Arcadia (20 page)

Such liberty! It suited Rook. He had his own plans for the day and these involved a little horseplay at the office desk. He was used to having sex with Anna on his bed. A day or two of anything
is time enough for it to seem routine. It had been fun – exhilarating fun – but not adventurous. His sexual needs were escalating. Making love to her at work was what engrossed him now.
Big Vic’s solemnity was more a stimulation than a restraint. The need for stealth and speed and stiflement would blunt the appetite, you think? Think twice. Lovemaking is at its best when it
transgresses social ordinances and strays far from the trodden path into the briars of the undergrowth, where risk and lust run neck and neck.

Rook wanted something more subversive than bed-steading. He wanted intercourse with Anna in the place where he had sat for months and contemplated her. He wanted office sex, with all the office
work continuing, and all the VDUs alight, and these two colleagues, ankled by their underclothes, and pressed together like a pair of angler’s worms. No one would think it odd if, later in
the day, he called Anna to his room for consultations. She’d come, an innocent. He wasn’t sure that she would share his eagerness – but from the appetite she’d shown for
making bed-top love he had an inkling that she might.

He draped his jacket on his chair and then – with nothing else to do so early in the day – he went to Victor’s office suite. The birthday throne was still outside, its plastic
foliage evergreen and fresh. It seemed so foolish now that he had wasted so much effort on this birthday gift, for a man who had no appetite for sentiment. He pulled the foliage with its sticky
tape free from the wood. He’d get someone to take it to the atrium and reconnect the stems where he had snapped them free. Or else he’d put them in a pot, a comic bouquet for
Anna’s desk – a teasing prelude for the courtship that he planned for her in his own room, at his own desk. But first – the bouquet in his hand – he knocked on
Victor’s door. He knocked again. And tried the handle. The door was locked. The old man’s growing soft, Rook thought. He’s slept through dawn for once. Rook bent to peer through
the keyhole in the door. The inner key was in the lock.

‘No signs of life!’ he called out cheerily – and inanely – to the company accountant who, carrying a steaming coffee and a bank of ledgers, was passing through the lobby,
tiptoeing through, in fact, as if he wished to keep his presence secret.

‘Where’s Victor, then?’ The accountant shook his head and seemed unwilling to meet Rook’s eye or match his cheeriness. ‘Where’s Victor, then?’ Rook
asked again.

‘He won’t be down today.’

‘Why not?’ Again Rook had to settle for the shaken head. The accountant went into his room, and slammed the door shut with his heel.

Rook took his bouquet to Reception. The women there were busy at their desks.

‘Where’s Victor’s schedule for today?’ he asked. Again he had to ask the question twice.

‘It’s cancelled.’

‘Oh, yes. Why’s that?’

No one could say. No one seemed keen to even talk about this rarity of Victor absent from his desk, his schedule ‘cancelled’ for the day. It was perplexing that the staff were
unforthcoming and morose when here was opportunity for them to waste a little time with talk.

‘What’s going on?’ Reception shrugged and held its tongue.

‘Why so grumpy, then?’ Rook asked out loud. ‘The Monday miseries? Too much to drink on Sunday night? Cheer up, cheer up. It’s only a job. “Work not shirk is
life’s best perk. So join my harem, said the Turk.”

Their smiles were thin and stretched. Something embarrassed them. He waited, unsure of what the problem was, but certain that these three women, hired for their public charm and cheerfulness,
were ill at ease. At last he said, unflippantly, ‘What’s up with you three, then?’ Still, there were no volunteers to look him in the eye. At last the eldest of the women said
with a voice that quavered in and out of key, ‘It’s not for us to say.’

‘It’s not for us to say.’ In other words, this was a private thing, too personal and intimate for them to comment on, despite Reception’s reputation as the
building’s bourse for rumour and hearsay. Rook no longer was perplexed. He guessed what caused their awkwardness, their blushing jealousy. Some office spy had spotted him and Anna out on the
town on Saturday, perhaps. Or walking hand in hand towards Big Vic. The word had spread. The word ‘Romance!’ For some reason he could hardly understand this out-of-office liaison was
not approved. You’d think this was some tutting medieval monastery, Rook thought (seated for the moment at his desk). Was this just jealousy, or sullen irritation that he’d breached an
office code that those in charge and close to Victor should be as continent as him? Or was secrecy the culprit? Did Reception and Accountancy and, come to think of it, the uniformed Commissionary
at mall level, resent that Rook had kept his tryst with Anna to himself for one weekend?

