Jim Crace - Arcadia

His accountants and advisers had been working on him for a year or more. The marketplace, they said, was out of date. It did not earn enough for such a central site. It was — compared to canneries and bottling plants — a poor outlet for fruit. There’d been hints from the city government that if he were to seek approval for a plan to renovate, or move the market elsewhere, say … then, there would be no fight. No fight, indeed! Victor was not so foolish as to think there’d be no fight if he were to tinker with the marketplace. He knew what soapies were, an awkward bunch, opposed to any change on principle. Well, that’s Rook’s job, he thought, to keep the soapies quiet. Yet Victor would not share his thoughts with Rook. He did not trust the man to hold his tongue. He did not trust his judgement or his loyalty. Rook was no businessman. What businessman would be so sociable? What businessman would settle for such a salary as Rook and for so long? What businessman could see the market operate and not be shocked at its trading nonchalance? But Rook, he loved the Soap Market. He loved its crowds. He’d said as much: ‘It’s paradise for me.’ And Victor thought, If that is paradise, that regimented, noxious crush, that milling battlefield of chores and errands and anonymity, then that’s the paradise of termites.

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.

VICTOR’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.