Victor ordered sweetened tea and waited for it, standing at the window of his office suite. The mall was almost clear. A broken placard lifted slightly in the wind. A few of Con’s blue leaflets were plastered to the marble flagstones by the grease and rain. Unhurried soapies stood in a circle by the fountains, as unimpassioned in their manner as a crowd of football fans discussing their team’s uninspiring draw.
The evening paper ran the photograph of comic revolution on the streets, the policeman and the trader beating skins. The Burgher, on an inside page, led with some gossip about a writer and his wife. His seventh item had the heading, ‘Victor’s Glass Meringue’, and comprised one long-winded feeble joke – I must admit – at the expense of cakes and architects and millionaires. But the frontpage headline read ‘You have been misled’. The newspaper group for which the Burgher worked had financial interests in Arcadia and the trading wings of Victor’s companies. It did not wish the old man any harm.
8
THIS IS THE sorcery of cities. We do not chase down country roads for fame or wealth or liberty. Or romance, even. If we hanker for the fires and fevers of the world, we turn our backs on herds and hedgerows and seek out crowds. Who says – besides the planners and philosophers – that we don’t love crowds or relish contact in the street with strangers? We all grow rich on that if nothing else. Each brush, each bump, confirms the obvious, that where you find the mass of bees is where to look for honey.
The conspiracy is this, that we – the seemly citizens – obey the traffic lights, observe timetables, endure the shadows and the din. We do not cross, or park, or push, or jump the queue, or trespass, except where we are ordered to. We wed ourselves to work and tickets. We ebb and flow with as much free will as salt in sea. Yet we count ourselves more blessed, more liberated than the country dwellers whose tumult is a tractor and a crow, whose ebb and flow is seasons, weather, meals. And why? Because we townies are the only creatures in the universe to benefit from chains, to make our fortunes from constraint, to wear the chafing, daily harnesses of city life as if they are the livery of plutocrats.
Who is more harnessed, then? The docile banker whose life is squared and mapped and calibrated, or the vagabond? Which of these two is more blessed with power and with wealth but is most likely to observe the bulls and firmans of the street? Who is the lag and who the libertine? Yet who would be a vagabond by choice? What ploughman would not hope to be a trammelled plutocrat? We flock in to the city because we wish to dwell in hope. And hope – not gold – is what they pave the cities with.
So Joseph, then, was happier than Rook. His life was more uncomfortable, of course. But he was rich with hope. He had more empty years ahead, more possibility, while Rook now knew that he was in decline. Rook’s harnesses had been unloosed. His city held for him few promises, few hopes. What was he but an unemployed, unmarried, and unhealthy man, a firebrand turned to ash? Who’d take him on? What woman, what employer, what company of friends, what neighbourhood? He looked for sentimental comfort now, the first quest of the middle-aged. His life orbited round Anna, her gossip, what news she had of Victor and Big Vic. He was resigned to witnessing Arcadia.
Of course, he spent each morning at his table in the Soap Garden, drinking fewer coffees than previously, but more spirits and – foolishly – even smoking a cheroot. You could count on him to join in cards or dice or dominoes, and to win or lose more recklessly than most. He rested on his bed most afternoons, but did not sleep. He took no pleasure in the radio or television. He did not read (except the evening news). He rarely cooked a meal more complicated than some soup or egg. At first he met with Anna every night. She slept with him. She had her own drawer and a suitcase in his apartment. Her blouses and her cardigans shared hangers with his trousers. She used his razor on her legs. He used her perspiration sprays. They talked of selling both their homes and pooling what they had to buy a quieter, larger place a little out of town. They’d buy a car with the profit. They’d take a holiday – in Nice or Istanbul or Amsterdam. He’d look for work, he said, but did not look. He promised he’d bring brochures from the travel firms, but he forgot. He would not visit valuers to discover what the flat was worth, or what sort of home the two of them could buy on the outskirts of the town. He only talked of how their life would be if they lived as a pair. His only act of union was in bed.
