Arcadia (28 page)

The police arrived – a single officer, already wet and robbed of patience – and there were comic scenes adorning both the evening and the morning television news and the front pages
of the daily papers, showing the drummer and policeman eye to eye. Both had their sticks raised in the air, both were intent on beating skin. The policeman, though, had been discreet and brought
his nightstick down upon the drum and not the drummer. The drummer was less restrained. He beat a tattoo on the policeman’s hat. In the photograph, two traders were stepping forward through
the jam of cars to intervene. They held placards as if they meant to chop the policeman down. One placard said, They Shall Not Pass – ironically, in view of all the chaos in the street. The
other exhorted, Save our Market from the Millionaire. That was the picture that the city saw. Those were the slogans that introduced them to Arcadia.

The traders were elated. Now they understood that, for a while at least, two hundred citizens could bring the city to a halt. They formed a crowd, a laughing, animated crowd, at the top of the
steps to the tunnel beneath Link Highway Red. Soon they were chanting slogans with one voice, walking unencumbered except by wind and rain down the centre of the mall. Their voices ricocheted wetly
off the office glass and stone and sounded like a bullet sounds when it is shot in a ravine and lodges in the buttocks of an elk. They were loud enough to summon Signor Busi and his host from their
breakfast to the parapet of Victor’s rooftop garden, and to crowd the tinted, toughened windows of Big Vic with staff, including Anna on the 27th floor.

The mall had not witnessed noise or passion such as this, not since the builders had removed their huts and debris and left the buildings clean and free for business. The architecture said
Don’t raise your voice, Don’t run, Don’t hang around
. Office workers, coming, going, did what they were told. The mall prepared them for the obeisances of the office desk
just as the aisles of churches subdue their congregations between the door and the altar. But the procession of greengrocers was not intimidated by the prospect of a desk. Encouraged by the
cameras, the echo and the camaraderie of rain, they bellowed slogans down the mall. The closer that the soapies got to Big Vic, the unrulier they became. To see their faces you would think that
they were mutinous and angry. In fact, these men and women were having fun. What is more fun than making noisy mayhem in a place where you’re not known but, yet, are flanked by a company of
friends? For once they felt like crusaders instead of selfish middlemen in trade. This day enriched them. Indignation and a drum would save their market from Arcadia.

They lined up with their placards outside Big Vic, unprotected from the rain, ennobled by discomfort, emboldened by their fears of being driven from their stalls. What then? No one had thought
to make a speech or send a deputation in or lobby for support and signatures from Victor’s office staff.

‘They only need to see us,’ Con had said. ‘And hear us too.’

So they stood firm and wet; and they began to chant and clap and jeer and offer leaflets whenever anybody passed them by to enter Victor’s fort.

Just before eleven the architectural press began to arrive for Victor’s conference, but there were other writers too, from papers and from magazines that would not normally concern
themselves with building schemes. Rook’s phone calls, Victor’s press release and invitation, the early radio reports of trouble in the marketplace and streets, had stirred the news
editors and the diarists to send their representatives. The Burgher himself had come (again my face is hoist above the parapet), and I was keen to follow up the anecdote of Victor’s coddled
fish with something else to make the rich seem ludicrous. I noted what the placards said – Save our Market from the Millionaire – and when I took their leaflet, saw what comedy the
Burgher could construct from Signor Busi’s pregnant domes. Already – and without, as yet, much cause beyond an appetite for mischief – the traders had a champion. The Burgher
loathed those men who gained their power and wealth from trade.

‘Who are these people?’

Signor Busi was glad of an excuse to leave the breakfast table and look out on the mall. An hour of non-business conversation with Victor had obliged him to sit silently, engaged in food, or
else – his choice, in fact – to hold a monologue. As Victor showed no sign that he was either bored or entertained, the monologue was free to range untrammelled and, perhaps, unheard,
amongst the pleasantries of Busi’s intercontinental life. He talked at length about New York, its obesity. Did Victor know New York? No? So Busi spoke about Milan, the town he loved and
loathed the most. It was more Celtic than typically Italian, he believed. Did Victor realize that London was closer to Milan than Sicily? Victor had not realized, but seemed prepared to accept
Busi’s word.

