The Good Mayor (25 page)

“You will find,” said Yemko, “that I am a constant source of amazement and amusement.” And he smiled with the appealing, engaging, unrefusable smile of a baby and, in spite of herself, Agathe found she was smiling back.

Yemko waggled his cane up and down and started humming—“Oompah, oompah, pom, pom, pom”—that silly tune the band had been playing earlier, but the amazing thing was that nobody else in the crowd even seemed to notice or think it the least bit strange, even when he twirled the cane and started spinning his hat like those Chinese jugglers who were such a hit at the Opera House two seasons ago with their plates on sticks. “This is exhausting,” he wheezed. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up.”

“Well, if it’s a matter of the sky falling on our heads or something,” Agathe giggled, “I think I could take over for a bit. Oompah, oompah, pom, pom, pom.”

“I am under an obligement to you for that kind thought, Mrs. Stopak, but it seems that, after all, there will be no need.” And then, instead of saying “Oompah,” Yemko lowered his cane and said “Ta-daaah” with a kind of fanfare flourish.

There at Agathe’s elbow was a skinny man, wearing a taxi driver’s badge and carrying a large bamboo table with folding legs and a picnic hamper.

“You were signalling,” said Tibo.

“Of course I was signalling, Krovic. Did you think I’d lost my mind? How on earth was the poor chap to find us?” But his voice sank to an exhausted whisper as he turned to Agathe and said, “Mrs. Stopak, would you be gracious enough to act as hostess? ’Bliged.”

The taxi driver disappeared into the crowd again, pressing his fists into the small of his back with a groan and leaving Agathe to tackle the picnic hamper on the table. She opened it with the sort of look on her face that Hester Roskova had when she opened the treasure chest in the final scene of
Pirate Queen of Jamaica
.

“This is packed,” she said. “There’s everything in here!” And then she looked up at Yemko, sagging on his cane like a big top the day the circus leaves town. “Are you all right?” she asked kindly.

“See if there’s anything to drink in there,” Tibo said. He laid a hand on the lawyer’s shoulder. “Overdid things a bit, I think. You’ll soon be right.”

“There’s wine,” said Agathe. She passed a dark green bottle and a corkscrew to Tibo. “I’m never any good with these.” That was a lie. Agathe was perfectly able to use a corkscrew but she wanted to defer a little—to make the point that, like taking the rubbish out or bringing in the coal, this was a job for a big, strong man.

Tibo held the bottle down between his knees, drew the cork and poured a little wine into the glass which Agathe held out to him. “Take some of this,” he said and, holding the glass by its foot, Yemko drank a sip. It left his lips stained purple where, before, they had been an interesting shade of blue.

“Thank you,” he said. “I think you’ll find some iced biscuits in there. Might I have one, please?”

“Iced biscuit!” said Tibo.

“Iced biscuit!” said Agathe, passing him one the way a nurse would pass a scalpel to a surgeon at the crucial point of a tricky operation.

Yemko took a dainty bite and chewed politely with his front teeth, like a rabbit. “Don’t mind me, children,” he said. “I’ll be fine in a moment. Go ahead. Eat up. Enjoy.”

“There’s enough here to feed an army,” said Agathe.

“Were you expecting us?” Tibo asked. “Surely you weren’t planning on eating all this alone.”

“It’s as I said, my dear Krovic, one must never disappoint one’s public. I planned to nibble on a dry biscuit but, by tonight, my legend would walk abroad on Cathedral Avenue. Blameless accountants and ministers of religion would swear they saw me eat an entire cow. Now, you must help me.” He turned to Agathe with a wheeze. “I think you’ll find a bottle of champagne in there, Mrs. Stopak. You and Mayor Krovic must help yourselves.”

So they did. Tibo popped another cork and they drank champagne and ate cold chicken and ham and beef cooked pink and sliced thin and there was a big jar of preserved peaches and a pot of cream as thick as custard. They ate it all and laughed but, while they ate, Agathe would turn to Yemko from time to time with a look of gentle concern.

She leaned close to Tibo. “Swap seats, would you? Let me sit beside him.”

