Is there not cause to celebrate this new diversity, this innocent variety of goods, despite the claims of oracles and pamphleteers who say our city’s in decline — and money is the force? Yet how could those greengrocers who once traded out of sacks and boxes in the Soap Market meet the rents and standards of Arcadia? They had to modernize or close up shop. Every shop that dosed was taken up within a day, by businessmen whose visions were much looser and much wider than the soapies they replaced. Who needs so many outlets for a grape? One grape these days is much like all the rest. It makes good sense to let a market such as this diversify.
You only have to see the crowds to know these changes work. See how the middle classes flock from shop to shop, a bunch of parsley in their bags along with a batik headscarf that they’ve bought, and a piece of blue goat’s cheese. See those valet-attended dowagers braving arthritis and discretion in the couturières. See how the bars and restaurants are packed with men and women who never used the windswept bars in the old Soap Market for fear of chaos and antipathy. See the foreign faces here; the tourists who have come to witness what Fodor calls ‘the city’s triumphant fusion of modernity and tradition, order and spontaneity, Life and Art, business and entertainment’.
Of course, you will not see the night-time soapies here. The bye-laws say there can be no loitering, no unlicensed trading, no begging, no entertainment without a permit, no vehicles (including skates and skateboards), no animals (except for guide dogs), no unrestricted access to the sort who clutch a bottle or whose dress and cleanliness would strike a sour note. ‘Shop in Safety at Arcadia’, the adverts say. ‘Attended parking for two thousand cars’. There is no need to taste the city air at all, for those who drive, then shop, then drive. But who’s so fearful of the city air that they dare not venture into the open forecourts which surround Arcadia? Here an open market still survives — three stalls of fruit (no vegetables), with staff in rural uniforms of dirndl skirts, straw hats, and clogs. There’s a take-a-number, wait-your-turn lunch stand. There are greenstone benches, and official buskers more impromptu and eclectic than the bands and string quartets inside.
I browse amongst the pushcarts there. Their tenants are the city’s fireside artisans. I have the choice of jam or wooden beads or necklaces or cameos. One man sells woven bags. A woman and her dog have candles of a thousand kinds. Another deals in landscape prints and postcards of the town. I have the choice of riding on the garish carousel (restored from an original) or touring the old town by pony and trap, or visiting, with a bag of feed, the pigs, rabbits, goats, and llamas of City Farm. I also have the choice of sitting here, bathing in the bounce-light of Arcadia, or going back to work. I would return to work, except that life is comforting here, and entertaining too. It’s fun to watch the browsers shop, to watch the drama of the doorstaff turning back a drunk or turning out a bearded man with leaflets and a coat weighed down by badges. It’s better fun than work to watch the ‘flamingoes’ operate their upturned litter scoops so that the market site is clean enough — if it were not against the market law — to sit upon the ground and doze.
It is, of course, the spirit of research and not distaste for work that takes me strolling round the wind-stroked, whistling outer rim of Arcadia. The Glass Meringue indeed. The Lobster Trap. The See-through Octopus. The Pumpkin. It has a hundred names. But one has stuck amongst those people rarely let inside or rarely rich enough to browse and buy. They call the place Fat Vic. It’s Big Vic’s plumper sibling. One stands, one squats. They are the city’s strangest twins.
I come at last to Victor’s birthday gift, the statue cast in bronze, commissioned by the merchants of the Soap Market. The move amongst the bleeding hearts, some time ago, to pull it down and put a statue up for Rook, has come to nothing. Victor’s birthday gift survives. A woman sits cross-legged before a bowl. The artist has welded real coins inside. The woman has an infant at her breast. Its eyes are open wide, and fixed upon Arcadia. There was a time when children clambered over her, when office-workers used the plinth for lunch, when young men wrote the names of their sweethearts in felt-tip along the woman’s arms, or coloured in her nipple, darkly. But, pretty soon, they railed her and her infant in. The statue’s called The Beggar Woman and Her Child, but we all know it as The Cage.
So this is Em. And this is Victor, an infant at the breast. They are so still, you’d think their abject happiness could never end. Yet end it did. In flames. And here she — resurrected — is. Too rigid now to take the painted cart, piled high with melons — honeydews, casabas, cantaloupes, and musks — and far too late to set off, as she had promised, towards the city hems where blue fields match the sea-blue sky, with her small son her only passenger. I have the first line of his life: ‘No wonder Victor never fell in love.’
2
I’M IN THE MOOD to take my time. I walk across the last few patterned slabs and cobblestones of Arcadia and head off into town. The Woodgate pavements are old and cracked and buckled. They are ideal for puddles, weeds, and saunterers. I peer down squints and alleyways. They seem more festive than they used to. Perhaps the presence of Arcadia has enlivened them. They are not back streets now, but brisk with bars and antiques shops, and second-storey studios.
You cannot park. The wardens and the police make sure of that. How can they stop the soapies, though? At first it was just one or two — disgruntled fruiterers who’d been displaced from Fat Vic’s corridors. They had to work and feed their families, and so they set up shop in backs of vans and parked across the kerbstones in dead-ends, blind alleys, culs-de-sac, providing low-grade, cheaper fruit for those in too much hurry for Arcadia. Quite soon there were a bunch of makeshift stalls, some coloured awnings set up at the backs of vans, some trays of produce set out on the pavement. You’ve never seen such rugged mushrooms, such unselected fruit, such tattered sugar-snaps, such unwaxed oranges, such blemished pears, such unwrapped chard — poor man’s asparagus — and mulberries and radicchio still moist with country rain, already past their best, so cheap.
Quite soon, of course, the displaced market had a name — Soap Two, just like a film. You think its characters are dead, and then the sequel comes along, as lively as the first. So now we see that it’s not true that ‘cities swallow up the small’, that ‘soufflés only rise the once’. The pygmies flourish on the street. I used to think that buildings were all that could endure in cities. But people, it would seem, endure as well. They hang on by their nails. They improvise. They kick. They leave a legacy which is not brick or stone.
The first to come and trade are well established now. They have their clientele, their daily pitches, their regimens. Some clever spark has improvised some light for dawn, and after dusk. Soap Two trades into the night when Arcadia is shut and under guard. The soapie trading light is pilfered from the streetlamps, by an illegal wire connected and undone a dozen times a day as uniforms approach. Who’ll get the bill? Who cares! Not Cellophane. He does not give a damn. He is untouched by bills. He’s shielded by the corset of his cellophane. He waltzes, as sheenily as a stage sardine, through the market all day and all night long. Sometimes he takes it on himself to direct the traffic as it squeezes past the stalls. Sometimes he lies down in the street to block the passing cars. He begs. He steals. He shouts obscenities. I’ve never heard such words before. He kicks the windfalls from the trading stalls. He’s always at the market’s edge, a cellophane commissionaire. As Soap Two expands then so he moves out from the core, to summon people in. It does not matter what their business is, or if they have no cause at all to pack into the streets. He simply hopes to share — and complicate — the ecstasy of crowds.