Jim Crace - Arcadia

So Victor now — and almost by design — became an undramatic boy. He had his room, his job, his street routines. He had ambition, too, but nothing to make good grand opera from. He set his sights painstakingly on targets within reach — more sales of eggs, a market stall, an orchard and a field, a motorvan, some staff, some ledgers and a desk … He told himself that when he was more safe and certain, he would test the magic of the torn banknote. Not five thousand, naturally. He was the timid sort. A hundred note, perhaps. But that day never came, despite the money that he made. Because he never felt that he was safe or certain? Because he was mean and unadventurous? That was the judgement of the town. No one expected such a man — and so late in life — to lower his defences for a while and toss his money in the ring.

IT WAS THE MONDAY after Victor — pent up all his life, between the nipple and the purse — had celebrated being old with a birthday lunch of coddled fish, fresh air, accordions. It was the Monday after he became engrossed in his last, his first, his only civic fantasy, to publicly display his private wealth at last by building a market worthy of a beggar woman and a millionaire. A damp and windy morning, just short of nine o’clock — and Victor the Insomniac, a boss who normally was at his desk a little after dawn, was nowhere to be seen.

Rook, with Anna at his side, walked the two kilometres of cobble, stone, and asphalt between his apartment and the tunnel below Link Highway Red. Her hand was on his arm. They seemed as fearless as lovers half their age, made adolescent by the comfort — unexpected, overdue — of flesh on flesh. No one would think these two — this sparrow-chested, greying man, this woman, warm and pouchy as a pastry bun — were husband and wife. Such wooing, binary displays belong to fledgling romances. Maturer ones are more abashed, less startled and enraptured by the luck of love. These two fledglings on the street were not the married kind. Their circumstance was clear: here was an out-of-season grande affaire between two people almost old enough to be too old, too sleepy for such public love. ‘Sleepy’ is the word the growers use to specify a pear, and other soft-fleshed fruits, which have matured but, though they have their colour and their shape, will soon begin to brown and rot and lose their flavour and their bloom. To taste such fruit is to taste the gamey pungency of middle age.

As they cut diagonally across the town, between the rush-hour traffic and the crowds, beneath the ochre-coloured eiderdown of clouds, Rook and Anna seemed misplaced, late Sunday revellers caught by the Monday morning light. The hastening single people in the street, toothpaste and coffee on their gums, a day of labour summoning, a desk, a loom, a till, gave way to them, as if a couple so engrossed and casual had passage rights, like yachts, to an unhindered channel at the pavement’s crown. We all defer to couples, do we not? A man and woman hand in hand can make the toughest of us step aside, can stop a tram.

This couple were not rushed. They were not hungry for their desks or eager for their colleagues and their phones. They held each other by the hand, the upper arm, the elbow, and the wrist. They held each other’s waists. And when they reached the walkers’ tunnel — just at the spot where Rook had used his keys and fists and where the mugged and flattened laurel leaves still lifted in the draught — they took advantage of the solitude and gloom to kiss. Once they reached the windy mall, however, they separated by a metre, and walked in parallel. The weekend spent in Rook’s apartment had been refreshment for them both. They’d hardly left Rook’s bed by day, and then at night they’d taken to the streets and bars to fuel themselves, with the reckless alcohol of crowds, the aphrodisiacs of drink, for more lovemaking. Yet now they walked demurely, chastely, along the coloured marble flagstones. It was not wise to love too publicly. Who knew who might be watching from the greenhouse on the 28th, or through the tinted windows of his office suite? Who knew if Victor — that unimpassioned, loveless man who seemingly had never tried the luxuries of pressing skin to skin, who could not understand the pleasures of the thigh, the tongue, the abdomen, the breast — might take against two lovers in Big Vic.

The mall was cunning preparation for the lobby of the office block. It cooled and shrank pedestrians. It echoed with the click of heels, and the heavy doors of taxi cabs, and sighing ventilation ducts. The shiny brick-veneers, the mirrored colonnades, the fish-trap cloisters leading to the finance palaces and the trading brokerages which were the tenants there, did not invite ill-discipline or dawdling. The mall’s misanthropy struck Rook and Anna dumb, just as the deep, cool shade of conifers will silence those who exit from a field. They did not speak. They even blushed a little, as if they guessed their weekend intimacy could not be hidden here. Their entry to Big Vic was self-conscious, too, Anna’s face a little too composed and Rook’s — unanswered — greetings to the lobby staff, the uniformed commissionaires, too hearty for the time of day. They shared — a shade too clumsily — a segment of Big Vic’s rotating doors. They shared the lift for twenty-seven floors. But once they reached the office lobby they headed for their desks as if the only love they shared was love of work.

Rook was in the best of moods, and with good cause. He was relieved to find his desk was, for the moment, clear. Normally by that time on a Monday, Victor would have sent his Fix It list — a sheaf of notes, queries and instructions, recriminations. Victor himself did not like to deal with people on the telephone, or even speak to clients face to face. What was to blame for that? His hibernating temperament? His hearing aid? His shield of wealth? He read reports. He scanned accounts. He watched the share and stock prices dance banking quicksteps round their decimals on the office VDUs. If there was anything to be done , then Rook could do it. He had younger legs and ears. But on that Monday, there were no tasks for him, no estate manager to intimidate by telephone (‘We note that field beans are a trifle mean this year. And late’), no groundless tension to diffuse amongst the market traders, no thin letter of regret, refusal, to be composed and sent, no group executive meetings to be called and chaired while Victor claimed some old man’s malady as pretext for staying in his room or on the roof.

Such liberty! It suited Rook. He had his own plans for the day and these involved a little horseplay at the office desk. He was used to having sex with Anna on his bed. A day or two of anything is time enough for it to seem routine. It had been fun — exhilarating fun — but not adventurous. His sexual needs were escalating. Making love to her at work was what engrossed him now. Big Vic’s solemnity was more a stimulation than a restraint. The need for stealth and speed and stiflement would blunt the appetite, you think? Think twice. Lovemaking is at its best when it transgresses social ordinances and strays far from the trodden path into the briars of the undergrowth, where risk and lust run neck and neck.

Rook wanted something more subversive than bed-steading. He wanted intercourse with Anna in the place where he had sat for months and contemplated her. He wanted office sex, with all the office work continuing, and all the VDUs alight, and these two colleagues, ankled by their underclothes, and pressed together like a pair of angler’s worms. No one would think it odd if, later in the day, he called Anna to his room for consultations. She’d come, an innocent. He wasn’t sure that she would share his eagerness — but from the appetite she’d shown for making bed-top love he had an inkling that she might.