They imagined working under glass: warm in winter, cool in summer, dry and windless, weather-free. There’d be the same old camaraderie but air-conditioned. The fruit and vegetables would survive, be crisp and firm, be sellable, a few days longer. There would be less waste, and what waste there was would make a profit, too. Pig farmers on the edge of town would pay a fee for each full bag. The soapies saw themselves driving freely in vans. They’d save on porters’ fees. They’d save on time. There’d be disruptions, naturally. How would they manage during building work? But, all in all, the traders were buoyant. In fact, they were impatient. They were tired of being soapies: make us Arcadians, and quickly.
Rook’s bitter auguries did not alarm them. It did not matter how disgruntled Rook might be. Con was the man to listen to, and he, though cautious, shared the view that they had less to fear from progress than from torpor. Rook had fooled him with his jeremiac prophecies, ‘All this will disappear’, ‘You’ll soon be out of work and rattling round the streets like me’. Con now was more inclined to trust the word of Victor. It angered him that Rook was such a fixture in the marketplace and in the bars. Had he no self-respect? Had he no tact? If Arcadia would put an end to Rook, then that was fine by Con. Rook preached his words of warning, but anyone could see, and smell, that his views were distilled in alcohol and flavoured with the bitters of regret. The time would come when all his kind, the nighttime nestlers, the parasites, the idlers, would be swept away. Welcome the day!
It took a little less than twelve months for the Busi Partnership to complete their plans and raise a Bill of Quantities and put out the building tender. Architecture is a bureaucratic art — and Markitecture, as some comic christened the attempts to marry art and trade, was doubly bureaucratic because each detail had to satisfy the pocket and the eye, the aesthete and the businessman.
Victor provided offices in Big Vic for Signor Busi’s younger colleagues. The Philosopher Among Journeymen was not involved. He’d been persuaded to spend the winter in New York; the weekends in Manhattan, the weekdays upstate at Cornell where he had been appointed Comstock Visiting Professor in Art and Design. He gave sermons there on the Italian Masterbuilders — Giovanni Michelucci, Franco Fetronelli, and himself.
Busi’s colleagues wished he had not promised to make space for Victor’s birthday statue. They were the modern school and saw no point in statues that were, they said, ‘as sentimental as Capo di Monte figurines, but without the benefit of dwarfishness’. They wanted something glass or plastic, something steel, something big and time-honoured in concrete, a symbol of Arcadia. But they were stuck with Beggar Woman and Her Child, style 1910, in bronze.
Victor had insisted on where the statue would be placed: at that entrance to Arcadia which was the closest to the Woodgate district, halfway between where Em had begged and died.
‘Perhaps we could persuade a builder’s truck to back up and wreck it,’ one architect suggested. ‘We’d have a modern sculpture then, Flattened Woman and Her Child.’
My God, how they were bored by meetings, and evenings spent in their hotels, and all the budget-bullied cutbacks from their plans which were required, and which themselves required new plans, new calculations, work. They did not like our city. Newcomers seldom do. They are not literate in what leads where, or how and when. These architects hoped they’d never need to know our city well. Their main desire was Do the Job, and Home. They set a day, the first day of the year, when building work on Arcadia — two years of it — would start. So New Year’s Eve would close the market and the decade down.
There was a problem. You did not need to be a space-time engineer to spot a two-year gap between the closure of the Soap Market and the opening of Arcadia. Those rash and early promises that builders and merchants could work in concord, the market stalls amongst the scaffolding, trade amongst construction, could not be kept. Were they naive, or mischievous, these undertakings? How had anybody ever thought that tomatoes by the kilo could be compatible with six-tonne shovels and ballast lorries and men in safety hats? No one on site! That was the builder’s sensible demand. It only needed some old lady laden down with cabbages and onions to take a fall or take a bruise from building work and she’d be shopping for a lawyer and for damages before her bruise was brown. So Victor’s managers were told they had to relocate the market stalls for at least two years.
Victor himself was sent a memorandum — but what did he employ managers for? Besides he only had to look out of his window to see the perfect and the only answer to the two-year gap. There were open fields of tarmac, parking for the mall’s nine thousand staff and more for visitors. Two areas, three hectares each, were underused. They were too far from offices, and windswept, dirty from Link Highway Red which passed close by. Blue whisker herb and smog-nettle had taken purchase in the tarmac, making do with lime from the painted parking grids and puddled rain for soil. At night this was where lovers came and prostitutes who traded from the kerb, with rocking cars and peeping Toms parked asymmetrically for privacy. By day it was as empty as a prison yard. With access from the highway and, for pedestrians, by tunnel, this was the perfect place for market stalls. Good news for everyone involved. Or so Big Vic would have the world believe.
People are ready to be fooled. That’s optimism. ‘This is the price you have to pay for Arcadia,’ the stallholders were told, when they were trying to make light of their predicament, their exile to the car park. ‘If you want your share of wealth then you must expect to take some risks, to suffer inconvenience. We’re talking business here, not charity.’
Who told them that? Why, Rook, of course. He was amused to tease them with their foolishness, their gullibility. Why had they ever thought that Victor’s plan was some crusade to make them more secure and wealthier?
‘Con led you down a cul-de-sac,’ he said. ‘You may be sure he’ll turn out fine. They’ll keep him sweet and quiet at any cost. The last thing that they want is trouble on the mall again — so Victor’s men will take good care of Con. He’ll get prime site, you’ll see. But what about the little traders, the ones who don’t make noise but just scrape by, selling from the backs of vans? Or those who’ve got five kids to clothe? Or those …’ Rook was drunk and smart enough to make an endless list in which the only one who showed a profit from the move into the car-park site was Con.
No one doubted Rook was mischievous. He’d ducked and weaved too many times before. He’d broken free and realigned too frequently for any of his alliances to count for much. But it’s a fact that even fools and drunks and liars can sound alarms. What does it matter who shouts fire, or how, so long as there are flames? Here, then, was the Soap Market in its final weeks. It seemed the same as it had always been. There were no closing sales. No bargains to be had. Fresh food has a shelf life of a day, a little more in wintertime. There were no stocks to clear because in produce markets stocks are cleared each day and replenished overnight. But there was something stale upon the air, more pungent than the market waste or the odour of too many people in one place. This was the putrefaction of resolve, the enfeebling of that prod-and-nudge which got the traders from their beds each day at five to bargain with the wholesalers, which gave them pride and pleasure in the stall-top patterns they could make with what they had to sell, which made them cheeky, cheerful, quick with repartee. Now they did not wake with an appetite for work. They did not relish the day. They were offhand with fruit and customers. It did not matter which of these were bruised or handled without care. They left the business in the hands of sons and nieces and stood in circles, hands dug deeply into pockets, shoulders down, to hear the latest rumour or hard news about their prospects between the market and Arcadia.