Arcadia (25 page)

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 word. 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.

Rook spread his arms and flapped his hands in mockery of her. But there was no illusion at his fingertips – no desire to see the real world disappear, no wish to interfere in the bustling
kinship of the citizens who went about their business in the Soap Market with the fitful, browsing innocence of weevils in a cake.

‘What can I do?’ Anna said. ‘Victor keeps his room locked. And anyway, those plans aren’t small. They’re tablecloths.’

‘And what about your fancy architect?’ Rook let her repossess his hand.

‘Who? Busi?’

‘Yes. He must have duplicates.’

Anna nodded, shrugged, as if to indicate she had no access to this man.

‘I think,’ said Rook, his hand pushed through the buttoned vents of Anna’s coat, his palm upon her slimmer waist, a finger tucked beneath her belt, ‘that it might be a
good idea to let the signor take you out to dinner. At the Excelsior, no less.’

R
OOK WAS A JUGGLER
. He held and tossed five lives. He had to spin and mix them in the air. He had to pitch them so that they arched and fell into his
hands with just the angle and the impact he required. Rook had to space the five lives in his grasp, ensure they did not meet or touch, for he was keen to settle scores – deftly, speedily,
undetected. He was ready and impatient now to pay off debts and make amends, with Busi, Joseph, Anna, Con, but, most of all, with Victor. Quite what he ought to juggle up, Rook was not sure, though
at their simplest and their meanest his intentions were to punish Con and Victor for the job, the private income from pitch payments, the self-respect they’d robbed from him.

The uniformed expulsion from Big Vic tormented him. He had to torment in return. This was unadorned revenge, and revenge is next to lust in its single-mindedness, its self-regard. So Rook did
not care that Busi, Anna, Joseph, and yes, Con and Victor, too, were mostly innocent of blame for the malfunctions in his life. He’d still be on the 27th floor and welcome in the Soap Market,
sweet with Victor, Anna, Con, if he’d resisted those envelopes of cash, that money in the palm, those bribes. This is something that country people understand more readily than townies. If
you sow thorns, then you get thorns. They don’t need watering. They flourish and they snag.

Rook would not admit his pettiness, that what he wanted most was some wounding, simple recompense. He fooled himself that there were nobler motives driving him. The fiction that he made was
this: that his months of leisure, free from Victor and Big Vic, had resurrected an old self that had ideals and principles worth fighting for. How could he forget the man he’d been a dozen
years before when the produce boycott had been organized? They’d listened to him in the market then. They’d cheered. He’d stood on a platform made from crop boxes, dressed in
clichéd black, and made that speech that all the papers had reproduced in full.

‘This Soap Market,’ he had said, ‘is here to make good salads and fruit pies. To put some muscle into stews, some zest in cake, to keep the city fed. It is not here to make men
millionaires. So we traders should let the market die before we let the prices outstrip the common people.’ They’d flocked to that – and they’d held out on strike for seven
weeks. A stirring time. The world turned upside down, with market customers bringing cake and cheese and bread to feed the soapies, and every stall and awning dismantled, and not a scrap of lettuce
to be seen.

The striking soapies had given Rook the mandate to negotiate. They’d trusted him. But Victor knew the trick of tearing notes in half. ‘Why let the market die?’ he’d
asked, made loquacious by the seven weeks of damage to his wealth. ‘You only harm yourselves.’ His agents and his managers had offered Rook a compromise. You lift the boycott, and trade
according to the prices we have set, they counselled. And in return we freeze the market rents for two years, maybe three. You traders save a little cash for … OK, you win, let it be frozen
rents for the full
three years
. You save the marketplace for good.

Rook had said he was only a mouthpiece, that was all, but that he doubted his colleagues would betray their principles. Victor had spoken again. How much are principles? he asked himself, but he
said out loud, ‘It would be democratic, don’t you think, if my, our, colleagues in the market had some constant spokesman at my side to represent their principles.’ He had not
looked at Rook, but had written a sum in pencil on a memorandum pad and slid it across his desk so Rook could see. ‘That is the kind of yearly sum that we would pay for such a
diplomat.’ Rook had shaken Victor by the hand and had taken the stipend of the diplomat.

So now Rook felt he had the chance to make amends, to piece together once again the man that had been raised within the odour of the marketplace, that had been schooled in radishes and
rambutans, that thrived in clamour and crowds. He’d save the Soap Market. He’d be the champion of marketeers. He’d climb up on the platform once again and ‘represent their
principles, their fears’. But then, once he had sobered from the fever of the phrases in his head, he thought again, more clearly. Platforms were for innocents. Speeches only waylaid passion
with fine words. The player with the strongest hand, the running flush, was not required to show his cards. So it was in politics – for, yes, Rook was now so inflated with the altruism of his
mission that he’d cast himself as a man in service to the citizens. In politics you did not need to spout or strut or speechify if you could quietly slip behind the scenes to sabotage, to
juggle, and to complicate. He had a plan, unformed but irresistible, which would deliver Anna to his bed, and damage Con, and punish Victor, and introduce that muscly Joseph to the truth that
brains and money are more powerful than youth. He’d cause a little mayhem, too, for Signor Busi of Milan – and leave himself the hero of the marketplace.