Arcadia Read online

  Arcadia

  JIM CRACE is the author of Continent, The Gift of Stones, Arcadia, Signals of Distress, Quarantine (winner of the 1998 Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Being Dead (winner of the 2001 National Book Critics’ Circle Award), The Devil’s Larder, Six, and The Pesthouse. His novels have been translated into twenty-six languages. In 1999 Jim Crace was elected to the Royal Society of Literature.

  ALSO BY JIM CRACE

  Continent

  The Gift of Stones

  Signals of Distress

  Quarantine

  Being Dead

  The Devil’s Larder

  Six

  The Pesthouse

  JIM CRACE

  ARCADIA

  PICADOR

  First published 1992 by Jonathan Cape

  First published in paperback 1993 by Picador

  This edition first published 2008 by Picador

  This electronic edition published 2008 by Picador

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-330-47374-3 PDF

  ISBN 978-0-330-47373-6 EPUB

  Copyright © Jim Crace 1992

  The right of Jim Crace to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  The tallest buildings throw the longest Shadows

  (thus Great Men make their Mark by blocking out the Sun,

  and, seeking Warmth themselves, cast Cold upon the rest).

  EMILE DELL’OVA, Truismes

  Editions Baratin, Paris (1774)

  Contents

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part 2

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part 3

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part 4

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Part One

  THE SOAP MARKET

  1

  NO WONDER Victor never fell in love. A childhood like the one he had would make ice cubes of us all. He lived on mother’s milk till he was six, and then he thrived on charity and trade.

  On the day that he was eighty, Victor dined on fish. He loved fish best. As he had scaled and silvered with old age, so his taste for fish had grown. Ten live perch from his own stock pool arrived that morning at the station and were driven by cab in a plastic travel-tank to his offices. The kitchen staff were used to Victor and his coddled fish. They planned to cook them steeped in apple beer, and serve them cold with olives from his farm. There would be champagne too – the boss’s own. And fruit, of course. All this for just five birthday guests. Greengrocers every one, spud-traders, bean-merchants, middlemen in fruit – and each of them, like Victor, old and slow and hard of hearing. There were – at his request – no gifts, no cards, no cake. He would not tax himself – or any of his staff – with speeches. What old men want is peace and informality, and the chance to talk amongst themselves like smutty boys.

  He said he wanted a simple country meal. The fiction in his mind was this: that he would sit surrounded by his friends beneath a canvas awning. There’d be white cloths on a shaky trestle. A breeze. The guests would push off their slippers and rub their bare toes in the dust. They’d twist round on their stools and spit olive stones in the air. Some cats and chickens would take care of crumbs and perch skins. With just a little teasing and some cash, the cook’s fat son would play plump tunes on his accordion. That was Victor’s ideal birthday meal. Simple, cheap, and attainable for country people living earthbound on a farm, say, thirty years ago; but a dream beyond the reach of cheques and fax machines for a man whose home is twenty-seven storeys and a hundred metres up, with views all round, through tinted, toughened glass, and tinted, toughened air, of office blocks and penthouses and malls.

  Nevertheless, the man we knew as Rook had done his best to cater for old Victor’s dreams. White tablecloths were easy to locate. Rook had the cats. The breeze was air-conditioning. The old men could shake their slippers off and rub their toes in carpet wool. They could spit their olive pips at waitresses. Why not?

  They’d have to go without the chickens, reasoned Rook. Victor could not have free-range hens clucking amongst his halting guests. He was not Dalí, yet. The accordions were booked. The agency had arranged a band of three, two sisters and a friend. Perhaps, thought Rook, he ought to spray the elevator with aerosols of field dung, or play recorded birdsong on the intercom. He’d have the boss in tears. He’d have the boss in tears, in any case. He had resolved to indulge Victor for the day. He planned to dress a birthday chair for him in greenery, just like they used to in the village where Victor was born. Just like the chair in Leyel’s Calendar of Customs: Plate XVII, a fogged black-and-white photograph of a small boy from the twenties, beaming, tearful, overdressed in breeches and a waistcoat, amid the birthday foliage of a high-backed seat. Victor could have the same. Office Security and Caretaking would disapprove – but, surely, Rook could decorate a chair without the building grinding to a halt. A little greenery would do no harm.

  So that was Rook’s day arranged. It made a change from simply standing by as the old man inked his mark on cheques and papers or pointed his icy nose at the latest trading journals or – more warmly – at Alkadier’s Illustrated Guide to Greenhouse Coleoptera, which was his bed and desk and lavatory companion. Besides, it released Rook onto the streets for a while. His greatest joy, to let his tie hang loose, to dodge and stroll amongst the people of the city. But earning wages all the time, bleeding Victor’s purse, bleeding purses everywhere.