‘Ridiculous!’ He spoke the word out loud. It
was
ridiculous. Unlikely, too. The men and women in Big Vic were magnetized and not rebuffed by any hint of scandal or of secrecy.
They loved the ribaldries of life. Particularly the trio at Reception. They wore their grandest, most libertine of smiles when there was gossip to be shared and prurience to trade. They would not
drop their voices and their eyes, and act like undertakers’ clerks. They would have looked Rook in the eye and said, ‘What’s this I hear?’ or ‘You had a nice time
Saturday! A little pigeon spotted you and Anna rubbing noses in a bar …’

What then? What could the problem be? He went through Friday in his mind in search of irritants. What had he said, or done, to set this Monday morning frost? He’d seen that everyone had
shared the fun with champagne and cakes. He’d been his usual self, the Prince of Irony and Idleness. What had he done to give offence? Something was irking them, no doubt of that. And, truth
to tell, something was irking him as well. His conscience was not entirely clear. Again he ran Friday through his mind and recognized exactly what it was that had stained his day. The subway fight
with Joseph. The viciousness of fists and keys. The parting kick. The pleasure that he’d taken in such a squalid triumph. Yet these were private acts, less public than the time he’d
spent with Anna. Who could know and disapprove of what had happened out of sight and underground and to an ill-dressed clod who had no contact with Big Vic? Why would anybody care?

Again Rook shuffled through the Friday pack. The pretext that he’d used to get down to the marketplace. The orange that he’d peeled. The tugging and the ripping of the laurel stems.
The shaming bout of asthma in the presence of those men. The creaky birthday lunch. The gleeful coda to the day: Anna laughing on his bed, delighted by his mordancy, his teasing hands, that
clowning routine with his underpants, ‘Ourselves, Ourselves, Ourselves’. And yes (I raise my head above the parapet again), the mocking column that I, the Burgher, wrote about the taxi
and the boss’s coddled fish. All the workers in Big Vic would have seen and laughed at that … and thought, perhaps, the Burgher’s source was Rook? For that was just like Rook, to
feed the babblers of the press. So, then – they would not look him in the eyes because they thought he had betrayed a fishy confidence? Again, ‘Ridiculous!’

A firmer possibility occurred to Rook. He need not search his diary or his conscience any more. Of course! The staff’s solemnity could have only one cause. By God, the old man’s
dead! he thought. ‘No sign of life’ indeed! Rook almost felt relieved, as all that morning’s oddities were now explained. The missing Fix It list, the closed, locked door, the
empty schedule, those phrases, ‘It’s been cancelled … He’ll not be down today.’ What apart from death, or at least a major stroke perhaps, would keep Victor from his
work? If he had tumbled, say, and cracked a hip, his memos would be flying plumply from his bed like pigeons from a loft. While there was air left in his lungs and sufficient power in his arm to
hold a pen, nothing would stop him orchestrating his affairs.

So that was it. The stick had snapped at last. Victor had died, and no one on the staff was senior enough to let Rook know. Or else, perhaps – this was a possibility – they thought
he knew and were embarrassed by his lack of gravity or grief, his flippancy. ‘It’s not for us to say,’ the women on Reception had insisted. And they were right. Rook had been the
boss’s eyes and ears, his fixer and his messenger. He was as close, as intimate, as anyone could be to such a cube of ice. No wonder nobody could face him with the news. No doubt the Finance
Manager or the Group MD would come up from the floor below to inform Rook personally that there had been ‘a sad event’. Or Anna, even. She was senior enough. Rook sat and waited, hoping
it was Anna who would come. He closed his eyes and dropped his chin onto his chest. He felt – for the first time since the Friday night – that he would benefit from sleep.

Rook’s door was open. There was no need for Anna to knock so formally on the stained veneer. Yet she was wise enough to knock and wait. He woke from his half-sleep and waved her in.
Already he had prepared an elegiac face; already he was searching in his mind for what the death of Victor meant to him. Advancement? Displacement? Something in the will? At least it meant that
this was no time to close the office door and push his hands beneath the bands of Anna’s skirt and blouse.

