The fat man did not watch them go. He waited for a moment, on his stick, while three waiters put the chairs and table back in place, wiped up the beer, removed the mushy eggs. The proprietor himself brought out a replacement beer, the best. ‘It’s on the house,’ he said, thankful for the damage and the mayhem that the blue note had thwarted and thankful, too, for all the rich absurdities which they had witnessed.
The fat man started on his beer, as unbothered, it would seem, by the spat which he had ended as by the money he had lost. The no-expression on his face said, Five thousand? That’s a morsel for a man like me. I’d throw a hundred of them to the wind just so long as I can have my beer and eggs in peace and quiet. He looked up, then. The thought of eggs had made him lift his eyes and run his baby tongue along his lips.
Victor was standing where he always stood. Hypnotized. The fat man held three fingers up. Victor selected three more eggs. He cracked their shells at their thick ends and peeled them white and bare. He brought the sugar from another table. He stood and took the coins from the fat man’s hand. He hoped that he would tear a note in half for him as well. He was not old enough to fully understand what he had witnessed: the fickle, slender contrivances, the artifices, the stratagems of wealth, its piety, its fraudulence, its crude finesse. But — given time — he’d understand it all and make a scripture out of it.
‘The fat man taught me,’ Victor explained, to those who wished to hear or read the complex moral of his anecdote, ‘that money talks.’ He did not know that such an insight was old hat and crassly simple. Or that his variations of this insight — such as ‘Money is the peacemaker’ and ‘Money’s muscle’ — were simple complications of the truth. What the fat man had displayed was cynicism, if cynicism is the trick of seeming to engage with chance and danger but without taking any risks. Money has no moral tact. It’s true, the rich have power to intervene, to heal and damage as they wish. Toss money in the ring and see the drama that it makes of other people’s lives. But, more, they have the power, if they choose, to stay more silent and discrete than monks. The rich — and here was Victor’s unacknowledged dream — can simply make a wall, a fortress shield of wealth, beyond which the dramas of the world can run their courses unobserved.
Victor so far — he was nine or ten — had led a life not free of drama of the tragic kind. The misfortune of his father’s death. The journey into town. The nights beneath the parasol. The fire. The days with Aunt and Dip. The liberation and the tyranny of eggs. His was a moral tale, an exemplar of how miserably the small fry of the world can fare. Someone could write a book on his first years and make it stand for all our city’s woes. No wonder, then, that Victor now wished for something more mundane than poverty. He wished to be a fat man, too, protected from the city by what his wallet held. In this, he sought what Joseph, decades later, sought. And that was privacy. He saw himself, an older, wealthy man, alone and dining in a public place. At times it was a city restaurant, at other times a trestle in the countryside, with chickens and with trees. There was no noise, except the sound of cutlery on plates. He was quite calm and unafraid. No one around was close enough to disappoint him or betray him. A waiter, paid to do his job, was all he needed. He did not need or want a family, or friends. He did not need the warmth of company or conversation, or the reassurances of praise. No one could come and give him Chinese burns. No one could let him down or disappear. There was no comfort which could not be bought. There was no problem that he could not solve by tearing notes in half. What is more eloquent and reassuring than a shield of private wealth?
So Victor now — and almost by design — became an undramatic boy. He had his room, his job, his street routines. He had ambition, too, but nothing to make good grand opera from. He set his sights painstakingly on targets within reach — more sales of eggs, a market stall, an orchard and a field, a motorvan, some staff, some ledgers and a desk … He told himself that when he was more safe and certain, he would test the magic of the torn banknote. Not five thousand, naturally. He was the timid sort. A hundred note, perhaps. But that day never came, despite the money that he made. Because he never felt that he was safe or certain? Because he was mean and unadventurous? That was the judgement of the town. No one expected such a man — and so late in life — to lower his defences for a while and toss his money in the ring.
Part Three. VICTOR’S CITY
1
IT WAS THE MONDAY after Victor — pent up all his life, between the nipple and the purse — had celebrated being old with a birthday lunch of coddled fish, fresh air, accordions. It was the Monday after he became engrossed in his last, his first, his only civic fantasy, to publicly display his private wealth at last by building a market worthy of a beggar woman and a millionaire. A damp and windy morning, just short of nine o’clock — and Victor the Insomniac, a boss who normally was at his desk a little after dawn, was nowhere to be seen.
Rook, with Anna at his side, walked the two kilometres of cobble, stone, and asphalt between his apartment and the tunnel below Link Highway Red. Her hand was on his arm. They seemed as fearless as lovers half their age, made adolescent by the comfort — unexpected, overdue — of flesh on flesh. No one would think these two — this sparrow-chested, greying man, this woman, warm and pouchy as a pastry bun — were husband and wife. Such wooing, binary displays belong to fledgling romances. Maturer ones are more abashed, less startled and enraptured by the luck of love. These two fledglings on the street were not the married kind. Their circumstance was clear: here was an out-of-season grande affaire between two people almost old enough to be too old, too sleepy for such public love. ‘Sleepy’ is the word the growers use to specify a pear, and other soft-fleshed fruits, which have matured but, though they have their colour and their shape, will soon begin to brown and rot and lose their flavour and their bloom. To taste such fruit is to taste the gamey pungency of middle age.
As they cut diagonally across the town, between the rush-hour traffic and the crowds, beneath the ochre-coloured eiderdown of clouds, Rook and Anna seemed misplaced, late Sunday revellers caught by the Monday morning light. The hastening single people in the street, toothpaste and coffee on their gums, a day of labour summoning, a desk, a loom, a till, gave way to them, as if a couple so engrossed and casual had passage rights, like yachts, to an unhindered channel at the pavement’s crown. We all defer to couples, do we not? A man and woman hand in hand can make the toughest of us step aside, can stop a tram.
This couple were not rushed. They were not hungry for their desks or eager for their colleagues and their phones. They held each other by the hand, the upper arm, the elbow, and the wrist. They held each other’s waists. And when they reached the walkers’ tunnel — just at the spot where Rook had used his keys and fists and where the mugged and flattened laurel leaves still lifted in the draught — they took advantage of the solitude and gloom to kiss. Once they reached the windy mall, however, they separated by a metre, and walked in parallel. The weekend spent in Rook’s apartment had been refreshment for them both. They’d hardly left Rook’s bed by day, and then at night they’d taken to the streets and bars to fuel themselves, with the reckless alcohol of crowds, the aphrodisiacs of drink, for more lovemaking. Yet now they walked demurely, chastely, along the coloured marble flagstones. It was not wise to love too publicly. Who knew who might be watching from the greenhouse on the 28th, or through the tinted windows of his office suite? Who knew if Victor — that unimpassioned, loveless man who seemingly had never tried the luxuries of pressing skin to skin, who could not understand the pleasures of the thigh, the tongue, the abdomen, the breast — might take against two lovers in Big Vic.