The Good Mayor (17 page)

Of course, if Mrs. Agathe Stopak had looked out her window about then, she would have seen Tibo Krovic down in the square, looking into the south-most fountain and scratching his head. The water was deeper than he had imagined and there, at the bottom, he could see Mrs. Stopak’s blue enamel lunch box. A single bloated cracker was disintegrating on the surface of the pool. Tibo took off his jacket, folded it carefully inside out, as he had been taught to do at the age of eight, and laid it on a clean patch of pavement. He rolled up his sleeve until it tightened like a tourniquet well above his elbow, knelt on the edge of the fountain and began to grope for the tin. Mayor Tibo Krovic always had a keen sense of his own dignity and he was aware that this pose, head down, trouser seat in the air, leaning out at full stretch, was, perhaps, a little less than heroic. In fact, it brought to mind one of those desperately unfunny shorts they liked to show between the main features at the Palazz Kinema. “The man twirling the ladder should arrive just about now,” thought Tibo, “but the terrier won’t run off with my jacket until after I fall in the water.”

He stretched a little further. The water reached his sleeve but he just managed to brush the tin box with his fingers. It scraped along the bottom of the pool, coming a little closer. This time, Tibo was able to hook a finger under the lid and he dragged it up and let the water drain out. Inside there was a mess of bread which he tipped into a trough of geraniums. He looked at the box. “It’ll be fine,” he thought. The few remaining doughy bits that stuck in the corners he wiped away with his vast green handkerchief. “But, if I buy her lunch, she won’t be needing this again anyway.”

Tibo picked up his jacket and walked across the square to the Town Hall where Mrs. Stopak seemed ridiculously pleased to get her lunch box back. “That’s what you’ve been doing?” she gushed. “Thank you, Mayor Krovic. I thought that … No. Nothing.”

“No. Tell me. You thought what?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I’ve made some coffee. Want one?”

“No thanks,” he said. “Work to do.” From that very moment, Tibo Krovic, a man who had never loved a woman before, knew beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he loved Agathe Stopak. He knew, in the way that he would have known if an elephant had entered his kitchen, not that he had ever seen an elephant but something so big and so grey and so wrinkled could be nothing but an elephant. So, as obviously as an elephant, this was love. He walked on into the inner office but he left the door open in the hope that Mrs. Stopak might drift by from time to time. She did not. But she did find herself breaking off from her work rather a lot. She did find herself stopping to look at the lunch box that sat atop her in-tray where the little box from Braun’s had left its mark on memory just a short while before. She looked at it as if it were made of moon dust—a strange object from another world where men were kind and took a bit of trouble and, most of all, where they were not ashamed.

“He does seem to fit,” she whispered to herself. “A good man who likes Homer. He seems to fit.”

From her place at her desk, Mrs. Agathe Stopak turned to look at the open door to the mayor’s office, hoping that he might appear to demand coffee or paper clips or to bark dictation at her. But she was frightened to go near in case she saw him and that was probably just as well because, just on the other side of the door, Good Tibo Krovic was sitting at his desk in silence, a pencil gripped between his teeth, holding his breath as he listened for the slightest sound of her, or raising his nose to the open door, hunting for her perfume.

At five o’clock, Mrs. Agathe Stopak tidied her desk, locked her drawer and left the office. Just on the other side of the door, Mayor Tibo Krovic heard her go. He heard her arranging her papers, sliding the drawer shut, locking it, heard her walking, quietly, across the room, imagined the perfect pink O of her mouth as she blew out the tiny flame warming the coffee pot, felt her leaving, trailing perfume in her wake, listened, straining, for her call of “Goodnight” and prayed that it would not come because he could not trust himself to respond, whispered his own silent “Goodnight” to
her and sat, like a waiting hunter while the clock ticked through ten aching minutes, just to be sure she was gone, just to be sure she wasn’t coming back.

And, all that time, he was sitting, waiting, watching, Mrs. Agathe Stopak was standing halfway down the stairs, one hand on the banister, breathing in whispers because, halfway down the stairs, she realised that, for the first time, she had forgotten to say “Goodnight” to the mayor and she knew why. She couldn’t have managed it. Standing there on the green marble staircase, she felt a sudden strange warmth coiling inside her and she hurried away to escape it.

