Rook would not admit his pettiness, that what he wanted most was some wounding, simple recompense. He fooled himself that there were nobler motives driving him. The fiction that he made was this: that his months of leisure, free from Victor and Big Vic, had resurrected an old self that had ideals and principles worth fighting for. How could he forget the man he’d been a dozen years before when the produce boycott had been organized? They’d listened to him in the market then. They’d cheered. He’d stood on a platform made from crop boxes, dressed in clichéd black, and made that speech that all the papers had reproduced in full.
‘This Soap Market,’ he had said, ‘is here to make good salads and fruit pies. To put some muscle into stews, some zest in cake, to keep the city fed. It is not here to make men millionaires. So we traders should let the market die before we let the prices outstrip the common people.’ They’d flocked to that — and they’d held out on strike for seven weeks. A stirring time. The world turned upside down, with market customers bringing cake and cheese and bread to feed the soapies, and every stall and awning dismantled, and not a scrap of lettuce to be seen.
The striking soapies had given Rook the mandate to negotiate. They’d trusted him. But Victor knew the trick of tearing notes in half. ‘Why let the market die?’ he’d asked, made loquacious by the seven weeks of damage to his wealth. ‘You only harm yourselves.’ His agents and his managers had offered Rook a compromise. You lift the boycott, and trade according to the prices we have set, they counselled. And in return we freeze the market rents for two years, maybe three. You traders save a little cash for … OK, you win, let it be frozen rents for the full three years. You save the marketplace for good.
Rook had said he was only a mouthpiece, that was all, but that he doubted his colleagues would betray their principles. Victor had spoken again. How much are principles? he asked himself, but he said out loud, ‘It would be democratic, don’t you think, if my, our, colleagues in the market had some constant spokesman at my side to represent their principles.’ He had not looked at Rook, but had written a sum in pencil on a memorandum pad and slid it across his desk so Rook could see. ‘That is the kind of yearly sum that we would pay for such a diplomat.’ Rook had shaken Victor by the hand and had taken the stipend of the diplomat.
So now Rook felt he had the chance to make amends, to piece together once again the man that had been raised within the odour of the marketplace, that had been schooled in radishes and rambutans, that thrived in clamour and crowds. He’d save the Soap Market. He’d be the champion of marketeers. He’d climb up on the platform once again and ‘represent their principles, their fears’. But then, once he had sobered from the fever of the phrases in his head, he thought again, more clearly. Platforms were for innocents. Speeches only waylaid passion with fine words. The player with the strongest hand, the running flush, was not required to show his cards. So it was in politics — for, yes, Rook was now so inflated with the altruism of his mission that he’d cast himself as a man in service to the citizens. In politics you did not need to spout or strut or speechify if you could quietly slip behind the scenes to sabotage, to juggle, and to complicate. He had a plan, unformed but irresistible, which would deliver Anna to his bed, and damage Con, and punish Victor, and introduce that muscly Joseph to the truth that brains and money are more powerful than youth. He’d cause a little mayhem, too, for Signor Busi of Milan — and leave himself the hero of the marketplace.
So, four days after Rook and Anna reconnected in the Soap Garden bar and on the day that Signor Busi won the contract for Arcadia and once again invited Anna to his table, they walked to the Excelsior. They’d been together every night and had slept so deeply, back to back, that the dreams and snores which celebrated their resurrected passion did not wake them. They were refreshed by the affection that they gave and got, and Anna took the change in Rook, his liveliness, his youth, to be a sign that he returned her love. Why else would she, a careful woman wedded to her work, agree to dine with Busi and to chance his busy hand so that she could, for Rook, become a common thief?
Rook had been careless. He should have let Anna walk the final metres to the Excelsior on her own. But she was nervous — as she had a right to be. Dining with a stranger in a hotel such as this would make the toughest of us tremble. Rook had let her hold his arm until they reached the polished marble steps of the Excelsior.
‘Aha, my dear. You’ve brought a companion?’
Signor Busi was standing at the carpet edge, spying on the women in the street. Anna let go of Rook and, at once, wondered why. She held his arm again.
‘He’s a friend,’ she said, but had the sense to give no name.
Rook was disadvantaged by Busi’s height, his clothes, his age.
‘I was just passing by,’ he said. ‘Have a pleasant evening.’ He walked away, but slowly enough to note how Signor Busi had a voice that was as carpeted and marble as the hotel steps.
Rook would never know what happened between Anna and Busi that night, and she would never learn how Rook had passed his time. Though they, of course, would tease each other with alternatives.
It was quite clear to Rook and Anna that they were tethered to the ardour of the night. As they parted, both were charged with the sexual static implicit in the triangle that they formed — the ageing, elegant seducer; the apprehensive woman in her finery (bathed, perfumed, bangled, silk-dressed in gold and black); the thin-faced breathless lover transformed to thin-faced, breathless pimp as he despatched his paramour on her — on his — assignment; the dining table set and waiting with its single rose, its silver tub of ice, its candlelight and its connivance in the creed that all is fair in love and trade; the hotel bedroom with the balcony and matching lampshades, curtains, bedspread; the salacity of wintertime.
Rook had said to Anna, ‘Do what you can to get a copy of those plans. Do anything. It’s up to you.’ He had not said she ought to sleep with Signor Busi but, then, he had not asked her not to. He was excited, that’s for sure, by the power that he seemed to have. He liked to enmesh her in his intrigues and to allow the notion, if not the fact, that she would sleep with Busi if instructed so. How sensual it was, how riggish, how sportingly loyal, how grandly stimulating that she might do this thing for him. What would she not do, now, with Rook in his own bed, on his own floor, if she could be so dutiful as to serve him with another man?
Anna, for herself, had not contemplated for too long what Rook had meant by ‘Do anything. It’s up to you.’ She took his meaning, but she took it as a joke. She did not want to think that Rook, despite his recent protestations of affection, would use her as a bribe, a trinket. She had no wish to be his representative in Signor Busi’s arms. But Rook had spoken with such passion and such verve about his mission to save the Soap Market that she had redefined herself as a woman who, by surrendering and making servile her love for Rook, could consolidate his love for her.
Of course, she would not, when it came to it, allow the architect to touch a centimetre more of her than the pale, unsensual flesh around her wrist. But she had fooled herself into believing there was no insult in Rook’s evident indifference. She did not say, ‘If that old smoothie has the nerve to try it on with me he’ll get my dinner in his lap,’ or ‘If you’re so keen to get a copy of these plans why don’t you go and sleep with Busi yourself. He doesn’t seem the choosy sort. And nor do you.’ She did not say, ‘I’m not a prostitute.’ She simply let the atmosphere between them stay a little warmed and moist with the licence he had imposed on her to ‘Do what you can to get a copy of those plans’.