Anna had already lost the final kilo of the three she’d targeted, and so she felt the cold more keenly than before. She wore a business suit beneath the astrakhan, the same creamy colour but a more expensive cut than Joseph’s On the Town. It did not tug across the chest or pinch the waist. Her hair was short and razored still, though her hairdresser had added ‘just a little fire’ by lightening her quiff. She was not the jolly Anna any more, and glad of that. Jolliness is a despairing refuge for women of her age. It tries to take the place of youth and looks, and is not dignified. Anna was now as solemn and as trim as the clothes she wore. She’d had enough of men, and she had vowed, for this New Year, to do without their oily approbation. She would not seek their sexual patronage. She would not be their carrion. Let them fear her for a change. She held the keys to Victor now — and anyone who sought the chance of sitting at his desk, enveloped by his cheesy old-man’s breath, must knock upon her door.
The doormen did not wince a smile at her as they’d once done, as she followed Victor onto the rainy mall. They almost called her Sir, she was so manly in her self-regard. And she herself no longer had the need to smile from 9.00 to 5.00, or be polite, or defer to the men in suits and uniforms. Promotion had redeemed her from the curse of growing old. She had an office of her own, an office staff, the power of command. She’d use that power to the full. She’d not be loose at work like Rook had been, his feet and cake crumbs on his desk. She’d not emulate his lack of gravitas, his office improprieties, his open door. She’d not be Rook, or Mrs Rook. She would, though, welcome just one chance to see the man again, to let him know how disengaged she had become from him. To let him see — and rue — her power and her sleekness and her pride. She’d have him on his knees. He’d be like Victor, like a child.
The old man now was in the car. His door was closed. His face was purposeless and spoiled. He needed her like no man ever had, that is to say he had no need for love or touch. Where should she sit? Beside the chauffeur? With the boss? The doormen knew the protocol. They opened up the front and near-side door so that she could sit in the servant’s seat, where Rook had sat on those rare occasions when he’d shared a car with Victor. But Anna walked round to the driving side, emboldened by her freshly minted resolution for New Year. The chauffeur was too slow to open up the far rear door. She opened it herself and sat down on the same bench seat as Victor, one upholstered metre between their hips. He would not try to hold her hand. He would not try to touch her knees, or even look at them, despite their newly nobled shape, now that they sat as colleagues side by side. She tapped the glass behind the chauffeur’s cap and they set off into the city. When they cleared the mall she spoke for Victor into the intercom. ‘We’re going to the Soap Market,’ she said. ‘We’ll need an umbrella when we’re there.’ Then no one spoke. The chauffeur hid behind his cap, disturbed by the breach of protocol which placed a woman at the boss’s side. The old man closed his eyes and mouth, in disapproval, surely. The chauffeur could not see him breathe or move.
Anna, sitting with her fingers laced across her lap, sucked on a granny mint to make her breath and stomach sweet and anodyne. What would she do if she saw Rook where Rook was bound to be, amongst the soapies in the marketplace? She let herself imagine he was standing there, among the idlers on the cobblestones, with nothing else to do but watch the limousine, with Victor getting out, and Anna hovering behind. She’d look him in the eye if he was there, if she had pluck enough to lift her head and face the crowd. She’d have no need or time to smile. It was too windy and too wet to smile. She closed her eyes and mouth to match the old man at her side. The windscreen wipers sounded like an oxygen machine, pumping air into their lungs. If it stops raining we will die, she thought. Her heartbeat matched the wipers. It pulsed beneath the astrakhan. The black and courtly limousine advanced through the rain. There was no haste. They were like mourners in a hearse, composed, embarrassed, fearful for themselves, grey-eyed, but from weariness not grief.
When Victor’s chauffeur took the car through the Woodgate district to the edge of what had been the Soap Market, all appeared quite well. Much of the debris had been removed, and nearly all the cars that had been parked were claimed and driven off. Already work had begun on the wooden palisade that would enclose the empty oval while Arcadia was being built, and city labourers were taking down the hazardous charred remains of bars and trees. For the first time for six hundred years the fountains and the gargoyles of the ancient washing place were unattended. They were as disused by the city now as pyramids. Soon the trenchers and the labourers would come to harvest cobblestones and box them up like sugar beets for their deployment in Arcadia.
The police had cleared the site of everyone but the workmen and themselves. Detectives had set up a caravan at the market edge to interview those witnesses who volunteered to speak. They looked through the rubbish for evidence of organized disruption and put the charred and broken bottle-bombs in plastic bags together with examples of the fruit and cobblestones that had been thrown. They interviewed the last few young men who came to claim their cars. A fixed-frame canvas shed had been erected above the spot where Rook had died, but no one stood on guard. Inside, placed on the cobblestones, were six or seven lighted candles and a spray of greenhouse blooms, making the inside of the shed a warm and makeshift corpseless shrine. Who’d put the candles there no one was sure. But they’d been left to burn themselves into the ground. Two uniformed policemen controlled all access to the market site. They hesitated when they saw the black Panache, but were persuaded by the chauffeur’s cap and the imperious flashing of the limousine’s front lamps to lift the makeshift barrier. Victor and Anna were driven a further twenty metres. Then they stopped. The chauffeur’s umbrella matched the car and Anna’s coat. Now Victor and his female aide were thigh to thigh beneath the chauffeur’s outstretched arm. She took her boss’s elbow to help him walk. He was no longer used to cobblestones or hazards such as broken glass, wet leaf mush, splintered wood. She let him lead the way, but he was lost. There were no markers in this empty space for him to recognize. Where had the women sat with their shallots? Where had he stood with eggs? Where was the thoroughfare of stalls which seemed, by day, as ancient and as permanent as a Roman road? Who’d start a fire, who’d die, to save a place so empty and so dull?
Victor was not the sort to share his memories. He seemed just like the old, rich man he was — too grand to feel the rain. So this was his diplomacy, to shuffle on the cobbles for a while, and not share what he felt with those two aides who kept him dry and upright. They walked, this threesome, to the public washing square. The trees and shrubbery which had been there were reduced to blackened stumps. The lawns were stubble, stiff and dead and black. But fire could not harm stone or water, and the medieval fountains, with their gargoyles and their pitted scrubbing stones, were just as they had been the week before, the century before. The fountain water, augmented by rain, was like all mountain streams, like every brackish spring, indifferent to every living thing on earth.
They watched the water for a while and then turned back towards the car, but took a slightly different route, enticed by what might be beneath the canvas of the blinking, well-lit shed.
‘That man died here last night, I guess,’ said Anna. ‘They’ve made a shrine for him.’ She knelt and rearranged the flowers so that they made a neater shape between the candles. ‘It’s sad.’
The two men did not speak, so Anna rose and spoke for them. ‘He’s someone’s husband or son or dad. Or else he’s one of those no-hopers who sleep out here. Perhaps they’ll never find out who he was. They’ll put The Unknown Soapie on his grave.’