Victor was not the sort to share his memories. He seemed just like the old, rich man he was – too grand to feel the rain. So this was his diplomacy, to shuffle on the cobbles for a while, and not share what he felt with those two aides who kept him dry and upright. They walked, this threesome, to the public washing square. The trees and shrubbery which had been there were reduced to blackened stumps. The lawns were stubble, stiff and dead and black. But fire could not harm stone or water, and the medieval fountains, with their gargoyles and their pitted scrubbing stones, were just as they had been the week before, the century before. The fountain water, augmented by rain, was like all mountain streams, like every brackish spring, indifferent to every living thing on earth.
They watched the water for a while and then turned back towards the car, but took a slightly different route, enticed by what might be beneath the canvas of the blinking, well-lit shed.
‘That man died here last night, I guess,’ said Anna. ‘They’ve made a shrine for him.’ She knelt and rearranged the flowers so that they made a neater shape between the candles. ‘It’s sad.’
The two men did not speak, so Anna rose and spoke for them. ‘He’s someone’s husband or son or dad. Or else he’s one of those no-hopers who sleep out here. Perhaps they’ll never find out who he was. They’ll put The Unknown Soapie on his grave.’
‘My father’s buried over there,’ the chauffeur said. ‘In the Woodgate cemetery. My mother, too. We used to live round here. I’ve soapie blood …’
They stood like tourists in a foreign church, familiar with the funereal intimacy of candlelight, but ill at ease with dispositions they’d not met before: the flapping walls; the cobblestones; the rhythmic catechism of the rain on canvas. The weather worsened. They could hear it growing sullen. The candle flames curtseyed in the damp, cold air which pierced the fabric chapel. Water made its way between the cobblestones and crept inside to puddle beneath their feet. They might have been upon some Afghan plain, three hundred years ago, pinned in by space and sky and frost. The office blocks and tenements which circled them, though distantly, invisibly, were ancient cliffs, shrinking in the cold and wind and rain.
‘I’ll bring the car,’ the chauffeur said, glad to leave the candlelight. ‘It’s raining pips and pods.’
‘Exactly,’ Victor said to Anna after they had stood still and silent for longer than made sense. ‘It’s pips and pods. Just listen to the rain. I never hear the rain inside Big Vic. It’s pips and pods. She used to use that phrase. You can hear exactly what she meant.’
‘Who meant?’
Victor did not dare reply. He did not wish to make himself seem foolish as the chauffeur had, weak with sentiment. He crouched as best he could to look into the candle flames.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘we’ll take a lighted candle with us when we leave. The fellow who died here won’t mind.’ He broke the waxy seal which fixed a candle to its cobblestone. ‘A country ritual, that’s all. You take a lighted candle from the old place to the new. That way you keep the goodwill of the past.’
‘I’ll carry it.’ Anna held her fingers out. Just as she’d thought, the boss was like a child.
‘No, no.’
‘What “new place” will you take it to? Arcadia? That candle isn’t long enough to burn for two years.’
‘We’ll take it to the car-park site. It’s just a symbol.’
Anna’s nod displayed her patience and obedience, but not a sign of understanding.
‘It’s true you don’t grow rich on sentiment – not in the market trade,’ said Victor. ‘Hard work is what it takes, and common sense. But ritual has its part to play. We should not underestimate …’ He did not finish what he had to say. He was an undramatic man.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘You carry it.’ He held the candle up for Anna to hold. ‘Take care the wind and rain don’t put it out. A rain-soaked wick is bad luck for a hundred years.’
WHO PHONED the Burgher? I can’t be sure. I did not take the call. The chauffeur, maybe. Anna? No. The policeman who controlled the barrier and let the Panache pass into the squints and alleys of the old town? A worker at the car-park site? Some restless, spying spirit of the town? There’s always someone in a city with a tale to tell, and there are always Burghers to dress it up and publish it. Prompted by the memo on my desk from this unnamed source, I wrote a paragraph for the Burgher column. They ran it on the morning after Victor’s market pilgrimage on the usual inside page of the edition which had pictures of both Rook and Joseph on the front. The headline was ‘Soapie Rioter Charged with Murder’. Rook was described as being ‘an executive assistant in the produce-market industry, until his recent redundancy’.
By nine o’clock on the morning of January 2nd, when Anna walked down the mall and entered Big Vic, Rook’s name was known throughout the town. Office workers in the atrium pored over copies of our newspaper, regretting, relishing the fate of one so popular as Rook.
Anna sat before her untouched desk. She breathed as evenly as her tightened ribcage would allow. Could she now make more sense or less of what had happened in the canvas shed, of the strange journey in the car protecting that small flame as they sped through the town? The day before, the words she’d used had seemed too strong. ‘It’s sad,’ she’d said. But now ‘It’s sad’ took on a fugal note. She could not find the words to go beyond ‘It’s sad’. She could not comprehend the burden of the news expressed so solidly in print.
