Jim Crace: Arcadia

What should we make of Rook, then, as he, shamefaced, proprietorial, pushed through the shoppers and the porters in the medieval alleyways of wood and canvas, of trestles, awnings, stalls, and booths, of global colours, smells, and tastes, and reached the bars and lawns of the Soap Garden? That he was bad? Or shrewd? Or simply, like the rest of us, a weakling when it comes to cash?

WHEN ROOK arrived at the sunlit respite of the Soap Garden, there were no seats. The bars were full. The lawns were packed with porters and with the low-paid women who weighed, wrapped, and sold the city’s purchases. Their bosses occupied the shaded chairs. Keeping a fruit or vegetable stall is not an unremitting task. There is free time.

At that hour of the morning, the soapies came for coffee-and-a-shot and to fix and chalk their prices for the day. Some turned away or sank into their seats when they saw Rook. Some watched him blankly. One or two — the older, more successful ones, the ones invited to Victor’s birthday lunch — stood up and waved at him to indicate that he should join them at their table, that they’d be honoured if he’d drink a shot with them. But Rook had Victor’s chair to decorate and Anna’s cakes to buy. He’d join them later, when his tasks were done. He went first to the cake-and-coffee stand and chose a dozen cakes from their display — four fruit, four cream, four chocolate. Rook leaned against the stand and studied all the sales girls on the lawns and then the foliage of the garden while his cakes were gift-wrapped in a cardboard pyramid and tied with red and silver tape.

Of all the trees and bushes in the garden, the burgher laurels seemed the best for Victor’s birthday chair. Their leaves looked supple, shiny, washable. Besides, their branches were within easy reach and, unlike the roses and the snag trees which lined the lawns, they posed no problem for the naked hand. Rook chose a laurel which grew against the railings of the medieval washing place and threw its shadow across the worn stone sinks, the emaciated gargoyles on the fountains, the cluster of grotesques which nuzzled at the basin rim. Rook, made devil-may-care by his passage through the market, was in no mood to be unnerved by rules or inhibitions. He simply grasped a slender laurel branch, and tugged as if he expected it to snap like celery. His hands slipped, ran free, and stripped the leaves, together with the fledgling buds which roosted at each node. What was that smell?

He took more care with the second spray. He bent it downwards at its base, and tried to twist and break it off. It snapped but was too green and sinewy to separate cleanly. He tore it free. He held it by its broken stem, satisfied that it would do for Victor’s chair. Quite soon he had a thick papoose of laurel sprays resting on his arm.

Rook was bemused, not by the cussedness of laurels, but by the odour of the exposed wood, a cooking, kitchen smell both unnerving and familiar. He smelt his fingers and then put his nose to the fractured branch. ‘What’s that?’ he asked himself, and sneezed. He walked across the grass to the group of traders on the patio of a bar. They were all men that he knew by name, and all about Rook’s age, not old or rich enough to dine on Victor’s fish. They’d all been market boys together, kicking turnip-balls amongst the lettuce leaves, made shrewd and tough beyond their years by labouring for Dad. They’d all been comrades in the market strike a dozen years before. The noisy pair were brothers; bananas were their trade. The balding one was Spuds, a shapeless idle man with wife and kids to match. Another was the man called Con whose envelope of hard-earned cash was in Rook’s jacket pocket and who now held court with his account of how, at dawn that day, he’d very nearly had his pockets picked. He stopped mid-sentence when he spotted Rook. He’d already seen the fellow once too often for the day, a thousand times too often for a life. This was the man, this Rook, who’d betrayed the soapies, who’d led the produce strike and then abandoned it for pay and privilege at Victor’s feet, as if fine sentiments were not as fine as cash. That man’d barter every tooth inside his head, he thought, but said, ‘Watch out. Here comes the apple grub.’ Con was not the understanding sort. He’d gladly throttle Rook. He’d gladly shake out every golden tooth. He’d pay to have it done.

The others were more forgiving. They might still have been Rook’s intimates if it weren’t that they were always in his debt. ‘Pitch’ payments had cost Rook a thousand friends. They smiled at his approach, but not with generosity or welcome. It was simply that their childhood friend looked rather foolish to their male, no-nonsense eyes: one suited arm weighed down by foliage; the fingers of the other hand entwined in the fussy, dainty packaging of cakes.

Rook leant against their table and he sneezed again: a clearance of the nostrils and a shout of matching force and volume.

‘What is that smell?’ he asked, wiping his eyes with his sleeve and placing the laurel amongst their cups and glasses. They passed the broken branch around the table and put their noses to the wood. They scratched their heads. Their noses knew that smell so well, but their tongues could not locate the name.

‘Like coconut,’ said one.

Another thought it smelt like cake. They called their favourite waitress to their aid. She hardly had to smell. ‘It’s marchpane,’ she said, using the country word for marzipan. She handed back the laurel branch to Rook. Once more he held it to his nose. The girl was right. He smelt the eggs, the sugar, and the almond paste as perfectly as when he was a child and helping mother mix and shape the birthday treats, the balls, the stars, the leaves of marzipan.

‘That’s it! It’s marzipan,’ he said, translating. ‘I wonder if it tastes.’ He put a broken laurel stem into his mouth.

The waitress laughed and said, ‘That’s poison, that is. Don’t you know? You don’t suck that.’ She pointed at the beads of sap which were swelling like water blisters where the wood had snapped.

‘How should I know? I’m not a countryman,’ said Rook, and sneezed again. It was his boast that he would wither out of town. He wouldn’t last five minutes away from traffic fumes or crowds.

The waitress was the sort to stand and talk, mulishly deaf and blind to summonses from older, less flirtatious men at other tables.

‘Those spoonwood leaves,’ she said, using once again the country term, ‘are poisonous. You’ll run both ends.’ Encouraged by their laughter, she embarked upon a tale of how the women in her village used once to boil the poison out of laurel leaves. They’d soak the poison into bread, she said, to bait the rats and mice: ‘A woman my grandma knew made chicken soup with laurel seeds and laurel sap. They’d use it as fox bait. Or for killing crows. She fed it to her bloke by mistake. He had his bum and stomach pointing at the toilet pan for near enough a week, and then he died. The soup had poisoned him. Nice way to go.’

‘Ive eaten soup like that here,’ said Con, and winked. This time their laughter was prolonged. They knew this waitress had a second job. She was the kitchen girl as well.

‘Bang goes your chance of ever breakfasting with me,’ she said to Con, and then pressed on with what she had to say about the laurel tree: ‘My aunt, she had a neighbour who wanted to inherit a little apple orchard when his grandma died. Except she wouldn’t die. The older she got the fitter she became. So this man and his wife, they asked the granny round for supper. She got the spoonwood soup. She was shaking like a cow with qualsy before she’d eaten half a bowl. But she was tough. Her heart and stomach were made of wood. They had to pinch her nose and force some second helpings down her throat. Then that was that. She’d gone. He got her apple trees.’