The conspiracy is this, that we — the seemly citizens — obey the traffic lights, observe timetables, endure the shadows and the din. We do not cross, or park, or push, or jump the queue, or trespass, except where we are ordered to. We wed ourselves to work and tickets. We ebb and flow with as much free will as salt in sea. Yet we count ourselves more blessed, more liberated than the country dwellers whose tumult is a tractor and a crow, whose ebb and flow is seasons, weather, meals. And why? Because we townies are the only creatures in the universe to benefit from chains, to make our fortunes from constraint, to wear the chafing, daily harnesses of city life as if they are the livery of plutocrats.
Who is more harnessed, then? The docile banker whose life is squared and mapped and calibrated, or the vagabond? Which of these two is more blessed with power and with wealth but is most likely to observe the bulls and firmans of the street? Who is the lag and who the libertine? Yet who would be a vagabond by choice? What ploughman would not hope to be a trammelled plutocrat? We flock in to the city because we wish to dwell in hope. And hope — not gold — is what they pave the cities with.
So Joseph, then, was happier than Rook. His life was more uncomfortable, of course. But he was rich with hope. He had more empty years ahead, more possibility, while Rook now knew that he was in decline. Rook’s harnesses had been unloosed. His city held for him few promises, few hopes. What was he but an unemployed, unmarried, and unhealthy man, a firebrand turned to ash? Who’d take him on? What woman, what employer, what company of friends, what neighbourhood? He looked for sentimental comfort now, the first quest of the middle-aged. His life orbited round Anna, her gossip, what news she had of Victor and Big Vic. He was resigned to witnessing Arcadia.
Of course, he spent each morning at his table in the Soap Garden, drinking fewer coffees than previously, but more spirits and — foolishly — even smoking a cheroot. You could count on him to join in cards or dice or dominoes, and to win or lose more recklessly than most. He rested on his bed most afternoons, but did not sleep. He took no pleasure in the radio or television. He did not read (except the evening news). He rarely cooked a meal more complicated than some soup or egg. At first he met with Anna every night. She slept with him. She had her own drawer and a suitcase in his apartment. Her blouses and her cardigans shared hangers with his trousers. She used his razor on her legs. He used her perspiration sprays. They talked of selling both their homes and pooling what they had to buy a quieter, larger place a little out of town. They’d buy a car with the profit. They’d take a holiday — in Nice or Istanbul or Amsterdam. He’d look for work, he said, but did not look. He promised he’d bring brochures from the travel firms, but he forgot. He would not visit valuers to discover what the flat was worth, or what sort of home the two of them could buy on the outskirts of the town. He only talked of how their life would be if they lived as a pair. His only act of union was in bed.
Within a month or two, Anna felt she needed more time on her own. She was too tired after work for Rook’s invasive restlessness. She enjoyed, instead, the short bus journey to her own home, the respite of the empty rooms, the opportunity to sit alone in casual clothes with no demands beyond the television set. So she took to meeting Rook only on Wednesday nights and at the weekends. Rook was not pleased, of course, but Anna’s half-time absence suited him to some extent. It left him free to drink and smoke and gamble at night as well as day.
In time Anna’s Wednesday visits became less welcome. She wanted only to relax, to recuperate from work, to cook, make love impassively, sit up in bed with silence and a magazine. She did not wish to go out in the streets, take snacks in bars, make love more frequently, more rapidly, more testingly. The sexual hold she had on Rook was episodic and capricious. To indulge it was to end it. The moments of their greatest unity — their mouths and chests and genitals wrapped humidly together, their hands spread on each other’s backs, their legs in plaits — were the moments, also, when Rook became absolved of her. That is the turpitude of men and love. Rook’s orgasms unharnessed him. They transformed him, in an instant, from a man obsessed with Anna and the universe of bed to one impatient to pull his trousers on and walk, alone and passionless and free, out into town. He’d leave her less rewarded than a prostitute. At first, she would get out of bed with him, to wash and dress and rush outside when all she wanted was a massage and some tea, a shower and some sleep. But Rook always led her to the Soap Garden as if it had the only bars in town.
‘Why don’t you sleep out with the beggars and the alcoholics in the market?’ she asked. It appeared to Anna that Rook was obsessed, but not with her. He only wished, it seemed, to woo the Soap Market and its garden before they disappeared for good.
If Anna had been more certain of herself she could have taken charge of Rook. She could have gripped him by the wrist, as if he were a child, and led him to the valuers or to the travel firms or to employment agencies. She could have banned him from the market bars. He was weak enough to do what he was told. Instead she made do on his half portions. What choice was there? She made excuses for him.
One Wednesday night, he would not settle down to sleep, despite embraces on the counterpane and the post-coital sedative of sheets. He dressed again. He said he had to buy some milk. He needed some fresh air. He couldn’t breathe. She waited for him, but could not fight off sleep. When he returned, the broken noise of traffic from the street made clear that it was long past midnight. She did not need to ask him where he’d been.
She did not come on Wednesdays any more, and he was glad of that. When all the bars were shut he liked to join the vagrants in the marketplace. He liked to stare into their box and carton fires and share with them a song, a cigarette, a cob of roast maize, a throat of wine, a curse. They did not guess from how he dressed — his leather coat was old and bothered — that he was rich. They merely counted him as one of those, down on their luck but not yet down-and-out, who drank with them when all the bars were shut. They did not know, they did not care, what happened to him when he left. For all they knew he had a niche not far from theirs. In a corner of the marketplace, perhaps. Or in the sink estates — a tram’s ride out of town — where what had not been vandalized had never worked, where ground-floor flats were tinned up with corrugated sheeting, where staircases and lifts were urinous and dangerous and dark. No one among them knew about Arcadia. When Rook described the changes that would come it did not move them more than any other drunken, midnight speech. Why should they be alarmed? The distant future made no difference to them. They only waited for the bottle, still half a circle from their grasp. They only hoped the wood would last till dawn.
By day, Arcadia was much discussed among the marketeers. Of course. Surveyors were at work, and questionnaires were circulated. Inspection ditches had been dug across the grass in the Soap Garden. Women wearing ID badges sat on stools to monitor and graph pedestrian usage of the different market sectors. Outline proposals and planning certificates were displayed — as law decreed — at focal points. The marketeers were bemused, but flattered, too, by all the attention they received and by the consultation meetings and the Soapie Parliament that Victor promised them. They had agreed amongst themselves that there was little point in fighting progress with more demonstrations or with petitions. What power had a line of people or a list of names against the will of money to be spent? No, they would be modern citizens. That is to say, they would suppress their passions and hope to profit from their pragmatism. The boss had given them his word. The demonstration on the mall had winkled Victor from his lair. He’d stood amongst them in the rain and what he’d said had been a challenge: change your ways and prosper.