They lined up with their placards outside Big Vic, unprotected from the rain, ennobled by discomfort, emboldened by their fears of being driven from their stalls. What then? No one had thought to make a speech or send a deputation in or lobby for support and signatures from Victor’s office staff.
‘They only need to see us,’ Con had said. ‘And hear us too.’
So they stood firm and wet; and they began to chant and clap and jeer and offer leaflets whenever anybody passed them by to enter Victor’s fort.
Just before eleven the architectural press began to arrive for Victor’s conference, but there were other writers too, from papers and from magazines that would not normally concern themselves with building schemes. Rook’s phone calls, Victor’s press release and invitation, the early radio reports of trouble in the marketplace and streets, had stirred the news editors and the diarists to send their representatives. The Burgher himself had come (again my face is hoist above the parapet), and I was keen to follow up the anecdote of Victor’s coddled fish with something else to make the rich seem ludicrous. I noted what the placards said – Save our Market from the Millionaire – and when I took their leaflet, saw what comedy the Burgher could construct from Signor Busi’s pregnant domes. Already – and without, as yet, much cause beyond an appetite for mischief – the traders had a champion. The Burgher loathed those men who gained their power and wealth from trade.
‘Who are these people?’
Signor Busi was glad of an excuse to leave the breakfast table and look out on the mall. An hour of non-business conversation with Victor had obliged him to sit silently, engaged in food, or else – his choice, in fact – to hold a monologue. As Victor showed no sign that he was either bored or entertained, the monologue was free to range untrammelled and, perhaps, unheard, amongst the pleasantries of Busi’s intercontinental life. He talked at length about New York, its obesity. Did Victor know New York? No? So Busi spoke about Milan, the town he loved and loathed the most. It was more Celtic than typically Italian, he believed. Did Victor realize that London was closer to Milan than Sicily? Victor had not realized, but seemed prepared to accept Busi’s word.
Now the architect was stuck. The more he said, the less he had to say. So he was happy to stand and help the old man to the parapet and relay – his eyes were sharp – what he could see; the banners, the picket line, the drama in the mall. No, Victor did not know what all the distant noise was for. He sublet twenty-three floors of Big Vic to fourteen different companies, so there were fifteen possible reasons for demonstrations at the door.
When Anna came to lead her boss and Signor Busi down to the press conference, she said that there would be delays. They had expected just five writers at the most and perhaps an agency photographer, but there were thirty journalists in all, including a film crew and two people from the radio. The meeting room was far too small. They’d have to find a larger venue.
‘Then use my office suite,’ Victor said. ‘You might have guessed there’d be wide interest.’
Anna thought it prudent not to detail the width of interest that had gathered in the mall. She replied to Signor Busi’s urbane bow with a ceremonial smile and left to fetch the press.
Both men were pleased to launch Arcadia to such an eager group. The cameras were put to work as soon as the two men came down by Victor’s private lift. Anna distributed plans and paperwork. Each file contained an architectural brief, a plan, a sketch, an article from the International Gazette about the Busi Partnership. Big Vic’s Publicity Manager introduced the two men to the press. Signor Claudio Busi, he explained, would say a word or two, and then there would be questions and photo-opportunities and wine.
Signor Busi embarked upon his second monologue that morning, but on this occasion he had come prepared. The speech that he had already made to Victor would do for these people, too, except that now there was no need ‘to glorify the vision of the man who pays’.
‘My work is familiar to you, I think,’ he said, implying that the new Arcadia was all his work. ‘I have been called …’ (here he laughed, to demonstrate his lack of vanity) ‘… a guru of design, a philosopher amongst journeymen. I introduced the notion, as you know, of “building as event”. That is to say, that when we use a building we should experience narrative and drama in the way that on a mountain walk we experience the textures and elements of landscape.’
As yet the pens and pencils of the press had made no mark. What were they building in the marketplace? A planetarium? A Disneyland? An operatic set? A wildlife park? Mont Blanc?