The Burgher – steered by me – took the lighter view, of course. ‘It’s rare these days’, I wrote, ‘to see Victor, the city’s octogenarian Vegetable King, out on the streets. But if you could see through the tinted glass of limousines you might have spotted the old man in the recently truncheoned Soap Market yesterday afternoon. No doubt he came to creak his respects to Rook, his one-time accessory, who was struck to the ground in the small hours of New Year’s Day.
‘Sharp-eyed citizens report that Victor did not come away empty-handed. The greenhouse recluse who is not, you will recall, averse to transporting fish fillets to his table in a taxi, departed from Rook’s market shrine with a lighted candle in his hand. The candle made the journey across town by chauffeur-driven limousine. Of course. Who says the rich aren’t ludicrous?
‘My colleague, our religious-affairs correspondent, tells me as he passes between the city’s clubs and bars on some lifelong mission of his own, that “candles light the darkened alleyways through which we all must pass when time is up, and all our bottles emptied to the dregs”. Is it the fashion in these straitened times to pay respects to recent employees by removing candles from their place of rest? Victor’s “spokeswoman” could not say when I phoned on your behalf to put that simple question. She only knew the price of beans.
‘I’m sure a man as practical as Victor will find a use for Rook’s half-candle, if only to grease the elevators of Arcadia. The old greengrocer might, too, like to pillage the cemeteries and morgues of our city for further spoils. Gravestones make good foundations. So do bones.’
Part Four
ARCADIA
1
TODAY THE Press Club Buffers have their monthly lunch at Victor-In-Arcadia. We have the private room, beyond the mezzanine restaurant. There the finest produce of the market floors is served al dente for the city’s swiftest, trimmest, smartest clientele: I am not one.
The female maître d’ of Victor’s-In-Arcadia – ‘Madame’ to us, but Sophia to the younger men – conducts me past the rising stars, the upstart businessmen, the skipjack currency kings, whose mobile phones and calculators share tablecloths with button mushrooms à la grecque and vegetable brochettes. I pass the inner bars, and then the Conversation Pits where men and women half my age strike deals and attitudes in easy chairs. This is not the populace at lunch, and these are hardly citizens at all. They are – forgive my want of charity – Invulnerables, protected from the town by bottled water, parking permits, air-conditioned cars, and by the jaundiced deference of waiters, commissionai
res, receptionists, the police. Their tables are reserved. Their clubs, their tailors, their dentists, and their apartment homes are ‘Private and Exclusive’, meaning they are closed to those who are not dignified by wealth or birth or fashion. They seldom need to queue or step onto the street, but organize their lives through fax machines, credit cards, and home deliveries. Or else they delegate these tasks to secretaries, adjutants, and housekeepers who are employed to keep the world at bay. No wonder that, despite the stresses of the street, their faces are so cool, their suits and skirts so crisp and clean, their tempers so dispassionate. No wonder I am tempted to topple bottles into laps as I pass slowly by.
Our room is on the highest level of Arcadia. Sophia leaves me to go alone upstairs. She is too busy to escort those Buffers whose hearts and lungs and legs are so abused and slack that they climb slowly. Not one of us is less than sixty-two. What journalist, at sixty-two and more, could climb a stair at speed? What journalist would climb the stair at all unless there were good food and drink and gossip at the top? Not one of us is so required at work that he – yes, every Buffer is a man – cannot take time away from his desk to lunch with fading comrades. We’re of an age, when we toast ‘Absent Friends’, to mean those colleagues who are dead, or those few and tough successful ones too busy to be there – the managers, the editors who’ve grown grey and powerful like grizzly bears, while we are as grey and powerful as pigeons.
But us, the Friends too idle to be Absent? We undertake the stairs at Victor’s-In-Arcadia unburdened by wealth or status or by energy. We’re winding down our working lives. We’re dining out on what we were, before they took our offices away, before we were reduced from editors to columnists, from publicity executives to small-ad men, from roving correspondents to custodians of the letters page, before our bylines were removed.
The Burgher now is someone else. A younger woman has my job. She is not interested in the fate of millionaires or city councillors. The power that she follows is power of a different kind. She spends her afternoons in bars and restaurants and hotel lobbies. She writes a column cast with television hosts, and dance-club managers, and rich men’s sons. The term ‘Invulnerables’ is hers. She never misses trysts or tête-à-têtes. She lunches out on indiscretion, celebrity tantrums, scandal, flagrancy. Her sources are the city’s maîtres d’, the waiters and receptionists, the hotel boys who take the breakfast trays to guests.
I’m bitter, naturally. What trickery of physics allows the world to spin, yet leaves me motionless? They’ve moved me sideways to the waiting room, their mordant description of the office where the older, valued men like me are asked to wait until, at best, our underfunded pensions turn us out. I’m known as Back-End Editor. I have the weather and the law reports in my control. Obituaries, as well. You see how comic these professionals can be with words? And grimly accurate? Of my four predecessors three have died of heart attacks. The fourth has cancer of the throat. The Back-End Editor? The waiting room? The Press-Club Buffers? My laughter thins and hastens as I grow fat and slow.
