With this last word, Signor Busi spread his hands, the saddened pragmatist: ‘Arcadia must be defended. Of course! We must admit the truth. If it is your wish to lure into Arcadia those better citizens who have good taste and incomes to dispose, then we must promise them security from …’ Again he spread his saddened hands. ‘… from the city itself. You see we have provided surveillance cameras, anti-theft shutters, suicide netting, commissionaires. The building is a fortress. A hand grenade would only shake its glass. It can survive the full impact of an intercontinental airliner. But this is not enough. We owe it to your customers to keep out drunks and tramps and demonstrators and people who do not come to spend, but simply wish to shelter from the rain, or sleep, or cause unpleasantness. Arcadia – as you will see – is far too good for them.’
He took Victor on a tour, beginning with the two-storey basement, cushioned in poured concrete and served by a delivery ramp concealed by lines of trees. He showed where refrigerated storage pods kept produce fresh, where ripening units brought on bananas, apples, mangoes to the colours judged best and most tempting for shoppers. Here were the offices, the basement studios, the service workshops, the market courtyards, recapturing – intensifying – a medieval market atmosphere, with coloured awnings, painted signs, terrazzo flooring, augmented natural light. And beds of shrubs, and greenhouse trees, and displays of bedding plants, with ivy, vines, and bamboo stands.
The four meringues were joined inside Arcadia by a central hub much as the four seed-carpels of nasturtiums cling fatly to their stems. The hub supported terraces and balconies, with views through foliage of the heads and hats of shoppers, and the ‘authentic’ coloured awnings on the fixed-site stalls. On the lower terraces there were bars, a restaurant, an open concert arena. The upper balconies were almost out of sight. Below them stretched netting. It hung across the higher chambers of the domes like the billows of a Tuareg tent. Above and beyond the white and green patterns of the netting, there would be the largest aviary yet built in which the Busi Partnership envisaged cockatoos and cockatiels and minah birds, who finally, would learn to call like traders. ‘All fresh today. All fresh today. No loot, no fruit.’
The centrepiece!’ Signor Busi produced a final sketch. ‘You see, we are not charlatans. We have respect for history. We have not torn the medieval washplace down. We have given it new life.’ The sketches showed what careful restoration could achieve, how medieval gargoyles could be rescued by the heroic dentistry of modern masons, how old and pitted stones could have the plaque removed, the cavities disguised, the broken tops replaced. There’d be new fountains, waterfalls, where previously the flow had been fitful and controlled by taps.
Signor Busi showed photographs of the bludgeoned washing basins where soap and stone and cloth had for so long made slapping music with the water. Then his new designs: the renewed basins were transformed by lights and plants. They were kept full and busy with piped, pumped, filtered, and circulating water, which tumbled from hidden faucets into sculpted pools and then ran into channels to troughs of plants. At night, the air-conditioning, the concourse lights, the water would be turned off and floodlights would shine onto the four meringues. They’d make the innards of Arcadia warm and fathomless with the haywire shadows of pot-bound trees.
‘I am a Milanese,’ said Signor Busi, ‘but even so I must admit that here we have a building which will be as beautiful and functional, more functional perhaps, than the Galerie Victor Emmanuel II in Milan. You share a name. You are Victor III, perhaps. You share a place in history as well, if you allow the Busi Partnership to make these drawings come alive.’
Signor Busi spread his arms and laughed. ‘No more to say.’ He left the plans and drawings where they were and put out both hands to Victor. ‘I am at your disposal until Sunday, naturally. Tante grazie, Signor Victor.’
Victor summoned Anna. She took Signor Busi to the boss’s private lift and travelled with him to the atrium and to the exit on the mall. He was ebullient and playful like an actor who has triumphed on the stage. He liked the woman at his side. Her perfume and her plumpness and the crowded intimacy of Victor’s lift loosened him. His wife was far away. He laid two fingers on her wrist. He said, ‘I think that your employer will give to me the contract for the Soap Market. Perhaps I ought to celebrate tonight, and you should be my guest at my hotel.’