‘We have nostalgia and we have experiments,’ he continued. ‘We also have modernity. I think it will be clear to you – if I can now invite you to open up your files and look at the impression of Arcadia – that we have opted for modernity, that is to say, for this city of today we replace the chaos of a medieval market with the harmony and dignity of a modern one.’
He held his larger illustration of Arcadia up against his chest. ‘What does this recall to you?’ he asked, and gave no time for anyone to make a guess. ‘Here is a landscape at the city centre,’ he said, and then – encouraged by the smiles that greeted every word – Signor Busi added ‘an amusing confidentiality’: ‘Something to make us laugh. My colleagues in Milan have called Arcadia the Melting Glass Meringues. You see their joke, I think?’ I held the Burgher’s pen. It went to work. Busi had given me a comic heading for that evening’s diary. He had surrendered his confectionery Arcadia to my cartoonist and to my irony.
‘Meringues? Are these cakes known to you?’ asked Busi, unnerved that no one seemed amused.
Victor hid behind his desk, his eyebrows making Ms and Ws. Perhaps he wondered whether this Italian was entirely sound, or else was blinking back his mirth.
When questions came, there were the usual queries about budgets and timescales which Signor Busi and the publicity manager handled with unnecessary detail. Then the tougher questions came, ‘What consultations have there been with the street traders currently at work in the Soap Market?’ and ‘What provisions have been made to protect the interests of the marketeers?’ The PR man made reassuring noises. It was his opinion that the building scheme was in the interests both of the city and the traders. ‘Why, then, are there a crowd of soapies demonstrating in the mall?’
The Burgher rose upon my legs. I held the market traders’ leaflet up and read the question that it posed and then the answers that it gave: ‘Arcadia? Who pays? You, the shopper. Me, the trader. Us, the citizens. Them that value history and tradition.’
‘There are placards at this very minute at the door which call on us to help protect the market from the millionaire,’ I said. ‘I see the millionaire himself is silent. I wonder whether we can ask him to reply to what the traders say?’
Victor did not stand. He did not want to speak, but had no choice. Old men can take their time, and not seem slow. He looked down at his hands. It seemed he would not speak at all, but then he raised his head and looked, not at the people in the room, but at the rain which swept into the windowpanes.
‘The market’s getting taller. That’s all,’ he said. ‘When I was small the traders put their produce out on mats. You had to bend to make your choice. Then we brought in raised stalls with awnings on which bags and tresses could be hung. You had to stretch to take your pick. So now we have Arcadia with steps and lifts and balconies. The market’s like a plant. It grows and flourishes, or else it withers. There will be no problems with the marketeers. Arcadia will make them rich.’
‘The traders at the door do not share your optimism,’ someone said.
‘They will,’ said Victor. ‘I’ll speak to them myself.’
Quite what he meant no one was sure. They stood and watched him as he turned his back and went into his private lift, with Anna at his side, his papers in her hands. Would he go up or down? He could have said to Anna, ‘Phone the commissionaires and ask them to select a couple from the crowd who are presentable. I’ll talk to them. And phone
the police to clear the others from the mall.’ Instead he said, ‘Let’s get it over with.’
‘What? Up or down?’
He pointed at his shoes.
It was simple, icy curiosity, not pluck or duty, which determined Victor to descend. His earlier rooftop view of what was happening below – even with Signor Busi as his sharper eyes – had not been satisfactory. It all had been a little out of tune, a half turn out of focus, just as the television was these days for him, for all old men. Words and images had frayed for him. Their selvages had gone. When Signor Busi had spoken for so long that morning, over breakfast, Victor had simply stared, uncertain when to nod or laugh or show concern. His hearing aid was temperamental. It worked more clearly in shuttered rooms than in the open air. Weak light was a thinner filter for the sound. It left the consonants intact. It did not squeeze the words. At breakfast there was too much light, and too much accent in Signor Busi’s speech. At times, it seemed to Victor, the architect had retreated into Italian, or else was speaking seamless prose in which the pauses were as crammed with words as the sentences themselves. Was that a question that he asked? All Victor did was shake his head – a gesture which he hoped would be appropriate. The animation of the younger man was tiring. What kind of dilettante was he that he chattered while he ate? What sort of breakfast guest was too insensitive to match his host’s own reticence?
