The tourists take their coffee and their photographs, with views across the rebuilt medieval washing place towards the thickest foliage of Arcadia. The camera with a narrow lens can take a photograph which shows just water, washing place, and leaves, a flash of cockatoo, a beam of sun. Arcadia, so framed, could be a part of Yucatán or Abyssinia. It’s true the tourists cannot sit and pose amongst the resurrected gargoyles or the repaired stone, or trail their fingers in the water as they smile on film. A man in uniform is there to see they don’t. ‘What next,’ he’ll say, if they protest. ‘Let people touch the water, then they’ll want to wash their feet in it? Swim in it? Piss in it?’ He’s down there now. I see him prowling at the water’s edge, a two-way radio reverberating in his hand. He helps and points, reproves and redirects. He shows where handicapped visitors can find the courtesy wheelchairs, where children can be left in the Jungle Crèche while parents or au pairs shop and take a snack in the Picnic Basket, the Texas Pantry, or the Hunger Monger. No eating on the hoof, of course. It is not done to take an apple or an orange from your bag and munch it as you browse. There’s pith and skin and core to clear. No dining on a sandwich that you’ve bought outside. There’s paper then, and crust. No cigarettes, except inside the bars. This is the price you pay.
Yet, Arcadia is a triumph. Let’s admit it. It weathers as I watch; it settles in. There is no complacency, just the swagger and ambition that cities flourish on. I’d stand here happily — glass in hand, alone — all day, and not be bored, and not grow tired, and not be stifled by its flamboyant uniformity, by its recreant geometry, by its managed cheerfulness. Give me the chance. Give me the time. Give me the bottle and the glass. I’d sooner look upon Arcadia than anything in town. Yet I’m obliged to socialize. The room is filling now, and we are making phatic conversation, amongst the vines and birds. We put the world to rights. We are as vehement about the rain as we are sanguine and ironic with politics and trade. We do not merchandise our gossip, yet — not till our sixth or seventh glass.
When we have eaten, swapped our formal news, we leave the table and our muddied plates to stand in groups about the room, to stand in pairs in conversation as we look out through the bird-stained glass at birds or through the cleaner glass at Victor’s earthly paradise. What must we look like, standing here engrossed in our last drinks? I press my nose against the glass, twenty metres up above the market concourse, and watch those citizens, those purchasers below. I look, no doubt, like Victor looks, up on the rooftop garden of the 28th. I look like every suited grandee looks: untouchable, untouched. Yet, this I know, as I grow older, I must descend the stairs and join the populace before my day is done. The city claims its citizens before they die. The taxi cabs are full of younger men. The trams — soon to be replaced by subway trains — are slow with pensioners who cannot find their money or their step. The streets these days are for the old and weak and poor. I’ll leave no monument to me. No bar or restaurant, no market hall will bear my name. My book, if I survive to see it done, will have my name in print — but think how big my name in print will be compared to Victor’s name, a banner on the cover. My labours print his mark more deeply on the town. His labours press me deeper in.
So the lunch is done, and we go back to work or home, a little drunk and overfed. I’ve time to wander in Arcadia. I fool myself this is research, that everything I see is Victor manifest. Certainly it is not dull, though Victor manifest should be more dull than this. It is a work of art and industry and arrogance, but, then, where would our city be without these three? We’d be a village still. Arcadia hunches its four backs against the town, the sky, the world. Who, passing through its halls, its barrow-vaulted sub-lit aisles of glass, can tell or care if it is night or day, or north or south, or spring, or windy, wet or bright? Arcadia is — that word again — Invulnerable.
I take the route, along one trading corridor, which would have led from the old bars to the edge of the Woodgate district. I am besieged by colour and by smell. There is no wind or cold, and any sun that filters through is bounced by angles, shed by glass, and spread by glossy walls as if it were the bogus light of theatres. The music and the smells are piped: fresh bread with Paganini; oranges augmented by the quintets of Osvaldo Bosse. I cannot hear the birds. Even the humidifiers — roaring in the heavens of the building’s carapace — are silent at ground level. The fountains cast their strands of water as quietly as a jug pours milk. The traders do not shout. They do not cry their wares. They have found out what only now I discover for myself, that — removed from wind and open air — man-made sounds are quails. They cannot fly. They cannot travel far. They tremble on the ground. No screeching indoor parakeet can pierce a flight path with its cry. Any raucous marketeer evangelizing fruit would find no echo to endorse his claims. At best, the sound he’d hear — if he were close enough — would be the sullen impact of his voice on toughened glass.
Though the noises of Arcadia are flat, the fruit and vegetables have never seemed so polished and so uniform. The traders, beneath their matching awnings, seduce the passers-by with produce of the gene-bank and the science farm, enhanced by Spray-Dew, Frost-Ban, and by packaging. Recessed orange lights warm and flatter every radish, every grape, every hybrid superfruit. Together with the onions and the swedes, are Kingquats, a kumquat bigger than a plum and every part of it — the peel, the pith — is edible. And there are orange grapes, and bananas from Barbados shaped like avocado pears. And avocado pears without a stone. And lab-grown lettuces (red or green or white). And glasshouse broccoli with flower-heads as big and tight as cobblestones, achromatic rhubarb force-grown under fluorescent lights, and bio-technic aubergines which some chemist-gardener has artificially bloated in dioxide pods. Young men in search of romance can still buy their loves a courting quince, just as before, but more romantically presented in a silver nest with a heart-shaped, perfumed top. Each purchase has its plastic bag, each plastic bag its coloured logo for Arcadia; each coloured logo is a dancing apple with a hygienic, grub-free smile.
If I were rich I could buy jewellery and suits from boutiques which trade side by side with salad stands. If I were ill I could select a dozen cures for my maladies from the fresh herb shop; some adder buckthorn for my bowels (recalcitrant), some juniper for failing sight, some camomile to help me sleep, some cuckoopint to keep alert my hope of finding love, some mistletoe as sedative, some poisoned laurel sap for the new Burgher’s gin. If I liked fungi (I do not) I’d have the choice of fifty sorts from Mycologia, The Mushroom Shop. Should I prepare a fritto misto for my supper from an edible bolete? Or should I select a honey mushroom or a chanterelle?
If I were looking for a gift, a set of gaudy stamps from the philatelists might take my fancy. A first edition (slightly stained) of dell’Ova’s Truismes, complete with margin notes by Pierre Loti’s bastard son. A pair of hand-made gloves. A pastry-house with stucco-marzipan and flaked walnut tiles. A T-shirt printed with my name, or any name I choose. A postcard hologram of Arcadia. Or I could light a candle for the birthday of a friend. The Market Chapel is a shop and pays the usual rent, so needs to sell as many candles as it can. Nothing is cheap, of course. Don’t rummage for your bargains here. Arcadia is built to shake out pockets, unzip wallets, cash cheques, debit bank accounts. It is a monumental Dip. Victor has created the perfect cash machine. The traders pay, on top of rents, percentages to Victor, too, like feudal peasants paying ‘overage’ on everything they sell. You see, Arcadia observes tradition after all. Something medieval is preserved intact! (If I were still the Burgher, there’d be a paragraph in this.)