His car drew up and Signor Busi left Big Vic a happy man. Above him, on the 27th floor, his plans were strewn across the desk and carpet. Victor stood amongst them, a reference dictionary in his hand. Arcadia — a rustic paradise, he read. Arcadian — of pastoral simplicity. Arcade — a covered row of shops.
Signor Busi waited at the Excelsior for three more days, and on the fourth he received a call. Anna spoke for Victor. She was pleased, she said, to let him know that the Busi Partnership had secured the Soap Market contract. A formal letter would be sent, and Victor would be grateful if Signor Busi would extend his stay for three more days so that a press conference could be arranged and the timescale for construction plotted. He would, too, be sending Signor Busi sketches of a small statue which was a birthday gift to Victor from — how appropriate! — the leading market traders. It was a mother and a child and should be incorporated into Arcadia.
‘A small statue? This we will give pride of place!’ Busi told Anna. And then, ‘So, please let me give you pride of place at my table at the Excelsior tonight. Now I think it is not too soon to celebrate.’
4
ANNA ATE VEGETABLES like anybody else, but she was not an habitué of the Soap Market. She lived a little way from town — ten minutes on the bus, a forty-minute walk. She did not count herself so poor or so energetic that she need queue at market stalls and then transport her purchases by bag and bus. Within a hundred metres of her home there was a delicatessen with a fresh-products counter and an unhurried clientele, and this she used. Of course there were those times when she preferred to shop in city streets for clothes or shoes or presents for her nieces. Once in a while, after work, she set off down the mall towards the boutiques and the studios, determined to spend money on herself.
On the evening that Signor Busi first met Victor and then ventured to hold Anna by the wrist, she had felt so glad to be herself, so glad to be admired and flirted with (if only by a creaky clothes horse from Milan) that she went looking for a treat in town. She’d seen a brooch that she wanted, handmade, a galaxy of silver stars, a single moon of pearl. She’d need a darker jacket, too, to suit the brooch. Some Belgian chocolates, perhaps, could keep her company that night. She’d take a taxi home.
The jeweller had her workshop-studio beneath the timber galleries in Saints Row. Anna walked there by the quickest route. She was a little anxious that the galleries might close before the larger stores. But there the owner was, at work on a bracelet, a flight of copper geese. Anna could not see the brooch she wanted on display. She went inside. She asked. The jeweller did not lift her head, or take the magnifier from her eye. She said, ‘I sold it. Weeks ago.’
‘Do you have something similar? Another galaxy?’
‘I don’t do stars and moons, not any more. What I do now is birds and butterflies.’ Anna waited for some helpful word, for some expression of regret, for some polite farewell. Instead the jeweller, clearly not prepared to talk, instructed, ‘You could try elsewhere.’
Anna was too vexed to look elsewhere. What kind of businesswoman had such contempt for customers that she could not be bothered to raise her head or lift her eyes. Anna regretted that she had not gone home by bus as soon as work was done. She did not need a darker jacket now. She would not treat herself — and just as well, perhaps — to Belgian chocolates. Or take the taxi home. Instead she’d catch the bus back to her sewing and her television set, and spend the night, as many single women do, as silent and as self-possessed as quails. But first, she thought, she’d take a look at the Soap Market. It was so near, and on the way to her bus stop. Her contacts with the architects and with their plans had made her curious to see exactly what Signor Busi had meant that afternoon: ‘There’s nothing worth preserving there.’ She’d buy some salad for her sinless evening meal.
Anna had, a month before, turned her back on pasta, bread, and rice, and hoped to make her peace with lettuce and with beans. Her only lapse was chocolates. Those times that Rook had pinched her at her waist, the hoop of flesh too loose between his fingers and his thumb, had made Anna discontented with herself. She used to push his hands away. He called it teasing. He thought it was a pleasing intimacy to draw attention to her loss of shape. She counted pinches of that kind as bullying. Men, it seemed, were never satisfied for long with the details of the women that they loved. And that was heartless, was it not?
When Rook was sacked and had ignored her visits to his apartment and the notes she’d left, Anna had found cause to blame herself. She’d frightened Rook with too much passion. She’d slept with him too readily. She’d been the secret cause of his dismissal from Big Vic. Her ‘details’ were not right for him. If only she was slim and thirty-five, then Rook would leave his door ajar for her. Yet he was just as middle-aged and lined as her. At least she was not dry like him. She was not greying, yet. She could breathe without her chest trembling — though it was true that her chest would pout a little less if she shed three kilos, say. She’d learned to blame her weight, and not herself, for losing Rook. She never thought to blame and hate the man himself.
Quite speedily, she’d lost some weight and, if not trim, she was more statuesque and confident. She bought new clothes that fitted her. She had her hair shortened and razored at the neck. She exercised each evening on her phaga rug. Now that she was just a trifle lighter and more disguised by what she wore, she felt unburdened. But nothing that she did or ate could take away the pouching underneath her chin, or recompense her for the sudden, hurtful loss of Rook. What use were mottoes such as Yes-and-Now-and-Here if Now-and-Here were desk and home and bed without her Rook?
She was surprised, however, on that broochless night, how cheerful she was feeling amongst the shopping crowds and how seductive were the market stalls. One soapie dealt only in roots, the gormless starches of the fields. His carrots ranged in colour from the red of mutton steaks to the pink of carp; he had carrots as round and bright as fairy lights; he had them straight and long like waxen stalactites; he had them double-limbed. He had potatoes, too — all shades, all shapes, and kept apart in separate buckets. He had whites, yellows, reds, pinks, scrapers, bakers, boilers, friers, cocktail spuds, Idahos, Egyptian, Old Andean, starchy, seedy, sweet. He had potatoes which were grown organically and were presented with the soil intact (to mask the blemishes). He had potatoes slightly greened by light. These were good in salads, raw and shredded with some mayonnaise.
Anna burrowed deep into the Soap Market. She passed the ranks of oranges, the monsoon fruit, the chicory, the sea kale, the Valentino pears, the commonwealth of apples, and came into the cooler kingdom of the leaf. She wanted just one lettuce, but she was teased by choice and colour. She rummaged at a stall for a garden lettuce with a tight rosette. She’d never noticed how they smelled before. The salads at the produce counter of her local delicatessen were odourless. But here, banked up in such profusion, the leaves were acrid almost, funereal. Their odour was precisely that of damp clay newly turned to take a coffin. The lettuce that she chose was tight and heavy — an early Wintervale. Its leaf stems were white. The leaves themselves were strongly ribbed and shaped like scallop shells. These were the lettuce leaves that the Spirits of the Field would use as plates at midnight feasts when they were standing guard against the pinching frost. The soapie dropped the lettuce in a bag and took Anna’s payment as if the Spirits of the Field had yet to visit him.