So, all through the second half of the concert, all the way up to “Radetsky March,” Tibo sat on the end of the row, by the aisle, picking marzipan fruits out of the picnic basket and feeding them to her because both her hands were occupied, one holding his hand and one laid gently over Yemko’s, patting it softly from time to time, reassuring him.

Heaven alone knows what the tuba player made of it but, by the time the Fire Brigade Band got to the national anthem, Yemko had completely recovered from the strain of juggling his hat. Along with the rest of the crowd, he managed to drag himself to
his feet but, unlike Tibo and Agathe, he didn’t bother with singing along.

Tibo said, “Well, that’s that for another year. Time to get ready for winter again.”

“It was a lovely picnic,” said Agathe. “Can we help with clearing it up?”

But Yemko shook his great head. “The driver will do that. It’s been a pleasure.”

“Then I’ll take Agathe to the tram.”

“Yes,” said Yemko. That was all he said but he managed to put so much into it, the way that geese flying south from the Ampersand never say anything more than “honk” but manage to fill the whole sky with melancholy and longing just the same.

Tibo recognised it and decided that now would be an excellent time to make his goodbyes and set off through the park with Agathe towards an afternoon of who knew what.

But Agathe recognised it too and it very nearly broke her heart. From hating the lawyer Guillaume with a cold fury, she had gone, in the space of an hour, to loving him as only a mother can love. She looked at him and, for some reason that she could not explain, she wanted to help. So, when Good Mayor Krovic said, “I think we might catch a tram by the main gate, if we hurry,” she only said, “Yes. Why don’t you go ahead? I’ll catch up in a minute,” and turned back to Yemko.

Tibo would never have admitted it, of course, but he was a little offended. “Yes,” he said, “of course. I’ll wait for you at the gate.” And he began to shuffle down the choked path, between the toppled rows of folding chairs, jostled through the crowd like a cork, looking back over his shoulder at where she stood, face to face with Yemko, a pace apart and holding his hand. As he went, Tibo noticed, far out to sea, the dark pencil-line of cloud along the horizon that always signified a coming storm. There was a sudden gust of wind that made the people burrow down into their collars and laugh about “winter coming.”

Agathe was almost the last to leave Copernicus Park that day.
The crowds cleared quickly once they were through the bottleneck of the park gate, some walking home, some heading for the tram stops arranged on either side of the road and serving routes that led to every corner of Dot with a more than municipal efficiency.

Standing alone by the big stone pillar, Tibo noticed a sweet wrapper stuck to his shoe. He bent down to pick it off and dropped it in the bin that hung from the green iron lamp post nearby and, when he looked back, Agathe was there. She started beating him on the back and shoulders with a gloved hand. “You’ve been leaning on something,” she said.

But he shooed her off. “You’ll be spitting on your hankie to give my face a wash next.”

Agathe was standing there, just as she had been with Yemko, face to face but close to him, the buttons of her coat brushing his, her face turned up to him, chin raised, nose in the air, eyes closed, smiling faintly. She was happy, she was amused by his silly protests, she was confident, like a woman who knew she had the right to brush dust off a man’s shoulder.

Her body and Tibo’s were touching, belly and breast and thigh, as naked as a wedding night with nothing to separate them but the layers of warm wool cloth that wrapped them. Her hair moved in the wind. The scent of her filled him. She was waiting to be kissed.

Tibo did not kiss her. He pulled away, stepped back by the length of a shoe and said, “What did Guillaume want?”

Agathe’s shoulders slumped. She opened her eyes. It was as if a sigh of disappointment ran silently through her whole body and she said, “He wanted to offer me his friendship. He says that he is my friend. Tibo, are you my friend?”

Good Mayor Krovic looked briefly at his feet, then back into the park and the empty bandstand and then at Agathe again. “I’ll take you to the tram,” he said.