Now the architect was stuck. The more he said, the less he had to say. So he was happy to stand and help the old man to the parapet and relay – his eyes were sharp – what he could
see; the banners, the picket line, the drama in the mall. No, Victor did not know what all the distant noise was for. He sublet twenty-three floors of Big Vic to fourteen different companies, so
there were fifteen possible reasons for demonstrations at the door.

When Anna came to lead her boss and Signor Busi down to the press conference, she said that there would be delays. They had expected just five writers at the most and perhaps an agency
photographer, but there were thirty journalists in all, including a film crew and two people from the radio. The meeting room was far too small. They’d have to find a larger venue.

‘Then use my office suite,’ Victor said. ‘You might have guessed there’d be wide interest.’

Anna thought it prudent not to detail the width of interest that had gathered in the mall. She replied to Signor Busi’s urbane bow with a ceremonial smile and left to fetch the press.

Both men were pleased to launch Arcadia to such an eager group. The cameras were put to work as soon as the two men came down by Victor’s private lift. Anna distributed plans and
paperwork. Each file contained an architectural brief, a plan, a sketch, an article from the
International Gazette
about the Busi Partnership. Big Vic’s Publicity Manager introduced
the two men to the press. Signor Claudio Busi, he explained, would say a word or two, and then there would be questions and photo-opportunities and wine.

Signor Busi embarked upon his second monologue that morning, but on this occasion he had come prepared. The speech that he had already made to Victor would do for these people, too, except that
now there was no need ‘to glorify the vision of the man who pays’.

‘My work is familiar to you, I think,’ he said, implying that the new Arcadia was all his work. ‘I have been called …’ (here he laughed, to demonstrate his lack of
vanity) ‘… a guru of design, a philosopher amongst journeymen. I introduced the notion, as you know, of “building as event”. That is to say, that when we use a building we
should experience narrative and drama in the way that on a mountain walk we experience the textures and elements of landscape.’

As yet the pens and pencils of the press had made no mark. What were they building in the marketplace? A planetarium? A Disneyland? An operatic set? A wildlife park? Mont Blanc?

‘We have nostalgia and we have experiments,’ he continued. ‘We also have modernity. I think it will be clear to you – if I can now invite you to open up your files and
look at the impression of Arcadia – that we have opted for modernity, that is to say, for this city of today we replace the chaos of a medieval market with the harmony and dignity of a modern
one.’

He held his larger illustration of Arcadia up against his chest. ‘What does this recall to you?’ he asked, and gave no time for anyone to make a guess. ‘Here is a landscape at
the city centre,’ he said, and then – encouraged by the smiles that greeted every word – Signor Busi added ‘an amusing confidentiality’: ‘Something to make us
laugh. My colleagues in Milan have called Arcadia the Melting Glass Meringues. You see their joke, I think?’ I held the Burgher’s pen. It went to work. Busi had given me a comic heading
for that evening’s diary. He had surrendered his confectionery Arcadia to my cartoonist and to my irony.

‘Meringues? Are these cakes known to you?’ asked Busi, unnerved that no one seemed amused.

Victor hid behind his desk, his eyebrows making Ms and Ws. Perhaps he wondered whether this Italian was entirely sound, or else was blinking back his mirth.

When questions came, there were the usual queries about budgets and timescales which Signor Busi and the publicity manager handled with unnecessary detail. Then the tougher questions came,
‘What consultations have there been with the street traders currently at work in the Soap Market?’ and ‘What provisions have been made to protect the interests of the
marketeers?’ The PR man made reassuring noises. It was his opinion that the building scheme was in the interests both of the city and the traders. ‘Why, then, are there a crowd of
soapies demonstrating in the mall?’

The Burgher rose upon my legs. I held the market traders’ leaflet up and read the question that it posed and then the answers that it gave: ‘Arcadia? Who pays? You, the shopper. Me,
the trader. Us, the citizens. Them that value history and tradition.’

‘There are placards at this very minute at the door which call on us to help protect the market from the millionaire,’ I said. ‘I see the millionaire himself is silent. I
wonder whether we can ask him to reply to what the traders say?’

