The Good Mayor (28 page)

LL THE WAY THROUGH THE LIBRARIES
Committee, when the councillors were talking about the number of books that should be replaced that year and what to do with the old ones and which new ones they should buy and whether or not schoolchildren should have to pay a fine if they kept a book out for too long, he was listening with only half an ear. He was worrying about Agathe and thinking about the evening before when he had found, in a magazine, a picture of a pair of china cats with shiny green marbles for eyes and floppy roses painted all over them. Now they were in his wallet, torn out as neatly as he could manage and ready to go in Agathe’s book. It would be all right, he decided. Whatever it was that had upset her so much, he would sort it out. He would make it right again.

When, at last, the Libraries Committee was over, Tibo hurried back to his office. Agathe was already gone. He ran down the stairs, pulling his coat on as he went but there was no sign of her in City Square or amongst the crowds on the bridge and he was more than halfway along Castle Street, almost at The Golden Angel, before he caught sight of her, just going through the door.

By the time Tibo hurried into the cafe, Agathe was sitting at the window seat. She saw Mamma Cesare smile as soon as the mayor came through the big swing doors, smile and wave and point to where Agathe was sitting with her chin cupped in her hand.

Agathe found herself resenting that—the way that everybody
noticed Tibo, the way that everybody welcomed him and went out of their way for him, the way everybody brightened if he bothered with them in return. And yet he took it all for granted. He accepted it all. He never noticed that he was wonderful. He never noticed that she thought he was wonderful. He never noticed that she loved him.

She watched him dancing between the tables towards her, bouncing along like a cheerful puppy and so, so stupid. Tibo sat down and she welcomed him with a huffy sigh. He pretended not to notice. She noticed that he had pretended not to notice.

“What’s good today?” He smiled. “What’s tasty and delicious, apart from you, my favourite mayoral secretary in the whole world?”

“‘Tasty and delicious’? If I’m so ‘tasty and delicious,’ why don’t you take me away and eat me, you idiot?” But she said only, “Soup. It’s soup. When I arrived, Mamma Cesare said it was soup today.”

“Good. What kind?”

“How would I know what kind?”

“Sorry. I just asked.”

“Look. I came in. She said, ‘Hello.’ She said it was soup today. I sat down and you arrived. That’s all I know.”

Tibo looked hurt. He put on his “wounded” face and shut up. She could see him working things out behind his eyes. “What do I say to that? Better just say nothing at all.”

She wanted to grab a breadstick and stab him in the eye with it. She wanted to stand up on the table and yell, “Bloedig hell, Tibo, say something! Notice me.” But there he was leaning on his elbow, looking over her shoulder and out into Castle Street. She tutted and rolled her eyes to the ceiling.

After a little time, the waiter arrived with two huge bowls of minestrone, one in each hand, and baskets of bread decorating his forearms and, by some miracle, he managed to put everything on the table without spilling a drop.

Tibo nodded thanks at him and smiled politely and picked up his spoon. “This looks good,” he said. It was a plea for an armistice.

Agathe ignored it and bent over her steaming bowl, saying nothing. In the silence, their spoons dragged with a noise like anchor chains.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” said Tibo. He leaned back in his chair and reached into his pocket for his wallet. “I brought you a present.”

“I hope it’s money.”

“No, it’s not money. Do you need money? I can get you money if you need it.”

Agathe shook her head and let her tongue mop up some stray soup in the corner of her mouth. She reached across the table with an impatient gesture as if to say, “Come on, come on,” and took the scrap of paper from Tibo’s fingers.

“For the house in Dalmatia,” Tibo said. “They are ornaments. Cats. China cats with marbles for eyes.”

“Yes, I see that.” Agathe reached into her handbag and brought out the notebook where she kept her clippings. She tucked the cats between the pages and dropped the whole thing on the table with a thump.

He looked wounded and baffled again, like Achilles when he turned up at the flat with a nice fat mouse to play with and she was less than delighted. It was a bit of paper, just a bit of paper. Why was she expected to ooh and ahh over every little thing?

