Arcadia (7 page)

Old Victor took his stick and walked quite steadily between the pots of young peppers and tomatoes towards the lift. And lunch. He paused to rub out with his thumb the greenfly on the fessandra
bushes which grew in sentinel pots at the roof-top door. He wiped the mush of bodies on the lintel, wheezed, coughed, and spat a practised splash of phlegm into the pot compost. It glistened for a
moment like the gummy, silver residue of slugs. ‘Good luck,’ said Victor, to himself. That’s what all good farmers said when they spat in the soil. The luck was for the soil and
for the spitter, too. The luck that Victor wished upon himself was this: that he would live into his nineties, long enough to make his lasting, monumental mark upon the city. His age was not an
enemy. In fact, the day that he was eighty seemed the perfect moment to begin the spending of his millions. He had no family to leave it to. He had no debts. What should he do, then? Leave it all
to charities, and tax, and undeserving skimmers-off like Rook? Or play the geriatric fool and plough the crop back in?

Eighty was the age for second childhoods, so they said. He’d never had his first. He’d never been a boy. He’d only been a baby and a man. So let’s commence the childhood
now, he thought. Let’s be an old man full of impulse, prospects, hope. Let’s lay the bitterness aside and die at peace. He spat again – more to clear his lungs than to win more
luck than he deserved – into the compost of the second pot.

V
ICTOR
’
S SIMPLE DREAM
of celebrating eighty years in country style could not come true. The air inside Big Vic lacked
buoyancy. It was heavy and inert. It was soup. Dioxides from the air-conditioning; monoxides from the heating system; ammonia and formaldehydes from cigarettes; ozone from photocopiers; stunning
vapours from plastics, solvents, and fluorescent lights. What oxygen remained was drenched in dust and particles and microorganisms, mites and fibres from the carpeting, fleece from furniture,
airborne amoebi from humidifying reservoirs, cellulose from paper waste, bugs, fungi, lice. The air weighed too much and passed too thickly through the nostrils and the mouths of the guests at
Victor’s lunch. They coughed and sneezed and grew too hot. Their eyes began to water, their heads to ache, the rheumatism in their knuckles and their knees to grumble. Big Vic was sick.
Contagious, too. It shared its sickness speedily with these old traders, these outdoor men, as they waited for their boss. They blamed their wheeziness, their migraines and their lethargy on
nerves. They blamed their dry mouths on embarrassment at the prospect of what had been described on their printed invitation cards as ‘a relaxed birthday lunch for a few close friends’.
Relaxed?
Not one of them could be relaxed in Victor’s company unless there was a deal to close or market business to be done.
Close friends?
Were they the closest friends that
Victor had? It made them smile, the very thought of it.

But then, who else could he have asked if not these five? He had no family, as far as anybody knew. There were no neighbours on the mall. This was not, after all, the countryside, where people
lived so close at hand and in such sodality that they were free and glad to sit in overnight to ease the passage of a corpse, to be the wedding guest, to aid with births or weeping, to help an old
man puff his eighty candles out.

‘We’re here,’ one ageing soapie remarked, ‘because there’s no one else.’

‘We’re here,’ another said, ‘because, these days, we have to do what Victor wants. We’re here because we haven’t got the choice.’

It was true they’d been more intimate, at one time, when Victor’s empire was as small as theirs and his unbroken dryness had been seen as irony, his silences as only childlike, not
malign. But now he was the ageing emperor and they the courtiers, obsequious, fearful, ill at ease. Indeed, the whole lunch had been arranged as if this old man were a medieval ruler, addicted to
the indulgences and flattery of everyone who crossed his path. He’d been met, as he stepped out of the bright lights of his lift into his office suite, by quiet applause. A respectful
corridor was formed for him, so that he could make his progress to the table without the hindrance of his old colleagues. Three accordionists accompanied him across the room with the March from
La Regina
, the bellows of their instruments white and undulating like the young and toothy smiles of the staff who had gathered at the door.

The snuffling trader guests closed in when Victor passed and formed his retinue. A waiter or a waitress stood at every chair, except for Victor’s. Rook stood there, like the
prince-in-waiting or the bastard son in some fairy tale, clapping both the music and the man. Even Victor felt emotions that, though they did not show, were strong enough to make him sway and lean
more heavily upon his stick.