Up in his room, Mayor Tibo Krovic picked up his pen and began the work he should have done that afternoon—the contracts he should have approved, the letters he should have signed, the licensing applications and planning consents he should have “glanced over”—and, at the end of it all, when the bells in the cathedral struck seven, Tibo left his office and walked down the green marble steps of the Town Hall, out into the square and over White Bridge. The ducks paddling in the Ampersand quacked politely as he passed. Bats nestling under the arches flittered in wide swoops as they hunted the evening moths. Everything had changed. The colours were a little sharper, the birdsong a little sweeter, each individual quack of each individual duck swimming under the bridge across the Ampersand was that bit more “quacky” and cheerful and defiant. All the way up Castle Street, Tibo tried to catch sight of himself in shop windows as he passed. “Not bad,” he thought. “Tall. Not fat. Not slim, but not too fat for a man who had been mayor for twenty years.” He decided on a new suit. Two new suits. And some shoes. The mayor of a town like Dot should be well turned out. He deserved it. Dot deserved it.

And, as Tibo stepped smartly up Castle Street, admiring himself in the shop windows as he passed, Mrs. Agathe Stopak was standing by the stove in her flat in Aleksander Street, turning ham and eggs over in a shiny frying pan with a wooden spatula and looking out the scullery window over the darkling town and wondering about him as that strange new feeling which had found her
on the stairs and followed her home on the tram curled about her shoulders and rubbed itself down her back.

“Are you going out tonight?” she asked, as she put the plate down in front of Stopak and his evening paper.

“Yes.”

“With Hektor?”

“Yes. Any objections?”

“When’s he coming?”

“’Bout eight. Maybe sooner.”

“Better eat up then.” And she made plans for a long hot bath.

A few minutes later, as Mrs. Agathe Stopak was standing at her sink, pouring away the greasy washing-up water and taking a last look out the window where there was nothing to see now but a steamy image of herself looking back from the glass, Good Tibo Krovic was sitting down in his kitchen with a plate of herring and fried potatoes and a notebook open on the table in front of him.

He made notes—a list of things he had decided he would like to buy for Agathe. Sweets, especially Turkish delight, soft and pink and yielding, the essence of hedonism, a symbol of the Fall, so sweet. And jellied fruits, for the tang. And chocolate gingers. And chocolate caramels. And books—a Homer, a new one. No, an old one, old and love-worn. Find one. Hunt it out. Perfume. “Tahiti,” he remembered the name. He remembered it every day. In fact, he had added “Tahiti” to the list of beautiful words he liked to say to himself from time to time. Saying it brought to mind Mrs. Stopak’s smell and, when he said it, he imagined himself in a naval uniform, lying on bone-white sands under a nodding palm with Mrs. Stopak nestled in the crook of his arm, bougainvilleas in her hair. Perfume. And knickers. Men bought knickers for the women they loved, didn’t they? Would he dare? Go into a shop and buy knickers? Mayor Tibo Krovic? Buy women’s underwear? He scored a heavy line through the word “knickers” and looked at it. It was a reproach and a challenge. On the next line, he wrote “lingerie” and left it there. There may come a time, after all. Well, there might. Tibo filled a whole page in his notebook but he found, when he read it again, that so many of the things he had written there were
presents he would like to receive—the leather writing case he had seen in the window of Braun’s, a silver pen, even the stockings he had listed were, he conceded, not really for her at all. Not really. “I can add more as they occur to me,” he said and quickly put down “lottery tickets” on the very last line.

Tibo sat for a long time at the table, reading and rereading his list and watching and wondering at the images each word provoked in his mind. He was experiencing feelings now that he had never known before or had buried for so long that he believed himself immune to them. He astonished himself. Even reading the word “lingerie” made something hoist in his chest. He put down his pen and lifted his head from his notebook. “I am in love,” he told the dark kitchen. “I love you, Mrs. Agathe Stopak. I love you.” He said it again as he scraped his cold herring into the bin under the sink. How strange that, whether love comes or love goes, all thought of food disappears. Lucky that, sometimes, love stays else we would all starve to death. “I love you, Mrs. Agathe Stopak.” He said it again climbing the stairs and again, several times more, as he lay down in his bed and went to sleep.

Across town in Aleksander Street, Mrs. Stopak was lying down in her own bed, fresh and warm and tingling after a long bath. The strange feeling that came to her at work had never left her. It had snuggled next to her on the tram home, it coiled itself around her at the stove and lashed its tail in the bath water and now it lay beside her in the bed, as warm and heavy and purring as Achilles. It made her feel guilty—guilty and delicious. She befriended it. And then it was morning.