  There was a city garden, at the heart of the crop market and not far from Victor’s, where there were roses, laurels, and all sorts of green-grey, stunted shrubs. It used to be the public washing square, and was known still to all the locals as the Soap Garden. With a logic more poetic than functional, the market which engulfed the garden was known, too, as the Soap Market, though soap was not on sale. The bludgeoned medieval scrubbing stones and the gargoyle fountains of the washing square were still there, though protected from the people by a fence. Seats and tables spilled out into the garden from the many adjacent market bars. And there were lawns, a cake-and-coffee stand, and shrubbery that would make a perfect dressing for a birthday chair. I could send a chauffeur or a clerk, it’s true, t
hought Rook. But on sunny days like this there were girls spread out across the grass – more and prettier than he’d ever meet in country lanes. Why waste such prospects on a clerk?

  He told Anna, the woman who ran the outer rooms, hired and fired the staff, and controlled the door to Victor’s office suite, that there were ‘arrangements to be made’ and that he’d be gone two hours at the most. ‘Bring back a cake for me,’ she said. She was no fool. She knew Rook well. She’d known him hurry out before on urgent morning calls, then caught him sitting idly in his room with nothing on his desk but crumbs. He was not the sort to play the grandee if the staff included him in their gossip or their pleasantries. He did not have a reputation there for hard work, or pride. He was Victor’s buffer – and his fixer – that was all. Boss said; Rook did. Though what Rook did and fixed was anybody’s guess.

  Anna liked the teasing mystery of Rook. Her pleasure showed: her voice amused, her face a little flushed and kindled. She wondered if she would dare to share a cake with him, their mouths and tongues contesting every crumb. They’d been so close to that a thousand times before – his hand upon the waistband of her skirt or pinching at her flesh, his breath upon her neck, as they stood in line at the coffee or the copying machine; her hand, just playfully, on his, when side by side each morning, when hip to haunch at Anna’s desk, they checked the agenda of Victor’s day. If this was love, then it was wise, not youthful love, not timid love, not blind romance. And if this was simply passion and no more, then it was in good hands, for Rook and Anna were both old – and young – enough to make the most of passion while time was on their side. For Anna there was pouching beneath her chin, some lines and bruising at the eyes, a softness to her stomach and her thighs, some parchmenting of skin along her inner limbs, the loss of buoyancy, and more, to tell her daily, every time she washed or dressed or ran, that she was over forty and that she should dare to change her motto from the Careful Does It of her youth to Yes and Now and Here.

  For Rook the signs of ripening were much the same, plus listless hair that was blanching at the temples and an asthmatic’s prow-like chest as evidence that, underneath the lively tie and shirt, his lungs were shallow and distressed. He saw himself as lean and weightless. His mind was lean. The expression on his face was lean. But – naked in the shower or in bed – his leanness was exposed as thinness. But still he was a tempting, enigmatic man, not dry or beaten like the other men she knew. Anna dared to look him in the eye and contemplate the cake – and more – that they could share. ‘We’ll see,’ she said, not quite aloud, her fingers church-and-steepled at her chins, her spirit moistened by the prospects of the day. Yes, yes. Yes here. Yes now. Rook recognized himself in her. He smiled at Anna and he asked, ‘Just name your cake. What can I tempt you with today?’ She said she wanted a Viennese with fruit and cream. That would go well with the best champagne which she expected the boss to press upon his personal staff so they could toast him at his birthday lunch. Rook promised to fix it. What he’d do was this. He’d see to it that all the people working in the outer rooms got cakes and drink. They’d join the aged greengrocers in celebrating Victor’s eighty years. The staff could eat a cake, he thought, without the building grinding to a halt, though buildings-grinding-to-a-halt appealed to him.

  Thus Rook, on that summer Friday in our city, was armed with errands to gather cakes and greenery, as he descended the hundred metres and the twenty-seven floors by Victor’s private lift and walked towards the open air through the pampered, plastic foliage of the atriums which flared and billowed from the building like quilted valances of glass. He showed his face and his Staff Pass at the tasselled rope and stepped between the wings of a revolving door. THESE DOORS ARE AUTOMATIC, announced the sign. It was a warning and a boast: These Doors are Greater and More Permanent than You. They simply swept him in a rotating triangle of processed air into the sun and breeze beyond. All security ended there.

  You note he did not choose to take a car. There was a man on duty at the doors who would have been glad to summon one, a taxi or a chauffeured company Panache. Rook was valued there as much as Victor’s perch – if not a little more – and he was not expected to take his chances on the street. But he preferred to walk. And who would know? Five minutes and he would be amongst the crowds, indistinguishable from all those other duplicates in office wear on worktime errands in the city. What could be sweeter than to pass unrecognized amongst familiar strangers, or to proffer half a nod, a shadow smile, to passers-by whose faces rang a bell? What democracy! – to dodge and jostle, tadpoles in the stream. But first he had to walk the hot and empty cloisters of the mall where the noise of distant traffic was waylaid by architectural water. It fell and fountained, day and night, with a rhythmic certainty no mountain stream could match. Rook did not pause, despite the heat and solitude, to sit beneath the award-winning lamp posts on the mall, or to play elaborate hopscotch on the coloured marble flagstones.