Anna shook her head. ‘It’s very kind,’ she said, ‘but far too early for a celebration yet, don’t you think? Victor has another three to see.’
‘My dear,’ said Signor Busi, letting go her arm, ‘I feel it in my blood that we shall win. Our plans will be preferred.’
‘Perhaps Victor will decide to preserve the market as it is.’
Busi laughed. ‘There’s nothing to preserve. There’s nothing there. There is nothing to demolish. Of course there are the cobblestones to lift and lay again more cunningly. And there are those unkempt small bars and restaurants which cluster round the Soap Garden. Those we have to level off. And then we start from scratch! So we will speak again, I think. And many times.’
His car drew up and Signor Busi left Big Vic a happy man. Above him, on the 27th floor, his plans were strewn across the desk and carpet. Victor stood amongst them, a reference dictionary in his hand. Arcadia – a rustic paradise, he read. Arcadian – of pastoral simplicity. Arcade – a covered row of shops.
Signor Busi waited at the Excelsior for three more days, and on the fourth he received a call. Anna spoke for Victor. She was pleased, she said, to let him know that the Busi Partnership had secured the Soap Market contract. A formal letter would be sent, and Victor would be grateful if Signor Busi would extend his stay for three more days so that a press conference could be arranged and the timescale for construction plotted. He would, too, be sending Signor Busi sketches of a small statue which was a birthday gift to Victor from – how appropriate! – the leading market traders. It was a mother and a child and should be incorporated into Arcadia.
‘A small statue? This we will give pride of place!’ Busi told Anna. And then, ‘So, please let me give you pride of place at my table at the Excelsior tonight. Now I think it is not too soon to celebrate.’
4
ANNA ATE VEGETABLES like anybody else, but she was not an habitué of the Soap Market. She lived a little way from town – ten minutes on the bus, a forty-minute walk. She did not count herself so poor or so energetic that she need queue at market stalls and then transport her purchases by bag and bus. Within a hundred metres of her home there was a delicatessen with a fresh-products counter and an unhurried clientele, and this she used. Of course there were those times when she preferred to shop in city streets for clothes or shoes or presents for her nieces. Once in a while, after work, she set off down the mall towards the boutiques and the studios, determined to spend money on herself.
On the evening that Signor Busi first met Victor and then ventured to hold Anna by the wrist, she had felt so glad to be herself, so glad to be admired and flirted with (if only by a creaky clothes horse from Milan) that she went looking for a treat in town. She’d seen a brooch that she wanted, handmade, a galaxy of silver stars, a single moon of pearl. She’d need a darker jacket, too, to suit the brooch. Some Belgian chocolates, perhaps, could keep her company that night. She’d take a taxi home.
The jeweller had her workshop-studio beneath the timber galleries in Saints Row. Anna walked there by the quickest route. She was a little anxious that the galleries might close before the larger stores. But there the owner was, at work on a bracelet, a flight of copper geese. Anna could not see the brooch she wanted on display. She went inside. She asked. The jeweller did not lift her head, or take the magnifier from her eye. She said, ‘I sold it. Weeks ago.’
‘Do you have something similar? Another galaxy?’
‘I don’t do stars and moons, not any more. What I do now is birds and butterflies.’ Anna waited for some helpful word, for some expression of regret, for some polite farewell. Instead the jeweller, clear
ly not prepared to talk, instructed, ‘You could try elsewhere.’
Anna was too vexed to look elsewhere. What kind of businesswoman had such contempt for customers that she could not be bothered to raise her head or lift her eyes. Anna regretted that she had not gone home by bus as soon as work was done. She did not need a darker jacket now. She would not treat herself – and just as well, perhaps – to Belgian chocolates. Or take the taxi home. Instead she’d catch the bus back to her sewing and her television set, and spend the night, as many single women do, as silent and as self-possessed as quails. But first, she thought, she’d take a look at the Soap Market. It was so near, and on the way to her bus stop. Her contacts with the architects and with their plans had made her curious to see exactly what Signor Busi had meant that afternoon: ‘There’s nothing worth preserving there.’ She’d buy some salad for her sinless evening meal.