Today I am the first Buffer to arrive, and glad of it. I have the chance to catch my breath and fuel myself with drinks. We like to formalize the lunch, to listen to each Buffer give his news before the meal. Today I’ll tell them what I know of Victor, the man who built Arcadia and gives his name to this restaurant and bar, the man who is too old these days to interest my substitute. His ninetieth birthday passed by, unremarked by her.
Why Victor? Here’s the news which almost gives a skip to my edgy pacing of the room. Six months ago I prepared the old man’s obituary for the pending pile. I turned – the well-trained journalist – to the trusted testimony of the cuttings files. What could I learn of him from what’s in print? I searched the archives and the only items on the man, apart from industry and trade reports, were those I’d written up myself. He’d brought fish by taxi for his birthday once, from the station to Big Vic. He stole a candle from a colleague’s grave. Enough to deepen interest in the man, of course. But not much of an epitaph. I phoned Big Vic. Anna, his deputy, a woman in her fifties now, sharp-faced, a little overdressed, but winsome still, did what she could to help. And then – when she had checked the accuracy of the obituary – she said, ‘He’s looking for an author to prepare a memoir. Might you be interested … ?’ And so I am the one retained to write his Life. Luck has landed me a paying task for my maturity. A contract’s signed, and already I have spent some – mostly silent – time with him, though he has told me anecdotes of a fat man in the Soap Market and he has talked a little of his childhood. Is that the word? Is ‘childhood’ not too innocent for how he passed his urchin years, for how he says his mother died in flames? The old man had a mother, yes. Her name was Em. He’s not the product of a melon and a cucumber after all. I have, through Anna, some access to the files, her private memories, and – more crucially – some pointers to the old man’s early life which seem to bear his story out. But Anna much prefers to talk of Rook, and of the boy who murdered him. She has procured court depositions for me to study, and can arrange, she says, for me to visit Joseph on the prison farm (he’s working in the fields again!) where he is serving life. She mistakes me for a detective-journalist, a Woodward or a Bernstein, and wants me to investigate what truly happened all those years ago to Rook. I have asked her more than once to dine with me, to socialize about the book. But she declines. She gives more thought to Rook, it would appear, than she gives to her boss’s life. She shows no interest in his childhood or his youth. For evidence of Victor in his later years I have no need to search. I only have to look around – at our hired room, at our refurbished town.
I’m in a treehouse made of glass. On two sides there is stretched netting screening off the market concourses below. The netting supports creepers, cycads, vines. They are the building’s drapery. They grow from elevated beds, together with other hot-house plants such as philodendrons and spider palms which can breathe and neutralize the atmosphere. It is their task – for nothing here is idle or unplanned – to filter from the air the carbon monoxide, the benzene and the formaldehyde, the fumes and vapours, the leakages and pungencies of Arcadia.
The plants define the frontiers of Signor Busi’s ‘largest aviary yet’. One hundred cockatiels, one thousand finches, sixty pheasant doves, a throng of budgerigars, and cockatoos and parakeets and minah birds, a petal storm of buntings, are billeted up here. They seem to like the glass and framework of Arcadia better than the trees. They make their nests and perches on the tops of the suspended humidifiers which – under the direction of a computer christened Zephyr – blast compressed air into the tropics of the aviary. The birds shuffle on the metal girders and the arching glassmounts, pecking at the paintwork made loose already by the eczema of the rust. Rainforests cannot keep rust at bay. But glass has kept the day-hawks out. They hover at the transparent domes of Arcadia, like children at sweet-shop windows, hopelessly drawn to candied parakeets.
Imagine what so many birds can do to glass. They settle on the window frames and jettison their chalky waste in reckless, heavy streaks which provide food and habitation for lime flies, silver thrips, and fleas. What architect could plan for that? What glazier could outwit birds and coprophagous parasites? What scaffolder could foresee the territorial conflicts that take place above Arcadia’s trading concourses, its restaurants and bars? I look out through the room’s streaked glass to see what causes such raucous purpose amongst the rainbow flocks. A small brown interloper from the city streets, a sparrow in its business suit, has found its way inside Arcadia. Busi’s ‘hermetically sealed megalith’ is no match for a hungry sparrow. It has squeezed through the cavity of an expansion joist, and then found passage through the ill-docked heating duct. The bird now seeks to feast on sunflower seeds, mixed nuts and grain put out in feeding trays by the custodians. The doves are beating at it with their wings. A cockatiel has caught the sparrow’s underbreast. Down in the folds of netting which separate the people and the birds, a dozen corpses can
be seen. Dead sparrows that have reached this dripping, heated heaven and have died.
The third side of the room has unstreaked glass. No birds. My view is unrestricted, except by bamboo leaves and vines and slight myopia. I look down on the building’s centrepiece, its hub: the garden court to which the trading corridors and halls, the stairs, the patios, the terraces and balconies defer. I spend a little time watching the light-show on the fountains, its blushes and its loops, exactly like the blushes and the loops which decorate the chamber music being played by three young women and a man on the concert podium by the open brasserie. The entertainment’s free all day. Six Africans will play their drums this afternoon. A girl will juggle with some market fruit. The Band Accord, those ageing sisters and their friend, will squeeze out melodies for tea.