  He chose a route which freed him from the shadows. He fixed his eye ahead, upon the skyline, where the unaspiring towers of the ancient town competed for light and oxygen with the mantis cranes of building sites and the skeletal scaffolding of half-completed office blocks, draped for modesty in flapping plastic skirts. Rook said he loved to see the cranes perched overhead. He loved it best, at Summerfest, when all the cranes were hung with streamers and with lights and there were fireworks. Then, for once, the streets were duller, darker than the night sky. He liked his city noisy, teeming, dressed in black. He saw himself as lean and black, a cliché creature of the night. Indeed, that’s partly why our Rook was known as Rook: the black clothes that he wore when he was young and on the streets. The rook-like nasal cawing of his laugh, too, his love of crowds, his foraging, his criminality. But more than that: the puff-chested, light-limbed posture of a bird.

  They said he’d made his money out of Victor – that Victor, childless, heirless, treated Rook like a son and settled money on him in lieu of love. A cheque was Victor’s version of a kiss. ‘Money is the best embrace,’ he said. But there the gossip amongst the secretaries and clerks was way off mark. Victor – for all his years and for all his understanding of the blandishments of money, of how people could be purchased and caressed by cash – paid Rook a salary, no more. And Rook was wise enough to keep his office fingers clean. He knew how frayed and slender was the leash which tied him to the old man’s purse, and, indeed, how loosely that leash was now held, how easily his boss could let the leash go free. For two men who spent so much time together, they shared few sentiments or loyalties. Rook’s cheerfulness should not be taken as fondness for his boss or work, but more as his device for filling in the silences which were the heavy furniture of their daily intercourse. Victor did not appreciate Rook’s special knack of levity, his disregard of silence, his subversion of proprieties, his aggravating idleness. Victor’s simple creed was this: until a man agrees to dedicate himself to work, then he will not be rich, or valuable, or admirable, or – best of all – at peace.

  Yet Rook was rich, there is no doubt. A poorer man would not pass up the offer of a limousine. It takes a man who’s certain of his wealth to choose to walk when he could ride. It also takes a man who’s used to streets, whose heels have eyes, to know when he is being followed and by whom. As those dismissive, automatic doors rotated Rook into the unconditioned air, a fellow, hardly in his twenties, with a cream and crumpled summer suit, detached himself from the hard shadows amongst the quirks of a colonnade and followed him onto the mall, keeping, catlike, to the sunless walls. He sauntered like a truant, faking interest in the fountains, the street lights, avoiding joins and fissures in the coloured marble flagstones. Here is, his manner meant to say, an innocent abroad. It said, instead, here is a ne’er-do-well at large. Stay clear. Watch out. Protect your pockets when you walk.

  Rook’s ne’er-do-well was fresh in town. His nails were cracked like slate. His hands and neck were scorched. His eyes were streaming from the windborne grit and dust which pecked and
spiralled at his face. He hadn’t learnt the city trick of squinting as he walked. He was jubilant at being there and far from home, and lost, and poor, and free. He had in his pocket an old flick-knife that’s spring was slow and temperamental. No cash. Sometime, on Victor’s birthday, he’d come face to face with Rook. Who’d come off worse? He was an optimist, though in the end, of course – unless there was murder on his mind – a boy like him was bound to come off worse. At best, there would be poverty ahead, and drink, and crime, and selling sex and favours in the street. At least while he was young. And then just poverty and drink.

  If we were looking for two poles-apart to represent good fortune and bad luck we could not better these two men, the fixer and his shadow, as they ducked into the walkers’ tunnel and passed below Link Highway Red which separated the old town from the landscaped decks and platforms of the new. It was a tunnel built for beatings or for rape or for the urgent emptying of bladders or as a refuge from the rain and night for people without roofs. Pillars provided dark recesses for loiterers. Its low lighting winked and buzzed, failed at intervals or flared like photographic bulbs. The paper litter scooped and fluttered like a pigeon, trapped and fretful. The smell was urine mixed with street.

  Rook thought his shadow might close the gap between them underground and there would be a tussle for his wallet, or he’d be cornered for ‘a loan’. He walked a little faster then, and breathlessly. He wrapped his fingers round his keys, so that any punches thrown by him would be hard and heavy. He was glad to see the daylight spilling down the steps at the far end of the tunnel and to hear the pavement clack of women’s heels, the vendor bells, the shop-front tannoys touting bargains for the town, the doors and horns and brakes of cars.