They begged, of course, that Victor should sit down, and then they clapped some more. He asked for water, but surely this was the perfect moment for champagne. Trays of it were brought, for
Victor and his guests, for all the workers in the outer rooms. Even the accordionists were given glasses of champagne, though hardly had their nostrils fizzed with the first sip than they were
called upon to play – and sing – the Birthday Polka. So Victor sat, the Vegetable King, surrounded by employees, waiters, clients, acquaintances, and cats, each one of them dragooned to
serve him for the afternoon, as two stout ladies and their friend pumped rhapsodies of sound and celebration round the airless room. Those few who knew the words joined in. The others hummed or
simply stood and grinned.

There was an instant, when one of the three cats jumped up amongst the cheeses and the fruits on the table and put its nose into the butter dish, when it seemed that village ways had made the
journey into town. But Rook’s raised eyebrow and his nod brought that fantasy and the cat’s adventure to an end. A waiter, none too practised in the ways of cats, removed the creature
from the butter, lifting it clear by its hind legs as if it were a rabbit destined for the pot.

The music ended. Rook nodded once again, and all the staff, following the details of his memo to them earlier that day, left Victor’s room and returned to their screens, their telephones,
their desks, their manifests of trade in crops. The Band Accord played –
largamente
– at the far end of the room. The guests sat down to the silent whiteness of the tablecloth,
while the waitresses served the coddled fish. Rook, bidding everybody
Bon appetit
, left Victor to hold court and joined Anna and her staff for flattened cakes – and more champagne
– in the outer rooms. Later on, when Victor had been softened by the meal, he’d enter with the birthday chair.

The meal, in fact, was not as perfect as the cook had hoped. The perch, despite their freshness, were just a little high, a touch too bladdery. They had not travelled well. Only one guest, his
palate bludgeoned by the pipe he smoked, dispatched his fish with any appetite. The rest concealed their daintiness by making much of savouring the olives and the bread, or filling up on cheese and
fruit. They turned the perches’ bones and mottled skin to hide the flesh they could not eat.

It was not long, of course, before the meal was finished and the waitresses had cleared the dishes, leaving the old men, freed by champagne and liqueurs, to follow the informal agenda of the
birthday lunch and reminisce. There’d be no gifts or speeches. That was Victor’s stated wish. His hearing was not good enough, despite his humming, temperamental hearing aid, for gifts
and speeches. But stated wishes of that kind are only code for something else. No one demands the gift they want. Instead they say, ‘No need. No fuss. I’m happy just to see you
here.’ So Victor’s friends had done their best to translate the old man’s code. What gift would please a frail and childless millionaire about to embark upon his ninth decade?
Something you cannot buy, of course. They’d had grim fun, these five ageing traders, identifying all those things that can’t be bought and which were lost as men got old. Good health.
Good looks. Teeth, hair, and waists. The pleasures of the bed. Patience. Energy. A fertile place in someone’s living heart. Control of wind and bladder. All these were gone and way beyond the
sway of credit cards. What then for Victor’s birthday gift? A place in history? Esteem? These must be earned, not bought.

‘A statue, then!’ The suggestion had been meant in jest. A statue to the vanity of age. But the idea was better than the jest, and soon had the old traders nodding at its aptness.
They’d place a statue with a plaque in the Soap Garden. They’d raise the funds through subscription. All the traders in the marketplace would want to give. A good idea. A public gift to
the city to mark the old man’s birthday. They’d had some drawings done by the woman who had cast a bronze statue (for the entrance of the new concert hall) of the city senators who died
on lances in 1323. They liked her work. These senators were men in pain. Those lances were as straight and cruel as Death’s own finger. The hands which sought to stem the wounds or pull out
the lances by their shafts were hands like mine or yours, except a little larger and in bronze. This was no abstract metaphor. She was no artist of the modern school. She’d talked to them in
terms they understood: payments, contracts, completion dates, the price of bronze. Despite his spoken wishes, then, there was a shortish speech, a gift. The five old men presented Victor with the
artist’s drawings. ‘They’re just ideas,’ they said. ‘You choose. We’ll see your statue is in place before you’re eighty-one.’ Victor did not make a
speech. He nodded, that is all, and put the portfolio of drawings on his desk.

