Jim Crace - Arcadia

The Burgher — steered by me — took the lighter view, of course. ‘It’s rare these days’, I wrote, ‘to see Victor, the city’s octogenarian Vegetable King, out on the streets. But if you could see through the tinted glass of limousines you might have spotted the old man in the recently truncheoned Soap Market yesterday afternoon. No doubt he came to creak his respects to Rook, his one-time accessory, who was struck to the ground in the small hours of New Year’s Day.

‘Sharp-eyed citizens report that Victor did not come away empty-handed. The greenhouse recluse who is not, you will recall, averse to transporting fish fillets to his table in a taxi, departed from Rook’s market shrine with a lighted candle in his hand. The candle made the journey across town by chauffeur-driven limousine. Of course. Who says the rich aren’t ludicrous?

‘My colleague, our religious-affairs correspondent, tells me as he passes between the city’s clubs and bars on some lifelong mission of his own, that “candles light the darkened alleyways through which we all must pass when time is up, and all our bottles emptied to the dregs”. Is it the fashion in these straitened times to pay respects to recent employees by removing candles from their place of rest? Victor’s “spokeswoman” could not say when I phoned on your behalf to put that simple question. She only knew the price of beans.

‘I’m sure a man as practical as Victor will find a use for Rook’s half-candle, if only to grease the elevators of Arcadia. The old greengrocer might, too, like to pillage the cemeteries and morgues of our city for further spoils. Gravestones make good foundations. So do bones.’

TODAY THE Press Club Buffers have their monthly lunch at Victor-In-Arcadia. We have the private room, beyond the mezzanine restaurant. There the finest produce of the market floors is served al dente for the city’s swiftest, trimmest, smartest clientele: I am not one.

The female maître d’ of Victor’s-In-Arcadia — ‘Madame’ to us, but Sophia to the younger men — conducts me past the rising stars, the upstart businessmen, the skipjack currency kings, whose mobile phones and calculators share tablecloths with button mushrooms à la grecque and vegetable brochettes. I pass the inner bars, and then the Conversation Pits where men and women half my age strike deals and attitudes in easy chairs. This is not the populace at lunch, and these are hardly citizens at all. They are — forgive my want of charity — Invulnerables, protected from the town by bottled water, parking permits, air-conditioned cars, and by the jaundiced deference of waiters, commissionaires, receptionists, the police. Their tables are reserved. Their clubs, their tailors, their dentists, and their apartment homes are ‘Private and Exclusive’, meaning they are closed to those who are not dignified by wealth or birth or fashion. They seldom need to queue or step onto the street, but organize their lives through fax machines, credit cards, and home deliveries. Or else they delegate these tasks to secretaries, adjutants, and housekeepers who are employed to keep the world at bay. No wonder that, despite the stresses of the street, their faces are so cool, their suits and skirts so crisp and clean, their tempers so dispassionate. No wonder I am tempted to topple bottles into laps as I pass slowly by.

Our room is on the highest level of Arcadia. Sophia leaves me to go alone upstairs. She is too busy to escort those Buffers whose hearts and lungs and legs are so abused and slack that they climb slowly. Not one of us is less than sixty-two. What journalist, at sixty-two and more, could climb a stair at speed? What journalist would climb the stair at all unless there were good food and drink and gossip at the top? Not one of us is so required at work that he — yes, every Buffer is a man — cannot take time away from his desk to lunch with fading comrades. We’re of an age, when we toast ‘Absent Friends’, to mean those colleagues who are dead, or those few and tough successful ones too busy to be there — the managers, the editors who’ve grown grey and powerful like grizzly bears, while we are as grey and powerful as pigeons.

But us, the Friends too idle to be Absent? We undertake the stairs at Victor’s-In-Arcadia unburdened by wealth or status or by energy. We’re winding down our working lives. We’re dining out on what we were, before they took our offices away, before we were reduced from editors to columnists, from publicity executives to small-ad men, from roving correspondents to custodians of the letters page, before our bylines were removed.

The Burgher now is someone else. A younger woman has my job. She is not interested in the fate of millionaires or city councillors. The power that she follows is power of a different kind. She spends her afternoons in bars and restaurants and hotel lobbies. She writes a column cast with television hosts, and dance-club managers, and rich men’s sons. The term ‘Invulnerables’ is hers. She never misses trysts or tête-à-têtes. She lunches out on indiscretion, celebrity tantrums, scandal, flagrancy. Her sources are the city’s maîtres d’, the waiters and receptionists, the hotel boys who take the breakfast trays to guests.

I’m bitter, naturally. What trickery of physics allows the world to spin, yet leaves me motionless? They’ve moved me sideways to the waiting room, their mordant description of the office where the older, valued men like me are asked to wait until, at best, our underfunded pensions turn us out. I’m known as Back-End Editor. I have the weather and the law reports in my control. Obituaries, as well. You see how comic these professionals can be with words? And grimly accurate? Of my four predecessors three have died of heart attacks. The fourth has cancer of the throat. The Back-End Editor? The waiting room? The Press-Club Buffers? My laughter thins and hastens as I grow fat and slow.

Today I am the first Buffer to arrive, and glad of it. I have the chance to catch my breath and fuel myself with drinks. We like to formalize the lunch, to listen to each Buffer give his news before the meal. Today I’ll tell them what I know of Victor, the man who built Arcadia and gives his name to this restaurant and bar, the man who is too old these days to interest my substitute. His ninetieth birthday passed by, unremarked by her.

Why Victor? Here’s the news which almost gives a skip to my edgy pacing of the room. Six months ago I prepared the old man’s obituary for the pending pile. I turned — the well-trained journalist — to the trusted testimony of the cuttings files. What could I learn of him from what’s in print? I searched the archives and the only items on the man, apart from industry and trade reports, were those I’d written up myself. He’d brought fish by taxi for his birthday once, from the station to Big Vic. He stole a candle from a colleague’s grave. Enough to deepen interest in the man, of course. But not much of an epitaph. I phoned Big Vic. Anna, his deputy, a woman in her fifties now, sharp-faced, a little overdressed, but winsome still, did what she could to help. And then — when she had checked the accuracy of the obituary — she said, ‘He’s looking for an author to prepare a memoir. Might you be interested …?’ And so I am the one retained to write his Life. Luck has landed me a paying task for my maturity. A contract’s signed, and already I have spent some — mostly silent — time with him, though he has told me anecdotes of a fat man in the Soap Market and he has talked a little of his childhood. Is that the word? Is ‘childhood’ not too innocent for how he passed his urchin years, for how he says his mother died in flames? The old man had a mother, yes. Her name was Em. He’s not the product of a melon and a cucumber after all. I have, through Anna, some access to the files, her private memories, and — more crucially — some pointers to the old man’s early life which seem to bear his story out. But Anna much prefers to talk of Rook, and of the boy who murdered him. She has procured court depositions for me to study, and can arrange, she says, for me to visit Joseph on the prison farm (he’s working in the fields again!) where he is serving life. She mistakes me for a detective-journalist, a Woodward or a Bernstein, and wants me to investigate what truly happened all those years ago to Rook. I have asked her more than once to dine with me, to socialize about the book. But she declines. She gives more thought to Rook, it would appear, than she gives to her boss’s life. She shows no interest in his childhood or his youth. For evidence of Victor in his later years I have no need to search. I only have to look around — at our hired room, at our refurbished town.