Jim Crace - Arcadia

‘Come home with me,’ he said. ‘Let’s celebrate.’

‘I’ve called round at your home a dozen times,’ she said. ‘I’ve written and I’ve called. Not one reply.’

‘So come home now. We’ll put it right.’

‘We’ll see,’ she said. ‘You’re not as fancy as my architect.’

‘Ah, the Italian, yes.’ Rook took his fingers out of hers. He held the edges of her coat. ‘If he wins, I’d like to see his plans.’

‘He’ll win. I’d bet on it.’ Anna’s voice had lost its resolution. She held her breath. She watched his fingertips.

‘When will you know?’

‘Next week, officially. There’ll be a press conference and a presentation of the scheme when the contract is awarded.’

‘And where?’

‘Big Vic.’

‘I’d like to see the plans before next week, before the press. Can you do that?’

‘Do what?’

‘Give me a preview of the scheme that wins.’

‘Why should I take that chance?’

‘Because I want you to,’ he said. And (he thought) because the old man plans to put an end to all of this. Because there’s no one in Big Vic to stand up for the soapies and the marketplace.

Rook spread his arms and flapped his hands in mockery of her. But there was no illusion at his fingertips — no desire to see the real world disappear, no wish to interfere in the bustling kinship of the citizens who went about their business in the Soap Market with the fitful, browsing innocence of weevils in a cake.

‘What can I do?’ Anna said. ‘Victor keeps his room locked. And anyway, those plans aren’t small. They’re tablecloths.’

‘And what about your fancy architect?’ Rook let her repossess his hand.

‘Who? Busi?’

‘Yes. He must have duplicates.’

Anna nodded, shrugged, as if to indicate she had no access to this man.

‘I think,’ said Rook, his hand pushed through the buttoned vents of Anna’s coat, his palm upon her slimmer waist, a finger tucked beneath her belt, ‘that it might be a good idea to let the signor take you out to dinner. At the Excelsior, no less.’

ROOK WAS A JUGGLER. He held and tossed five lives. He had to spin and mix them in the air. He had to pitch them so that they arched and fell into his hands with just the angle and the impact he required. Rook had to space the five lives in his grasp, ensure they did not meet or touch, for he was keen to settle scores — deftly, speedily, undetected. He was ready and impatient now to pay off debts and make amends, with Busi, Joseph, Anna, Con, but, most of all, with Victor. Quite what he ought to juggle up, Rook was not sure, though at their simplest and their meanest his intentions were to punish Con and Victor for the job, the private income from pitch payments, the self-respect they’d robbed from him.

The uniformed expulsion from Big Vic tormented him. He had to torment in return. This was unadorned revenge, and revenge is next to lust in its single-mindedness, its self-regard. So Rook did not care that Busi, Anna, Joseph, and yes, Con and Victor, too, were mostly innocent of blame for the malfunctions in his life. He’d still be on the 27th floor and welcome in the Soap Market, sweet with Victor, Anna, Con, if he’d resisted those envelopes of cash, that money in the palm, those bribes. This is something that country people understand more readily than townies. If you sow thorns, then you get thorns. They don’t need watering. They flourish and they snag.

Rook would not admit his pettiness, that what he wanted most was some wounding, simple recompense. He fooled himself that there were nobler motives driving him. The fiction that he made was this: that his months of leisure, free from Victor and Big Vic, had resurrected an old self that had ideals and principles worth fighting for. How could he forget the man he’d been a dozen years before when the produce boycott had been organized? They’d listened to him in the market then. They’d cheered. He’d stood on a platform made from crop boxes, dressed in clichéd black, and made that speech that all the papers had reproduced in full.

‘This Soap Market,’ he had said, ‘is here to make good salads and fruit pies. To put some muscle into stews, some zest in cake, to keep the city fed. It is not here to make men millionaires. So we traders should let the market die before we let the prices outstrip the common people.’ They’d flocked to that — and they’d held out on strike for seven weeks. A stirring time. The world turned upside down, with market customers bringing cake and cheese and bread to feed the soapies, and every stall and awning dismantled, and not a scrap of lettuce to be seen.

The striking soapies had given Rook the mandate to negotiate. They’d trusted him. But Victor knew the trick of tearing notes in half. ‘Why let the market die?’ he’d asked, made loquacious by the seven weeks of damage to his wealth. ‘You only harm yourselves.’ His agents and his managers had offered Rook a compromise. You lift the boycott, and trade according to the prices we have set, they counselled. And in return we freeze the market rents for two years, maybe three. You traders save a little cash for … OK, you win, let it be frozen rents for the full three years . You save the marketplace for good.

Rook had said he was only a mouthpiece, that was all, but that he doubted his colleagues would betray their principles. Victor had spoken again. How much are principles? he asked himself, but he said out loud, ‘It would be democratic, don’t you think, if my, our, colleagues in the market had some constant spokesman at my side to represent their principles.’ He had not looked at Rook, but had written a sum in pencil on a memorandum pad and slid it across his desk so Rook could see. ‘That is the kind of yearly sum that we would pay for such a diplomat.’ Rook had shaken Victor by the hand and had taken the stipend of the diplomat.

So now Rook felt he had the chance to make amends, to piece together once again the man that had been raised within the odour of the marketplace, that had been schooled in radishes and rambutans, that thrived in clamour and crowds. He’d save the Soap Market. He’d be the champion of marketeers. He’d climb up on the platform once again and ‘represent their principles, their fears’. But then, once he had sobered from the fever of the phrases in his head, he thought again, more clearly. Platforms were for innocents. Speeches only waylaid passion with fine words. The player with the strongest hand, the running flush, was not required to show his cards. So it was in politics — for, yes, Rook was now so inflated with the altruism of his mission that he’d cast himself as a man in service to the citizens. In politics you did not need to spout or strut or speechify if you could quietly slip behind the scenes to sabotage, to juggle, and to complicate. He had a plan, unformed but irresistible, which would deliver Anna to his bed, and damage Con, and punish Victor, and introduce that muscly Joseph to the truth that brains and money are more powerful than youth. He’d cause a little mayhem, too, for Signor Busi of Milan — and leave himself the hero of the marketplace.

So, four days after Rook and Anna reconnected in the Soap Garden bar and on the day that Signor Busi won the contract for Arcadia and once again invited Anna to his table, they walked to the Excelsior. They’d been together every night and had slept so deeply, back to back, that the dreams and snores which celebrated their resurrected passion did not wake them. They were refreshed by the affection that they gave and got, and Anna took the change in Rook, his liveliness, his youth, to be a sign that he returned her love. Why else would she, a careful woman wedded to her work, agree to dine with Busi and to chance his busy hand so that she could, for Rook, become a common thief?