“We have imagined you a beautiful house,” said Tibo, patting the book. He sounded nervous.

“Yes, we have. Do you think we’ll ever go there?”

Tibo smiled. Almost everything Agathe said could make him smile these days. “I am doing my best. All those lottery tickets and you haven’t won a thing. Not one single jackpot.”

“It’s not my fault,” she said. “You always buy faulty ones. You should take them back to the shop and demand a refund. Anyway …” she looked deep into her soup, “anyway I’d be just as happy with a damp little flat by the canal. It doesn’t have to be on the coast of Dalmatia.”

“You deserve the coast of Dalmatia.”

Agathe dipped her spoon again. “I deserve the very best of everything but I’m prepared to settle for something ordinary if it can be mine. Good isn’t so bad, is it?”

She looked at him, wondering why he could not see this was the time. “I will settle for something ordinary if it can be mine”—that’s what she’d said and, now, if he would only offer that little bit of something ordinary, he could make it wonderful.

But he said nothing and that made her see him differently.

Agathe looked round the cafe at the waiters running from table to table, the businessmen hurrying over their lunches, the people out in the street looking up at the thick grey sky and wondering about snow and she knew that, if she had asked any of them who was sitting there at the middle table of three right in the front window of The Golden Angel, they would have said, “Good Tibo Krovic.” But today they would have been wrong. Today they should have said, “Right Tibo Krovic.”

Good isn’t so bad. Agathe would have settled for “good” and, if he had chosen to do the good thing, Tibo could have stood up right there and then, he could have knocked the table over if need be and he could have picked her up in his arms and run out with her as if he had been rescuing her from a blazing building. He could have saved her. He could have taken her back to the big iron bed in his house at the end of the blue-tiled path with its broken gate and its brass bell and he could have spent all the rest of the afternoon saving her. He could have saved her all night. He could have saved her until he was too exhausted to save her any more. He could have saved her again and again like no woman has been saved before or since, saved her in every way he could imagine and some he’d never thought of until that very minute and then she would have come up with some ideas of her own. But he did not. Tibo Krovic was the Mayor of Dot and the Mayor of Dot had never been known to carry another man’s wife down the street, not even if she was his secretary, not even if she was in love with him, not even if she had loved him, it seemed, for as long as she could remember.

The moment passed. She saw it disappearing away from the
tiny point where “When” becomes “Now” and starts streaming backwards to “Then.” It only takes a second.

Embarrassed, he lifted the notebook that held her imaginary house and began to flick through it. “What do you think of that?” he said, pointing to a magazine clipping of a huge bath.

“I think it’s colourful,” said Agathe.

“Colourful? But it’s white.”

“I think it’s colourful,” she said, looking straight at him.

And she said it again, so softly that it made almost no sound. “Colourful, colourful, colourful.”

Good Tibo Krovic was baffled. He wondered if, perhaps, Agathe was having a breakdown.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine, Tibo.” And she spooned up some more soup but she held it a little away from her mouth, not trusting herself to eat it without spilling it. Her hand shook. Her body was shaking. Looking at her, Tibo thought she was about to burst out laughing. In fact, she was a breath or two away from a sob.

“How’s the soup?” he asked, pointlessly.

“Mmmmm. Minestrone.” Her voice had a sarcastic edge. “You know, of all soups it is the most …” There was a pleading in her eyes and, inside her head, she was saying over and over again, “For God’s sake, Tibo, look at me. Look at me. Look at me. See me.”

“Colourful?” Tibo said.

“Exactly, Tibo, colourful.” And she moved her mouth silently again. “Co-lour-ful, co-lour-ful. I wonder why we never invented soup like that in Dot. Why did it have to come from Italy where it’s already hot and bright and life is so …” She looked him full in the face and said the word again, “Co-lour-ful.”