‘I’ll find some time later for these,’ he said, and joined them at the table once again to add his monumental awkwardness to theirs.

They tried in vain to open up some windows and let some town air in. But all windows higher than the second floor were double-glazed and safety-sealed and only activated by a call to the
building’s brain, the high-tech deck of chips and boards which regulated everything from heating to alarms. They tried to resurrect the country lunches that they had shared when they were
younger, middle-aged, and vying for crops and produce at the smalltown auctioneers. They tried to sing along with all the sentimental tunes dished up for them by Band Accord. They tried to grow
animated rather than just sleepy with the alcohol they’d drunk. But the office suite was deadening. The headaches and the rheumatism which had made such progress, nurtured by the formal
tension of the lunch, deepened their discomfort and the furrows on their brows. Their coughs could no longer reach and clear the tickling dryness in their throats. Their eyes were smarting. Their
faces were as red and vexed as coxcombs. Conditions there were perfect for a heart attack or stroke.

Victor sat as deadened as his guests, not by the onslaught of the offices – he was used to that – but by the discomfort that he felt in company. He’d never had the conversation
or the animated face to make himself or the people round him feel at ease. He had no repartee, no party skills, no social affability. What kind of city man was he that did not relish the light and
phatic talk, the spoken oxygen of markets, offices, and streets? He did not care. He did not need to care. A boss can speak as little as he wishes, and stay away from markets, offices, and streets.
Truth to tell, he did not even relish the joshing and the drink-emboldened flattery that his guests – between their coughs and flushes – were exchanging at the table. He mistook their
talk for trivia. He took their wheezing and their creaking and the damp heat on their foreheads as the wages of their sinful lives, their drinking, smoking, family lives, their lack of gravitas. He
looked on them with less kindness, less forgiveness, less respect than he had looked upon the yellow aphids that he’d killed that day.

Victor’s own breathing – papery and shallow at the best of times – had become distressed by the cigarettes and the one pipe smoked with the brandy after lunch. His stomach too
was just a little restless from the fish.

‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ he said, and stood, his brandy glass in hand. His guests stood, too, as promptly as they could, expecting toasts.

‘Fresh air,’ said Victor, his sentence shortened by a cough. ‘Let’s go to the roof.’

He led them in a halting, single file across the room to where his private lift waited for his summons. The three accordionists, instructed to ‘accompany’ proceedings until
instructed otherwise, tagged on, their instruments strapped on their chests like oxygen machines. The waitress with the brandy – dutiful, uncertain – followed on. And last of all, the
cats. They crowded in as best they could. The lift was meant for one. It shook a little on its hawsers as the old men and accordions wheezed in unison, and stumbled intimately against each other on
the ascent to the 28th. But when they had emerged beneath the arch of fessandras into the air and foliage of the rooftop garden, the greengrocers breathed deeply, swallowed mouthfuls of the dirty
but unfettered air, turned their faces to the sun and wind, and looked out across the city and the suburbs to the blue-green hills, the grey-green woods, beyond.

The Band Accord stood at the door, their mood transformed. The new note that they struck was sweet and sentimental. They played the sort of joyful harvest tunes that make you dance and weep,
their grace notes jesting with the melody. The weaving cheerfulness of the accordion could make a teacup dance and weep. It is the only instrument strapped to the player’s heart. Its pleated
bellows stretch and smile.

The guests spread out, at ease, delighted, cured all at once by the magic of the place, invigorated by the care and passion bestowed on every plant that grew on that rooftop. The centrepiece, so
different from the sculptured water in the mall, was a pond surrounded by a path of broken stone. There were no fish, but there were kingcups, hunter lilies, flags, and – hunched over, like a
heron – the shoulders of a dwarf willow, providing shade for paddling clumps of knotweed and orange rafts of bog lichen. There were shrubs all around, some in clay pots, some in amphoras
coloured thinly with a wash of yellow plaster, some in raised beds. A wooden pergola, heavy with climbing roses, honeysuckle, creepers, led towards the greenhouse. The traders followed Victor there
and rubbed the leaves of herbs and primped the seedlings like owners of the land.