While they waited at the tram stop, they did not speak. When the No. 36 came round the corner with “Green Bridge” written in big white letters on its signboard, Agathe only said, “Bye, then.” And, when it stopped and she climbed on to the back platform,
her coat tight over her hips, the curve of her calf taut, heel and ankle curved and carved like a statue, she did not look back and, when the tram slid away again, Mayor Krovic looked up and down the street and found himself completely alone. He began to walk. There was nothing else to do. Before long, it began to rain but he kept on walking. After about an hour, he was on Foundry Street and, from there, it was only another mile to the docks. It was quiet there. No work to do on a Sunday. Old newspapers lay flattened like starfish in the rain. The cobbles were black and greasy and coal dust choked the gaps between them. Cigarette stubs lay in piles by the warehouse doors, marking the spots where the dockers had gathered to slouch around and talk and spit. There were rainbow pools of petrol shining on the dark water. It puckered like orange peel where the rain hit it.

Depressed seagulls with button-black eyes would glare at Tibo as he passed or rise up briefly, screeching like old machinery. They had already picked the fish boxes clean of scraps. They were bored. The rain grew heavier. Tibo walked on, through the docks and out the other side to where the cobbles vanished into a wild path that wandered among sand dunes for a bit and down to a long spit of gravel beach that led towards a tall grey lighthouse, appearing and disappearing through the squalls. Tibo found himself stumbling now as the pebbles crunched and shifted under his feet until, at the very end of the land, he reached the smooth stone wall at the foot of the lighthouse. He climbed up and walked round the flat parapet, standing with his back to the tower, looking out to where the islands were hidden by the weather and he yelled so the gulls rose off the water and cackled, “What the bloedig hell are you doing, Krovic? What are you doing? Is this what your life is? Is this the man you are—too frightened or too stupid to kiss a woman.” He put his face in his hands. “What are you doing?” he asked himself again.

Far behind him in the town, where the lights of evening were beginning to sparkle from street to street, Agathe was standing at the sink, her coat and her handbag dumped on the kitchen table, her shoes kicked off and lying sideways on the floor as she washed
the last of the dishes that Hektor and Stopak had abandoned. She had one of those little mops, the kind that’s held on to a stick with thick copper wire, and, every time she plunged it into the tired suds, she asked angrily, “What are you doing, Agathe? What are you doing? How can you make such a bloedig fool of yourself, woman? Is this what your life is?” She scrubbed her frying pan until it gleamed.

And just round the corner, in The Three Crowns, where the wind was blowing straight off Green Bridge and battering rain off the window, two men sat at the corner table. One of them was asleep, holding a bottle barely propped upright on his enormous belly and the other sat squinting through the smoke of the cigarette he held between his lips, drawing, scoring out and drawing again in the sketchbook open on his knees and asking himself, “What the bloedig hell are you doing? Drawing her all day long. Drawing her every day. Imagining what she looks like naked when you could go there now and find out. What the hell are you doing? Is this what your life is?”

UT AT THE LIGHTHOUSE, AT THE VERY FARTHEST
bit of ground that could still call itself “Dot,” Tibo turned his back on the storm and began to walk for home, crunching his way over the beach and back through the dunes, into the docks where the whores had come out for their night’s work. They yelled “Hello!” at him as he passed and asked him if he was lonely. Tibo almost laughed at that. He tramped on, saying nothing, sticking to the middle of the road, not looking at the men in the shadows. They did not look at him. Along Canal Street and, finally, back on to the avenue along the Ampersand, the elms dripped on him as he passed. Already most of their leaves had fallen and the rain had knocked almost the last of them off. They lay in a greasy carpet on the path.

Tibo reached City Square. He dug in his pocket for his keys and opened the side door that led to the back stair. When it closed behind him the whole Town Hall seemed to shake. Tibo put his hand out in the dark and found the bottom of the banister. He slid his foot forward over the tiled floor until it collided with the first step and he began to count, “One, two, three. Landing. Turn.” Then he counted fifteen more steps, then another landing and fifteen more, all the way to the corridor that led to his office. Tibo shuffled and stumbled his way through the dark, fingering his way past Agathe’s desk and into his own office where he groped across the table hunting for his lamp. He felt better with some light in the room—less like a burglar, more at home.