Tibo was reluctant to admit that he didn’t understand this game. He concentrated on soup. “We have borscht,” he said. “It’s good soup. As good as anything the Italians make.”

“It tastes like the cold earth. It’s like eating a grave. But I am prepared to admit that borscht is at least …” She paused long enough to make Tibo look up from his plate. “Co-lour-ful.”

“Colourful?”

“Co-lour-ful,” she replied, silently.

“I don’t understand what’s got into you.”

“No, Tibo, that’s the worst part!”

She said, “Co-lour-ful” silently again, as tears gathered in her eyes, threw down her napkin, fumbled for the handbag at her feet and hurried out of the restaurant.

Tibo had spent enough rainy afternoons in the Palazz Kinema on George Street to know that that, whether he called after her or ran out into the street or sat straight-faced and finished his soup, he was in danger of becoming a cliché. In the seconds that it took to consider which particular humiliation would be preferable, he saw Agathe run past the window and away.

Tibo decided to finish his soup. With the waiter looking on from behind at his reddening ears, Good Mayor Krovic found it took a very long time indeed. He did not order anything else. In fact, without even turning round, he raised his hand and, staring straight ahead through the window, he gestured to the waiter standing against the back wall. “Bring me the bill, please,” he said and, when it came, he left it under a little pile of notes and coins—far more than was needed—and walked quickly outside.

It was cold. The first snow flurries of winter were whirling down Castle Street and over White Bridge. They followed him into City Square where workmen were turning off the fountains until spring. Tibo tightened the belt on his thick overcoat and jammed his hat down as he looked across the river to where the dome of the cathedral was disappearing into an angry fist of grey cloud. Although it wasn’t two o’clock yet, most of the lights in the Town Hall were already burning. Inside the building, Tibo climbed the stairs to his office. Next door, Agathe was not in her chair. The clock ticked. The wind threw handfuls of frozen nails against the windows. Darkness came on. Tibo left the connecting door to his room open but Agathe did not return to work and, at six o’clock, Good Mayor Krovic cleared his desk, locked his drawer and left for the night. From somewhere down the brown corridor came the clunk and rattle of Peter Stavo’s mop bucket. It sounded as far
away and lonely as the last crane flying south from the Ampersand in autumn.

At the tram stop, nobody spoke. People in the queue stood wrapped in their coats, tipping their hats into the oncoming snow, ignoring each other as the wind tugged around them until the tram sailed up out of the dark, glowing like a liner in the middle of a night ocean. The tram pulled up, the queue moved forward and the people jammed themselves inside, all except Tibo. He stood at the back of the queue and then climbed the stair to sit alone on the upper deck. Tibo took the bench at the front of the tram and slouched in the seat with his legs flung out, his collar turned up and his hands stuffed in his coat pockets. The wind was at his back all the way home as the tram nudged through the streets of Dot.

Downstairs, the people in the bright tram could see nothing beyond the dark windows but Tibo watched the houses going by, street lamps passing close enough for him to reach out and brush away the little piles of snow that were gathering there, fathers returning home from work, front doors opening into rooms where children played, warm kitchens where bowls of soup had steamed the windows blind.

At the sixth stop, Tibo stood up. A thin ridge of snow had formed across the shoulders of his coat in a line marked by the edge of the tram bench. Good Mayor Krovic clumped down the slippery stairs and stepped backwards off the tram as it slowed and swung past the corner of his street. At his gate, the wind was rocking the bell in the birch tree so that it almost—almost—rang.

Tibo saw it swinging in the light of a street lamp and, for some reason, the word “plangent” came into his head. “Plangent,” said Tibo and he swung the bright edge of the bell with the tips of his gloved fingers. It rang gently against the clapper. “Plangent,” said Tibo again. He lifted the broken gate and swung it back on its slumped hinges. The blue-tiled path was beginning to disappear under a thin slime of wet snow and Tibo walked carefully, stiff-legged, to the front door. The prints of his heels showed like black bites in the snow.