‘My work is familiar to you, I think,’ he said, implying that the new Arcadia was all his work. ‘I have been called …’ (here he laughed, to demonstrate his lack of vanity) ‘… a guru of design, a philosopher amongst journeymen. I introduced the notion, as you know, of “building as event”. That is to say, that when we use a building we should experience narrative and drama in the way that on a mountain walk we experience the textures and elements of landscape.’
As yet the pens and pencils of the press had made no mark. What were they building in the marketplace? A planetarium? A Disneyland? An operatic set? A wildlife park? Mont Blanc?
‘We have nostalgia and we have experiments,’ he continued. ‘We also have modernity. I think it will be clear to you — if I can now invite you to open up your files and look at the impression of Arcadia — that we have opted for modernity, that is to say, for this city of today we replace the chaos of a medieval market with the harmony and dignity of a modern one.’
He held his larger illustration of Arcadia up against his chest. ‘What does this recall to you?’ he asked, and gave no time for anyone to make a guess. ‘Here is a landscape at the city centre,’ he said, and then — encouraged by the smiles that greeted every word — Signor Busi added ‘an amusing confidentiality’: ‘Something to make us laugh. My colleagues in Milan have called Arcadia the Melting Glass Meringues. You see their joke, I think?’ I held the Burgher’s pen. It went to work. Busi had given me a comic heading for that evening’s diary. He had surrendered his confectionery Arcadia to my cartoonist and to my irony.
‘Meringues? Are these cakes known to you?’ asked Busi, unnerved that no one seemed amused.
Victor hid behind his desk, his eyebrows making Ms and Ws. Perhaps he wondered whether this Italian was entirely sound, or else was blinking back his mirth.
When questions came, there were the usual queries about budgets and timescales which Signor Busi and the publicity manager handled with unnecessary detail. Then the tougher questions came, ‘What consultations have there been with the street traders currently at work in the Soap Market?’ and ‘What provisions have been made to protect the interests of the marketeers?’ The PR man made reassuring noises. It was his opinion that the building scheme was in the interests both of the city and the traders. ‘Why, then, are there a crowd of soapies demonstrating in the mall?’
The Burgher rose upon my legs. I held the market traders’ leaflet up and read the question that it posed and then the answers that it gave: ‘Arcadia? Who pays? You, the shopper. Me, the trader. Us, the citizens. Them that value history and tradition.’
‘There are placards at this very minute at the door which call on us to help protect the market from the millionaire,’ I said. ‘I see the millionaire himself is silent. I wonder whether we can ask him to reply to what the traders say?’
Victor did not stand. He did not want to speak, but had no choice. Old men can take their time, and not seem slow. He looked down at his hands. It seemed he would not speak at all, but then he raised his head and looked, not at the people in the room, but at the rain which swept into the windowpanes.
‘The market’s getting taller. That’s all,’ he said. ‘When I was small the traders put their produce out on mats. You had to bend to make your choice. Then we brought in raised stalls with awnings on which bags and tresses could be hung. You had to stretch to take your pick. So now we have Arcadia with steps and lifts and balconies. The market’s like a plant. It grows and flourishes, or else it withers. There will be no problems with the marketeers. Arcadia will make them rich.’
‘The traders at the door do not share your optimism,’ someone said.
‘They will,’ said Victor. ‘I’ll speak to them myself.’
Quite what he meant no one was sure. They stood and watched him as he turned his back and went into his private lift, with Anna at his side, his papers in her hands. Would he go up or down? He could have said to Anna, ‘Phone the commissionaires and ask them to select a couple from the crowd who are presentable. I’ll talk to them. And phone the police to clear the others from the mall.’ Instead he said, ‘Let’s get it over with.’
‘What? Up or down?’
He pointed at his shoes.
It was simple, icy curiosity, not pluck or duty, which determined Victor to descend. His earlier rooftop view of what was happening below — even with Signor Busi as his sharper eyes — had not been satisfactory. It all had been a little out of tune, a half turn out of focus, just as the television was these days for him, for all old men. Words and images had frayed for him. Their selvages had gone. When Signor Busi had spoken for so long that morning, over breakfast, Victor had simply stared, uncertain when to nod or laugh or show concern. His hearing aid was temperamental. It worked more clearly in shuttered rooms than in the open air. Weak light was a thinner filter for the sound. It left the consonants intact. It did not squeeze the words. At breakfast there was too much light, and too much accent in Signor Busi’s speech. At times, it seemed to Victor, the architect had retreated into Italian, or else was speaking seamless prose in which the pauses were as crammed with words as the sentences themselves. Was that a question that he asked? All Victor did was shake his head — a gesture which he hoped would be appropriate. The animation of the younger man was tiring. What kind of dilettante was he that he chattered while he ate? What sort of breakfast guest was too insensitive to match his host’s own reticence?
Victor had been relieved — though startled for a moment — when Signor Busi had so suddenly left the table to peer down on the mall. ‘Who are these people?’ Victor had not got a clue. It seemed to him the tide was going out and beaching him with failing faculties. It ebbed, it ebbed, it ebbed. Quite soon the only sounds and images which were defined would be those troubling ones — of Em and Aunt and eggs and fire — which were his memory.
Now that he was in the lift with Anna, though, his hearing aid was working perfectly. He heard the whisper of the steel hawsers, the detonation of the papers which Anna was tapping on her leg, the brittle timpani of his own bones. He even heard and felt the air grow thicker as the lift went down. How long since he had last been to the lobby? How much longer since he’d passed through Big Vic’s revolving doors? Three months at least. How long since God had last descended from the heavens to stand with mortals on the ground?
The power of the speech that he had been obliged to make for the journalists, the felicity of the words that came with such simplicity, had fired the old man with sufficient self-esteem to think he could anaesthetize the crowd with ‘Arcadia will make you rich’. He was not nervous in the least — except, perhaps, that he was uneasy in the lift. It had dropped through twenty floors and more and seemed to travel at a speed and with a purpose that was reckless. He had to steady himself on the lift’s steel walls, and then on Anna’s arm. He was not sorry when his first journey for three months at least came to an end. The single door drew back and Victor looked out on the foliage of the atrium. All the ground-floor staff — receptionists, security, commissionaires — were looking out onto the mall where marketeers were drenched in rain and indignation. Victor pushed his hair back — needlessly — with his hand. He buttoned his coat, and walked across the atrium and stood, the shortest, oldest man, behind the crowd who blocked the exit doors. No one gave way. No one deferred. No one noticed him. He did not pass through these revolving doors each day on his way to work or on his way back home. The man was not familiar.