Victor did not stand. He did not want to speak, but had no choice. Old men can take their time, and not seem slow. He looked down at his hands. It seemed he would not speak at all, but then he
raised his head and looked, not at the people in the room, but at the rain which swept into the windowpanes.

‘The market’s getting taller. That’s all,’ he said. ‘When I was small the traders put their produce out on mats. You had to bend to make your choice. Then we
brought in raised stalls with awnings on which bags and tresses could be hung. You had to stretch to take your pick. So now we have Arcadia with steps and lifts and balconies. The market’s
like a plant. It grows and flourishes, or else it withers. There will be no problems with the marketeers. Arcadia will make them rich.’

‘The traders at the door do not share your optimism,’ someone said.

‘They will,’ said Victor. ‘I’ll speak to them myself.’

Quite what he meant no one was sure. They stood and watched him as he turned his back and went into his private lift, with Anna at his side, his papers in her hands. Would he go up or down? He
could have said to Anna, ‘Phone the commissionaires and ask them to select a couple from the crowd who are presentable. I’ll talk to them. And phone the police to clear the others from
the mall.’ Instead he said, ‘Let’s get it over with.’

‘What? Up or down?’

He pointed at his shoes.

It was simple, icy curiosity, not pluck or duty, which determined Victor to descend. His earlier rooftop view of what was happening below – even with Signor Busi as his sharper eyes
– had not been satisfactory. It all had been a little out of tune, a half turn out of focus, just as the television was these days for him, for all old men. Words and images had frayed for
him. Their selvages had gone. When Signor Busi had spoken for so long that morning, over breakfast, Victor had simply stared, uncertain when to nod or laugh or show concern. His hearing aid was
temperamental. It worked more clearly in shuttered rooms than in the open air. Weak light was a thinner filter for the sound. It left the consonants intact. It did not squeeze the words. At
breakfast there was too much light, and too much accent in Signor Busi’s speech. At times, it seemed to Victor, the architect had retreated into Italian, or else was speaking seamless prose
in which the pauses were as crammed with words as the sentences themselves. Was that a question that he asked? All Victor did was shake his head – a gesture which he hoped would be
appropriate. The animation of the younger man was tiring. What kind of dilettante was he that he chattered while he ate? What sort of breakfast guest was too insensitive to match his host’s
own reticence?

Victor had been relieved – though startled for a moment – when Signor Busi had so suddenly left the table to peer down on the mall. ‘Who are these people?’ Victor had not
got a clue. It seemed to him the tide was going out and beaching him with failing faculties. It ebbed, it ebbed, it ebbed. Quite soon the only sounds and images which were defined would be those
troubling ones – of Em and Aunt and eggs and fire – which were his memory.

Now that he was in the lift with Anna, though, his hearing aid was working perfectly. He heard the whisper of the steel hawsers, the detonation of the papers which Anna was tapping on her leg,
the brittle timpani of his own bones. He even heard and felt the air grow thicker as the lift went down. How long since he had last been to the lobby? How much longer since he’d passed
through Big Vic’s revolving doors? Three months at least. How long since God had last descended from the heavens to stand with mortals on the ground?

The power of the speech that he had been obliged to make for the journalists, the felicity of the words that came with such simplicity, had fired the old man with sufficient self-esteem to think
he could anaesthetize the crowd with ‘Arcadia will make you rich’. He was not nervous in the least – except, perhaps, that he was uneasy in the lift. It had dropped through twenty
floors and more and seemed to travel at a speed and with a purpose that was reckless. He had to steady himself on the lift’s steel walls, and then on Anna’s arm. He was not sorry when
his first journey for three months at least came to an end. The single door drew back and Victor looked out on the foliage of the atrium. All the ground-floor staff – receptionists, security,
commissionaires – were looking out onto the mall where marketeers were drenched in rain and indignation. Victor pushed his hair back – needlessly – with his hand. He buttoned his
coat, and walked across the atrium and stood, the shortest, oldest man, behind the crowd who blocked the exit doors. No one gave way. No one deferred. No one noticed him. He did not pass through
these revolving doors each day on his way to work or on his way back home. The man was not familiar.