The guests spread out, at ease, delighted, cured all at once by the magic of the place, invigorated by the care and passion bestowed on every plant that grew on that rooftop. The centrepiece, so different from the sculptured water in the mall, was a pond surrounded by a path of broken stone. There were no fish, but there were kingcups, hunter lilies, flags, and — hunched over, like a heron — the shoulders of a dwarf willow, providing shade for paddling clumps of knotweed and orange rafts of bog lichen. There were shrubs all around, some in clay pots, some in amphoras coloured thinly with a wash of yellow plaster, some in raised beds. A wooden pergola, heavy with climbing roses, honeysuckle, creepers, led towards the greenhouse. The traders followed Victor there and rubbed the leaves of herbs and primped the seedlings like owners of the land.
The Band Accord was summoned to the greenhouse door. ‘Play on, play on.’ The waitress poured more brandy. The old men passed the glasses round like schoolboys on an outing, making sure they kept for themselves the fullest glass. They all found a place to rest or sit. Some upturned pots, a wooden bench, some low staging for the plants, made perfect seats. The cats made the most of the dry and practised hands, the bony laps, the strokes and preening that were on offer. The waitress was a little flustered by the flirting helpful hands which aided her with drinks. The two stout ladies of the band and their slimmer friend, on the other hand, were serenading this impromptu glasshouse gathering with the smiles and gestures of the most intimate nightclub. ‘To Victor!’ And someone added, ‘May you grow new teeth.’
Everybody raised a glass and once again the band squeezed out the Birthday Polka. Everybody sang the words and passed their glasses for more drink. Victor stood to say eight words, no more, of thanks. ‘Just like the village parties, gentlemen,’ he said, promoting the deceit that he had sap for blood, that he was just a countryman at heart. ‘Your health.’ He looked out for the second time that day towards the garish awnings of the marketplace. Before he’d had a chance to sit, he added one more toast, ‘Our town!’ He swept his hand towards the market, as if to wipe the townscape clean. He would have said, if he had been a more loquacious man, ‘Before I die I’d like to clear all that! To start afresh. A marketplace. A building worthy of our town.’ Instead, he said (he could not help himself), ‘To business, gentlemen.’ Again they lifted glasses up, and drank. ‘I trust your businesses are well. No problems that you want to talk about?’ No one was in the mood to answer him. They shook their heads and laughed, as if the very thought of problems was a joke.
‘Well, then,’ said Victor. ‘That is as it ought to be. Rook’s paid enough by me to solve and settle problems …’
‘By us as well …’ The man who spoke had meant it as a joke. He’d never stopped to think before whether Rook’s pitch payments were transactions that he shared with Victor. Too late to wonder now.
‘By you as well?’
‘It’s nothing much. A gratuity for everything he does.’
‘What does Rook do that is not already funded by his salary?’
Victor saw discomfort all round. He read it perfectly. No wonder Rook thought the Soap Market was paradise. The market termites droned for him. The man was taking bribes. Victor knew at once what he must do to this extortionist and how — a timely gift — it served his longterm purpose perfectly. A man like that, a man who served himself before his boss, a man, moreover, who could not be trusted should a market-renovation plan be contemplated, could not expect to keep his job. There was no wickedness in that. It was a duty for a boss to let the shyster go, just as it was the task of gardeners to rid themselves of bugs.
‘How much exactly do you pay?’ he asked. Again, there were no volunteers to speak. They did not wish to seem the victims of dishonesty, or collaborators in deceit. Victor took a notebook from his jacket, and a pen. ‘Jot down the size of payment that you make to Rook,’ he said. ‘I would not wish my friends to pay more than they ought.’ Of course, they did as they were told.
Downstairs, one floor below, Rook and Anna judged — as all seemed quiet in Victor’s office suite — that the time was right to seat their boss in his birthday chair, amongst the gleaming foliage, and to raise their glasses in a toast. The chair was carried from the anteroom. The drinks were poured. More champagne, naturally. The chair was placed at the centre of the lobby outside Victor’s suite where they presumed the birthday lunch was — quietly — still in progress. Rook stood behind the chair, a smile composed already on his face. Anna knocked on Victor’s door, and entered. The only sound and movement in the room came from the air-conditioning.
‘They’ve gone,’ she said to Rook. He came and stood beside her at the door and looked where she was pointing, at the table, at the olive pips, the undrained glasses, the stubbed cigar, the detritus of orange peel and fruit skin and undigested fish. Anna laughed, and — doing so — she dropped her head momentarily onto Rook’s shoulder.
‘They must have doddered to the roof,’ he said, and put his arm around her waist. He felt elated and uneasy. The empty room, the woman’s reassuring waist, the birthday chair, unoccupied and foolish in the middle of the lobby, were not what he had planned.
‘Let’s drink the champagne anyway.’ He turned his back on Victor’s door and sat himself amongst the plastic foliage of the birthday chair, satirically, defiantly. He lifted up his glass until Anna, standing at his knees, was still and silent and composed. She raised her glass as well. ‘Ourselves!’ she said. ‘Ourselves … ourselves … ourselves … ourselves …’
7
THE MARKET WAS as good as gone, and so was Rook. Decisions had been made, that day. The skyline of our lives was changed. Five halting traders, a band, a waitress, and the boss took air and brandy on Big Vic’s garden roof, while, on the 27th floor, Rook and Anna grew tipsy and engrossed with lesser things. There’d be a romance (How we love that word!), one death at least (We’re not so keen); there’d be distress and devilment upon the streets, some fortunes made and lost — and all because a dry old millionaire, alive too long, a little drunk, had fallen foul of that ancient sentimental trap, the wish to die yet linger on.
When Victor offered up his glass and said, ‘Our town!’ perhaps the toast was not for what there was but for what he saw in his mind’s eye, the prospects and the dreams. His hand swept up across the distant cityscape. He wiped the market off, as if he was simply clearing steam from glass and looking on the hidden clarity beyond, his place in history.
The story, though, that was running through the city by that midnight was not the one that would change lives and landscapes — unless you were a fish. The story that amused the traders and the porters as they gathered in the Soap Garden for their final coffee-and-a-shot, that so obsessed the chatterlings, the social consciences, the bleeding hearts, the evangelists of social change who talked into the night, was the story of Victor’s coddled fish. The fish at Victor’s party — or so the midnight edition of the next day’s city paper claimed — were better treated than his guests. Ten fresh and living perch were taken from the station to his offices. ‘By cab!’, was the report. Their plastic travel-tank was lifted by porters onto the cab’s rear seat and the driver was instructed to go no faster than a hearse. Live perch, it seemed, could lose their sweetness and their bloom if sloshed about like lunchtime bankers in the backs of cabs. Their flesh would flood and stress and, no matter what the chef might do, would disappoint at table, clinging apprehensively to the bone and tasting faintly bitter.