The bed was still empty. Agathe was not alarmed. She folded the covers back and swung her feet down to the floor. It was cold. She ran to the bathroom, past Stopak where he lay in the sitting room, collapsed, face down on the settee, head tipped towards the floor, snoring and drooling. He was still there, unmoving, a lard statue, when she trotted back to the bedroom and let her nightgown fall to the floor with a whisper. She stepped from the crumpled ring of warm cotton, flicked it into the air on the point of her toe, caught it, balled it in two hands and flung it on to the bed. She
moved part gymnast, part burlesque dancer, all poise and tease and unconscious buxom grace. She stood in front of the old bow-fronted chest and bent over easily, her body splitting, opening a little, as smoothly as the drawer where she kept her knickers and there, at the back, was the shiny red box from Braun’s.

Standing there, like an ivory carving of Pandora, she held the box in the palm of her hand and looked at it, rewrapped, retied, put away as if it had never been opened and she hesitated. “Not for him,” she told the mirror. “For me. Me.” This time, when Agathe opened the box, she shredded it, tore through the cardboard, ripped the tissue paper, tugged the ribbon off in knots. In a second, it went from being the relic of a bloody martyrdom to so much rubbish—old used packaging, that was all. She tossed it to the floor and kicked it away with a painted toe. Agathe was nothing if not modest—modest in every sense—but she found herself studying the mirror on the dressing table again, watching herself as she put on the tiny, gauzy strips of lingerie and she acknowledged herself as beautiful, even desirable. She allowed her fingers to trace over her own curves, watched them as they passed and then, when she glanced back at the mirror again, she was astonished to find the woman there looking back with a curl of pink tongue peeping from between her lips. It was a hungry look. Agathe was blushing. She hurried to dress. A simple white blouse, a sensible wool skirt of charcoal grey, perhaps a little too shaped, a little too snug over the hips and narrow round the calf, but sensible and modest enough, the sort of thing that the mayor’s secretary could wear without attracting a whisper of comment, even if it did force her into something of a wiggle as she walked. She smoothed it down over her bottom with the flats of her hands and, yes, there, managed to feel the hint of those special knickers, just. Just barely.

When Agathe left the flat that morning, pausing long enough to put a mug of coffee down on the floor next to Stopak’s hand and shake him by the shoulder as she went, she walked with a strut and a shimmy in her step. When the conductor on the tram looked at her with one of those looks, the kind of look that said, “I am trying very hard not to whistle at you,” she smiled back at him with the
suggestion of a wink and let her fingers linger in the palm of his hand when she handed over her fare. The strange feeling from the night before was still with her—that breathlessness, the excitement that gave everything a new tang, an electric buzz that ran through her. It was still there. It was still there when Agathe hurried down Castle Street, catching glimpses of herself in the shop windows as she went—not that she was late for work, she simply felt the urge to run and fought it. At the corner, she saw Mamma Cesare wiping down tables in the big bay window of The Golden Angel, halted in her tracks for a moment and knocked on the glass with a knuckle until the old lady looked up, saw her and smiled.

“You look lovely,” she mouthed.

Agathe pantomimed “Thank you!” back, blew her a kiss and hurried on. She moved through the crowds like a dragonfly over a pond, flashing colour and light as she went, with her bottle-green coat, her hair and shoes and handbag gleaming and her blue enamel lunch box glinting dully in her hand.

That same electric feeling lingered round Tibo too. It woke him early and sent him hurrying to work with no breakfast. Before anyone else came in to work, he placed an envelope on Agathe Stopak’s desk, right in the centre, where it would be the first thing she saw when she sat down. Tibo took out his fountain pen and wrote “Mrs. Stopak” across the middle of the envelope and underlined it. He wanted it to look brisk and official and businesslike but not unfriendly, just the way he would always have written a note to any of his staff but love had changed everything, even his handwriting. Tibo felt that anybody looking at that envelope, seeing those two words, would know at once that they were written by a man to the woman he loved. It would be as if every letter he had ever written was to be read out in City Square, as if an inventory of his library was pinned up on the doors of the Town Hall and a biography, garnered by a lifetime’s worth of government spies, was serialised in the pages of the
Evening Dottian
. Everything he was was in those two words.