Jim Crace - Arcadia

He draped his jacket on his chair and then — with nothing else to do so early in the day — he went to Victor’s office suite. The birthday throne was still outside, its plastic foliage evergreen and fresh. It seemed so foolish now that he had wasted so much effort on this birthday gift, for a man who had no appetite for sentiment. He pulled the foliage with its sticky tape free from the wood. He’d get someone to take it to the atrium and reconnect the stems where he had snapped them free. Or else he’d put them in a pot, a comic bouquet for Anna’s desk — a teasing prelude for the courtship that he planned for her in his own room, at his own desk. But first — the bouquet in his hand — he knocked on Victor’s door. He knocked again. And tried the handle. The door was locked. The old man’s growing soft, Rook thought. He’s slept through dawn for once. Rook bent to peer through the keyhole in the door. The inner key was in the lock.

‘No signs of life!’ he called out cheerily — and inanely — to the company accountant who, carrying a steaming coffee and a bank of ledgers, was passing through the lobby, tiptoeing through, in fact, as if he wished to keep his presence secret.

‘Where’s Victor, then?’ The accountant shook his head and seemed unwilling to meet Rook’s eye or match his cheeriness. ‘Where’s Victor, then?’ Rook asked again.

‘He won’t be down today.’

‘Why not?’ Again Rook had to settle for the shaken head. The accountant went into his room, and slammed the door shut with his heel.

Rook took his bouquet to Reception. The women there were busy at their desks.

‘Where’s Victor’s schedule for today?’ he asked. Again he had to ask the question twice.

‘It’s cancelled.’

‘Oh, yes. Why’s that?’

No one could say. No one seemed keen to even talk about this rarity of Victor absent from his desk, his schedule ‘cancelled’ for the day. It was perplexing that the staff were unforthcoming and morose when here was opportunity for them to waste a little time with talk.

‘What’s going on?’ Reception shrugged and held its tongue.

‘Why so grumpy, then?’ Rook asked out loud. ‘The Monday miseries? Too much to drink on Sunday night? Cheer up, cheer up. It’s only a job. “Work not shirk is life’s best perk. So join my harem, said the Turk.”

Their smiles were thin and stretched. Something embarrassed them. He waited, unsure of what the problem was, but certain that these three women, hired for their public charm and cheerfulness, were ill at ease. At last he said, unflippantly, ‘What’s up with you three, then?’ Still, there were no volunteers to look him in the eye. At last the eldest of the women said with a voice that quavered in and out of key, ‘It’s not for us to say.’

‘It’s not for us to say.’ In other words, this was a private thing, too personal and intimate for them to comment on, despite Reception’s reputation as the building’s bourse for rumour and hearsay. Rook no longer was perplexed. He guessed what caused their awkwardness, their blushing jealousy. Some office spy had spotted him and Anna out on the town on Saturday, perhaps. Or walking hand in hand towards Big Vic. The word had spread. The word ‘Romance!’ For some reason he could hardly understand this out-of-office liaison was not approved. You’d think this was some tutting medieval monastery, Rook thought (seated for the moment at his desk). Was this just jealousy, or sullen irritation that he’d breached an office code that those in charge and close to Victor should be as continent as him? Or was secrecy the culprit? Did Reception and Accountancy and, come to think of it, the uniformed Commissionary at mall level, resent that Rook had kept his tryst with Anna to himself for one weekend?

‘Ridiculous!’ He spoke the word out loud. It was ridiculous. Unlikely, too. The men and women in Big Vic were magnetized and not rebuffed by any hint of scandal or of secrecy. They loved the ribaldries of life. Particularly the trio at Reception. They wore their grandest, most libertine of smiles when there was gossip to be shared and prurience to trade. They would not drop their voices and their eyes, and act like undertakers’ clerks. They would have looked Rook in the eye and said, ‘What’s this I hear?’ or ‘You had a nice time Saturday! A little pigeon spotted you and Anna rubbing noses in a bar …’

What then? What could the problem be? He went through Friday in his mind in search of irritants. What had he said, or done, to set this Monday morning frost? He’d seen that everyone had shared the fun with champagne and cakes. He’d been his usual self, the Prince of Irony and Idleness. What had he done to give offence? Something was irking them, no doubt of that. And, truth to tell, something was irking him as well. His conscience was not entirely clear. Again he ran Friday through his mind and recognized exactly what it was that had stained his day. The subway fight with Joseph. The viciousness of fists and keys. The parting kick. The pleasure that he’d taken in such a squalid triumph. Yet these were private acts, less public than the time he’d spent with Anna. Who could know and disapprove of what had happened out of sight and underground and to an ill-dressed clod who had no contact with Big Vic? Why would anybody care?

Again Rook shuffled through the Friday pack. The pretext that he’d used to get down to the marketplace. The orange that he’d peeled. The tugging and the ripping of the laurel stems. The shaming bout of asthma in the presence of those men. The creaky birthday lunch. The gleeful coda to the day: Anna laughing on his bed, delighted by his mordancy, his teasing hands, that clowning routine with his underpants, ‘Ourselves, Ourselves, Ourselves’. And yes (I raise my head above the parapet again), the mocking column that I, the Burgher, wrote about the taxi and the boss’s coddled fish. All the workers in Big Vic would have seen and laughed at that … and thought, perhaps, the Burgher’s source was Rook? For that was just like Rook, to feed the babblers of the press. So, then — they would not look him in the eyes because they thought he had betrayed a fishy confidence? Again, ‘Ridiculous!’

A firmer possibility occurred to Rook. He need not search his diary or his conscience any more. Of course! The staff’s solemnity could have only one cause. By God, the old man’s dead! he thought. ‘No sign of life’ indeed! Rook almost felt relieved, as all that morning’s oddities were now explained. The missing Fix It list, the closed, locked door, the empty schedule, those phrases, ‘It’s been cancelled … He’ll not be down today.’ What apart from death, or at least a major stroke perhaps, would keep Victor from his work? If he had tumbled, say, and cracked a hip, his memos would be flying plumply from his bed like pigeons from a loft. While there was air left in his lungs and sufficient power in his arm to hold a pen, nothing would stop him orchestrating his affairs.

So that was it. The stick had snapped at last. Victor had died, and no one on the staff was senior enough to let Rook know. Or else, perhaps — this was a possibility — they thought he knew and were embarrassed by his lack of gravity or grief, his flippancy. ‘It’s not for us to say,’ the women on Reception had insisted. And they were right. Rook had been the boss’s eyes and ears, his fixer and his messenger. He was as close, as intimate, as anyone could be to such a cube of ice. No wonder nobody could face him with the news. No doubt the Finance Manager or the Group MD would come up from the floor below to inform Rook personally that there had been ‘a sad event’. Or Anna, even. She was senior enough. Rook sat and waited, hoping it was Anna who would come. He closed his eyes and dropped his chin onto his chest. He felt — for the first time since the Friday night — that he would benefit from sleep.