Jim Crace - Arcadia

Anna had, a month before, turned her back on pasta, bread, and rice, and hoped to make her peace with lettuce and with beans. Her only lapse was chocolates. Those times that Rook had pinched her at her waist, the hoop of flesh too loose between his fingers and his thumb, had made Anna discontented with herself. She used to push his hands away. He called it teasing. He thought it was a pleasing intimacy to draw attention to her loss of shape. She counted pinches of that kind as bullying. Men, it seemed, were never satisfied for long with the details of the women that they loved. And that was heartless, was it not?

When Rook was sacked and had ignored her visits to his apartment and the notes she’d left, Anna had found cause to blame herself. She’d frightened Rook with too much passion. She’d slept with him too readily. She’d been the secret cause of his dismissal from Big Vic. Her ‘details’ were not right for him. If only she was slim and thirty-five, then Rook would leave his door ajar for her. Yet he was just as middle-aged and lined as her. At least she was not dry like him. She was not greying, yet. She could breathe without her chest trembling — though it was true that her chest would pout a little less if she shed three kilos, say. She’d learned to blame her weight, and not herself, for losing Rook. She never thought to blame and hate the man himself.

Quite speedily, she’d lost some weight and, if not trim, she was more statuesque and confident. She bought new clothes that fitted her. She had her hair shortened and razored at the neck. She exercised each evening on her phaga rug. Now that she was just a trifle lighter and more disguised by what she wore, she felt unburdened. But nothing that she did or ate could take away the pouching underneath her chin, or recompense her for the sudden, hurtful loss of Rook. What use were mottoes such as Yes-and-Now-and-Here if Now-and-Here were desk and home and bed without her Rook?

She was surprised, however, on that broochless night, how cheerful she was feeling amongst the shopping crowds and how seductive were the market stalls. One soapie dealt only in roots, the gormless starches of the fields. His carrots ranged in colour from the red of mutton steaks to the pink of carp; he had carrots as round and bright as fairy lights; he had them straight and long like waxen stalactites; he had them double-limbed. He had potatoes, too — all shades, all shapes, and kept apart in separate buckets. He had whites, yellows, reds, pinks, scrapers, bakers, boilers, friers, cocktail spuds, Idahos, Egyptian, Old Andean, starchy, seedy, sweet. He had potatoes which were grown organically and were presented with the soil intact (to mask the blemishes). He had potatoes slightly greened by light. These were good in salads, raw and shredded with some mayonnaise.

Anna burrowed deep into the Soap Market. She passed the ranks of oranges, the monsoon fruit, the chicory, the sea kale, the Valentino pears, the commonwealth of apples, and came into the cooler kingdom of the leaf. She wanted just one lettuce, but she was teased by choice and colour. She rummaged at a stall for a garden lettuce with a tight rosette. She’d never noticed how they smelled before. The salads at the produce counter of her local delicatessen were odourless. But here, banked up in such profusion, the leaves were acrid almost, funereal. Their odour was precisely that of damp clay newly turned to take a coffin. The lettuce that she chose was tight and heavy — an early Wintervale. Its leaf stems were white. The leaves themselves were strongly ribbed and shaped like scallop shells. These were the lettuce leaves that the Spirits of the Field would use as plates at midnight feasts when they were standing guard against the pinching frost. The soapie dropped the lettuce in a bag and took Anna’s payment as if the Spirits of the Field had yet to visit him.

Why did she not go now to catch her bus? Because she was seduced by all the multiformity of food? Because she was confused by colour, noise and crowds? Because Cellophane directed her on some detour? Or because a woman who had just detected death in lettuce leaves could have no difficulty picking up the smell of Rook as he sat with his coffee in the Soap Garden?

Rook spotted her as she negotiated chairs and customers. At first he watched her idly, thinking simply that she was a woman to his taste, a trader’s stylish wife, perhaps, or the elegant and tempting boss of some boutique. Then he recognized her, just in time, as she saw him. His chest grew tight. His trousers, too. The lovers had not spoken for five months. Or touched. So Rook felt doubly cornered, both by the brutal carelessness with which he’d treated her and by the meanness of his sudden concupiscence. He wished to be a thousand miles away; he wished to be ten metres closer, so close and wrapped that he digested her, took from her mouth the salty sauce and fillet of her tongue.

‘You’ve changed,’ he said. ‘You’ve cut your hair.’ She seemed embarrassed. She reddened when he complimented her on how she looked. Was that the red of anger or delight? She did not speak, but put her lettuce on the table, and sat down facing Rook. Let him speak first.

‘Am I to take it that there is another man?’

‘Why should there be?’

‘The way you look, of course.’

‘Like what?’

‘You’ve blossomed since I last saw you. Is there a man?’

‘Of course there is,’ she said, quite truthfully.

‘And who is he?’ Rook looked as if his face had lost its bones.

‘An architect,’ she said. ‘He’s asked me back to the Excelsior, no less. To celebrate.’

‘And what is there to celebrate?’

‘The end of all this!’ Anna spread her arms and flapped her hands, as if she were an illusionist who could make the real world disappear.

To some extent she was exactly that. Most women are. They are illusionists, at least when they are young. They have the trick of making clocks stand still for men, of making clocks run fast, of lowering the temperature a trace, of raising it, of being so desirable that all the world beyond the bubble of themselves is distanced and diluted. Their narrow heads, their scent, the scissored hairline at their neck, the leafy rustling of their skirts become bewitchments. So Rook was netted and engulfed, and Anna gloried that she was not too old or large to hold this man in thrall. She laid her hands upon his table. He had the courage and the shame to hold her by the wrist.

‘Just like my architect,’ she said, and then her story tumbled out, how secretive the boss had been, how plans had been passed off as something else, how nine architects — so far — had been escorted up to Victor’s suite like prisoners in custody and not allowed to share a lift or chatter with the staff. She told how Victor was obsessed by plans, and how his books on greenhouse pests had been pushed aside by models, elevations, and projections for the Soap Market. She told how Signor Busi had — that afternoon — seduced the boss with sculpted words and how she was convinced — like him — that Busi would be the man to ‘start from scratch’.

‘I could have stopped him. I would have stopped him,’ Rook said, more energized and focused than he had been for a dozen years. ‘But now I’ve gone, who is there to give him good advice?’

‘So, that’s why you got the sack? He didn’t want you in the way …?’

‘What does Victor say?’

‘What does Victor ever say? He hasn’t said a word. When does he ever say a word? You know what he’s like, out of sight, out of mind …’

She put her one free hand on top of his so that the three arms on the table made a bas-relief of flesh and fingers. Rook felt reprieved. Anna had not learned about his market fraud from Victor. The ice cube had not revealed the truth. Nor would he. Rook raised his head. He squared his shoulders. He was a cockatoo, all squawk and feathers now, all strut and peck and preen.