‘My father’s buried over there,’ the chauffeur said. ‘In the Woodgate cemetery. My mother, too. We used to live round here. I’ve soapie blood …’
They stood like tourists in a foreign church, familiar with the funereal intimacy of candlelight, but ill at ease with dispositions they’d not met before: the flapping walls; the cobblestones; the rhythmic catechism of the rain on canvas. The weather worsened. They could hear it growing sullen. The candle flames curtseyed in the damp, cold air which pierced the fabric chapel. Water made its way between the cobblestones and crept inside to puddle beneath their feet. They might have been upon some Afghan plain, three hundred years ago, pinned in by space and sky and frost. The office blocks and tenements which circled them, though distantly, invisibly, were ancient cliffs, shrinking in the cold and wind and rain.
‘I’ll bring the car,’ the chauffeur said, glad to leave the candlelight. ‘It’s raining pips and pods.’
‘Exactly,’ Victor said to Anna after they had stood still and silent for longer than made sense. ‘It’s pips and pods. Just listen to the rain. I never hear the rain inside Big Vic. It’s pips and pods. She used to use that phrase. You can hear exactly what she meant.’
‘Who meant?’
Victor did not dare reply. He did not wish to make himself seem foolish as the chauffeur had, weak with sentiment. He crouched as best he could to look into the candle flames.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘we’ll take a lighted candle with us when we leave. The fellow who died here won’t mind.’ He broke the waxy seal which fixed a candle to its cobblestone. ‘A country ritual, that’s all. You take a lighted candle from the old place to the new. That way you keep the goodwill of the past.’
‘I’ll carry it.’ Anna held her fingers out. Just as she’d thought, the boss was like a child.
‘No, no.’
‘What “new place” will you take it to? Arcadia? That candle isn’t long enough to burn for two years.’
‘We’ll take it to the car-park site. It’s just a symbol.’
Anna’s nod displayed her patience and obedience, but not a sign of understanding.
‘It’s true you don’t grow rich on sentiment — not in the market trade,’ said Victor. ‘Hard work is what it takes, and common sense. But ritual has its part to play. We should not underestimate …’ He did not finish what he had to say. He was an undramatic man.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘You carry it.’ He held the candle up for Anna to hold. ‘Take care the wind and rain don’t put it out. A rain-soaked wick is bad luck for a hundred years.’
WHO PHONED the Burgher? I can’t be sure. I did not take the call. The chauffeur, maybe. Anna? No. The policeman who controlled the barrier and let the Panache pass into the squints and alleys of the old town? A worker at the car-park site? Some restless, spying spirit of the town? There’s always someone in a city with a tale to tell, and there are always Burghers to dress it up and publish it. Prompted by the memo on my desk from this unnamed source, I wrote a paragraph for the Burgher column. They ran it on the morning after Victor’s market pilgrimage on the usual inside page of the edition which had pictures of both Rook and Joseph on the front. The headline was ‘Soapie Rioter Charged with Murder’. Rook was described as being ‘an executive assistant in the produce-market industry, until his recent redundancy’.
By nine o’clock on the morning of January 2nd, when Anna walked down the mall and entered Big Vic, Rook’s name was known throughout the town. Office workers in the atrium pored over copies of our newspaper, regretting, relishing the fate of one so popular as Rook.
Anna sat before her untouched desk. She breathed as evenly as her tightened ribcage would allow. Could she now make more sense or less of what had happened in the canvas shed, of the strange journey in the car protecting that small flame as they sped through the town? The day before, the words she’d used had seemed too strong. ‘It’s sad,’ she’d said. But now ‘It’s sad’ took on a fugal note. She could not find the words to go beyond ‘It’s sad’. She could not comprehend the burden of the news expressed so solidly in print.
The Burgher — steered by me — took the lighter view, of course. ‘It’s rare these days’, I wrote, ‘to see Victor, the city’s octogenarian Vegetable King, out on the streets. But if you could see through the tinted glass of limousines you might have spotted the old man in the recently truncheoned Soap Market yesterday afternoon. No doubt he came to creak his respects to Rook, his one-time accessory, who was struck to the ground in the small hours of New Year’s Day.
‘Sharp-eyed citizens report that Victor did not come away empty-handed. The greenhouse recluse who is not, you will recall, averse to transporting fish fillets to his table in a taxi, departed from Rook’s market shrine with a lighted candle in his hand. The candle made the journey across town by chauffeur-driven limousine. Of course. Who says the rich aren’t ludicrous?
‘My colleague, our religious-affairs correspondent, tells me as he passes between the city’s clubs and bars on some lifelong mission of his own, that “candles light the darkened alleyways through which we all must pass when time is up, and all our bottles emptied to the dregs”. Is it the fashion in these straitened times to pay respects to recent employees by removing candles from their place of rest? Victor’s “spokeswoman” could not say when I phoned on your behalf to put that simple question. She only knew the price of beans.
‘I’m sure a man as practical as Victor will find a use for Rook’s half-candle, if only to grease the elevators of Arcadia. The old greengrocer might, too, like to pillage the cemeteries and morgues of our city for further spoils. Gravestones make good foundations. So do bones.’
Part Four. ARCADIA
1
TODAY THE Press Club Buffers have their monthly lunch at Victor-In-Arcadia. We have the private room, beyond the mezzanine restaurant. There the finest produce of the market floors is served al dente for the city’s swiftest, trimmest, smartest clientele: I am not one.
The female maître d’ of Victor’s-In-Arcadia — ‘Madame’ to us, but Sophia to the younger men — conducts me past the rising stars, the upstart businessmen, the skipjack currency kings, whose mobile phones and calculators share tablecloths with button mushrooms à la grecque and vegetable brochettes. I pass the inner bars, and then the Conversation Pits where men and women half my age strike deals and attitudes in easy chairs. This is not the populace at lunch, and these are hardly citizens at all. They are — forgive my want of charity — Invulnerables, protected from the town by bottled water, parking permits, air-conditioned cars, and by the jaundiced deference of waiters, commissionaires, receptionists, the police. Their tables are reserved. Their clubs, their tailors, their dentists, and their apartment homes are ‘Private and Exclusive’, meaning they are closed to those who are not dignified by wealth or birth or fashion. They seldom need to queue or step onto the street, but organize their lives through fax machines, credit cards, and home deliveries. Or else they delegate these tasks to secretaries, adjutants, and housekeepers who are employed to keep the world at bay. No wonder that, despite the stresses of the street, their faces are so cool, their suits and skirts so crisp and clean, their tempers so dispassionate. No wonder I am tempted to topple bottles into laps as I pass slowly by.