Anna had, a month before, turned her back on pasta, bread, and rice, and hoped to make her peace with lettuce and with beans. Her only lapse was chocolates. Those times that Rook had pinched her at her waist, the hoop of flesh too loose between his fingers and his thumb, had made Anna discontented with herself. She used to push his hands away. He called it teasing. He thought it was a pleasing intimacy to draw attention to her loss of shape. She counted pinches of that kind as bullying. Men, it seemed, were never satisfied for long with the details of the women that they loved. And that was heartless, was it not?
When Rook was sacked and had ignored her visits to his apartment and the notes she’d left, Anna had found cause to blame herself. She’d frightened Rook with too much passion. She’d slept with him too readily. She’d been the secret cause of his dismissal from Big Vic. Her ‘details’ were not right for him. If only she was slim and thirty-five, then Rook would leave his door ajar for her. Yet he was just as middle-aged and lined as her. At least she was not dry like him. She was not greying, yet. She could breathe without her chest trembling – though it was true that her chest would pout a little less if she shed three kilos, say. She’d learned to blame her weight, and not herself, for losing Rook. She never thought to blame and hate the man himself.
Quite speedily, she’d lost some weight and, if not trim, she was more statuesque and confident. She bought new clothes that fitted her. She had her hair shortened and razored at the neck. She exercised each evening on her phaga rug. Now that she was just a trifle lighter and more disguised by what she wore, she felt unburdened. But nothing that she did or ate could take away the pouching underneath her chin, or recompense her for the sudden, hurtful loss of Rook. What use were mottoes such as Yes-and-Now-and-Here if Now-and-Here were desk and home and bed without her Rook?
She was surprised, however, on that broochless night, how cheerful she was feeling amongst the shopping crowds and how seductive were the market stalls. One soapie dealt only in roots, the gormless starches of the fields. His carrots ranged in colour from the red of mutton steaks to the pink of carp; he had carrots as round and bright as fairy lights; he had them straight and long like waxen stalactites; he had them double-limbed. He had potatoes, too – all shades, all shapes, and kept apart in separate buckets. He had whites, yellows, reds, pinks, scrapers, bakers, boilers, friers, cocktail spuds, Idahos, Egyptian, Old Andean, starchy, seedy, sweet. He had potatoes which were grown organically and were presented with the soil intact (to mask the blemishes). He had potatoes slightly greened by light. These were good in salads, raw and shredded with some mayonnaise.
Anna burrowed deep into the Soap Market. She passed the ranks of oranges, the monsoon fruit, the chicory, the sea kale, the Valentino pears, the commonwealth of apples, and came into the cooler kingdom of the leaf. She wanted just one lettuce, but she was teased by choice and colour. She rummaged at a stall for a garden lettuce with a tight rosette. She’d never noticed how they smelled before. The salads at the produce counter of her local delicatessen were odourless. But here, banked up in such profusion, the leaves were acrid almost, funereal. Their odour was precisely that of damp clay newly turned to take a coffin. The lettuce that she chose was tight and heavy – an early Wintervale. Its leaf stems were white. The leaves themselves were strongly ribbed and shaped like scallop shells. These were the lettuce leaves that the Spirits of the Field would use as plates at midnight feasts when they were standing guard against the pinching frost. The soapie dropped the lettuce in a bag and took Anna’s payment as if the Spirits of the Field had yet to visit him.
Why did she not go now to catch her bus? Because she was seduced by all the multiformity of food? Because she was confused by colour, noise and crowds? Because Cellophane directed her on some detour? Or because a woman who had just detected death in lettuce leaves could have no difficulty picking up the smell of Rook as he sat with his coffee in the Soap Garden?
