Jim Crace - Arcadia

What should Dip and Aunt do now? What could they steal? Where were there eggs to boil for the next day’s trade? Aunt took the money that Victor had brought home. She did her sums, and showed Dip how it worked with matchsticks spread out on the floor. They’d buy the eggs from a poultryman like blameless citizens for such-and-such each egg. Cheap eggs perhaps, not fresh exactly, but not green either. They’d boil them up, and despatch Victor to sell them in the marketplace for such-and-such and such again. Ten matches spent earned fifteen matches back. And fifteen matches made more than twenty-two. It was safe and legal — and lucrative, so long as eggs were à la mode. If only Aunt could recover her old hat or buy another one, the pair of them would be content again.

So it nearly was. At first they provided and prepared the eggs, and Victor sold them on the streets. But soon they were too bored with boiling them, four at a time, in their one pot. They said to Victor, ‘It’s your job.’ And so he got them from the poultryman himself. He learnt to count the money out and pay. He begged for charcoal or found wood to feed the stove in Dip’s one room. He boiled the eggs himself, and took more care than Aunt or Dip had ever done to keep the shells intact and clean. They shared the profits, but he kept his merchandise well out of sight. They hardly spoke. They hardly met. When Dip and Aunt came back at night, Victor was curled up with stomach pain and sleep. The eggs he ate each day had made him constipated. His guts were pumped up with wind. They were as hard and bilious as sated snakes. His farts were counter-tenor monotones, as noisy and as regular as chimes. This was the fiercest smell. But there were others too — the eerie odours that the eggs released when they were boiled, the badger-pungency of souring, broken eggs, the mawkishness of shells. The three of them had sulphur nightmares, sulphur in their clothes, brimstone breath. They might as well have slept on Etna or inside the crater of some soufrière , decapitated like a breakfast egg. The smell was sweet and hot and aggravating. Victor’s guts whined like unpunctured sausages in coals. Aunt did not snore, but puffed and hummed all night as if she did not dare to taint her lungs with inward breaths of air.

Dip hardly slept. He stayed out on the streets all night. He longed to push his hands in strangers’ pockets once again. He had no appetite for sex with Aunt, or drink with Aunt, or hatless Aunt. One evening he did not return. He’d make his fortunes in some other part of town. Then Aunt — her judgement blurred by reckless loneliness — found some other man. Her sister’s boy? She left him with her baggage, unattended, in what had been Dip’s room and now was his. These were the first days of a life alone.

When Victor was eighty he could not recall his mother’s face, or Aunt’s, or Dip’s. He could recall the parasol, the broad-brimmed cloche, the patent shoes, the collar studs. He could recall the painted cart piled high with greens and melons which Em had promised would one day take him and her out to the city edges where the trees began. He could recall his father’s greying candle stub.

He did not talk about these things — though the bricks and cobbles of the town and marketplace stored all his early life like walls store moss, and the osmotic gossips of the city had taken in his life and passed it on to anyone with time to spare. Victor himself, when he grew to be a man of consequence, had just one public story from those days of poverty and waifing eggs. It was the story that he told when he could not escape the duties of the business millionaire and was called upon to make a speech to the Commerce Club or talk to someone from the radio or the financial press, or write a foreword for the little magazine his staff produced.

They knew he started life with eggs. But then? What was it drove him onwards, up and out of eggs, apart from cramp and flatulence? How was it that a boy so young could have the vision to diversify from eggs to eggs and fruit and bread and cheese, to upgrade his tray with decoration, then with wheels until he traded off a barrow? Where did he find the energy, the business zeal, to strip his barrow when the trading day was done and hire out himself and it for bringing produce cheaply from the station, until he had two barrows, five, and twenty-five, and ten boys in his pay, and fruit stalls of his own, and packing firms and farms, and, finally, before his fortieth year, the Soap Market itself?

Why not stop when he was crowned the Fruit King of the city? Why battle on to set up import/export firms, and trucking companies, and canneries, to build Big Vic, to spread his fortune round the city and the world so that each lemon squeezed for tea by anyone in town would have been packeted as seed, and grown in soil, and harvested in plantations, and sent in trucks and trains and boats, and invoiced out of offices, and sold on market stalls that Victor owned?

‘You tend your tree. You get good fruit,’ he used to say. Or, ‘I was born a countryman — and country people always reinvest their seed.’ These were both phrases he had taken from his man called Rook. But that single story from his past was not Rook’s work. It was Victor’s own: one evening — he was nine or ten, Aunt and Dip were gone, and he was still surviving on boiled eggs — he ended up as usual in the cafes and the bars of the Soap Garden. Boiled eggs went well with mugs of beer — but he had learnt there was no point in offering boiled eggs to those who drank the favoured clay-red wine or ordered coffee. Malt and eggs do not do battle in the mouth — but eggs with coffee or with wine destroy the taste and smell of both.

There was a man who nearly always bought three eggs and ate them, without pause, whether he was drinking beer or wine or coffee-and-a-shot. He paid a little extra to have his eggs unshelled by Victor. He did not take a plunge of salt. He dipped his eggs instead into the sugar pot. He halved each egg longways with his teeth and then consumed each half open-mouthed and without much regard for the spectacle and mess he made. It was not clear what kind of man he was. He sat alone, though everyone who served or passed by deferred to him. He was so fat that he walked with a stick, not because he lacked the strength to bear his weight, but simply as a means of maintaining lift and balance should he need to sit or climb a stair, or — rarity indeed — to step aside. His walking stick was tarbony and topped in silver, not ostentatious but smart, and as sturdy as a cudgel. The scroll etching in the silver was made bold in its recesses by city grubbiness and verdigris and — who could doubt it? — dried blood.

They said he was a landlord of some sort, a pimp, a man who’d been a consul in the tropics and had made a fortune out of gold or slaves or running guns, an impresario, a counterfeiter, an operatic star who had not sung since some scandal or some love affair had silenced him, an undercover cop. He hardly ever spoke a word. He took his usual seat, at the margins of the nearest cafe. It was a seat which did not require him to negotiate the narrow spaces between tables, chairs, and customers. He drank his drinks. He ate his eggs. He read his paper or his magazine. He made a note, occasionally, inside a grey-bound book. He held his stick as if he were a shepherd eager for the chance to drive away a raven or a dog. He staved off fullness with excess.

‘We never knew his name, or what he did,’ said Victor. ‘The only certainty about this man was that he was worthy of respect.’

So Victor was fastidious. He made certain that the eggs he sold to him were fresh and free of shell, and clean. He placed the three shelled eggs, as usual, on the metal bill-and-tip which the waiter had positioned next to — that balmy night — a glass of beer, and waited for his payment in small change. There was always a wait. A fat man finds it difficult to fish his purse or coins from his trousers or his coat. His right hand was trapped inside his pocket when someone knocked him from behind. The table shuddered. And the beer? It spilled a little and would have fallen from the table had not the fat man, with the speed and delicacy of a lizard’s tongue, shot out his one free hand and steadied it. He turned as best he could. His body did not turn, just his head and neck. His chair and back received another blow and this time the beer and glass were on the ground before his hand could move. The eggs began to slide and arc across the tabletop, their passage eased and oiled by beer. They jostled at the table’s edge like nervous bubbles at a drain, fell off, and then were split and knocked as tasteless as the cobblestones.