Jim Crace - Arcadia

In time Anna’s Wednesday visits became less welcome. She wanted only to relax, to recuperate from work, to cook, make love impassively, sit up in bed with silence and a magazine. She did not wish to go out in the streets, take snacks in bars, make love more frequently, more rapidly, more testingly. The sexual hold she had on Rook was episodic and capricious. To indulge it was to end it. The moments of their greatest unity — their mouths and chests and genitals wrapped humidly together, their hands spread on each other’s backs, their legs in plaits — were the moments, also, when Rook became absolved of her. That is the turpitude of men and love. Rook’s orgasms unharnessed him. They transformed him, in an instant, from a man obsessed with Anna and the universe of bed to one impatient to pull his trousers on and walk, alone and passionless and free, out into town. He’d leave her less rewarded than a prostitute. At first, she would get out of bed with him, to wash and dress and rush outside when all she wanted was a massage and some tea, a shower and some sleep. But Rook always led her to the Soap Garden as if it had the only bars in town.

‘Why don’t you sleep out with the beggars and the alcoholics in the market?’ she asked. It appeared to Anna that Rook was obsessed, but not with her. He only wished, it seemed, to woo the Soap Market and its garden before they disappeared for good.

If Anna had been more certain of herself she could have taken charge of Rook. She could have gripped him by the wrist, as if he were a child, and led him to the valuers or to the travel firms or to employment agencies. She could have banned him from the market bars. He was weak enough to do what he was told. Instead she made do on his half portions. What choice was there? She made excuses for him.

One Wednesday night, he would not settle down to sleep, despite embraces on the counterpane and the post-coital sedative of sheets. He dressed again. He said he had to buy some milk. He needed some fresh air. He couldn’t breathe. She waited for him, but could not fight off sleep. When he returned, the broken noise of traffic from the street made clear that it was long past midnight. She did not need to ask him where he’d been.

She did not come on Wednesdays any more, and he was glad of that. When all the bars were shut he liked to join the vagrants in the marketplace. He liked to stare into their box and carton fires and share with them a song, a cigarette, a cob of roast maize, a throat of wine, a curse. They did not guess from how he dressed — his leather coat was old and bothered — that he was rich. They merely counted him as one of those, down on their luck but not yet down-and-out, who drank with them when all the bars were shut. They did not know, they did not care, what happened to him when he left. For all they knew he had a niche not far from theirs. In a corner of the marketplace, perhaps. Or in the sink estates — a tram’s ride out of town — where what had not been vandalized had never worked, where ground-floor flats were tinned up with corrugated sheeting, where staircases and lifts were urinous and dangerous and dark. No one among them knew about Arcadia. When Rook described the changes that would come it did not move them more than any other drunken, midnight speech. Why should they be alarmed? The distant future made no difference to them. They only waited for the bottle, still half a circle from their grasp. They only hoped the wood would last till dawn.

By day, Arcadia was much discussed among the marketeers. Of course. Surveyors were at work, and questionnaires were circulated. Inspection ditches had been dug across the grass in the Soap Garden. Women wearing ID badges sat on stools to monitor and graph pedestrian usage of the different market sectors. Outline proposals and planning certificates were displayed — as law decreed — at focal points. The marketeers were bemused, but flattered, too, by all the attention they received and by the consultation meetings and the Soapie Parliament that Victor promised them. They had agreed amongst themselves that there was little point in fighting progress with more demonstrations or with petitions. What power had a line of people or a list of names against the will of money to be spent? No, they would be modern citizens. That is to say, they would suppress their passions and hope to profit from their pragmatism. The boss had given them his word. The demonstration on the mall had winkled Victor from his lair. He’d stood amongst them in the rain and what he’d said had been a challenge: change your ways and prosper.

They imagined working under glass: warm in winter, cool in summer, dry and windless, weather-free. There’d be the same old camaraderie but air-conditioned. The fruit and vegetables would survive, be crisp and firm, be sellable, a few days longer. There would be less waste, and what waste there was would make a profit, too. Pig farmers on the edge of town would pay a fee for each full bag. The soapies saw themselves driving freely in vans. They’d save on porters’ fees. They’d save on time. There’d be disruptions, naturally. How would they manage during building work? But, all in all, the traders were buoyant. In fact, they were impatient. They were tired of being soapies: make us Arcadians, and quickly.

Rook’s bitter auguries did not alarm them. It did not matter how disgruntled Rook might be. Con was the man to listen to, and he, though cautious, shared the view that they had less to fear from progress than from torpor. Rook had fooled him with his jeremiac prophecies, ‘All this will disappear’, ‘You’ll soon be out of work and rattling round the streets like me’. Con now was more inclined to trust the word of Victor. It angered him that Rook was such a fixture in the marketplace and in the bars. Had he no self-respect? Had he no tact? If Arcadia would put an end to Rook, then that was fine by Con. Rook preached his words of warning, but anyone could see, and smell, that his views were distilled in alcohol and flavoured with the bitters of regret. The time would come when all his kind, the nighttime nestlers, the parasites, the idlers, would be swept away. Welcome the day!

It took a little less than twelve months for the Busi Partnership to complete their plans and raise a Bill of Quantities and put out the building tender. Architecture is a bureaucratic art — and Markitecture , as some comic christened the attempts to marry art and trade, was doubly bureaucratic because each detail had to satisfy the pocket and the eye, the aesthete and the businessman.

Victor provided offices in Big Vic for Signor Busi’s younger colleagues. The Philosopher Among Journeymen was not involved. He’d been persuaded to spend the winter in New York; the weekends in Manhattan, the weekdays upstate at Cornell where he had been appointed Comstock Visiting Professor in Art and Design. He gave sermons there on the Italian Masterbuilders — Giovanni Michelucci, Franco Fetronelli, and himself.

Busi’s colleagues wished he had not promised to make space for Victor’s birthday statue. They were the modern school and saw no point in statues that were, they said, ‘as sentimental as Capo di Monte figurines, but without the benefit of dwarfishness’. They wanted something glass or plastic, something steel, something big and time-honoured in concrete, a symbol of Arcadia. But they were stuck with Beggar Woman and Her Child , style 1910, in bronze.

Victor had insisted on where the statue would be placed: at that entrance to Arcadia which was the closest to the Woodgate district, halfway between where Em had begged and died.

‘Perhaps we could persuade a builder’s truck to back up and wreck it,’ one architect suggested. ‘We’d have a modern sculpture then, Flattened Woman and Her Child .’