Jim Crace - Arcadia

Victor looked around to check there were no journalists, and then he spoke again the words that had worked so well earlier that day.

‘The market’s getting taller, that is all,’ he said. ‘I’m eighty years of age. I’ve seen it grow. When I was just a kid and your fathers and grandfathers were the traders there, they put their produce out on mats and sat like Buddhists on the cobblestones. When we brought in raised stalls, the sort you use and seem to love today, your fathers rioted. They said they were a modern curse. They said no one would buy from stalls. But market stalls have made you wealthier. And now we have Arcadia with all its beauty and its benefits. Everyone will want to buy their produce there. Not just the poor. The wealthy too. Why else would I agree to invest so much in you? To make us all as poor as our grandfathers were? My friends, have faith. Arcadia will make you rich.’

Now Con was saying something in reply. Though Victor could not make out all his words, he knew the mood had changed. The placards were gripped less resolutely. After all, the boss himself had come out. He’d treated them as colleagues. He’d promised them meetings, safeguards, parliaments. And what he said made sense. Why would he wish to damage market trade? Their business made him rich.

Victor made a show of shaking hands, and then he turned about with Anna and the umbrella in his wake and re-entered Big Vic. He would not talk to journalists. His publicity manager (now surrounded by the traders) was paid for that. He felt immensely tired and disconcerted. It was not age, but anger that such private plans as his should suffer from such scrutiny, from press, from public, from market traders, and that despite his eminence and wealth he had to barter in the open air as if he were a boy of seven dependent on a tray of eggs.

He shared the lift with Anna. He said, ‘Now I suppose you’d better see to it that meetings are arranged. We must be democrats.’ He held up Con’s leaflet for closer scrutiny. ‘Those plans were confidential. Someone’s leaked.’ He looked at Anna. Looked straight through her. ‘Find out who leaked,’ he said. ‘Give me the name, it doesn’t matter who, or what it costs. He gets the sack.’

For a moment Anna almost gave the boss a pair of names, her own and Busi’s. Would the old man reward her for her honesty? Would he send Busi home, Arcadia and all? She doubted it. But then, why should she take the blame? There was another name, a guilty name. Rook was the man, and he was safe from anything that Victor might do. You cannot sack a man when he is sacked. If she was ever cornered, then Rook would be the name to help her out, to keep her safe, to earn rewards. ‘I’ll ask around,’ she said.

Victor ordered sweetened tea and waited for it, standing at the window of his office suite. The mall was almost clear. A broken placard lifted slightly in the wind. A few of Con’s blue leaflets were plastered to the marble flagstones by the grease and rain. Unhurried soapies stood in a circle by the fountains, as unimpassioned in their manner as a crowd of football fans discussing their team’s uninspiring draw.

The evening paper ran the photograph of comic revolution on the streets, the policeman and the trader beating skins. The Burgher, on an inside page, led with some gossip about a writer and his wife. His seventh item had the heading, ‘Victor’s Glass Meringue’, and comprised one long-winded feeble joke — I must admit — at the expense of cakes and architects and millionaires. But the frontpage headline read ‘You have been misled’. The newspaper group for which the Burgher worked had financial interests in Arcadia and the trading wings of Victor’s companies. It did not wish the old man any harm.

THIS IS THE sorcery of cities. We do not chase down country roads for fame or wealth or liberty. Or romance, even. If we hanker for the fires and fevers of the world, we turn our backs on herds and hedgerows and seek out crowds. Who says — besides the planners and philosophers — that we don’t love crowds or relish contact in the street with strangers? We all grow rich on that if nothing else. Each brush, each bump, confirms the obvious, that where you find the mass of bees is where to look for honey.

The conspiracy is this, that we — the seemly citizens — obey the traffic lights, observe timetables, endure the shadows and the din. We do not cross, or park, or push, or jump the queue, or trespass, except where we are ordered to. We wed ourselves to work and tickets. We ebb and flow with as much free will as salt in sea. Yet we count ourselves more blessed, more liberated than the country dwellers whose tumult is a tractor and a crow, whose ebb and flow is seasons, weather, meals. And why? Because we townies are the only creatures in the universe to benefit from chains, to make our fortunes from constraint, to wear the chafing, daily harnesses of city life as if they are the livery of plutocrats.

Who is more harnessed, then? The docile banker whose life is squared and mapped and calibrated, or the vagabond? Which of these two is more blessed with power and with wealth but is most likely to observe the bulls and firmans of the street? Who is the lag and who the libertine? Yet who would be a vagabond by choice? What ploughman would not hope to be a trammelled plutocrat? We flock in to the city because we wish to dwell in hope. And hope — not gold — is what they pave the cities with.

So Joseph, then, was happier than Rook. His life was more uncomfortable, of course. But he was rich with hope. He had more empty years ahead, more possibility, while Rook now knew that he was in decline. Rook’s harnesses had been unloosed. His city held for him few promises, few hopes. What was he but an unemployed, unmarried, and unhealthy man, a firebrand turned to ash? Who’d take him on? What woman, what employer, what company of friends, what neighbourhood? He looked for sentimental comfort now, the first quest of the middle-aged. His life orbited round Anna, her gossip, what news she had of Victor and Big Vic. He was resigned to witnessing Arcadia.

Of course, he spent each morning at his table in the Soap Garden, drinking fewer coffees than previously, but more spirits and — foolishly — even smoking a cheroot. You could count on him to join in cards or dice or dominoes, and to win or lose more recklessly than most. He rested on his bed most afternoons, but did not sleep. He took no pleasure in the radio or television. He did not read (except the evening news). He rarely cooked a meal more complicated than some soup or egg. At first he met with Anna every night. She slept with him. She had her own drawer and a suitcase in his apartment. Her blouses and her cardigans shared hangers with his trousers. She used his razor on her legs. He used her perspiration sprays. They talked of selling both their homes and pooling what they had to buy a quieter, larger place a little out of town. They’d buy a car with the profit. They’d take a holiday — in Nice or Istanbul or Amsterdam. He’d look for work, he said, but did not look. He promised he’d bring brochures from the travel firms, but he forgot. He would not visit valuers to discover what the flat was worth, or what sort of home the two of them could buy on the outskirts of the town. He only talked of how their life would be if they lived as a pair. His only act of union was in bed.

Within a month or two, Anna felt she needed more time on her own. She was too tired after work for Rook’s invasive restlessness. She enjoyed, instead, the short bus journey to her own home, the respite of the empty rooms, the opportunity to sit alone in casual clothes with no demands beyond the television set. So she took to meeting Rook only on Wednesday nights and at the weekends. Rook was not pleased, of course, but Anna’s half-time absence suited him to some extent. It left him free to drink and smoke and gamble at night as well as day.