The Good Mayor (49 page)

“The owl and the pussycat went to sea,” said Tibo. He sang it all the way through to “They danced by the light of the moon” and Agathe loved him for it.

“But I am not a pussycat,” she said.

“No, and I am not an owl.”

“Oh, you are, Tibo! You are, you are!”

And that’s how things were as they rowed away through the night.

Perhaps there should be more to tell about a night voyage in an open boat—particularly in a story which has gone on for pages about a concert in a bandstand and bothered to note how a simple postcard made its way from a pillar box on City Square, all the way to the Central Post Office and back again. Neither of these are events of great interest or adventure and, since anybody can see we must be getting near the end of this story, you might think that sailing to Virgule deserves a little more attention. You may be
right. The truth is that the sea can be very boring. It tends towards flatness and there’s a lot of repetition—one wave generally follows another and, when they do, they are much alike in size and shape and colour, especially at night, which this was.

Anyway, this story is much more about the telling than the things that happen in it so, can we just agree that things carried on much the same for the next few hours until a little after midnight, when Tibo had been rowing for fully three hours and he was beginning to feel really quite tired?

Tibo was not a rower, he was the Mayor of Dot. He had never pretended to be an athlete and he had no idea how far he was supposed to row, only that the lawyer Yemko Guillaume, who could barely walk the length of a garden path, said they would be there by morning. Tibo’s arms ached and his hands were blistered. He found himself stopping more and more often “just to check the compass” and he began to wonder if Yemko had not simply sent them to their deaths. After all, if there was one Gnady Vadim ready to inherit his house, why should there not be another? He thought back to the scowling taxi driver—an ideal accomplice—and he kept rowing.

But, before he had time to stop and check the compass bearing again, Tibo felt that same crunch and grind of sand under the boat. And, because hope will always overcome plain common sense, he ignored it and rowed again. The boat stayed still. He rowed again and his oar juddered on harsh sand.

“Are we there?” Agathe asked although she knew the answer.

“I don’t think so,” he said, although he knew they were not.

There was nothing to see. Tibo stood up to get a better view and, just then, the moon came out from behind a cloud and showed him a huge, flat ellipse of water with angry waves biting away all round the edge of it.

“We’ve hit a sandbank,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll just push ourselves off and find a way round.”

But, when Tibo got out to push, their little boat tipped over to one side, nearly all the way into the water and, from right along at the other end of the sandbank, a wave came, getting bigger and
more spiteful as it came, and it fell into the boat and lay there, a cold grey lump of water. Tibo fell over into the sea. The cold of it made him gasp. It flooded every fibre of his clothes. It weighed him down like chains flung around him and, by the time he got to his feet, wave after wave had hit the boat and swamped it. It made sickening little lurches and burrowed deeper into the sand with every one and Agathe sat on the thwart at the back wailing, “Tibo, Tibo.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “Jump out. Come to me. It’s only ankle deep.”

The sound of his voice—even though he had to gasp for breath between every word—made her brave and she splashed through the waves and stood beside him.

“Don’t. You. Worry. My. Darling,” he said. “We can just roll the boat over a bit and get the water out.”

But he couldn’t, of course. Half full of sand and seawater, the little boat might as well have been made of lead. Tibo heaved and struggled but it wouldn’t move. With the last of his strength, Tibo managed to climb over the side and back into the boat where he used his hands to shovel water back into the sea but the waves were coming faster and he couldn’t keep up. Luckily, he was too wet and the night was too dark for the tears to show on his face and he was so wet and so tired that his breath came in sobs anyway. And then, when an especially big wave came shining and glistening out of the moonlight, glittering with all the flat dead malice of a shark’s eye, the little boat swung to receive it, tipped, went under, came up and righted itself bravely but without its two oars.

Agathe stood on the sandbank, howling and defeated. Tibo crawled and swam and waded and wrestled out of the boat to sit, slumped in the water, beside her. He wound one end of the rope around her body and knotted his hand through it. “At least,” he thought, “if they ever find our bodies, we will be together.”

“We’ll simply have to wait here until the tide goes out and try again,” said Tibo.

But Agathe said, “It’s up to my knees already. I think it’s coming in.”