Rook spotted her as she negotiated chairs and customers. At first he watched her idly, thinking simply that she was a woman to his taste, a trader’s stylish wife, perhaps, or the elegant and tempting boss of some boutique. Then he recognized her, just in time, as she saw him. His chest grew tight. His trousers, too. The lovers had not spoken for five months. Or touched. So Rook felt doubly cornered, both by the brutal carelessness with which he’d treated her and by the meanness of his sudden concupiscence. He wished to be a thousand miles away; he wished to be ten metres closer, so close and wrapped that he digested her, took from her mouth the salty sauce and fillet of her tongue.
‘You’ve changed,’ he said. ‘You’ve cut your hair.’ She seemed embarrassed. She reddened when he complimented her on how she looked. Was that the red of anger or delight? She did not speak, but put her lettuce on the table, and sat down facing Rook. Let him speak first.
‘Am I to take it that there is another man?’
‘Why should there be?’
‘The way you look, of course.’
‘Like what?’
‘You’ve blossomed since I last saw you. Is there a man?’
‘Of course there is,’ she said, quite truthfully.
‘And who is he?’ Rook looked as if his face had lost its bones.
‘An architect,’ she said. ‘He’s asked me back to the Excelsior, no less. To celebrate.’
‘And what is there to celebrate?’
‘The end of all this!’ Anna spread her arms and flapped her hands, as if she were an illusionist who could make the real world disappear.
To some extent she was exactly that. Most women are. They are illusionists, at least when they are young. They have the trick of making clocks stand still for men, of making clocks run fast, of lowering the temperature a trace, of raising it, of being so desirable that all the world beyond the bubble of themselves is distanced and diluted. Their narrow heads, their scent, the scissored hairline at their neck, the leafy rustling of their skirts become bewitchments. So Rook was netted and engulfed, and Anna gloried that she was not too old or large to hold this man in thrall. She laid her hands upon his table. He had the courage and the shame to hold her by the wrist.
‘Just like my architect,’ she said, and then her story tumbled out, how secretive the boss had been, how plans had been passed off as something else, how nine architects – so far – had been escorted up to Victor’s suite like prisoners in custody and not allowed to share a lift or chatter with the staff. She told how Victor was obsessed by plans, and how his books on greenhouse pests had been pushed aside by models, elevations, and projections for the Soap Market. She told how Signor Busi had – that afternoon – seduced the boss with sculpted words and how she was convinced – like him – that Busi would be the man to ‘start from scratch’.
‘I could have stopped him. I would have stopped him,’ Rook said, more energized and focused than he had been for a dozen years. ‘But now I’ve gone, who is there to give him good advice?’
‘So, that’s why you got the sack? He didn’t want you in the way … ?’
‘What does Victor say?’
‘What does Victor ever say? He hasn’t said a w
ord. When does he ever say a word? You know what he’s like, out of sight, out of mind …’
She put her one free hand on top of his so that the three arms on the table made a bas-relief of flesh and fingers. Rook felt reprieved. Anna had not learned about his market fraud from Victor. The ice cube had not revealed the truth. Nor would he. Rook raised his head. He squared his shoulders. He was a cockatoo, all squawk and feathers now, all strut and peck and preen.
‘Come home with me,’ he said. ‘Let’s celebrate.’
‘I’ve called round at your home a dozen times,’ she said. ‘I’ve written and I’ve called. Not one reply.’
‘So come home now. We’ll put it right.’
‘We’ll see,’ she said. ‘You’re not as fancy as my architect.’
‘Ah, the Italian, yes.’ Rook took his fingers out of hers. He held the edges of her coat. ‘If he wins, I’d like to see his plans.’
‘He’ll win. I’d bet on it.’ Anna’s voice had lost its resolution. She held her breath. She watched his fingertips.
‘When will you know?’
‘Next week, officially. There’ll be a press conference and a presentation of the scheme when the contract is awarded.’
‘And where?’
‘Big Vic.’
‘I’d like to see the plans before next week, before the press. Can you do that?’
‘Do what?’
‘Give me a preview of the scheme that wins.’
‘Why should I take that chance?’
‘Because I want you to,’ he said. And (he thought) because the old man plans to put an end to all of this. Because there’s no one in Big Vic to stand up for the soapies and the marketplace.