Within a month or two, Anna felt she needed more time on her own. She was too tired after work for Rook’s invasive restlessness. She enjoyed, instead, the short bus journey to her own home, the respite of the empty rooms, the opportunity to sit alone in casual clothes with no demands beyond the television set. So she took to meeting Rook only on Wednesday nights and at the weekends. Rook was not pleased, of course, but Anna’s half-time absence suited him to some extent. It left him free to drink and smoke and gamble at night as well as day.
In time Anna’s Wednesday visits became less welcome. She wanted only to relax, to recuperate from work, to cook, make love impassively, sit up in bed with silence and a magazine. She did not wish to go out in the streets, take snacks in bars, make love more frequently, more rapidly, more testingly. The sexual hold she had on Rook was episodic and capricious. To indulge it was to end it. The moments of their greatest unity – their mouths and chests and genitals wrapped humidly together, their hands spread on each other’s backs, their legs in plaits – were the moments, also, when Rook became absolved of her. That is the turpitude of men and love. Rook’s orgasms unharnessed him. They transformed him, in an instant, from a man obsessed with Anna and the universe of bed to one impatient to pull his trousers on and walk, alone and passionless and free, out into town. He’d leave her less rewarded than a prostitute. At first, she would get out of bed with him, to wash and dress and rush outside when all she wanted was a massage and some tea, a shower and some sleep. But Rook always led her to the Soap Garden as if it had the only bars in town.
‘Why don’t you sleep out with the beggars and the alcoholics in the market?’ she asked. It appeared to Anna that Rook was obsessed, but not with her. He only wished, it seemed, to woo the Soap Market and its garden before they disappeared for good.
If Anna had been more certain of herself she could have taken charge of Rook. She could have gripped him by the wrist, as if he were a child, and led him to the valuers or to the travel firms or to employment agencies. She could have banned him from the market bars. He was weak enough to do what he was told. Instead she made do on his half portions. What choice was there? She made excuses for him.
One Wednesday night, he would not settle down to sleep, despite embraces on the counterpane and the post-coital sedative of sheets. He dressed again. He said he had to buy some milk. He needed some fresh air. He couldn’t breathe. She waited for him, but could not fight off sleep. When he returned, the broken noise of traffic from the street made clear that it was long past midnight. She did not need to ask him where he’d been.
She did not come on Wednesdays any more, and he was glad of that. When all the bars were shut he liked to join the vagrants in the marketplace. He liked to stare into their box and carton fires and share with them a song, a cigarette, a cob of roast maize, a throat of wine, a curse. They did not guess from how he dressed – his leather coat was old and bothered – that he was rich. They merely counted him as one of those, down on their luck but not yet down-and-out, who drank with them when all the bars were shut. They did not know, they did not care, what happened to him when he left. For all they knew he had a niche not far from theirs. In a corner of the marketplace, perhaps. Or in the sink estates – a tram’s ride out of town – where what had not been vandalized had never worked, where ground-floor flats were tinned up with corrugated sheeting, where staircases and lifts were urinous and dangerous and dark. No one among them knew about Arcadia. When Rook described the changes that would come it did not move them more than any other drunken, midnight speech. Why should they be alarmed? The distant future made no difference to them. They only waited for the bot
tle, still half a circle from their grasp. They only hoped the wood would last till dawn.
By day, Arcadia was much discussed among the marketeers. Of course. Surveyors were at work, and questionnaires were circulated. Inspection ditches had been dug across the grass in the Soap Garden. Women wearing ID badges sat on stools to monitor and graph pedestrian usage of the different market sectors. Outline proposals and planning certificates were displayed – as law decreed – at focal points. The marketeers were bemused, but flattered, too, by all the attention they received and by the consultation meetings and the Soapie Parliament that Victor promised them. They had agreed amongst themselves that there was little point in fighting progress with more demonstrations or with petitions. What power had a line of people or a list of names against the will of money to be spent? No, they would be modern citizens. That is to say, they would suppress their passions and hope to profit from their pragmatism. The boss had given them his word. The demonstration on the mall had winkled Victor from his lair. He’d stood amongst them in the rain and what he’d said had been a challenge: change your ways and prosper.
