Our room is on the highest level of Arcadia. Sophia leaves me to go alone upstairs. She is too busy to escort those Buffers whose hearts and lungs and legs are so abused and slack that they climb slowly. Not one of us is less than sixty-two. What journalist, at sixty-two and more, could climb a stair at speed? What journalist would climb the stair at all unless there were good food and drink and gossip at the top? Not one of us is so required at work that he — yes, every Buffer is a man — cannot take time away from his desk to lunch with fading comrades. We’re of an age, when we toast ‘Absent Friends’, to mean those colleagues who are dead, or those few and tough successful ones too busy to be there — the managers, the editors who’ve grown grey and powerful like grizzly bears, while we are as grey and powerful as pigeons.
But us, the Friends too idle to be Absent? We undertake the stairs at Victor’s-In-Arcadia unburdened by wealth or status or by energy. We’re winding down our working lives. We’re dining out on what we were, before they took our offices away, before we were reduced from editors to columnists, from publicity executives to small-ad men, from roving correspondents to custodians of the letters page, before our bylines were removed.
The Burgher now is someone else. A younger woman has my job. She is not interested in the fate of millionaires or city councillors. The power that she follows is power of a different kind. She spends her afternoons in bars and restaurants and hotel lobbies. She writes a column cast with television hosts, and dance-club managers, and rich men’s sons. The term ‘Invulnerables’ is hers. She never misses trysts or tête-à-têtes. She lunches out on indiscretion, celebrity tantrums, scandal, flagrancy. Her sources are the city’s maîtres d’, the waiters and receptionists, the hotel boys who take the breakfast trays to guests.
I’m bitter, naturally. What trickery of physics allows the world to spin, yet leaves me motionless? They’ve moved me sideways to the waiting room, their mordant description of the office where the older, valued men like me are asked to wait until, at best, our underfunded pensions turn us out. I’m known as Back-End Editor. I have the weather and the law reports in my control. Obituaries, as well. You see how comic these professionals can be with words? And grimly accurate? Of my four predecessors three have died of heart attacks. The fourth has cancer of the throat. The Back-End Editor? The waiting room? The Press-Club Buffers? My laughter thins and hastens as I grow fat and slow.
Today I am the first Buffer to arrive, and glad of it. I have the chance to catch my breath and fuel myself with drinks. We like to formalize the lunch, to listen to each Buffer give his news before the meal. Today I’ll tell them what I know of Victor, the man who built Arcadia and gives his name to this restaurant and bar, the man who is too old these days to interest my substitute. His ninetieth birthday passed by, unremarked by her.
Why Victor? Here’s the news which almost gives a skip to my edgy pacing of the room. Six months ago I prepared the old man’s obituary for the pending pile. I turned — the well-trained journalist — to the trusted testimony of the cuttings files. What could I learn of him from what’s in print? I searched the archives and the only items on the man, apart from industry and trade reports, were those I’d written up myself. He’d brought fish by taxi for his birthday once, from the station to Big Vic. He stole a candle from a colleague’s grave. Enough to deepen interest in the man, of course. But not much of an epitaph. I phoned Big Vic. Anna, his deputy, a woman in her fifties now, sharp-faced, a little overdressed, but winsome still, did what she could to help. And then — when she had checked the accuracy of the obituary — she said, ‘He’s looking for an author to prepare a memoir. Might you be interested …?’ And so I am the one retained to write his Life. Luck has landed me a paying task for my maturity. A contract’s signed, and already I have spent some — mostly silent — time with him, though he has told me anecdotes of a fat man in the Soap Market and he has talked a little of his childhood. Is that the word? Is ‘childhood’ not too innocent for how he passed his urchin years, for how he says his mother died in flames? The old man had a mother, yes. Her name was Em. He’s not the product of a melon and a cucumber after all. I have, through Anna, some access to the files, her private memories, and — more crucially — some pointers to the old man’s early life which seem to bear his story out. But Anna much prefers to talk of Rook, and of the boy who murdered him. She has procured court depositions for me to study, and can arrange, she says, for me to visit Joseph on the prison farm (he’s working in the fields again!) where he is serving life. She mistakes me for a detective-journalist, a Woodward or a Bernstein, and wants me to investigate what truly happened all those years ago to Rook. I have asked her more than once to dine with me, to socialize about the book. But she declines. She gives more thought to Rook, it would appear, than she gives to her boss’s life. She shows no interest in his childhood or his youth. For evidence of Victor in his later years I have no need to search. I only have to look around — at our hired room, at our refurbished town.
I’m in a treehouse made of glass. On two sides there is stretched netting screening off the market concourses below. The netting supports creepers, cycads, vines. They are the building’s drapery. They grow from elevated beds, together with other hot-house plants such as philodendrons and spider palms which can breathe and neutralize the atmosphere. It is their task — for nothing here is idle or unplanned — to filter from the air the carbon monoxide, the benzene and the formaldehyde, the fumes and vapours, the leakages and pungencies of Arcadia.
The plants define the frontiers of Signor Busi’s ‘largest aviary yet’. One hundred cockatiels, one thousand finches, sixty pheasant doves, a throng of budgerigars, and cockatoos and parakeets and minah birds, a petal storm of buntings, are billeted up here. They seem to like the glass and framework of Arcadia better than the trees. They make their nests and perches on the tops of the suspended humidifiers which — under the direction of a computer christened Zephyr — blast compressed air into the tropics of the aviary. The birds shuffle on the metal girders and the arching glassmounts, pecking at the paintwork made loose already by the eczema of the rust. Rainforests cannot keep rust at bay. But glass has kept the day-hawks out. They hover at the transparent domes of Arcadia, like children at sweet-shop windows, hopelessly drawn to candied parakeets.
Imagine what so many birds can do to glass. They settle on the window frames and jettison their chalky waste in reckless, heavy streaks which provide food and habitation for lime flies, silver thrips, and fleas. What architect could plan for that? What glazier could outwit birds and coprophagous parasites? What scaffolder could foresee the territorial conflicts that take place above Arcadia’s trading concourses, its restaurants and bars? I look out through the room’s streaked glass to see what causes such raucous purpose amongst the rainbow flocks. A small brown interloper from the city streets, a sparrow in its business suit, has found its way inside Arcadia. Busi’s ‘hermetically sealed megalith’ is no match for a hungry sparrow. It has squeezed through the cavity of an expansion joist, and then found passage through the ill-docked heating duct. The bird now seeks to feast on sunflower seeds, mixed nuts and grain put out in feeding trays by the custodians. The doves are beating at it with their wings. A cockatiel has caught the sparrow’s underbreast. Down in the folds of netting which separate the people and the birds, a dozen corpses can be seen. Dead sparrows that have reached this dripping, heated heaven and have died.
The third side of the room has unstreaked glass. No birds. My view is unrestricted, except by bamboo leaves and vines and slight myopia. I look down on the building’s centrepiece, its hub: the garden court to which the trading corridors and halls, the stairs, the patios, the terraces and balconies defer. I spend a little time watching the light-show on the fountains, its blushes and its loops, exactly like the blushes and the loops which decorate the chamber music being played by three young women and a man on the concert podium by the open brasserie. The entertainment’s free all day. Six Africans will play their drums this afternoon. A girl will juggle with some market fruit. The Band Accord, those ageing sisters and their friend, will squeeze out melodies for tea.