Victor had been relieved – though startled for a moment – when Signor Busi had so suddenly left the table to peer down on the mall. ‘Who are these people?’ Victor had not got a clue. It seemed to him the tide was going out and beaching him with failing faculties. It ebbed, it ebbed, it ebbed. Quite soon the only sounds and images which were defined would be those troubling ones – of Em and Aunt and eggs and fire – which were his memory.
Now that he was in the lift with Anna, though, his hearing aid was working perfectly. He heard the whisper of the steel hawsers, the detonation of the papers which Anna was tapping on her leg, the brittle timpani of his own bones. He even heard and felt the air grow thicker as the lift went down. How long since he had last been to the lobby? How much longer since he’d passed through Big Vic’s revolving doors? Three months at least. How long since God had last descended from the heavens to stand with mortals on the ground?
The power of the speech that he had been obliged to make for the journalists, the felicity of the words that came with such simplicity, had fired the old man with sufficient self-esteem to think he could anaesthetize the crowd with ‘Arcadia will make you rich’. He was not nervous in the least – except, perhaps, that he was uneasy in the lift. It had dropped through twenty floors and more and seemed to travel at a speed and with a purpose that was reckless. He had to steady himself on the lift’s steel walls, and then on Anna’s arm. He was not sorry when his first journey for three months at least came to an end. The single door drew back and Victor looked out on the foliage of the atrium. All the ground-floor staff – receptionists, security, commissionaires – were looking out onto the mall where marketeers were drenched in rain and indignation. Victor pushed his hair back – needlessly – with his hand. He buttoned his coat, and walked across the atrium and stood, the shortest, oldest man, behind the crowd who blocked the exit doors. No one gave way. No one deferred. No one noticed him. He did not pass through these revolving doors each day on his way to work or on his way back home. The man was not familiar.
Anna tried to clear a path, but did not have the voice or strength to cut into the crowd. But when the press arrived a minute or so later, packed into Big Vic’s main lifts, the crowd was soon pushed back and Victor was identified by cameramen and journalists who wished to winkle from him some idea of what he meant to say to the soapies on the far, wet side of the revolving doors.
Now Security did its work. It cleared a path. It made the staff give way. It made the pressmen step aside, and let Anna, Victor, and the breathless publicity manager whose face they knew, proceed towards their confrontation on the mall. Rank, age, and power, and the circling quarters of the automatic doors – too fast and intimate for more than one high-ranker at a time, or so the doorman judged – conspired to send the old man, first and singly, into the rain. The taxi captain knew his boss’s face. He’d been at Big Vic since the start. He hurried over with a black umbrella and followed Victor as he crossed from private territory into the public domain of the mall. There was no sudden wind. The sun did not break through to mark this unaccustomed meeting between the subjects and their distant king. The rain was democratic and it fell as dully everywhere – except that Victor was not wet. He had his canopy, and now a retinue of three – Anna, PR, and the umbrella man.
The stout commissionaire – the one who had escorted Rook out of Big Vic with such inflexible diplomacy – took it on himself to block the building’s exits. If the boss was on the mall, then it became Victor’s private place and no one could presume the right to go outside and join him there unless they had appointments to do so. The newspaper and the television cameramen had to press their lenses to the rain-splashed, tinted glass, while the soundmen and the scribes stood by helplessly or made the best of their imprisonment by interviewing Signor Busi.