They imagined working under glass: warm in winter, cool in summer, dry and windless, weather-free. There’d be the same old camaraderie but air-conditioned. The fruit and vegetables would survive, be crisp and firm, be sellable, a few days longer. There would be less waste, and what waste there was would make a profit, too. Pig farmers on the edge of town would pay a fee for each full bag. The soapies saw themselves driving freely in vans. They’d save on porters’ fees. They’d save on time. There’d be disruptions, naturally. How would they manage during building work? But, all in all, the traders were buoyant. In fact, they were impatient. They were tired of being soapies: make us Arcadians, and quickly.
Rook’s bitter auguries did not alarm them. It did not matter how disgruntled Rook might be. Con was the man to listen to, and he, though cautious, shared the view that they had less to fear from progress than from torpor. Rook had fooled him with his jeremiac prophecies, ‘All this will disappear’, ‘You’ll soon be out of work and rattling round the streets like me’. Con now was more inclined to trust the word of Victor. It angered him that Rook was such a fixture in the marketplace and in the bars. Had he no self-respect? Had he no tact? If Arcadia would put an end to Rook, then that was fine by Con. Rook preached his words of warning, but anyone could see, and smell, that his views were distilled in alcohol and flavoured with the bitters of regret. The time would come when all his kind, the nighttime nestlers, the parasites, the idlers, would be swept away. Welcome the day!
It took a little less than twelve months for the Busi Partnership to complete their plans and raise a Bill of Quantities and put out the building tender. Architecture is a bureaucratic art – and Markitecture, as some comic christened the attempts to marry art and trade, was doubly bureaucratic because each detail had to satisfy the pocket and the eye, the aesthete and the businessman.
Victor provided offices in Big Vic for Signor Busi’s younger colleagues. The Philosopher Among Journeymen was not involved. He’d been persuaded to spend the winter in New York; the weekends in Manhattan, the weekdays upstate at Cornell where he had been appointed Comstock Visiting Professor in Art and Design. He gave sermons there on the Italian Masterbuilders – Giovanni Michelucci, Franco Fetronelli, and himself.
Busi’s colleagues wished he had not promised to make space for Victor’s birthday statue. They were the modern school and saw no point in statues that were, they said, ‘as sentimental as Capo di Monte figurines, but without the benefit of dwarfishness’. They wanted something glass or plastic, something steel, something big and time-honoured in concrete, a symbol of Arcadia. But they were stuck with Beggar Woman and Her Child, style 1910, in bronze.
Victor had insisted on where the statue would be placed: at that entrance to Arcadia which was the closest to the Woodgate district, halfway between where Em had begged and died.
‘Perhaps we could persuade a builder’s truck to back up and wreck it,’ one architect suggested. ‘We’d have a modern sculpture then, Flattened Woman and Her Child.’
My God, how they were bored by meetings, and evenings spent in their hotels, and all the budget-bullied cutbacks from their plans which were required, and which themselves required new plans, new calculations, work. They did not like our city. Newcomers seldom do. They are not literate in what leads where, or how and when. These architects hoped they’d never need to know our city well. Their main desire was Do the Job, and Home. They set a day, the first day of the year, when building work on Arcadia – two years of it – would start. So New Year’s Eve would close the market and the decade down.
There was a problem. You did not need to be a space-time engineer to spot a two-year gap between the closure of the Soap Market and the opening of Arcadia. Those rash and early promises that builders and merchants could work in concord, the market stalls amongst the scaffolding, trade amongst construction, could not be kept. Were they naive, or mischievous, these undertakings? How had anybody ever thought that tomatoes by the kilo could be compatible with six-tonne shovels and ballast lorries and men in safety hats? No one on site! That was the builder’s sensible demand. It only needed some old lady laden down with cabbages and onions to take a fall or take a bruise from building work and she’d be shopping for a lawyer and for damages before her bruise was brown. So Victor’s managers were told they had to relocate the market stalls for at least two years.