Anna did not look at Rook. Her expression was the same as those worn by the Reception staff, by the accountant as he hurried to his room, by the commissionaire who had ignored Rook’s airy
greeting as he had entered Big Vic from the mall. Now he was sure he had identified the truth. She looked so shocked, so drained, so unlike the face upon the pillow. ‘Come in. What’s
wrong?’

‘Bad news,’ she said. She looked as if her knees would give. He held her in his arms. It didn’t matter what the staff might think. Her tears fell on his jacket and his tie.

‘Sit down. Sit down,’ he said. He wished to cry himself. He felt so nervous and so powerful. He could not focus on the old man’s death.

‘What’s wrong?’

She took deep breaths, and then she looked him in the face at last. ‘I wish it wasn’t me who had to tell you this,’ she said.

‘I know.’ And then, ‘No need to tell me, Anna. I can guess.’

‘Guess what?’

‘It’s Victor, isn’t it? He’s ill. He’s dead.’

She shook her head. She almost laughed. ‘He isn’t dead. You’ll wish he was. It’s you … It’s us!’ She wiped her face, and took deep breaths until she
found her usual even voice: ‘He says you’ve got to go. He seems to know that we’ve been meeting out of work. How can he know? It’s not his business anyhow. This isn’t
sane!’

She handed him an office memorandum. Victor had put it on her desk, unsealed. Some office rubber-neck had read it and spread the news. It only took one prying clerk, one internal phone call, to
circulate bad news throughout Big Vic, from the atrium to the 27th floor. Victor had written the memorandum – in pencil – late on the previous Friday night, his birthday night. It
instructed Anna to tell Rook: ‘His out-of-work contacts and activities are not morally compatible with the trust invested in him. They have no place in an organizaion such as mine where
relationships between all members of the office staff, producers, clients, and customers, should be based on propriety and honesty. He is dismissed. Please inform him that he has until midday to
clear his desk, and that there can be no further contact between us except through the mediation of lawyers.’ There was an envelope for Rook – a formal note of termination.

‘He’s mad,’ she said. She understood the comforts of hyperbole. ‘He’s old and mad and wicked! He’s shut himself away up there like a gutless little kid. Does
he think he owns us all? Can’t we have “contacts, out of work” without the nod from him?’

But Rook was in no doubt what Victor meant by ‘contacts and activities’. Someone – he hadn’t got an inkling who, not yet – had spilled the beans. Victor knew now
all about the pitch money which the soapies had paid each quarter and which had made Rook so rich and careless.

‘He isn’t mad,’ he said. ‘And this hasn’t got anything to do with you, or us.’

‘We’ll fight for you! Come on!’

She was prepared to head an office strike, to draft petitions, risk her job, give Victor merry hell. She was prepared to burrow into Rook, and make a warren at his heart. Rook shook his head.
Why fight to lose? Who’d be his ally when the word got out about the scheme he’d run, the money that he’d made, the cynicism of his office jocularity? If he made merry hell, then
Victor or his lawyers might make hell of some less cheerful kind. They could inform the police and then the charge might be extortion or embezzlement. He’d end up in a cell. The old man
hiding in his room had struck a distant deal with Rook that robbed him of his work but not his liberty.

‘Anna. Please,’ he said, and shook his head. ‘No fuss.’ That’s all he had the heart to say. Already he was letting work and Anna go. He only asked for dignified
retreat. He almost packed a bag and just walked out. But Anna would not understand. She stood her ground.

‘Do something now,’ she said.

Her pluck – and innocence – put Rook to shame.

‘All right. I’ll make him talk to me.’ He thought there might be just a chance of changing Victor’s mind. He’d find a way of justifying the unofficial payments
he’d received. The payments were in Victor’s interest, after all. They kept the traders quiet. They guaranteed Rook’s role as intermediary between both camps. ‘I had to take
their money,’ he could say. ‘They wouldn’t trust a man who wasn’t in their pay.’

He knocked on Victor’s office door again. He tried to call him on the apartment’s internal phone, but the day-valet merely repeated that his boss could ‘take no calls until the
afternoon’. The truth was that Victor was hiding in the greenhouse on the roof, exterminating aphids once again and primping plants and looking out through glass and rain and wind on distant
neighbourhoods. What was the point in facing Rook himself, when he could deputize dismissals, and Rook could just evaporate before the afternoon and leave no trace?