No one could say. No one seemed keen to even talk about this rarity of Victor absent from his desk, his schedule ‘cancelled’ for the day. It was perplexing that the staff were unforthcoming and morose when here was opportunity for them to waste a little time with talk.
‘What’s going on?’ Reception shrugged and held its tongue.
‘Why so grumpy, then?’ Rook asked out loud. ‘The Monday miseries? Too much to drink on Sunday night? Cheer up, cheer up. It’s only a job. “Work not shirk is life’s best perk. So join my harem, said the Turk.”
Their smiles were thin and stretched. Something embarrassed them. He waited, unsure of what the problem was, but certain that these three women, hired for their public charm and cheerfulness, were ill at ease. At last he said, unflippantly, ‘What’s up with you three, then?’ Still, there were no volunteers to look him in the eye. At last the eldest of the women said with a voice that quavered in and out of key, ‘It’s not for us to say.’
‘It’s not for us to say.’ In other words, this was a private thing, too personal and intimate for them to comment on, despite Reception’s reputation as the building’s bourse for rumour and hearsay. Rook no longer was perplexed. He guessed what caused their awkwardness, their blushing jealousy. Some office spy had spotted him and Anna out on the town on Saturday, perhaps. Or walking hand in hand towards Big Vic. The word had spread. The word ‘Romance!’ For some reason he could hardly understand this out-of-office liaison was not approved. You’d think this was some tutting medieval monastery, Rook thought (seated for the moment at his desk). Was this just jealousy, or sullen irritation that he’d breached an office code that those in charge and close to Victor should be as continent as him? Or was secrecy the culprit? Did Reception and Accountancy and, come to think of it, the uniformed Commissionary at mall level, resent that Rook had kept his tryst with Anna to himself for one weekend?
‘Ridiculous!’ He spoke the word out loud. It was ridiculous. Unlikely, too. The men and women in Big Vic were magnetized and not rebuffed by any hint of scandal or of secrecy. They loved the ribaldries of life. Particularly the trio at Reception. They wore their grandest, most libertine of smiles when there was gossip to be shared and prurience to trade. They would not drop their voices and their eyes, and act like undertakers’ clerks. They would have looked Rook in the eye and said, ‘What’s this I hear?’ or ‘You had a nice time Saturday! A lit
tle pigeon spotted you and Anna rubbing noses in a bar …’
What then? What could the problem be? He went through Friday in his mind in search of irritants. What had he said, or done, to set this Monday morning frost? He’d seen that everyone had shared the fun with champagne and cakes. He’d been his usual self, the Prince of Irony and Idleness. What had he done to give offence? Something was irking them, no doubt of that. And, truth to tell, something was irking him as well. His conscience was not entirely clear. Again he ran Friday through his mind and recognized exactly what it was that had stained his day. The subway fight with Joseph. The viciousness of fists and keys. The parting kick. The pleasure that he’d taken in such a squalid triumph. Yet these were private acts, less public than the time he’d spent with Anna. Who could know and disapprove of what had happened out of sight and underground and to an ill-dressed clod who had no contact with Big Vic? Why would anybody care?
Again Rook shuffled through the Friday pack. The pretext that he’d used to get down to the marketplace. The orange that he’d peeled. The tugging and the ripping of the laurel stems. The shaming bout of asthma in the presence of those men. The creaky birthday lunch. The gleeful coda to the day: Anna laughing on his bed, delighted by his mordancy, his teasing hands, that clowning routine with his underpants, ‘Ourselves, Ourselves, Ourselves’. And yes (I raise my head above the parapet again), the mocking column that I, the Burgher, wrote about the taxi and the boss’s coddled fish. All the workers in Big Vic would have seen and laughed at that … and thought, perhaps, the Burgher’s source was Rook? For that was just like Rook, to feed the babblers of the press. So, then – they would not look him in the eyes because they thought he had betrayed a fishy confidence? Again, ‘Ridiculous!’