Victor’s hearing suffered in the air and light. He was surrounded by the banners and the slogans of the marketeers, but he could not make sense of what they said. The news that he was Victor had somehow spread. It rippled every placard there. It made each demonstrator briefly vehement in preparation for the quiet they knew must come. They crowded him. They waved their placards and their leaflets – and, one or two, their fists. If only Victor could have separated sound from sound he would have understood the essence of their anger, that a man who lived in grandeur in an office penthouse on a business mall could, by decree, destroy their livelihoods, could build on them, could sweep them up and bin them out like worthless market waste.
‘Who speaks for you?’ he asked.
They pushed Con forward and made him stand square on to Victor so that the rain which ran off the black umbrella splashed at his feet.
‘You have been misinformed,’ Victor told the man. ‘You’ve been misled.’ He took the leaflet from the trader’s hand. ‘I don’t know how you got hold of this.’ He pointed at the illustration of Arcadia, taken from Busi’s confidential plans. ‘But had you been more patient you would have heard the good news that we have prepared for you. “Arcadia? Who pays?”, your leaflet asks.’ He put his finger to his chest. ‘I pay. Who else? Sixty million US dollars it will cost, but not one dollar of that comes from you. I take the risk. I tremble at the bills. And who will benefit from this? Who will have dry and permanent premises? Who will no longer need to put up and pack away the stalls each day? Who will no longer need to barrow in the produce from the market edge, but will have storage space and access for the lorries and dumper lifts to bring the produce to the stalls?’ He spread his arms to encompass everybody there. He promised them that he would not betray his ‘market friends’. He spoke of meetings where all the details would be hammered out and all their worries could be voiced. He suggested there should be liaison every week, and a trading parliament inside Arcadia on which the marketeers could have their representatives, their ministers.
Victor looked around to check there were no journalists, and then he spoke again the words that had worked so well earlier that day.
‘The market’s getting taller, that is all,’ he said. ‘I’m eighty years of age. I’ve seen it grow. When I was just a kid and your fathers and grandfathers were the traders there, they put their produce out on mats and sat like Buddhists on the cobblestones. When we brought in raised stalls, the sort you use and seem to love today, your fathers rioted. They said they were a modern curse. They said no one would buy from stalls. But market stalls have made you wealthier. And now we have Arcadia with all its beauty and its benefits. Everyone will want to buy their produce there. Not just the poor. The wealthy too. Why else would I agree to invest so much in you? To make us all as poor as our grandfat
hers were? My friends, have faith. Arcadia will make you rich.’
Now Con was saying something in reply. Though Victor could not make out all his words, he knew the mood had changed. The placards were gripped less resolutely. After all, the boss himself had come out. He’d treated them as colleagues. He’d promised them meetings, safeguards, parliaments. And what he said made sense. Why would he wish to damage market trade? Their business made him rich.
Victor made a show of shaking hands, and then he turned about with Anna and the umbrella in his wake and re-entered Big Vic. He would not talk to journalists. His publicity manager (now surrounded by the traders) was paid for that. He felt immensely tired and disconcerted. It was not age, but anger that such private plans as his should suffer from such scrutiny, from press, from public, from market traders, and that despite his eminence and wealth he had to barter in the open air as if he were a boy of seven dependent on a tray of eggs.
He shared the lift with Anna. He said, ‘Now I suppose you’d better see to it that meetings are arranged. We must be democrats.’ He held up Con’s leaflet for closer scrutiny. ‘Those plans were confidential. Someone’s leaked.’ He looked at Anna. Looked straight through her. ‘Find out who leaked,’ he said. ‘Give me the name, it doesn’t matter who, or what it costs. He gets the sack.’
For a moment Anna almost gave the boss a pair of names, her own and Busi’s. Would the old man reward her for her honesty? Would he send Busi home, Arcadia and all? She doubted it. But then, why should she take the blame? There was another name, a guilty name. Rook was the man, and he was safe from anything that Victor might do. You cannot sack a man when he is sacked. If she was ever cornered, then Rook would be the name to help her out, to keep her safe, to earn rewards. ‘I’ll ask around,’ she said.