“I’d hoped you wouldn’t notice for a while,” he said and he put an arm round her and said, “Agathe, I have nothing and nobody in the entire world. I have signed away all that I ever owned to a man I never heard of and, in a short time, when I am dead, there is not one single soul who will know it or care but there is nowhere else in the world that I would rather be than here with you, who knows how many sugars I take in my coffee. Now, let me hold you, because I am very frightened.”

That was quite a pretty speech and Good Tibo Krovic should have felt entitled to hear something at least as nice in return—perhaps something about sticking by her and loving her, even when she had become a dog—but all that Agathe said was, “Look over there.” And, when Tibo did not move, she said, “Look over there,” again, until he did look. “I know where we are,” said Agathe.

Coming through the water towards them, splashing knee-deep along the sandbank out of the darkness like a train over the winter steppe, there was a long line of figures and, first in the line, huge and solid like a tree walking, came a giant figure in a leopard-skin rug with an enormous handlebar moustache. Over his shoulder, he carried two oars.

He said not a word but, with gentle fingers, he uncoiled the rope from round Agathe’s body and wound it round his own then, walking backwards towards the middle of the sandbank where the water was shallowest, he dragged the boat from the waves, heaving it up, bouncing it out of the water like a huge, defeated fish. But it was still far from afloat. The sea was lapping just inches from the gunwales and the boat was still full of water. The strongman set his jaw grimly, squatted with his back against the stern and began to lift. His feet shifted in the sand, his face contorted in an agony of effort but the boat began to tilt, it began to lift forward on its prow and the water poured away. The little boat rose clear of the sea and, with a gentle smile, the giant helped Tibo and Agathe back on board. Then, his huge hands on the stern, he pushed the boat off and sent it nodding away into the waves.

Tibo and Agathe hung over the side, looking back at the circus people standing in a row on the sandbank, waving. Already the water
was up to their waists. The boat drifted on. The moon went behind a cloud. When it came out again, the circus people had gone and there was nothing to see but moonlight shining on a flat, smooth sea.

Tibo and Agathe were too tired to row, too cold and wet. They simply floated in the dark, looking towards the one bright star that still shone through the clouds.

Eventually, after a long time, Tibo said, “I have something very important to ask you, Agathe.” When she said nothing, he took that as a signal to ask. He said, “My darling, did you know Hektor is dead?”

“Yes, Tibo, I think I did.” After a moment, she said, “I don’t think he was a very nice man.”

Tibo said, “Does that mean that you think it was a mistake to become a dog?”

“I think becoming a dog was probably the wisest thing I could have done. On the other hand, I have decided to change back to being a woman as soon as possible—in fact, probably as soon as the sun comes up.”

Tibo and Agathe were very far from Dot by then, too far even for me to see them, and nobody ever heard from them again. Nobody ever knew how their journey ended but every morning at 7:30, just before The Golden Angel opens its doors, I know that Mr. Cesare kneels quietly by my tomb where he says a prayer for the peace of the soul of his friend and never fails to leave a bag of mints.

And everybody knows that a portrait of Good Mayor Krovic, painted from his many likenesses in the archives of the
Dottian
, still hangs proudly in the Town Hall he served so well.

And the whole world knows that the celebrated twelve
Unfinished Nudes
of Hektor Stopak, stolen from his home, sold off hither and yon, passed from hand to hand, collected and reassembled at enormous cost into one perfect magnum opus, now hang together as a permanent exhibit in the Krovic Memorial Wing of Dot’s Municipal Art Galleries.

Legend says there is a thirteenth Stopak but only the lawyer
Guillaume knows that it hangs in the sitting room of No. 43 Loyola Street, in a very private collection shared with no one and definitely not on show to the public, displayed on new wooden stretchers with its canvas expertly restored. And only the lawyer Guillaume knows that, on the shelves of the same room, there is one solitary book—a signed copy of
On Rice
by the celebrated author Gnady Vadim, who lives happily with his wife in a large white house on the coast of Dalmatia where they spend their days drinking wine and eating olives and speaking of Homer to their beautiful children.

ANDREW NICOLL has spent his working life as a journalist. He has had short stories published in
New Writing Scotland
and other magazines. He lives in Scotland.

[http://www.bantamdell.com]