Victor himself was sent a memorandum – but what did he employ managers for? Besides he only had to look out of his window to see the perfect and the only answer to the two-year gap. There were open fields of tarmac, parking for the mall’s nine thousand staff and more for visitors. Two areas, three hectares each, were underused. They were too far from offices, and windswept, dirty from Link Highway Red which passed close by. Blue whisker herb and smog-nettle had taken purchase in the tarmac, making do with lime from the painted parking grids and puddled rain for soil. At night this was where lovers came and prostitutes who traded from the kerb, with rocking cars and peeping Toms parked asymmetrically for privacy. By day it was as empty as a prison yard. With access from the highway and, for pedestrians, by tunnel, this was the perfect place for market stalls. Good news for everyone involved. Or so Big Vic would have the world believe.
People are ready to be fooled. That’s optimism. ‘This is the price you have to pay for Arcadia,’ the stallholders were told, when they were trying to make light of their predicament, their exile to the car park. ‘If you want your share of wealth then you must expect to take some risks, to suffer inconvenience. We’re talking business here, not charity.’
Who told them that? Why, Rook, of course. He was amused to tease them with their foolishness, their gullibility. Why had they ever thought that Victor’s plan was some crusade to make them more secure and wealthier?
‘Con led you down a cul-de-sac,’ he said. ‘You may be sure he’ll turn out fine. They’ll keep him sweet and quiet at any cost. The last thing that they want is trouble on the mall again – so Victor’s men will take good care of Con. He’ll get prime site, you’ll see. But what about the little traders, the ones who don’t make noise but just scrape by, selling from the backs of vans? Or those who’ve got five kids to clothe? Or those …’ Rook was drunk and smart enough to make an endless list in which the only one who showed a profit from the move into the car-park site was Con.
No one doubted Rook was mischievous. He’d ducked and weaved too many times before. He’d broken free and realigned too frequently for any of his alliances to count for much. But it’s a fact that even fools and drunks and liars can sound alarms. What does it matter who shouts fire, or how, so long as there are flames? Here, then, was the Soap Market in its final weeks. It seemed the same as it had always been. There were no closing sales. No bargains to be had. Fresh food has a shelf life of a day, a little more in wintertime. There were no stocks to clear because in produce markets stocks are cleared each day
and replenished overnight. But there was something stale upon the air, more pungent than the market waste or the odour of too many people in one place. This was the putrefaction of resolve, the enfeebling of that prod-and-nudge which got the traders from their beds each day at five to bargain with the wholesalers, which gave them pride and pleasure in the stall-top patterns they could make with what they had to sell, which made them cheeky, cheerful, quick with repartee. Now they did not wake with an appetite for work. They did not relish the day. They were offhand with fruit and customers. It did not matter which of these were bruised or handled without care. They left the business in the hands of sons and nieces and stood in circles, hands dug deeply into pockets, shoulders down, to hear the latest rumour or hard news about their prospects between the market and Arcadia.
The bars and restaurants which fringed the Soap Garden had most to fear. There’d be no place for them in Victor’s car park. They’d been promised leases in Arcadia, and there was compensation to be paid, negotiated by lawyers from Big Vic. They’d have to look for premises elsewhere. But for two years? What landlord would let his premises for just two years? Theirs was a quandary impossible to solve – to move, to stay, to wait and see? Yet, as the new year drew closer, so the market mood transformed again. Business boomed at all the bars. The marketeers were thirsty all day long. They stayed at tables, stood at counters, found perches on the weathered stones around the medieval washing fountains. You’d think they had no work to do, and had no end of cash. You’d think they were in celebratory mood, the noise they made, the bottles that they drank. Theirs was a carnival of despair, the despair of those whose rafts draw closer to the weir and see both the tumbling dangers and the placid pools beyond. No one is fool enough to swim, yet none looks forward to the rocks.